(bright music) - [Jim] Her acting career started as a child on The Goldenrod Showboat, and Kathleen Nolan went on to be a TV star and a tough union leader, using lessons she learned in those early years.

- I have all fond memories of growing up in St. Louis.

It was a good foundation for me.

- [Jim] A story about telling stories, a production company profiling people who make this city a special place.

- A growing group of people that have become real St. Louis boosters, and those are my people.

- [Jim] And this musical couple from Columbia, Missouri, is back on PBS for a new season of "Now Hear This", traveling and exploring the world of music.

- And so it's kind of an ideal job for both of us, and we get to do it together, which is great.

- It's all next on "Living St. Louis".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) I am Jim Kirchherr, and our first story is about a local girl who made good.

Well, a local girl who is now 90 years old.

And if all she did was one successful TV show, she'd be part of television history.

But Kathleen Nolan did that and a whole lot more.

And recently she was happy to talk with us from her home in LA about her career that started as a little girl on the St. Louis Riverfront.

♪ Want you to meet the family ♪ Known as The Real McCoys ♪ That's Grand Pappy Amos - This was one of the top rated TV shows in the late fifties and early sixties, and it's what Kathleen Nolan's best remembered for.

But she did so much after that and so much before.

In her twenties, she had already spent her entire life in show business, a career that started on a showboat on the St. Louis Riverfront.

She was just 13 months old when she made her first appearance in 1934 on stage at The Goldenrod Showboat, where her parents were regular players.

And throughout her childhood and teenage years, she would continue to perform.

Her career would continue for decades on stage, screen, television.

Her last film credit was in 2017.

But how much of that St. Louis girl who worked on the Goldenrod is still part of who you are today?

- I think a lot.

(Kathleen laughs) I think very much so, yeah.

I'm still the kid from St. Louis.

(bright music) - [Jim] She is now retired, living in Los Angeles, and turned 90 last September.

She started life as Joycelyn Schrum.

The Schrums were a local show business family performing in plays and tent shows, and regularly in the melodramas staged on The Goldenrod Showboat, which only recently had stopped traveling the rivers and was permanently docked on the St. Louis Riverfront.

- We didn't live close to the boat at that time, so we took a bus, and then you walked on the levee down to the boat.

For a period of time, we lived on the boat, but most of the time we didn't.

- [Jim] Every week or so, they had to learn a new show, a new script.

- [Kathleen] It was a good foundation for me.

- So I ran across this article from 1947.

I don't know if you remember this or not.

It said, "Joycelyn Schrum at 13 is as much the trooper as her dad, Sam Schrum, veteran of stock and showboats including the Goldenrod.

The story was she stepped on a needle in the dressing room, took part of it out and hobbled through the show.

Then a doctor took out the rest, gave her a tetanus shot, and she hobbled through the second show.

- I do remember that, I'm still doing it.

(Kathleen laughs) It was, I guess, the beginning.

And the lessons that I learned there, I still apply today.

(bright music) - [Jim] The 1950 census has the Schrums living on Delmar, and lists 16-year-old Joycelyn as working 30 hours a week as an actress on a showboat.

And she was still going to school during the day.

- I did my lessons in the dressing room.

(bright music continues) - [Jim] After graduating from Southwest High School, she was off to New York, changed her name to Kathleen, sometimes Kathy Nolan, and started getting work.

- I did a series called "Jamie" with Brandon De Wilde and Polly Rowles, Ernest Truex.

I was very lucky.

Because when I left and went to New York, it was really the beginning of, it was mostly live television then.

"Studio One", "Playhouse 90", all those early shows that were mostly out of New York.

It was good times.

You had to have some kind of a theater background, I think, early on.

- [Jim] She was back in the theater in 1954 on Broadway playing Wendy in the musical "Peter Pan" starring Mary Martin.

♪ I gotta crow - [Jim] And she was part of the historic live television broadcasts of the play in 1955, and again in 1956.

