tower grove park
The statue of a bearded man has been at the north entrance to Tower Grove Park since 1886. It’s doubtful Italian explorer Christopher Columbus looked quite as heroic as depicted in the monument, but there he is, all 9 feet of him atop an impressive pedestal. Maybe it has been struck by lightning in the past 132 years, and maybe not. Either way, Columbus is a lightning rod nowadays, as was the case with the Confederate monument removed from Forest Park last year. That was taken in by a Civil War museum, which is, IMHO, where such monuments to the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ belong. Sure, they’re history, but they glorify the abhorrent ‘Lost Cause’ to perpetuate slavery. Columbus, recognized since 1937 by a national October holiday, brutalized the Taíno, the indigenous people of the Caribbean who welcomed him. When the statue was installed here nearly 400 years later, the approach to human rights in ‘The New World’ was still egregious. Coast to coast, settlers had wiped out Native Americans or forced them onto reservations. Railroad bosses treated Asian workers like slaves. Former slaves did not have certain inalienable rights. For the next few generations, white mobs lynched thousands. Meanwhile, our government’s attitude toward non-Caucasian people was not enlightened. Some argue it’s not much better today. We shouldn’t try to revise history, but I believe we should revise our interpretation of it. Or find more appropriate places for its interpretation. The city formed a commission to study what should be done with Columbus, and at some future date is supposed to make a recommendation to the park board.
the metro
If you don’t know who you’re calling when you dial ‘878-ninety-nine, ninety-nine,’ well, you just haven’t lived here long enough. Natives and long-time metro transplants know it’s no longer that dude with the goofy, down-home radio voice. Ray Vinson hasn’t been with American Equity Mortgage since his contentious split from Deanna Daughhetee a dozen years ago. For a while, AEM was getting plenty of publicity for that, rather than its mortgage rates, and Daughhetee’s vanity plate was BYE RAY. Vinson was not to be stopped, though: He and his distinctive voice—irksome, many listeners might say—plugged his new company with a different three-digit prefix and the same old nasal ‘ninety-nine, ninety-nine.’ Meanwhile, Daughhetee soldiered on at AEM until last month, when it was announced that creditors had come knocking for about $1.2 million. Vinson’s son and namesake has been in his own kettle of hot water, in part for owing money on ads. Then, it was a flap over HUD loans. Today, if you dial 878-9999, you actually can talk to somebody at AEM. But when we called Vinson’s company at 839-9999, we got the voicemail system. It’s hard to buy local when so many products and services are available with just a click of the mouse, with mortgages certainly among them. And it seems the clever advertising jingle that imprints a phone number into the consumer brain—especially when preceded by two letters of the exchange—has faded into the past. OK. I’ve been in the StL long enough to remember Becky, the Queen of Carpet, managing to keep her balance despite standing on a flying carpet floating near the Arch … but I recall no audio, only the ridiculous video. Still, “for a hole in your roof or a whole new roof,” who ya gonna call?
kirkwood
Although the Coral Court Motel, the iconic ‘no-tell motel’ that hid many real or imagined racy secrets at 7755 Watson Road since the early 1940s, was demolished in 1995, its legend remains. Who could tell you how many dalliances bosses had with their stenographers over a half century or so? (No, no. Don’t ask us.) Not all of its architecturally intriguing buildings were trucked away as construction debris. One of the distinctive, curved units of glazed brick and glass block, including a privacy-enhancing garage, was reconstructed at the Museum of Transportation in Kirkwood. A 1965 Corvette convertible sits in the driveway for all to see. Imaginative minds can picture a driver and passenger inside the honey and dark brown bungalow. C’mon. They’re probably just napping or watching free TV in the air-conditioned room. To be sure, the garage wouldn’t accommodate their sports car. It’s not nearly as deep as they actually were, so this garage couldn’t have hidden one of those giant road cruisers popular in the heyday of Route 66, say, a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado with taillights on the rear fins. The loss of the late Art Deco motel for a typical subdivision is one of the sadder chapters of late 20th-century construction intent on expediency and profit, not preservation. Coral Court was on the National Register of Historic Places. The stone entrance gates and a few of the stone pillars remain to enhance the subdivision, which appears to be very nice. Too bad the motel’s awesome pink neon sign was not preserved, but a reasonable facsimile was installed above the reconstructed unit at the museum. The installation is a sight worth seeing at 2933 Barrett Station Road. Now, if you’re not an architecture buff, it’s inside the museum’s building displaying beaucoup vintage autos, just a few yards from Bobby Darin’s space-age dream car, its burgundy paint job infused with ground diamonds. Really. Not into cars? There are choo-choos here, too. Not into those, either? Geez. For sure, your kids or grandkids—or somebody else’s—are.
u.city
Anybody remember seeing searchlights as a wee one and pestering adults until they piled the kids in the station wagon and went on a quest to find the source of the mysterious beam? There was never a pot of gold, like there is at the end of every rainbow. It was usually a used car lot. Searchlights are history, having gone the way of barn roofs painted ‘See Rock City’ and jukeboxes on the counter at every red vinyl-covered swivel stool in Walgreens’ fragrant, greasy grill. (Allow me to wipe my misty eyes. Allergies, you know.) Well, U. City has got it going on Sept. 20 for searchlight fans. The city’s historical society is throwing a party in the fifth-floor council chamber at City Hall, 6801 Delmar Blvd., from 7 to 9 p.m. Five bucks gets you in to hear the intriguing story of the U. City searchlight as told by Jim Kirchherr of KETC. Weather permitting, the searchlight will scour the skies for flying saucers and Russian aircraft, which hasn’t been done here since 2012. Of course, we’re just kidding about flying saucers. But we’re not so sure about the Russians.
notable neighbors: ladue
Kathy Templer started needlepointing more than 40 years ago, just a decade after Sign of the Arrow, the beloved nonprofit emporium on Clayton Road in Ladue, was established by the Pi Beta Phi Alumni Club in 1966. Soon, Templer switched to painting the open-weave canvases on which the yarn is stitched, having adapted her skill as a draftsman. Something clicked. She’d discovered a perfect way to work from home as a young mother of three, including a set of twins. She found it very calming then, and it still grounds her. “When everything around me is going nuts, I can focus,” she says. In the late 1970s, Sign of the Arrow started buying her canvases for customers of the ‘belt capital of the world’ to stitch. The longest 1.25-inch-wide belt Templer has created was for a 58 inch waist. For a group of groomsmen’s belts, she painted a cocktail party scene, including a limo, waiters carrying domed trays, musicians and dancers. “That was one of those, ‘You want me to do what?’ moments,” she confesses. One of her weirdest commissions had to be anatomically correct. Belts for a wedding party of doctors featured the liver, stomach and other internal organs, along with X-rays and medical instruments. One of her perennially popular belt designs is the downtown skyline. For several years, she’s been creating kits for an annual holiday ornament—stitch guide, painted canvas and thread—that the store starts selling in April for the upcoming season. She even fashioned a kneeler for Pope John Paul II when he visited St. Louis. Today, Templer also paints canvases for a Kirkwood store, as well as one near Chicago and another in Chapel Hill, N.C. She’s probably painted one featuring your alma mater. For more than a dozen years, Templer has volunteered at Sign of the Arrow, wearing many different hats, including ‘IT Gal’ (my title, not hers … she insists she doesn’t have one). She found it easier to make changes to the website herself rather than try and explain to someone else what to do. Want to learn a little from a master? Templer will teach canvas painting as part of a three-day workshop at Sign of the Arrow starting Sept. 20.
