Robert St. John

Robert William St. John (March 9, 1902 – February 6, 2003) was an American author (23 books), broadcaster (NBC Radio) and journalist (AP, etc.).

St. John was born in March 9, 1902, in Chicago. His mother Amy (nee Archer) was a nurse, and his father John, a pharmacist. He had one brother, Archer, who was two years younger. In 1910 his family moved to the well-to-do suburban Oak Park, Illinois. There, St. John attended Oak Park River Forest High School, where he was in a writing class with Ernest Hemingway. According to a Los Angeles Times interview he gave in 1994, their teacher kept them both after class one day to tell them they had no future in writing: "Neither one of you will ever learn to write."

St. John's father died from cancer in 1917, and the mother remarried (he had a half brother from his mother's second marriage), while St. John, at age 16, lied about his age to enlist in the Navy during World War I.

On his return from France, St. John became the campus correspondent for the Hartford Courant while attending Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. But he was soon expelled for trying to expose the college president's censorship of an outspoken English professor.

Abandoning formal education, St. John pursued journalism as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago American. In 1923, with his younger brother Archer St. John (1904–1955), he co-founded the Cicero Tribune in suburban Cicero, Illinois, and at 21, became the youngest editor-publisher in the United States. A short while after that his brother Archer founded the Berwyn Tribune, in the city of Berwyn near Cicero.

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