Home is where the heart is

By Evan Young | February 6, 2026

On Tower Grove Place, a quiet St. Louis street just steps from the Missouri Botanical Garden, sits a beautiful home with a surprising WashU connection: it’s where two alumni couples exchanged vows more than 40 years apart.

Both couples said “I do” in the living room. Both couples included fellow Bears in their wedding party. And both couples share a deep love of the university that helped bring them together.

Ellen Barker, AB ’76, and Tom Shoup, MA ’77, PhD ’81

Ellen worked at the WashU Campus Y during graduate school. Her friend and Campus Y student board member, Jan Brown, AB ’72, MA ’74, PhD ’78, shared an office in Compton Hall with Tom, a fellow physics grad student.

One evening in 1977, after a YWCA event in downtown St. Louis, Ellen and Jan went back to Jan’s apartment for a glass of wine.

“We were complaining about men we knew, which was most of them, and how irresponsible they were,” Ellen says. “Jan said, ‘I know two responsible men: my dad and this guy I share an office with, Tom Shoup.’ And she fixed us up.”

Their first date was a bike ride.

“By then I was assigned a lab by my adviser with compressed air, so I could pump up her tires,” Tom says.

Ellen and Tom enjoyed free Muny and St. Louis Symphony tickets through Ellen’s Campus Y job and played intramural volleyball. Once, the couple volunteered with the Campus Y to host a group of Russian tourists for a Thanksgiving dinner at Ellen’s apartment.

Then they found the house on Tower Grove Place.

Tom, who lived in the Dogtown neighborhood, still had a few years left of graduate school and enough of an inheritance from his late mother for a down payment. The owners at the time, teachers from Georgia, were spooked by an unusually cold and snowy St. Louis winter and put the house up for sale in early 1979. Tom and Ellen looked at the house over President’s Day weekend and closed on it in April.

The house needed some work but still had plenty of charm: a cut-glass front door, some original woodwork, friendly neighbors, easy access to the botanical garden, and a “treehouse” — a sleeping porch that hung out over the driveway.

It also turned out to be an economical, low-key place to get married. Tom and Ellen didn’t make a big deal about their engagement, and they didn’t want a splashy wedding or the challenge of creating a guest list.

“Neither one of us wanted a big society wedding. We didn’t think we could fill Graham Chapel,” Ellen says. “It just seemed like, we put all this money into buying this house; let’s have it here.”

The result was an intimate ceremony on Nov. 21, 1980, officiated by St. Louis Circuit Judge and civil rights activist Michael B. Calvin. What the wedding lacked in pomp it made up for in WashU presence: Tom’s adviser, physics professor James G. Miller, MA ’66, PhD ’69, served as best man, and Mary L. Brown, MSW ’76, was maid of honor.

About an hour after the wedding, Tom and Ellen invited their unsuspecting next-door neighbors over to celebrate.

“They said, ‘Well, we knew it was something big, so we brought champagne,'” Ellen says.

The newlyweds headed to Chicago for a weekend honeymoon and hosted a handful of relatives at the house the following week for a dual Thanksgiving dinner and wedding reception.

Miller helped Tom land a job at Hewlett-Packard after graduation, and the couple moved to the San Francisco area in late 1981. They keep in touch with Ed, one of their former next-door neighbors on Tower Grove Place, and maintain strong ties with WashU. In addition to supporting greater access to WashU as longtime Eliot Society members, Tom helps plan the Graduate Physics Reunion every five years, and Ellen, a novelist, plans to release two books set at WashU in the 1970s.

“WashU has had three chancellors since my undergraduate years, and each one has been exceptional. That consistency in leadership gives us real confidence that the money is well spent,” Ellen says. “We also have a deep fondness for St. Louis. While so many major companies I remember from working downtown have disappeared or changed, WashU has remained. It’s a cornerstone of the city and a big part of what still makes St. Louis such a fantastic place.”

Matthew Hyde, MEM ’11, and Patrick O’Neal, BS ’05

More than 25 years after Tom and Ellen sold the Tower Grove Place house, another alumni couple fell in love with the home as they were falling for each other.

Through WashU, Patrick found an internship at biotech company bioMérieux. He later became a full-time software engineer in the company’s software research and development group.

Patrick’s old car broke down before work one day in 2007. Matthew, who was a biomedical engineer at bioMérieux, offered to give him a ride since they lived close to each other.

“That led to carpooling, and the rest is history,” Patrick says.

Shortly after they began dating the following year, Patrick and Matthew went house hunting. Some of the couple’s early dates were botanical garden classes, and when they came across the house on Tower Grove Place, they saw a perfect template to bring their dream outdoor space to life. They also appreciated the house’s turn-of-the-century architecture, with tall windows and high ceilings that mirrored the house Matthew was renting in the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood.

As if those reasons weren’t enough, Ed, the same neighbor whom Tom and Ellen befriended decades before, saw the couple looking at the house with their realtor and invited them over to tour his home, too.

Patrick, who previously hadn’t considered moving to St. Louis city, closed on the house in June 2008, and Matthew moved in the following year.

“It’s just a close-knit neighborhood, and I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” Patrick says.

When the couple decided to get married, they, like Tom and Ellen, didn’t want a big production. The COVID-19 pandemic made them leery of bringing a large group of people together, and for them, a wedding was more of a formality anyway.

“I felt like Matthew and I were already married,” Patrick says. “We’d been acting married for a decade at that point. And it was just a no-brainer to have it at the house. This is our home. This is where we have our life.”

They asked a friend, Lisa Burns, PhD, a former WashU post-doctoral biology researcher, to officiate, and surprised a small group of friends with the ceremony in December 2021 by inviting them over under the guise of coming to their annual Yule gathering.

“These are people we’d get together with very frequently who’d known us since we started dating,” Matthew says. “It just felt right to have a simple and heartfelt celebration in our house.”

Since earning their WashU degrees, Matthew and Patrick have spent more than a decade giving back to the university through serving on alumni committees and being Eliot Society members. They’re also the anchors for their WashU friend group. When friends come to visit from around the country, they often stay or visit with them at the Tower Grove Place house, and the couple takes them around campus to see what’s changed.

“As we’ve gotten older and friends have moved away, we’ve pretty much decided this is our home,” Patrick says. “This is where we want to be.”

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