(bright music) - [Jim] We take a whack at explaining this new twist on an old game.

- It's a family reunion almost.

You all get together and see each other and have fun playing polo.

- [Jim] We'll meet some young people, who might get you thinking differently about these kids today.

A tough break for an old house.

A burst pipe causes extensive water damage to the historic Field House, going from this, to this.

- We have to keep moving forward.

We will have a great future.

- And "This Week in History," when having a donkey in the parlor was all the rage.

It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(upbeat piano music) (upbeat piano music continues) (upbeat piano music continues) - I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we usually don't have a sports segment on our show, but tonight we do have a segment about sports or a sport, nothing as timely as the Cardinal's opening day, but this story by Brooke Butler gives an age old sport some street cred.

(bright music) - [Brooke] There are certain sports that seem to be reserved for the prim and proper, activities like tennis, crew, golf, not the kind of events to haul out the pickup for a tailgate.

Or say polo, sophisticated, swing, sometimes referred to as the "sport of kings."

But here in St. Louis, you'll find a group that swapped the horses for bikes, ditched the preppy uniforms, shelved the mint juleps... - Get the jello shot.

- [Brooke] And created the St. Louis Bike Polo League.

- It's a hard sport to jump into, but it's such a welcoming community, and everyone is always helping each other and loaning gear, and it's unlike anything else, I think.

- Believe it or not, this is the St. Louis Bike Polo team's spring tournament.

And as we know in the Midwest, weather is unpredictable, but what's predictable is the amount of people who travel from all over the country to play in the tournament, not necessarily because it's seriously competitive.

They're just here for a seriously good time.

(bright music continues) - [Announcer] Six, five, four, three, two, one!

- So I think this is our fun tournament for the year.

We usually throw two tournaments a year, one that's a little more serious and one that's a little more fun.

- [Brooke] Alyssa Jones has been playing bike polo for about eight years now, and while the league encourages people of all skills to try the game out, Alyssa says a lot of the players merge into the sport from the cycling community.

(playful music) In fact, that's how the sport first got started in the US.

Although cycle polo dates back to the late 1800s in Ireland, it was in the early 2000s when a group of Seattle bike messengers were looking for a way to pass the time in between deliveries, and they developed what is now known as hardcourt polo.

There's also grass court bike polo, which, if you ask me, sounds a lot safer.

- You know, I've never really gotten hurt playing polo, but I, again, I play casually, I like to ride slow.

Some people like to ride fast or get a little physical, the rules allow for that.

Contact is allowed or certain kinds of contact.

It feels a lot like hockey.

(playful music) - [Brooke] Okay, so it's a little bit like hockey, but beyond understanding that the objective is to get the most amount of goals, that's about the extent of what I know.

- They start with the joust.

So both teams line up on either side of the court.

The ball's in the center.

They call, "Three, two, one, polo," and then one person from each team runs to the center to race for the ball.

- So you're handling the bike with one hand, mallet in the right.

The biggest rules is you have to hit the ball with the ends of the mallet, not the broad side.

- [Brooke] Hitting the ball with a broad side of the mallet, called a "shuffle," doesn't count for a goal, but it is allowed for passing the ball back and forth on the court.

And if you lose your balance off your bike, called a "dab," you're no longer part of gameplay until you touch a designated spot at half court.

Games are always three versus three and last about 12 minutes or until a team scores five goals.

But with these tournaments, the way teams are formed is a bit unusual.

But it's not like cities competing against other cities, right?

So yeah, how do you form teams?

- It's all just reaching out to your friends and whoever you want to play with.

Sometimes it's people you've never played with before that you think they're gonna be good on the court.

Sometimes I just play with my friends.

We're not even the most competitive, but I'm just here to have a good time and if we score a few goals, that's good as well.

- So the premise of this one is that every team has to have at least one WTF player, so someone who identifies as woman, trans, or fem.

- This is all like, there's no sponsors, there's no funding, so everyone is staying at each other's houses, warm community, and you get to know everyone.

And I play with people across the Midwest, and this is like kind of a, it's a family reunion almost.

You all get together and see each other and have fun playing polo.

- You have all these best friends that live in other cities.

So now, it doesn't matter where I travel in the US, I always know people.

I know someone in every city that plays bike polo.

- If you're really into a really community-focused sport, bike polo is great for that.

(soft music) - Every now and then we come across a story that makes us think about how our own actions can affect others and how maybe we, as individuals, can do a little better.

Anne-Marie Berger went back to elementary school where kindness is a part of the curriculum.

(upbeat bright music) - [Staff Member] Here's Miss Erica, good morning!

