- [Jim] They take to the streets on a mission.

In tough times, it's good to get a little help from friends in Jeeps.

- [Lee] We're not just ridin' around, we're ridin' around with a purpose.

- [Jim] A look at the efforts to protect these treasures in Tower Grove Park.

- [Bill] We have the best collection of Victorian pavilions in the entire world.

- [Jim] Made in St. Louis, every product has a story, and often a story that is today, a family history.

- [Patrick] Landed here with nothing except the ability to make candy.

- [Jim] And we look back to the old days of baseball and the old park, where for the fans, the game was up close and personal.

- [Man] You were still close enough to the field and involved in the action that you could see the expressions on people's faces, you could hear some of the language, you know, which wasn't always the best.

It's all next on Living St. Louis.

(upbeat music) - I'm Jim Kirchherr.

There may have been a few times in this past year when you've shaken your head and wondered, what is this world coming to?

Well, we've got a few stories that might give you a little bit of hope.

Brooke Butler tells us about some people who made me think of the old sports cliche, "when the going gets tough, the tough get going."

In this case in a Jeep.

- Jeepformers!

Transform!

Jeepformers!

Transform!

Jeepformers!

Transform!

(upbeat music) - [Brooke] We've all seen the bumper stickers.

"It's a Jeep thing," and us non-Jeep owners might not ever get it, but clearly it's definitely a thing.

(upbeat music) These particular Jeep enthusiasts are a part of a group called Jeepformer Social Club.

Like other car clubs, it's centered around admiring each other's flashy models.

But unlike other car clubs, the Jeepformers' mission goes a little bit deeper.

Our conversations always go back to J-E-E-P, Jeeps.

- [Brooke] Lee Stokes is the executive director of the Jeepformers, a nonprofit organization, not only passionate about Jeeps, but also about uplifting the St. Louis community.

- [Lee] We're not just ridin' around, we're ridin' around with a purpose.

The reason why our name is Jeepforms, because our Jeeps, if you notice some of the Jeeps, they transform.

Our Jeeps can break down, can take the doors off, put the doors on.

You can take the tops off, you can change the wheels.

- [Brooke] And just like the group transforms their Jeeps, they're also transforming lives.

When the club gets together, they map out their driving routes around people and places that could benefit from a little transforming.

- [Lee] Well, Michelle called us out.

She told us her mother was the greatest.

She said, "Lee (indistinct), my mom is the greatest."

We said, Michelle, we love you.

We love your mother.

Just let us know when and we will be there.

Today is when and we are here!

(cheering) - [Brooke] The group selects the recipients through requests from members or, now that they've built up a reputation, people in the community come directly to the group leaders.

The recipients range from people who are out of work, frontline workers, families facing illnesses, or sometimes random people they engage with out in the community.

The Jeepformer blessings are usually in the form of a care basket filled with essentials and always with a song and dance.

- It's time for people to come together.

You know, if we work as a whole, we can do so much better.

- [Brooke] Jeepformers president Glynes Stokes, who's also Lee's wife, is the one organizing these outings.

- It's not about what this person has, what that person has, it's what we can do for you just to get you through the day or whatever.

We're not sayin' we can make your life whole, but we're just here to give some kind of help, cheer, or anything.

It's hard.

There's a lot of people don't know he's takin' care of her.

It's a very tough job.

Here's here every day, all of it.

Doctor's appointments, takin' to the beautician every day.

I just want you to know that you are appreciated.

You are very, very much appreciated.

- [Brooke] The group formed back in the Fall of 2020, when drive-by celebrations were becoming a normal way to socialize during the pandemic.

Seeing the need to give back to their community, Lee and Glynes now have almost 30 Jeeps parading around the entire metro area spreading endless amounts of positivity.

- We have one member who is a professor, and her students, they graduated above and beyond.

They couldn't have a graduation.

So we did a mini one for them.

And she actually held a ceremony.

That right there was so touching.

It was unreal.

- We have one of our members, who's an alderwoman in the city of Alton.

She had a young lady who was evicted, didn't have anything.

She got with us.

We all got together.

We got our truck load of furniture.

We took the furniture over to her, and all my Jeepers just unloaded the furniture for her.

She was happy.

