St. Louis News Blog

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Taxed enough already, kid?

​You know how it is each April. You'd think your kids would be happy. Summer is just around the corner. Little League season is starting up. In short, there's a lot to look forward to.

But no. All your kids can think of is the @$%&in' government. 'Cause April is tax time, and nothing pisses off the kiddies more than filing that annual 1040 form.

Well, good news! Now your tykes have an outlet.

A 22-year-old student in Alton, Illinois, has formed an organization specifically tailored for angry, small-government-minded juveniles. It's called the Alton Youth TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party Organization and it's having a rally this very month!

"I am very conservative. The youths don't know what is going on, and we don't have anything that focuses on getting news to kids," Eric Maxon, founder of the group told the Alton Telegraph this week. "Our generation will be the outcome of legislation being passed now. We will pay for it in the end."

Word up! The rally takes place Nov. 28 at Alton's Gordon Moore Community Park.

Viva la revolucion!

On Monday KTVI (Channel 2) followed up on the story reported in Riverfront Times and Daily RFT about an old Spanish cannon in Forest Park.

The gun has sat in the park for over a century with no plaque or identification, its history a mystery to park officials and city archivist. Enter Fred Ruhrwien.

A volunteer at the park, Ruhrwien spent the past year searching for clues about the cannon. Recently he struck gold when the St. Louis County Library subscribed to a database that includes copies of the Post-Dispatch from the late 1800s to early 1900s.

We'll let Ruhrwien explain the rest:
 

​ It was 20 years ago today that the Berlin Wall fell. Tonight the Berlin Wall will fall again, sort of, this time at Westminster College in Fulton.

Westminster has a special connection to the wall; it was here, in 1946, that Winston Churchill delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech, and the college owns eight sections of the wall, the largest contiguous piece in the world outside Berlin.

Last spring the German Embassy contacted Westminster officials about participating in some activities to commemorate the falling of the wall. This week, there will be films and debates and a poster contest. But undoubtedly the highlight will be at 6:53 this evening -- exactly when the original wall fell 20 years ago (Missouri time) -- when students will topple a replica of the Berlin Wall they built themselves.

Rob Crouse

A replica of the Berlin Wall, built by students at Westminster College.

​

Ruhrwein and the Spanish cannon.

​For the past year, Fred Ruhrwien has waged a lonely crusade to discover the origins of a Spanish cannon in Forest Park.

The 80-year-old Ruhrwien works as a volunteer guide at the park, giving walking tours to hundreds of visitors each year. Until last month, Ruhrwien never had much to say about one particular landmark: the copper, green cannon  near Lindell Avenue.

Etchings on the gun in Spanish reveal the word "Examinador" and tell that it was forged in 1783 for King Charles III of Spain. Beyond that, little else was known about the gun.

Last September, Riverfront Times chronicled Ruhrwien's quest to learn more about the mysterious cannon. We even tried researching it ourselves. No one with the city or park department could tell us the history of the weapon, and a library search turned up only one vague newspaper clipping. In January of 1900 the now-defunct St. Louis Republic reported that Missouri Congressman Charles Edward Pearce had procured a Spanish cannon and that the gun was on its way to town.

Was that our cannon? Maybe. Maybe not.

​ ​ Alas Chicago! First of the 2016 Olympic Final Four to get knocked out of contention! After you dropped $50 million and sent President and Mrs. Obama and Oprah to Copenhagen to campaign on your behalf! (Not to mention thoroughly pissing off your citizens by raising sales tax to 10 percent and cracking down so hard on parking violations that people are terrified to leave their cars at the meter 30 seconds past expiration.)

Let all St. Louisans pause a moment to wipe away a tear of sympathy for our 300-miles-to-the-northeast neighbor, who, in a grand show of its largess, had graciously promised to let us join in the hype by allowing us to host athletes in training and preliminary soccer matches. Oh, the honor!

OK, now that that's done with... Let's go back 100 years or so when Chicago did get the Olympics. The 1904 Olympics, to be specific.

Wait, you say, we had those Olympics!

builtstlouis.net/industrial/gasometers

​If upon driving down Interstate 44 through Shrewsbury you've looked off to the north and asked yourself "What in God's name are those towering cages!?", here's the answer: They're gasometers.