- [Anne-Marie] Fridays are great for just about everyone, but at Trautwein Middle School in the Millville School District, the second Friday of every month is extra special.

In fact, these Fridays are so great that kids at this school happily arrive an hour early.

- Hi, good morning, Aman, how are you?

- [Anne-Marie] Why, for the Buddy Club.

Now listen closely, the description of this club is so simple, yet so brilliant, you may miss it.

(kids talking) - You play with all the kids that don't have friends and you give them a friend and have someone to play with.

- [Anne-Marie] Yep, that's it, this is a club where kids who may be struggling to connect with other kids come together to become friends.

That alone is pretty amazing.

But what's even better is who came up with this idea.

It wasn't a parent, it wasn't a teacher.

It was nine-year-old Draigon Schmitt, who saw a need in his school and wanted to do something about it.

- My friend Zaden and Erica, they didn't have anyone to play with.

- Draigon, one of our third-grade students, came to me and said that he noticed that some kids were not being included or not played with at recess.

And so I told him to think about something that he wanted to do to alleviate that problem, something to do to help.

- [Anne-Marie] So Draigon developed the Buddy Club as a way to connect his friends with and without disabilities, so no one would be alone on the playground.

- It makes all the difference in the world.

- [Anne-Marie] Dina Merry's 10-year-old daughter, Chloe, has Down syndrome.

- Everybody always says, "Oh, with kids with Down syndrome, "they're so happy," and they are, but they also have real feelings too.

And so if people don't like Chloe or don't know how to interact with Chloe, Chloe feels that, and she wants to play with others.

I just think that she shies away from it, because other kids just don't know how to interact with her.

So this has given them the opportunity to teach the other kids how to interact with Chloe.

- [Anne-Marie] The timing couldn't be better.

Since COVID, connecting with people of any age or ability has been a struggle for many.

- We're calling it the COVID Slide.

And so, our students came back and staff came back just not knowing how to connect naturally and not knowing how to connect without using a device or without being behind a screen.

And so, now socially, emotionally, students are one grade level, sometimes two grade levels behind.

- [Anne-Marie] At Buddy Club, all students are developing skills to use when interacting with new friends.

This includes different communication strategies to use when playing with friends of different abilities and how to interact in different settings throughout the school day.

- Communication, like I said, comes in all shapes and sizes and forms.

You can be using sign language, you can be using all sorts of different language.

Hi, bye, open, more please, all of these are so welcome and so loved.

- Jayden, what do you wanna be when you grow up?

(Jayden responds) - Do you wanna use your talker?

- Yeah.

(Talker answers) - [Both] Oh, you wanna be a YouTuber!

- Yeah.

- Jinx.

- [Teacher] Ah, shoot.

(playful music) - [Anne-Marie] But these kids, they're putting in the work.

Through the Buddy Club, they're making face-to-face connections, new friends, and making an impact in the lives of others and themselves.

Do you love the Buddy Club?

- Yes.

It's my first club I have ever been in.

We are learning how to be with a buddy, and if there's a new student, we can show them around school.

- [Anne-Marie] How do you think that makes the students feel?

- Like they're family here, they're loyal, loving.

- [Anne-Marie] I think you're a pretty neat kid.

- Thank you.

- [Anne-Marie] It's been a year since Draigon launched the Buddy Club.

He's now 10 and in the fourth grade, and the word exclusion is not in his vocabulary.

Who can be a part of this club?

- Anyone, anyone can.

- [Anne-Marie] Anybody of any ability?

- Anyone.

- I think we all benefited from having the Buddy Club in our building, and we're trying to make sure that it's a culture.

- [Anne-Marie] And for us adults, it would do us all some good to be a little bit more like Draigon.

- Very happy to see other people happy, so, and it just... Every time I see someone happy, I might shed a tear or two.

(kids talking) - Draigon has one more year at Trautwein before he hits middle school.

He's leaving the Buddy Club there in good hands, but he plans to continue his efforts to make sure all kids feel included through high school.

Draigon, there's no doubt you will make that happen.

And Draigon's inspired us to dig a little bit deeper into an issue that for many has carried a shameful stigma.

Joining me to discuss youth mental wellbeing is Dr. Bart Andrews, Chief Clinical Officer at Behavioral Health Response.

Thank you, Doctor, for joining us today.

- You're welcome.

- Following Draigon is a tough act.

(laughs) We put ourselves in a situation to follow a kid that, when I walked away from him, I thought, okay, I need to do a little bit better myself.

How important is this to see kids that might be struggling in that way and address it?

- Well, what Draigon hit on is incredibly powerful here.