I mean, it was great.

It was great.

That was one of the memorable moments.

(upbeat music) - [Brooke] For some people, the pandemic gave more opportunity to pursue hobbies.

And for everybody, it created the need for a caring community.

Lee and Glynes have made the best of both worlds by combining their hobby of Jeeps, with their passion for helping others.

The Jeepformer blessings will continue and they even hope for more members, as long as the streets can handle all the traffic.

- What we do comes strictly from the heart.

We do not get anything out of this except the joy of seein' people happy, the smiles that we put on people's face.

We do it outta love and kindness.

(upbeat music) - When I was a kid, we called spring break cleanup week, and my mom really meant it.

Spring cleaning, it's a time of repainting and discarding, and generally freshening things up.

Well Ruth Ezell takes us to one of St Louis's most popular parks where that ritual is taking place on a large scale.

- [Ruth] There's no mistaking where you are if you're within eye shot of one of Tower Grove Park's 11 distinctive pavilions.

In March of 2021, fencing was installed around the iconic Turkish Pavilion located near the Arsenal Street park entrance.

The same goes for the Old Playground Pavilion, which is just west of the Grand Avenue park entrance.

Both are undergoing an extensive restoration and preservation at a cost of nearly $1 million.

- [Bill] We have the best collection of Victorian pavilions in the entire world.

And our collection is about 150 years old now.

So it's in need of a little bit of a fresh up.

- [Ruth] Tower Grove Park, executive director, Bill Reininger.

- We're gonna go in and we're taking off all the old paint, and stripping that down, so that we can get to the bare metal where we need to make iron repairs so that we can see some of the structural issues.

On some of the roofs we need to do some welding, so getting that paint off.

Then the carpenters are gonna come in and any of the posts that need to be replaced, any of the trim work, the architectural elements, the wooden ones, we'll have those created, but we're gonna paint the structures.

They're gonna be very, very vibrant going back to their original colors.

So there was a lot of research that was done in the past to find those exact colors and we'll be using those again.

And then underneath them, there's currently like a brick or concrete edge with a brick, just red brick, bottom to it for people to walk on.

And that really is not as ADA accessible as what we would like.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna put a exposed aggregate underneath the entire structure which will make ADA accessibility so much better.

And then something that's never happened in their history is we're gonna have lighting on them.

We did a mock up in Fall of 2019 and it was just astonishing.

And you just see them in a whole new way.

- Tower Grove park was founded in 1868 as a gift to the city of St. Louis from retired merchant, Henry Shaw.

He had already established the Missouri Botanical Garden located just north of here.

The land for both projects came from Shaw's country estate.

And the pavilions?

That was his idea.

- Henry Shaw traveled Europe after he retired at the age of like 40.

So he went to Europe a couple different times.

And that's where he really got inspired, and you see that from his travels.

The different architecture from the Chinese Pavilion, to the Turkish Pavilion, to the Victorian, like the Old Playground.

Those are different types of architecture that he saw while he was traveling.

So he came back and worked with different architects to bring to life the architecture that he saw in Europe, and most of them were built about 1871 through 1873.

- This was original walking path and flooring, so we're very carefully, painstakingly removing these, palletizing them, so that they're good to use later on.

- [Ruth] In 2017, Reininger explained the initial stages of a now completed restoration project, the stable and surrounding grounds where the parks horses live.

The flooring is composed of hardwood bricks.

- We're really excited to be able to save these and amazing how good a shape these are after all of these years and all the wear and tear on 'em.

- [Ruth] Addressing the historic flooring was phase one of a top to bottom renovation of the stable.

There are new windows and doors, new tuckpointing, and exterior lighting.

Most important, for the comfort of residents Sheffield and Moonshine, the heating and ventilation systems are upgraded.

All the work done here and at the pavilions is part of a bigger vision.

- We did a master planning process, which involved a lot of input from the general public.

And you're startin' to see some of those projects come online now.

One of the things that they identified, obviously, because the importance of our collection was to preserve our historic structures, and so the pavilions are some of those things that we're really focusing on right now.

And there's other projects that we'll be moving along that are part of the master plan to improve the park, suggestions from the general public of different amenities that they wanna see in the park.