The steel structures were built by Laclede Gas in the 1920s and '40s and once held millions of pounds of natural gas in storage tanks that would rise and fall (depending on how full the tanks were) inside the skeletal steel sleeves. 

Laclede Gas quit using the gasometers in 1995, and for the past decade they've sat there rusting with their storage tanks no longer visible.

Now the gasometers days are numbered.

People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got."

-- Richard Nixon, November 17, 1973, to Associated Press journalists 

dogguide.net

​A survivor at any cost, Richard Nixon, our most famous political Grendel, would of course do and say anything to save his shameless hide. Anything. On this day in 1952, Nixon used the family dog, a cute little cocker spaniel named Checkers, to ensure that his rapid Red-baiting rise in American politics would not come to a crashing halt.

Several days after Dwight Eisenhower tapped Nixon as his running mate, a sensational story appeared in the New York Post suggesting that Nixon had personally profited from a secret, though legal, political slush fund, in the amount of $18,000. Outrage and shock ensued, with many Republicans urging Ike to tell Dick to take a hike.

So here's how Tricky Dicky played it:

energizer.com

​Fact: St. Louis-based battery firm Energizer debuted its famous Energizer Bunny 20 years ago.

Fact: Measuring 166 feet high, the Energizer Bunny hot-air balloon is the tallest balloon in the world and 15 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Fact: The official name for the balloon is the Hot Hare Balloon.

Not a Fact: Rapper Nelly was inspired to pen his Hot in Herre single after seeing the balloon for the first time.

Fact: You can see Hot Hare -- and dozens of other dirigibles -- beginning tonight at the Balloon Glow  and tomorrow at the kickoff of the Great Forest Park Balloon Race. 

Dorothea Lange, courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

​In an interesting piece in the October Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz surveys a collection of books about daily life during the Great Depression in an attempt to glean some lessons from the past about what we can expect in the near future as the nation lurches toward economic recovery.

The good news, Schwarz discovers, is that the Great Depression was not, in reality, as terrible as the mythology that surrounds it: "For all the terrible unemployment figures and searing WPA images of Dustbowl migrants, the typical worker remained on the job, though he had most likely been forced to take a pay cut."

The bad news is, many middle-class workers -- those with white-collar jobs that approximate those of many Americans today -- never returned to the same level of economic security they enjoyed before the crash wiped out their savings accounts, and with them, many of their plans for the future.

​RFT managing editor Ellis Conklin offers his two cents on the latest political ramblings in Washington D.C.

Goodness, have you ever seen so much hand-wringing and over-the-top condemnation over Representative Joe Wilson's unfortunate discharge Wednesday evening when he derisively hooted, "You lie!" during President Obama's healthcare address?

Get a grip. Our democracy will survive, civility in the hallowed halls of Congress is not entirely dead, and somehow the nation will stumble forward. And besides -- despite all the radio and cable TV fuss -- the South Carolina Republican's prime-time outburst pales in comparison to how our chosen lawmakers once dealt with their disagreements.

​Once again the universities of Missouri and Illinois will start their football season with a game September 5 at the Edward Jones Dome.

But besides the gridiron showdown and all the pre- and post-game tailgating downtown, this year's competition features something better. What really matters in 2009 is which team wins the riverboat race down the Mississippi.

Yeah, that's right. On Saturday morning before the game, fans can hop aboard two riverboats (one for Mizzou, the other for the Illini) for a race down the river.

The St. Louis Sports Commission and the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission are sponsoring the event. Click here for more information and to reserve your spot on the deck.

Mark Twain would be so proud.

sonypictures.com

Films like Year One could make you dumb -- or dumber.

​What!? This summer's flop, Year One, was not an accurate portrayal of real historical events?!

Shocking, we know. But could it be that even some of Hollywood's more "authentic" historical films also tend to blur the facts? And could those inaccuracies affect learning?

That's what a new study from Washington University doctoral student, Andrew Butler, suggests.

The study, appearing in the forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, suggests that showing popular history movies in a classroom setting can be a double-edged sword when it comes to helping students learn and retain factual information in associated textbooks.

us.penguingroup.com

​There's an interesting article in Salon today about a new book called Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi by an archaeologist named Timothy Pauketat.  Three guesses what it's about, and the last two don't count.

