Aunt Arabell’s house in Mission Hills, Kansas
1900 W 55th Street, Mission Hills, Kansas 66208, United States
Hemingway’s longest stay in Kansas City was for six and a half months when he worked as a young newspaper reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1917-1918 but he did return to the city from time to time later in life.
One occasion was in June 1928 when he and his second wife, Pauline, came to the Kansas City Metropolitan area for the birth of their son, Patrick. During that time, they stayed at Ernest’s aunt Arabell’s house at the Northwest Corner of 55th Street and State Line Road in Kansas. Unfortunately, Aunt Arabell wasn’t particularly fond of her nephew, perhaps stemming back to the time in 1917 when Hemingway had stayed with her and his Uncle Alfred Tyler Hemingway at their house on Warwick Boulevard in Kansas City. Hemingway, who had been a budding journalist for the Kansas City Star at the time, moved out of his aunt and uncle’s house after only a short period into a boarding house only a block away. So in 1928 Hemingway and Pauline spent only some of their time here at his aunt’s house in Mission Hills and the rest at his cousin’s house, also in Mission Hills.
Patrick, who was Hemingway’s second son, and his first one with Pauline, was born on June 28th 1928 at the old Research Hospital in Kansas City. He was delivered by Dr Don Carlos Guffey, a Kansas City obstetrician who would also deliver the couple’s second child in 1931. The birth of Patrick, which Hemingway witnessed, was done by Caesarean section and was probably the model for Catherine’s fatal delivery in A Farewell to Arms, the novel Hemingway was working on at this time.
At the time of writing, Patrick Hemingway is 95 years old. In an interview with NPR on his 80th birthday, he recounted a time when he was mistaken for his famous father. At a restaurant in a casino in Las Vegas, a maitre d’ came over and said “Mr Hemingway, I’ve read everything you’ve wrote, and my favourite is ‘The Grapes of Wrath'” …
Patrick, incidentally, considered A Farewell to Arms to be his father’s greatest work.
Arabell White Hemingway died on 3rd November 1963 and is buried alongside her first husband, Hemingway’s Uncle Tyler, at Mount Washington Cemetery in Independence, Missouri.
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