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Moonstruck
Newspapers across the country noted the death in 1910 of Henry Ziegenhein, a former St. Louis mayor who became famous a decade earlier for a flippant remark about the street lighting situation in the city. “We got a moon yet, ain’t it?” is what old “Uncle Henry” supposedly said, a quip that was widely repeated, Continue reading
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‘Our parasite class’
A neighborhood group in St. Louis recently held an event to commemorate “what many have claimed as the first cocktail party: the legendary 1917 soirée hosted by Mrs. Julius S. Walsh Jr. at her Lindell Boulevard home.” As with other “legendary” events, the passage of time has blurred some details. Continue reading
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‘Home city’
Charles F. Wenneker, wealthy owner of a St. Louis candy company and president of the Million Population Club, thought the best way to grow the city was to promote it like crazy. “He’s deeply, desperately determined that St. Louis shall have a million people for the census taker to take next year,” the Post-Dispatch reported Continue reading
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‘Memorial to St. Louis abandoned’
The “Twain” sculpture by Richard Serra, located in downtown St. Louis, garnered an excessive amount of media attention in the early 1980s. This was due, in part, to its expense and because it was promoted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch while simultaneously being criticized by the declining St. Louis Globe-Democrat. In September 1985, novelist and Continue reading
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‘We are governed by boodlers’
“It is useless to simply change the men in office. It is the system itself, the real source of corruption, that must be changed.” — Dr. William Preston Hill, a St. Louis physician, reformer and leader of the Referendum League, which championed the Initiative and Referendum Constitutional Amendment, approved by Missouri voters in 1908. Here Continue reading
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‘Almost fantastic’
Well before the post-war exodus, St. Louis planners were sounding the alarm about the rapid development of St. Louis County while the city was stagnating. Continue reading
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Cat boxing, floaters, St. Louis orangutans, UFOs, dumb cops, Hitler sightings, and other minutiæ
BOXING CATS: 75 years ago, the featured act at Club Boulevard on North Grand was Eddie Fay and his boxing cats. The Post-Dispatch memorialized the act in a full-page spread on May 2, 1948; two days later, the Star-Times had a Humane Society rep warning Fay “against using rough treatment on the cats.” Fay had Continue reading
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The Republican’s ‘joke’
The currently popular origin story of the Order of the Veiled Prophet describes the organization as a reaction by the St. Louis establishment to the labor turmoil of 1877. The Veiled Prophet was racist, elitist, secretive and maybe even violent. Exhibit A has been an illustration of the very first Veiled Prophet, published by the Continue reading
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Madness, dissipation, despair
The tragic stories of otherwise obscure St. Louisans filled the pages of the Post-Dispatch in the late 19th century, a sideshow of freaks and curiosities that showed how brutish and uncertain life could be during the first Gilded Age. Here are three women whose tales of woe were highlighted 125 years ago: Continue reading
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From the ‘scrapbooks’ of JPII
In 1922, Joseph Pulitzer II, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, asked his business manager A.G. Lincoln to approach E. Lansing Ray, publisher of the morning St. Louis Globe-Democrat, with a confidential proposition: agree to cut the number of comic pages to four in both Sunday papers. Continue reading
Roland Klose 