Robert William St. John

Robert William St. John (March 9, 1902 – February 6, 2003) was an American writer, broadcaster, and journalist. Biography Early life Robert William St. John was born on 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.