forest park
Still mulling over greeting card choices for the holidays? Here’s an idea: a card featuring a wintry photo of the Jewel Box, the beloved Art Deco greenhouse dedicated in 1936. Sales benefit Forest Park Forever, the nonprofit tasked with the remarkable (and continuing) improvements to the planet’s most awesome urban green space, with apologies to those who believe it’s tied with Tower Grove Park.
» Each set contains 20 cards of the same design.
» Cards are 5 x 7 and printed on recycled paper.
» Inside message: “Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season and a very happy New Year.”
» Matching blank white envelopes are included.
» Cards are available for pickup, or will begin shipping, in mid-November.
» Sets are $25 each. (Forest Park Forever members receive a discount!)
st. charles
The modest ranch house on Nancy Drive in St. Charles isn’t haunted, but all hell had broken loose in the front, back and side yards the week before Halloween. The grounds looked like a neighborhood barbecue that was so crowded—with dozens of human skeletons, a bony horse and a few skeletal dogs—that the cops had better swing by and break it up. (Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters? They’ll never get back to you.) Since mid-September, Halloween decorations had been arranged ‘just so’ in the yard, past the point of obsessiveness. That’s just the way Chris Donaubauer has liked it for nearly half of his 38 years. He started a modest Christmas display not long after his first son was born 15 years ago and for the Oct. 31 holiday, he adds ghouls, pumpkins, spiders, gravestones, and inflatable and animatronic creatures to a light display that can distract airline pilots. Drivers at least slow to gawk or drop in from throughout the Midwest—and beyond; a Norwegian writer visited recently. Donaubauer’s willing, able and eager to give them a tour, but it’s after dusk that the action starts. At witching hour, the Donaubauers remove plastic covers that protect electronics from the elements, and about a dozen dentally challenged, broom-borne hags commence to cackle and move around, along with all manner of other specters and varieties of the undead. Two bony dudes play still-life poker. A horseman has kept his head … so far. A skeletal bowler aims a pumpkin at 10 pins down the driveway. Another in a black hat and cape, jaw dropping, walks four dog skeletons … hounds from Hades that might include long-gone pit bulls and pugs. Often hysterically funny, it’s all in good fun and family-friendly at 620 Nancy— no hideous dudes chasing you around with chainsaws. Yes, this family may be a tad kooky, but creepy, mysterious and spooky? Not so much. Last night (Oct. 31) the Donaubauers expected to have handed out thousands upon thousands of pieces of candy that they buy in bulk. And today is the Day of the Dead for the display, because if Donaubauer doesn’t start dismantling it now, he can’t get his Christmas display up in time. There’s almost $100,000 of scary goods to store before holiday visitors start dropping by his version of the North Pole, which he admits is even more elaborate (and pricey). What’s he to do the other three quarters of the year? He mows lawns, works on cars … plus replaces bulbs and tinkers with whatever else is busted in his displays. He hates throwing anything away. That’s why the garage has no room for his truck.
st. louis
Almost anybody who’s lived somewhere in the metro for at least 15 minutes has seen KSHE 95 radio’s iconic pig in headphones and shades, ring through its snout, cigarette dangling from its jowls. ‘Sweetmeat’ has been around since 1972, just five years after the powerhouse changed to the format that has stayed consistent for 50 years now: album-oriented rock. Somebody should make a documentary about KSHE 95, actually at 94.7 on the FM dial. Well, somebody has … and not just anybody. Ron Stevens, himself an integral part of the ‘Real Rock Radio’ juggernaut as a DJ in the 1970s, traces the origins of the world’s longestrunning rock radio station in Never Say Goodbye: Birth of a Station. The documentary premieres Nov. 1 at the Moolah Theatre in midtown (3821 Lindell Blvd.), with the whole red carpet, limo treatment starting around 6 p.m. for many of the voices you may have heard at one time or another but whose faces you may never have seen. Hey, it’s radio. Many in the metro recognize the voices of Mark Klose, John ‘The U Man’ Ulett, Joe ‘Mama’ Mason or ‘Radio Rich’ Dalton but wouldn’t know them from Adam if they passed them at the mall. After the local luminaries have made an entrance, the film will unspool at 7 p.m. (After that, the entire public theater run is only five showings. The one at 6 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 12 at .ZACK (3224 Locust) is free!) Stevens tracked down every major personality who worked there through 1979. Plus, the tireless director interviewed the very first person ever heard on the station’s airwaves at 7 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 11, 1961. Notably, from 1968 to 1976, no disc jockey KSHE hired had any previous experience in radio, including manager Shelley Grafman, who was selling insurance door-to-door before his brother hired him to run the station. Packed with archival film footage and photos from the ’70s—and a soundtrack featuring ‘KSHE Klassics’—the documentary celebrates both the onair personalities and the rock stars (a few wannabes or no-hit wonders, to be sure) whose careers KSHE gave a big boost. Many played the Mississippi River Festival, our own regularly scheduled mini-Woodstock at SIU-Edwardsville, which those who came of age in the 1970s and late ’60s should remember—even if they were in a smoky haze at the time.