So over the next couple years, you're gonna to start to see some of that 2017 master plan come to life.

- Thank you, appreciate it.

- [Ruth] Because of the pandemic, the Tower Grove farmer's market was relocated in 2020 to the western edge of the park's roundabout and vehicle traffic was diverted accordingly.

That is also the case for the 2021 market season.

COVID related restrictions that limited where and how the public could gather came with an unexpected silver lining for Tower Grove Park.

- Our membership grew 60% last year.

So as we adapted to being responsive to the general public by closing roads, making sure that the park was safe and kept up for everybody who was coming in, we were seeing crowds on a Tuesday afternoon that were typical Saturday afternoon crowds.

You know, people were coming in, they were telling us, I'm in the park three times a day.

It's been an interesting year and we're blessed and honored to be able to help our community through this pandemic.

- I've always sort of been a fan of company histories because if you dig deep enough you'll find that somebody came up with the first idea.

They built it, they made it, they mixed it, they cooked it.

Kara Vaninger's story is about that very thing, not just a company and a product but the people who made it happen.

- [Patrick] I grew up in a family of storytellers.

I thought that I knew people who had even died before I was born.

I heard so many stories about them.

In time, all of these come together and then you step back and you see a picture.

And in our case, there is a Fenian uprising, there is steerage to America, there is a slum in north St. Louis, a candy factory.

And that's the story of us.

- [Kara] Nine producer, Patrick Murphy, has spent decades telling other people's stories, but since entering semi-retirement, he decided it was finally time to tell one of his own, in the family history titled Candy Men.

Released in October, 2020, it tells the tale of two immigrant families brought together by love and held together by licorice.

- [Patrick] It started with my great grandfather.

His family had a candy store in Dublin and he grew up working in the candy store.

This is the middle of the potato famine.

And he got involved in the Fenian movement.

And in 1867, there was a rebellion.

He was in it and he was going to be hanged if they caught him.

So at 20 years old, he booked steerage to America, landed here with nothing except the ability to make candy.

So he came to St. Louis, met a young woman in the Dunham Coconut Factory where they both had jobs, 17 years younger than he was, named Margaret Switzer.

And they got married in 1881.

And she had a brother named Fred Switzer.

Now the Switzer's were really poor.

They grew up in Kerry Patch, the Irish slum on the north side of St. Louis.

And he spent his life as a kid selling candy on the riverfront and around Kerry Patch.

So my great grandfather knew how to make candy, Switzer knew how to sell it.

- [Kara] And so began another immigrant realization of the American dream.

This one spun from sugar and the determination to rise above desperate circumstances.

- [Patrick] There was a lot of prejudice.

My uncle, Fred, told me about stories of seeing "Irish and Catholics need not apply."

You know, they were in their own red lined district in north St. Louis, Kerry Patch.

They couldn't live anywhere else, and they didn't wanna live anywhere else.

- [Kara] Using the kitchen in their Kerry Patch tenement apartment, Joseph Murphy began making the chocolates, creams, and other sweets he remembered from the shop in Dublin, and Fred Switzer began selling them.

Just a few years later, they had a brick and mortar factory called Murphy & Switzer Candy Company.

Long gone, it once sat where the Gateway Arch now stands.

But this was just the beginning of the Switzer and Murphy family story.

And though at times they did try their best to get away from each other, their fates remained intertwined through bankruptcy and success, betrayal and reconciliation, and above all the making and selling of candy.

- [Patrick] It's called Candy Men, but the women in this story are actually probably the most interesting people.

There is my great grandmother, Margaret Switzer, who put up with this roaming Irishman who was always picking up his bags and going to another city, or going back to Ireland, you know, very temperamental, creative.

While all this is going on, you know, she lost a child.

She kept things together, resolved to never be poor, again.

The sister of the founder, Fred Switzer, Mary Ellen Switzer, was a force of nature.

- [Kara] It was the mysterious Mary Ellen's wheeling and dealing skills and the money she had earned trading horses out West that not only saved the business from bankruptcy in the late 1890s, but also put it completely into her brother Fred Switzer's hands.

Murphy, one time co-owner and product developer, wasn't included at all.

Even after he was asked to return to the company, the sign from then on would only read Switzer's.

