70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor • Downtown workers gathered around a loudspeaker at Eighth and Olive streets, outside the federal Custom House (now the Old Post Office), to hear a live broadcast of President Franklin Roosevelt’s war speech to a joint session of Congress. The day before, Japan bombed a U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Congress quickly ratified the declaration of war, as seen on the front page of the Post-Dispatch on Dec. 8. (The government didn’t confirm the destruction of the USS Arizona for another week.) You can see me at the bottom of the page — there was no “bird line” phrase that day. (Post-Dispatch archives)
A former Consolidated Service Car Co. driver picks up customers at Ninth and Cole streets downtown on Dec. 7, 1965, a few days into the Committee of Racial Equality boycott of Bi-State Transit System to save what was left of service cars. In 1965, they charged 20 cents per rider. That was 10 cents cheaper that buses, but buses allowed free transfers. The defiant owner-operators erased Consolidated’s name from their cars. (Lester Linck/Post-Dispatch archives)
Service cars operated like small buses
ST. LOUIS • A hybrid in between taxicabs and buses, service cars were large automobiles that cruised regular routes for hire, offering the relative comfort of a car seat on a schedule.
Cabbies and streetcar motormen loathed service cars because they siphoned customers and clogged downtown corners. Bus company executives called them “parasites.”
Before World War II, almost 500 service cars plied the city and suburbs, charging five-cent fares. Many people called them “jitneys” — old slang for a nickel. Separate cars and routes served blacks and whites. Police officers hounded service-car drivers for failing to possess commercial licenses or veering from assigned routes.
Gangster turns stool pigeon in '24 trial
ST. LOUIS • The courtroom’s cast-iron shutters were slammed shut. Only people with passes were admitted. A phalanx of federal agents surrounded their star witness.
Ray “the Fox” Renard, one-time wheelman for the notorious gang called Egan’s Rats, was back in town.
Renard, 26, became a Rat as a teenage pickpocket. The gang formed in Kerry Patch, the hardscrabble Irish neighborhood northwest of downtown. When Prohibition began, Egan’s Rats muscled into bootlegging. But their specialty was big-time stickups.
Execution part of Missouri's brutish civil war
ST. LOUIS • Six prisoners of war were tied to wooden posts and blindfolded with cotton bandages. A squad of 36 riflemen waited at 10 paces. One of the condemned asked to speak.
“I am now to be shot for what other men have done,” said Charles W. Minniken, 22, a Confederate soldier from Arkansas. “Oh Lord, be with me.”
The volley ripped across a field northeast of present-day Jefferson and Shenandoah avenues at 3 p.m. Oct. 29, 1864. It was a vengeance execution, ordered by the Union command in St. Louis for the murders of Union Maj. James Wilson and six soldiers who had been captured by Confederates. Their bodies were found in Franklin County.
Beer wins applause in 1932 campaign
ST. LOUIS • The serious speechifying was about hard times. The cheers were for beer.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democratic candidate for president, stopped in St. Louis on Oct. 21, 1932, barely two weeks before Election Day. More than 12,000 Democrats jammed the St. Louis Coliseum, a convention hall at Washington and Jefferson avenues. On the sidewalk outside, an additional 5,000 gathered around scratchy loudspeakers.
Roosevelt delivered a ponderous 50-minute prepared speech on farm policy, railroad debt and President Herbert Hoover’s “dangerous” budget deficits. Democrats, sensing the landslide to come, were easy to please.
They gave their most joyous applause for two lines that weren’t in the typewritten text.
The Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009. Construction began at the garden in 1959, and cost $700,000 — almost double the projection. Today, it provides cover for 2,800 plants, including palm trees, devil flowers, spider lilies and orchids. (Photo by Johnny Andrews / jandrews@post-dispatch.com)
Climatron is a novel and enduring hit
ST. LOUIS • It rose like a honeycomb of aluminum tubes, slowly curling into a dome high above the flowers. It could save the palm trees and, perhaps, revive the garden.
The odd structure was the Climatron, the world’s first geodesic greenhouse and new home for the Missouri Botanical Garden’s orchids, coffee trees and hibiscus. The local architects who designed it were inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller, a Harvard dropout and prolific spinner of big ideas.
The unusual shape drew visitors during the year of construction. Shortly before the dedication on Oct. 1, 1960, all 112 interior floodlights were illuminated. Outside, the Climatron glowed like a magic mushroom in a fantasy movie.
Workers assemble the first rows of aluminum tubes in October 1959 to build the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden. The tubes create interlocking hexagons, (six-sided structures) to form a 70-foot-high dome that needs no interior vertical supports. Local architects Wayne Mackey Sr. and Joseph Murphy designed the building with inspiration from prolific inventor R. Buckminster Fuller, who patented the “geodesic dome.” (Photo by Buel White / Post-Dispatch)
Confederate spy's fateful bid to join invading army
MANCHESTER • Confederate agent James Morgan Utz’s wagon clattered toward the Meramec River with a hidden stash of medicine and secret messages. Utz hoped to contact Gen. Sterling Price’s army, which was pressing north toward St. Louis.
Utz, 23, had grown up on a farm in present-day Hazelwood and was a Confederate soldier until his capture in 1862. Returning home, he became a spy. He was driving west on Sept. 25, 1864, when Union cavalrymen stopped him near the village of Manchester. They hauled him to the Gratiot Street Prison, the jail for secessionists in St. Louis.