Draigon hit on the power of belongingness.

And one of the things that we know is that people, particularly children, need to have a sense of belonging to be happy, to feel good about themselves and the world around them, and what you saw Draigon doing was creating this sense of belonging.

One of the things, I wish I had had the emotional maturity that he has at that age, oh my goodness.

But you could just see, he could tell when these kids were struggling, and his immediate response was, let's include them, let's do something about this.

- Is there a difference between including and belonging?

Is there a different feeling?

- It's a wonderful question.

I think it's really hard to feel like you belong when you're not included in things, so I think they go hand in hand.

And I think you saw an excellent example, that one young lady said, "This is the first club I've ever belonged to."

That was incredibly powerful.

And one of the things you see in our culture today, and this is one of the things that Draigon is fighting, is we've professionalized belonging.

Kids belong to hockey clubs and archery clubs, soccer clubs, all these things that are professionalized, and they're not joining clubs like we used to when were kids.

We'd make our own club.

We'd go hang out in the woods in a fort that we built.

So as we've professionalized our social structures, we've lost these sorts of connections that we just saw where kids are connecting with kids, and that's incredibly important to their wellbeing.

- Yeah, so let's talk about the role that parents, teachers, caregivers play in correcting this as an issue.

And we talked earlier before we sat down here about how involvement with parents might be a little bit too much, and what's happened because of that?

- Yeah, I like to say that latchkey kids became helicopter parents.

And so, one of the things that we see is that we have more time with our kids, face-to-face, parents and kids, than we've ever had in the history of tracking parent-child contact.

At the same time, the amount of time kids spend with each other unsupervised is at the lowest level since we've been tracking it.

And so what we've done is we have really kind of parentified all of our children's experiences.

They're either with teachers, or they're with coaches, or they're with parents, they're not hanging out just with each other unsupervised anymore.

Now, there's some good things about that, but there's lots of bad things in that kids no longer are connecting with each other and learning to form their own groups and their own social institutions the way that we did when we were kids.

- And what's at risk if we don't course correct that a little bit?

- What what we're at risk for is where our youth are growing up, and they're expecting people to create institutions for them instead of creating their own structures and own social settings.

- So we're gonna have a bunch of adults that we're not gonna like.

- Yes, we're gonna have a bunch of adults that are looking for adults to tell them what to do, and that is going to be a huge problem.

And so like everything now, I will say this about the younger generation, it's not all bad or all good.

They are incredibly more kindhearted.

They are more open about talking about their emotional experiences and what they're going through.

They're much more inclusive than we were as kids.

At the same time, they don't have the same sense of self-confidence.

They don't have the same sense of being able to take risk.

Risk taking among youth is down in a big way, and that's not a good thing, that's a really bad thing.

Taking risk is a really important developmental milestone.

- And celebrating failure a little bit, or not saying failure is the worst thing, 'cause it's something you can learn from.

- Absolutely, so one of the things that we've gone about is we, as parents, have tried to make the perfect world for our children.

That doesn't sound bad, does it?

But it has problems, because the world isn't perfect.

The world is an inherently dangerous, unsafe place, and there are people that are mean to us sometimes, and there are times we don't get what we want, and there's times we try things and we fail at them.

This is important, (laughs) we need to have our kids have these same experiences that we had, so they learn to get over them the way that we had to get over them.

- So they're not filling that toolbox with the tools they need to get through things that are tough, to address things that might be challenging.

- That's correct, the youth today are more educated, they're more aware, they're more knowledgeable than we were as kids, but they have knowledge of things that we didn't wanna know as young kids, and they lack the tools to get along with each other, to communicate with each other and to solve each other's problems without getting an adult involved.

In fact, one of the things that we've seen recently is that the suicide rate is actually correlated with return to onsite schooling.

During COVID, the suicide rate among our young folks plummeted until they returned to school.

Only when they returned to the school did we see the suicide rate increase.

And when we looked at some data to figure out what was going on, the primary driver was negative social interactions with other kids.

Kids are bullying me, kids are mean to me.

Well, guess what, that's kind of part of life, isn't it, that sometimes we have interactions with people that aren't pleasant, and we need to be able to learn how to adjust and work those things out with each other, and that's not happening anymore.

- Well how do you balance between the toughen up, get over it, but then actually recognizing and addressing something that might be a mental health issue?

- Oh, that's a really important question.

- I have an 11-year-old.

I need you to answer this question before we wrap up?

- This is really important, 'cause both things are true at the same time.

So first, validating their experience is incredibly important.

Yeah, this hurts, this is painful.

Now we need to build self-agency.