According to Pauketat, Cahokia wasn't just a random collection of mounds but, rather, at least in the twelfth century, a city of 20,000 people, the largest in what is now the United States. (It would take 600 years for another U.S. city to surpass it. That would be colonial Philadelphia.) Its suburbs -- of sorts -- stretched across the river, a nice twist on the modern St. Louis/East St. Louis divide.

About two-thirds of Cahokia's original 120 mounds still exist. Earlier archaeologists hypothesized that such an impressive city could not possibly have been built by Native Americans -- the most obvious candidates -- and must have been constructed by a mysterious, now-defunct tribe of people of European or African origin known as the "Mound Builders" or even visitors from outer space. (This was a popular theory about Mayan and Incan ruins as well.)

But Pauketat has definitive proof that the ancient Cahokians were indeed human beings, in the form of Mound 72.

Let's get to the good stuff now, shall we?

Wikimedia Commons

Houston, we have a problem.

It's always good to have a backup plan. Space.com has posted Richard Nixon's condolence speech to the wives of the Apollo 11 astronauts had the moon landing not worked out. Nixon's speechwriter, William Safire, titled it "In the Event of a Moon Disaster".

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

Subsequently, a clergyman would consign Armstrong and Aldrin's souls to "the deepest of the deep." (Writes commenter j. h. on the blog 3quarksdaily, "It is interesting that when bad things happen, we blame 'fate'. When good things happen, we praise 'god'. That's quite some gig god's got.")

And, of course, Michael Collins, the pilot, is forgotten yet again.

simonandschuster.com

A new edition of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast hits bookstores today, to the outrage of at least one of Hemingway's old pals, writer and St. Louis memoirist A. E. Hotchner, best known for King of the Hill.

A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964, is Hemingway's own memoir of his impoverished years in Paris in the twenties and includes, among other things, descriptions of bullfights, Ford Madox Ford's body odor and F. Scott Fitzgerald fretting about his penis-size and ability to satisfy Zelda.

All of these things presumably remain in the new edition, which was assembled Hemingway's grandson, Seán. Seán Hemingway was more concerned with the original edition's final chapter, which portrayed his grandmother, Pauline Pfeiffer, Hemingway's second wife, as a husband-stealing floozy.

St. Martin's Press

John Heidenry is probably one of the few people who remember the Bobby Greenlease case, though in 1953 it was considered the most audacious kidnapping in American crime history since the Lindbergh baby in 1932.

Heidenry, whose resume includes St. Louis magazine and Penthouse Forum and books about the Browns and Cardinals and who is now a contributing editor to The Week, was just a kid back then. But he spent a lot of time hanging around his father's bookstore, listening to reporters and detectives puzzle over the details of not just Greenlease's murder, but whatever became of the $600,000 ransom.

Now he's written a book about it, Zero at the Bone: The Playboy, the Prostitute and the Murder of Bobby Greenlease, due in bookstores on Tuesday, July 21.

Lloyd Gaines

The New York Times wrote yesterday about Lloyd Gaines, the St. Louis civil-rights pioneered who disappeared mysteriously 70 years ago.

The Times story, published as the NAACP's Centennial Celebration gets underway this week in New York, was something of an abbreviated version of a similar tale told in the Riverfront Times a couple years back.

In December 1938 Gaines won a Supreme Court decision to enroll in the University of Missouri Law School. A few months later, Gaines' NACCP attorneys were preparing to defend an appeal from the state legislature when they discovered their client missing.

No trace of his body or disappearance has ever been recovered.

Yesterday the Times quoted one of Gaines' descendants, Tracy Berry (an assistant U.S. attorney in St. Louis) as saying she believes her great uncle was murdered.

Berry provided similar thoughts to Riverfront Times in 2007. Not mentioned in the Times article, though, are theories that Gaines' fled to Mexico to escape threats and the public spotlight.

You can read that speculation here.
 

flickr.com/photos/The Picture House

In 1957, amid the true glory days of air travel, Frank Sinatra came out with a hit song, "Come Fly With Me," which evoked the glamour and exhilarating anticipation of climbing aboard an airplane.

