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Age: nine years, and — painful memories — not only piano lessons but spectacles!
A family portrait of the Stewarts — taken just before Captain Alec went off to France. Jim, at the age of ten, became man of the house and, to his family's amusement, he hasn't forgotten a certain habit formed then
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these distracting influences, Jim Stewart remained essentially unspoiled, the roots of his character ever deep in the soil of substantial values.
And to appreciate fully the wholesomeness which distinguishes Jim Stewart today, it is necessary to trace those roots back to the small town from which he emerged.
Indiana is a brisk, busy little town of about 10,000 population in Western Pennsylvania, in the rolling foothills of the Alleghenies. A county seat and the shopping center of the mining and farming districts which encircle it, Indiana is near enough to Pittsburgh to keep the hayseed combed out of its hair, yet isolated enough from any metropolitan area to achieve an independent personality of its own.
HERE four generations of the Scotch-Irish family of Stewart have enjoyed success and substance as leaders in the business and social life of the town, leaving it only to march off to war, quietly, purposefully; returning without fanfare to the big brown-stoned hardware store of J. M. Stewart and Company which, since 1853, has stood like an impressive guardian at one end of the business block.
It was to this hardware store Jim's grandfather, James Maitland Stewart, returned in Union blue after Grant had lit a cigar and accepted Lee's sword at Appomattox. And it was to this store, his tall, rangy son Alexander Stewart came home to carry on the family tradition, after strolling out of a senior classroom at Princeton to volunteer in the Spanish-American War.
Alec, so the family story goes, clad in white flannels and dancing pumps, had walked out of a chemical laboratory to enlist, leaving behind him some test tubes heating over a fire. The explosion which followed his departure was as devastating as any he heard in Cuba.
They tell a lot of other intriguing tales about this big-boned Alec, who rollicked through Princeton in the gay nineties, such as the time he spirited a cow past campus proctors and into the dean's office in Nassau Hall one night.
But it was a more sedate young Alec Stewart who had buried the pranks of his past in the nailbins of his father's store and was now singing a lusty tenor in the First Presbyterian Church choir, who met and married Elizabeth Jackson from the neighboring town of Apollo. A college graduate, like Alec, Bessie Jackson
Jim took the war seriously. He saluted the postman, the grocer, the baker, his teachers
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