It's not enough to acknowledge that the world causes us pain and suffering.

Part of this is also acknowledging guess who's the only person that can do anything about that?

You, so what we need to be doing is validating experiences and also creating self-agency that you can do something about this.

You can choose how to respond to this.

We've entered an era where if someone says something that hurts your feelings, the option is to shut that person up or make that person feel bad, or they should get in trouble for saying something bad.

Maybe, but also maybe part of this is learning to choose not to be upset when people say things that are stupid or shortsighted.

- That sounds so easy, and if you've got parents who were raised to, you keep your personal mental health issues buried, or you don't talk about it, you don't tell people, and then that continues to go on, it's a tough place to be.

- It is a really tough place to be, and in fact, one- - [Anne-Marie] And it's all coming from love, but maybe not getting the right result.

- So it's incredibly... Children need love, they need validation, but they also need to build resilience.

They also need to feel like they can do things, that they have power in their lives, that they can make choices, it's really important.

One of the things there is actually, Dr. Jonathan Haidt, who is a social psychologist, in his book, "The Coddling of the American Mind," talks about this.

There's a whole form of therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy where we teach people to minimize threats, maximize coping resources, don't distort things, don't assume things that aren't true to be true.

We're teaching our children the exact opposite.

We're teaching them how to (indistinct).

The world's gonna, global warming's gonna kill the planet.

Imagine if you're 10-years-old, and you've got people telling you the world's doomed.

What do you do with that information?

First of all, it isn't even accurate information.

Second of all, what we're doing is we're scaring our kids to death.

- Well, who's telling them that?

- I wondered who possibly could be telling folks about global warming and the world's going to end.

- [Anne-Marie] Well, okay, we've only got a few seconds left.

What would you tell a parent who, like me, sitting here, young kids, what do I need to look for and what do I need to do?

- So here's some important things that we should be doing.

We should be talking to our kids about their experiences.

What's going on?

Have things happened that you're excited about?

Did things happen that hurt or bothered you?

We should make it normal to talk about good things and bad things.

Both of these things are part of our experiences.

Two, we definitely should monitor our children's social media use.

You should be, as a parent, very aware of what your kids are saying and doing on social media.

So what are they searching?

What are they interested in?

Not only do you learn more about them, you have a better chance to prepare them.

- So be involved, but not helicoptering over all the time.

So I'm gonna walk away with validation and filling that toolbox with coping skills.

- Validation, giving them tools and giving them agency.

Third, creating opportunities for them to take risks in safe places.

- Thank you so much for coming.

I could talk to you about this for much longer, and I really appreciate your time.

- Always glad to help out.

- Jim?

(soft music) - Thanks, Anne-Marie.

Over the years we've done stories about how the historic Eugene Field House downtown underwent major makeovers, a new focus, a new name, a new exhibit space.

Well, we just went back, because of the need for another makeover that wasn't part of anybody's plan or anybody's budget.

The Field House Museum on Broadway, just south of the ballpark, what we used to call the Eugene Field House, has boarded up windows, but that was part of a planned window restoration.

This was not part of the plan.

But on a bitter cold Christmas Eve last year, museum director, Stephanie Bliss, got a call with some bad news, a pipe in the sprinkler system, designed to protect the house, was causing major damage.

You've got three floors here, right?

- Yeah, so what happened was in the attic, the pipe burst.

It came down through the middle of the house, through all three floors.

There was some water damage to the carpeting on the upper floors, and it all came down into the basement where there was over a foot of water, and sometimes the water came down on a few of the pieces of furniture.

And unfortunately, some of 'em did get wet, however, all of our furniture is restorable, so it will be saved.

We will be able to get back to our glory of highlighting the Field family and St. Louis culture, but there is gonna need to be some work done to the furniture.

(gentle music) - [Jim] Today, the once immaculately decorated Field House has been stripped down.

Walls and ceilings need to be replastered, holes that were cut to help dry out the innards, they need to be patched, but the bones are pretty good.

- No luckily, structurally, we were fine.

The house itself is in great condition.

It's lasted 178 years.

- Yeah, when was it built, 18... - 1845.

- Wow!

The Field House was once one of 12 homes built on South Broadway, called Walsh's Row.

In 1850, the Field family moved in.

Roswell Field was one of Dread Scott's attorneys, and his son, Eugene Field, became famous as the Children's Poet, famous enough for Mark Twain to dedicate a plaque there in 1902.

But the city changed over the years, and in the 1930s, the owner of Walsh's Road, described in this article as a grimy tenement, started tearing down the buildings for a parking lot or a freight terminal.