Come fly with me, lets' fly let's fly away
If you can use some exotic booze
There's a bar in far Bombay
Come fly with me, we'll fly we'll fly away

Yes, Virginia, there was a time when no one dared hop a plane in flip-flops and shorts, when there was ample space in mood-lit cabins, and the food was delicious and served on real dishes and tablecloths, when flight attendants were pampering stewardesses who took pride in memorizing the names of all those who strode in their Sunday best onto 58-passenger DC-7s.

flickr.com/photos/neoarcana1o

You may have heard today that the last living survivor of the Titanic, Millvina Dean, died Sunday at the age of 97, in Southhampton, the English port from which the giant ocean liner embarked on its fateful maiden voyage in April 1912.

Dean was only nine weeks old, the ship's youngest passenger, when the Titanic struck an iceberg in waters off Newfoundland. The disaster claimed more than 1,500 lives. According to the Guardian of London, Dean's parents decided to leave England for America, where her father and hoped to open a tobacco shop in Kansas City.

The infant child, one of 705 survivors, was lowered into lifeboat No. 10 in a canvas mail sack that night of April 14. Her mother and brother were placed in the same lifeboat and later rescued by the Carpathia. Dean's 29-year-old father, who ran a pub in London, remained aboard.

flickr.com/photos/whinendine

Six years ago, Margaret Benedict remembers being riveted by an article in Investor's Business Daily on the life and times of Joyce Clyde Hall, the highly-driven founder of Hallmark Cards. At the time, Benedict was reaching the end of a long career as a fifth-grade teacher in St. Charles.

"I've always loved biographies. They've always been my favorite genre," Benedict, who lives in Kirkwood, said last week. (In fact, she required her students to read eight biographies a year.)

"After reading the story on Hall, I kept wanting to learn more about him -- and couldn't really find much. So I contacted his grandson, Donald Hall, who is the president of Hallmark. He sent me a copy of his memoirs and invited me to come to headquarters in Kanas City. Everyone at Hallmark was extraordinarily helpful in me writing this biography."

The rest, so to speak, is history.

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It seems it will always be John F. Kennedy's deathday in Dallas -- not his birthday -- that we will observe, and that which, even now, almost 46 years later, still fills a dark, anguished corner in the national psyche. JFK, the most famous initials of our lifetime. Strange that Lincoln's deathday goes by with barely a whisper.

But today is Kennedy's birthday, born 92 years ago at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. Can you imagine, a 92-year-old Jack Kennedy?

flickr.com/photos/Jiffy Cat

JFK birthplace at 83 Beals Street , Brookline, Mass.

Kennedy's made his final visit to St. Louis on September 12, 1962 in order to tour the Gemini space capsule construction site at McDonnell Aircraft Corp. In a speech to congratulate the workers, the 35th and youngest elected president said,

Courtesy of Missouri Preservation

Missouri Preservation is out again with it annual list of Missouri's most endangered historical properties. Cracking the lineup again is the James Collier Marshall Home -- often referred to as the Fairfax House -- at 9401 Manchester Boulevard in Rock Hill.

In observance of National Preservation Month, the full slate of nine endangered sites was unveiled (click here for complete list) in Hannibal at the Pilaster House -- also on the list, and known, too, as Dr. Grant's Drug Store.

"When we put this list together, we are not only looking at buildings that may not be physically sound or falling down," explains Missouri Preservation Board President Karen Bode Baxter. "But we also took to see if, like in the case of the Rock Hill house, it is being threatened by commerical development."

It was the summer of 1953. Queen Elizabeth had just been cornonated. The Braves had left Boston for Milwaukee, and Elvis was making his first recording. Back in Independence, Missouri, meanwhile, there was Harry Truman, restless in his first months of presidential retirement and itchy as a tick bite to make the transition into civilian-hood.

A cross-country road trip in his brand new Chrysler New Yorker, thought Truman, would help pave the way for him to become "Citizen Truman" after eight grueling years in the White House. And what a long, strange -- and delightful -- nineteen days it was. Put it this way: Harry and Bess were quite a roadside attraction.

Matthew Algeo's book, Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip, is a charming and engrossing account of the 2,500-mile Truman voyage in a bygone era, back in the golden age of the automobile, and several years before the Interstate Highway system would forever change the way we travel.