And when St. Louisans today hear the name Switzer, they think licorice.

- It actually only became a licorice factory making exclusively licorice during World War II because of sugar shortages.

Before that, they made licorice, but they made all kinds of other candies too.

Something called the Buttermel, the chocolate soldier, wonderful things that actually had their roots back to that Irish candy store.

I actually found newspaper ads for my family's candy factory, 1845, in Dublin newspapers.

- [Kara] And this was just one treasure that Patrick found during his research for the book.

Many more he discovered in his own family's collection.

- My great grandfather, the guy who came over from Ireland, he had a hobby of photography.

He used to make glass plates and he took pictures like, this is in the 1890s, 1900, of his family and his employees.

There are over 90 photos in this book, and a lot of them I'd never seen before.

And I was really lucky.

My dad and his brother, back in 1967, did like a five hour interview with my Uncle Fred.

I had all of that, every family story, all about the factory where he worked.

In 1900, he was a 13 year old kid throwing rocks at streetcars in the St. Louis streetcar strike.

I mean, this guy is really a part of history.

Thank you, Uncle Fred because you really made this book possible.

- [Kara] And one day, all of those characters in his book, those people whom Patrick had grown up hearing so much about, came back to life.

- [Patrick] Among my parents' things was a canister of film.

Fast as I could get an old projector, I looped it up.

It was like Christmas time of 1930.

Everybody was in it.

All of my relatives.

My grandparents were in their thirties and they were all kind of hamming it up, pointing at their car, pointing at their house, doing the kind of things that people do in home movies.

And then there's this flash and my great grandfather, the old judge from Dublin, Ireland, is full frame like kind of laughing, wondering why are they doing this?

That was a surprise to find that.

That was a real gift.

- [Kara] Long after the Murphy name was gone from both the factory in Ireland and the one on the St. Louis Landing, Murphy men were still making candy.

- [Patrick] So the Murphy's and the Switzer's worked at Switzer's Candy Company for three generations.

In 1972, my dad, the last of the candy men was fired, and it was bought by Beatrice Foods Corporation, which was trying to bring in its own way of doing things.

My dad was doing it the old way of things.

It was inevitable.

In the course of doing the research, I actually contacted the fellow who, at the time, was a young executive who fired my dad.

Interviewing this fellow was really interesting because like, I stopped hating him.

I realized that it was his job.

It's something he had to do, but that was tough for my dad.

So this family business in the 1960s is sold to a corporation, which sells it to another corporation, like sells it to a bigger corporation, and eventually they just kill it.

There is no more Switzer's Licorice.

And then 2006, this abandoned factory is hit by a storm, made all the newspapers.

Bricks are strewn all over the Eads bridge, and in 2007, they tear down this iconic building.

End of the product, end of the factory, end of story.

But not.

After that, there's another chapter.

And I'll let my cousin, Michael Switzer, tell that part.

- This is one of our new flavors.

And I thought you'd really enjoy it.

When you think about it, candy is really one of the first brand choices that we make, right?

You'd go to the movie theater, you'd go to the store, and your parents give you a dollar and say, "go ahead and buy some candy."

They don't really care what you buy, but you care.

It's a significant decision now and it's all yours.

And that sense of my candy brand and my relationship, my personal relationship with this brand, it stays with us.

- [Kara] As an advertiser, Michael Switzer knew that consumers were always on the lookout for brands that felt authentic.

After years of people wistfully telling him how much they had loved Switzer's Licorice, Mike decided the time was right to put his family's name back on a national product that had created more than a century of joy.

But it wasn't nostalgia that prompted Mike Switzer to bring back his family business.

It was the product itself.

- So the process is a little bit different.

Most of the ingredients are exactly the same.

But there were many times as I was doing this, and it could be in the middle of a trade show, it could be in some negotiations with somebody who's supplying sugar, and I realized, wow, this is what my grandfather went through.

It's a passion and you live it.

And it's difficult.

It's hard.

There are a thousand ways you can fail every day.

So, to see him start the company and grow it into America's number one licorice from those kinds of roots, it's extremely powerful to me and very touching.

My one regret my entire life is that I never met the man.

He died before I was born.

Boy, what I would give to be able to sit down now and trade stories with him.