But there was a successful movement to save one unit, the Eugene Field House, and that's why it ended up standing alone as a museum with Eugene Field's toy collection, one of the big draws.

But while the house remained, the story changed.

- [Speaker] I realized that his role was so critical.

- In 2007, it was designated a national historic landmark, not because of the poet, (crowd clapping) but because of Roswell Field's role in the Dread Scott case.

And there were now plans for the empty lot next door.

In 2017, a new museum was opened, and the Eugene Field House became The Field House Museum, new stories, new interpretations, but alongside an old house with old furniture and some of Eugene's old toys.

- [Stephanie] Yeah, we've been going through everything in our collection, so even if it wasn't hit specifically by the water, we have to go through everything, because it became a moisture-filled environment.

- [Jim] The the dolls were the most vulnerable of the toys, do you think?

- Typically, yes.

So some of 'em have some slight water damage.

You can see here, she's a little dirty.

- Can I pick her up?

- Yeah, go ahead.

So she's a little dirty, but we're able to clean her.

- [Jim] And some maybe can't recover.

- Unfortunately, yes, some of the items within the collection, they're just not gonna make it.

They were too sensitive or the issues with it was just too much that unfortunately are not repairable.

- The dolls were...

The museum exhibit space has been reopened to visitors, and it has a new St. Louis Browns exhibit in time for the baseball season.

But getting the house back in shape will take quite a bit longer.

- Oh yes, this is gonna take much longer.

Ideally, we would be open, the historic house again, by the next holidays, next fall, or this coming fall, I should say.

- Yeah, so there will be Christmas at the Field House again.

- [Stephanie] (laughs) Well, yes, once again, of course.

I mean, Christmas is our favorite time.

We decorate to the nines.

- This is expensive stuff, right?

You're covered by insurance, I'm guessing, but does it cover everything you need?

- Well, as we know, insurance only goes so far.

(laughs) So no, it won't necessarily cover all of our costs to do repairative work to the collection, to the house.

We were in the middle of doing a window restoration prior to that, so we also have those bills that we are trying to fundraise for and... - [Jim] The Field House Museum has a small staff and gets no public funds, so that's another part of this challenge.

- We do have a great community here in St. Louis that does believe in our history (gentle music) and that does believe that we should preserve for the next generation.

So I think that they will help us, and they will support us, and we will have a great future.

And so, yes, it has been a struggle, but we have to stay positive, because if we sit in that sorrow, we're not going to move forward, and we have to keep moving forward.

- When we started doing our "This Week in History" feature, we knew a lot of our stories would involve famous people and important events, but we also figured, actually, we kinda hoped, that we would stumble across the quirky and the unexpected and learn something in the process.

That's just what happened when we were going through some newspapers from this week, 120 years ago.

(upbeat music) (typewriter keys clicking) We found it on the Society page, you know, engagements and weddings, who's heading to Europe or to Hot Springs.

But in the "Globe Democrat Society," News and Gossip column on April 4th, 1903 was this.

"Miss Lillian Reinhardt of 2806 St. Louis Avenue "gave a donkey party for some friends," a donkey party?

Well, if you were thinking this, no, but if this, yes, but not really, because a donkey party was not child's play.

What many today grew up playing at children's birthday parties, Pin the Tail on the Donkey, was in 1903, a popular parlor game for adults, and it had been around since the 1880s, quite the rage.

The "Post-Dispatch," in 1887 called it, "The latest amusement in fashionable West End Society," and explained how it was played and mentioned that male guests often placed side bets on the outcome.

It was big in Jefferson City.

A Sedalia paper said, "Everybody who is anybody "in Capitol Society is trying the dextrous feat "of tailing the donkey."

And the game was still popular in St. Louis in the new century.

(bright orchestral music) Mrs. Rhodes of South Jefferson hosted one.

Miss Carrie Priesmeier's donkey party was followed by a supper and a short musical program.

And there was even a surprise donkey party thrown for Charles McAnany.

But a full page feature in 1905 was about something new, a donkey party for children, and it would lose its popularity with adults.

Generations later, it would just be another children's party game, like dropping clothes pins into the milk bottle.

But in 1903, Lilian Reinhardt's donkey party was probably a big hit with prizes awarded, followed by a dainty luncheon and an evening of music and dancing.

And worth a mention, on the Society page, "This Week in History," in 1903.

(bright music) And that's "Living St.

Louis."

We love hearing from you.

You could get in touch with us at NinePBS.org/LSL.

I'm Jim Kirchherr, thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

(bright music continues) (bright music continues) - [Announcer] "Living St. Louis" is funded in part by the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.