Sharing a room with Carl Edgar
3516 Agnes Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri 64128, United States
On or just before December 6th 1917, Hemingway moved from Mrs Haynes’s boarding house, which was both relatively expensive and too close to his Uncle Tyler’s home, to this wood-frame house at 3516 Agnes Avenue, where he stayed in an upstairs room with Carl Edgar.
Edgar was a friend Hemingway had made during the summer while he was in Horton Bay, Michigan. He was some 10 years older than Hemingway and worked for the California Fuel Oil Co. in downtown Kansas City. It was he who had greeted Hemingway when he first stepped off the train at Union Station back in October. Since then the two had managed to go out together frequently, including taking a trip on Hemingway’s first Sunday in Kansas City to St Joseph to visit Edgar’s family. Hemingway probably saw the older man as a father figure and was happy to have him around. In a letter to his father, Clarence, he described Edgar as “peach”, a term he often used for people he liked. And in a letter to his mother, who seems to have unjustly criticised Edgar without ever having met him, Hemingway said that his friend had been a better influence on him than anyone he’d ever known.
Edgar later spoke of Hemingway’s enthusiasm for his job as a reporter: “Hemingway felt the charm and romance of newspaper work fully,” he said. “He would talk for hours about his work, frequently when it would have been better to go to bed.”
The upstairs room in the house at Agnes Avenue was a comfortable one with a table, dresser, a couple of large double beds, a sleeping porch outside, and cost the friends only $2.50 each per week. Hemingway had been paying three times as much at Mrs Haynes’s boarding house on Warwick Boulevard. The electric streetcar was only four blocks away on Prospect Avenue, which allowed Hemingway to travel easily to work and back.
Hemingway continued to live at this house until he returned home to Oak Park, Illinois at the start of May, having collected his last paycheck from the Kansas City Star on 30th April 1918. His time at the newspaper had been utterly exhausting but, as he told his father, he had gained a lot of valuable experience and had done some good work. A few weeks later he was on the steamship Chicago, heading to Europe and the War.
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