- [Kara] So while Mike connected with the loved ones he had never met by reviving their business, Patrick did so by becoming the next in a long line of storytellers.

- Writing this book brought me a lot closer to these people that I'd heard stories about.

I really feel, in some strange way, that I really know them, that we have some kind of a relationship.

By telling stories, you do more than just relate things that happened.

You actually can relive the past.

- Finally, a seasonal story, and by seasonal, I mean baseball season.

It's not a complicated history.

This is, with no apology, simple, good old days nostalgia.

Years ago before the building of Busch Stadium III, we did a program about baseball in St. Louis.

The move towards these more classic brick ballparks was just underway.

At the time, Busch Stadium II was undergoing a major renovation and that included tearing out the AstroTurf in favor of the more traditional grass field.

So back then we asked people, including the late legendary sports writer, Bob Gray, for their own baseball memories.

Yes, it was a nostalgic look back the good old days, and for a lot of folks, the good old days meant Busch Stadium I, the old Sportsman's Park on North Grand.

Maybe baseball wasn't really better back then, but it was different and closer to its roots, and to its fans.

It began as a ball field and Sportsman's Park seemed to be built around the game itself.

Built to serve the people who used to stand in the outfield or near the sidelines.

And it was a long time that feeling survived.

Into the 1930s, the stadium announcer was still on the field shouting out the lineup.

- [Bob] He would stand behind home plate with a double handed megaphone.

The megaphone was very large, double handed.

And with a booming voice, he would read the batting order to a press radio level, which meant that people close to home plate got that.

But then he would waddle, and I mean waddle, 'cause he was heavy, down to third base, and just get the battery.

When he made a batting change, by the time he got through with the change, the inning was over.

(band playing) - [Jim] Before the electric organ, or blasting rock songs, if you heard any music, it was likely to be coming from a high school band sitting in the stands.

The old time stadium still had things in common with the school athletic field or the playground.

Players would trot in off the field, empty handed, leaving their mitts out on the diamond, near their position.

Watch the shortstop after he makes the inning ending play.

You'd think it wouldn't be safe, but nobody remembers anybody ever getting hurt, or losing a game because of a mitt on the field.

And if you've ever wondered why some of the old action photos look so good from those days, it's because photographers were on the field, gathered near home for the batter or near first or third if they were expecting a play there.

You didn't need a telephoto lens, not even to get a picture, when Brown's owner, Bill Veeck sent Eddie Goodell up to bat.

- [Bob] If Bill Veeck hadn't tipped me off the night before we were drinking, we would've never had a picture because the photographer would've been long gone, and not only he there, but he was able to get out on the field, and he kneeled on what you and I would call the on deck circle to be that close.

- [Jim] All of this, plus the physical closeness of the fan to the game made a huge difference in the ballpark experience.

A difference that was easier to feel than to explain.

Adding public address systems and making rules removing gloves and photographers made sense, but they removed some of the informality of baseball.

That's the thing everybody remembers about Sportsman's Park, how close you were to the players, how much you were a part of the game.

- [Man] You were still close enough to the field and involved in the action that you could see the expressions on people's faces.

You could hear some of the language, you know, which wasn't always the best.

And you were into the game.

You had a closer feeling.

You weren't in this mega complex.

- [Jim] There was a time when kids knew what it was like to share the field with their heroes.

- [Bob] Yeah.

The kids would run around on the field.

They didn't stop the kids at that time after the games were over.

- [Man] Yeah, you could do it then.

But now you can't, you get on the field, you get arrested.

They don't want you on the field.

- [Jim] Television may have been one of the big things that made regular guys into modern celebrities.

The camera brought their images and their accomplishments into homes around the country, but it left a lot of their humanity back on the field.

And you've got to see them, hear them, maybe even exchange a word with them, to really see that they are regular guys, and maybe to remind them of that as well.

- [Woman] Because see the other ball player's he could almost touch them if you got down there, close to the field, where now you're too far away from the ball players but, that's progress, so you just have to look at it that way.

- And that's Living St. Louis.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Jim Kirchherr and we'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] Living St. Louis is made possible by the support of the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation, the Mary Rankin Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan Charitable Trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.

(upbeat music)