- And up you go!

- [Jim] There was a third live broadcast, but by then, Kathleen Nolan had another job.

- Ten penny nails!

- [Jim] She was on Thursday night TV as a young wife, Kate McCoy, in the popular sitcom, "The Real McCoys", with Richard Crenna and Walter Brennan.

- Milkweed won't do her no good.

- Why of course it will.

- It was in the top 10 for five years.

So we did very well.

- Excuse me.

Oh, what did grandpa say about the lights in the henhouse?

- [Jim] It stayed on for years and reruns and to this day at age 90, Kathleen Nolan is still getting fan letters every day, many from old fans of "The Real McCoys", even though she did so much more after that.

There was a short-lived comedy series, "Broadside", about World War II-era nurses in the South Pacific.

(crickets chirruping) - Yes?

- Mrs. Hartman?

- Yes.

- My name is Jim Rockford.

- [Jim] In fact, she appeared in hundreds of TV shows in the coming years, made some movies, did some plays.

And in 1975, Kathleen Nolan was elected the first woman president of the Screen Actors Guild and served two terms.

Not surprising when you hear the story about how back on The Goldenrod Showboat, at age six, she felt underpaid compared to the adult actors, and one night marched in to see the captain.

- Yes, I did.

Captain Bill.

I thought that it was unfair for me to get 50 cents a night, and I think they were getting 2.50 or something at the time.

So I got a raise for everybody.

(Kathleen laughs) I guess maybe that was the beginning of me being a union organizer later in life, yeah.

- And I read an article about you, and they called you the Firebrand Union Leader.

- I'm okay, I'm okay with that.

I think I was.

- [Jim] And still is.

Her son, actor Spencer Garrett, brought her to the SAG-AFTRA picket line last summer, and she led strikers in an old union song.

♪ I am a union woman as brave as I can be ♪ ♪ I stand up for fair wages and for equality ♪ - All right.

- This is my kid.

- As we were wrapping up, Spencer Garrett joined the conversation.

He's currently shooting an upcoming Netflix series, and the night before appeared on an episode of ABC's "Station 19".

- He was on last night.

He was terrible.

- I walked in the door, and she said, "You were terrible last night."

I was like, "Oh, no, I didn't do a good job."

I played a horrible person, which it seems to be my stock and trade.

I play a lot of bad guys.

- No, you don't.

- [Jim] When asked about her proudest achievement, well, that's him.

And he's just as proud of her.

He'd like to see her get a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

- I mean, you covered sort of an early part of her career in the fifties and the sixties, but her union activism in the seventies and the stuff she did with human rights and in the Equal Rights Amendment.

I mean, in the seventies and eighties as went from being a working actor and a mom also to being a very, very staunch defender of great liberal causes.

- [Jim] Spencer Garrett was born into show business just as Kathleen Nolan was.

It's a story today that is set in Hollywood, but with roots that stretch back to a showboat on the St. Louis Riverfront.

- I have all fond memories of growing up in St. Louis.

It's kind of still my place, you know?

I still have friends there.

And it's very much my home.

(bright music) (light music) - And now we move from television's Golden Age to the Golden Age of Hollywood.

And it so happens that our This Week in History segment is also about show business and riverboats.

(upbeat music) (typewriter clicking) This week in 1913, 111 years ago, a pretty important guy in St. Louis died.

He was survived by his wife, a young son, and a 14-year-old daughter, who, by the way, would become one of America's most popular movie stars.

But first, the reason Joseph Dunn's death was mentioned in the newspaper.

He was the supervising inspector of steam vessels in St. Louis, described as one of the most important men on the Mississippi River.

He'd spent his entire career as a government steamboat inspector and chief engineer on the nation's rivers.

He was considered one of the best river navigation experts in the United States.

The Dunns were living in South St. Louis on Humphrey Street just off Grand when he died, leaving his widow Adelaide and two children, including Irene, as in Irene Dunne.

(lively music) The daughter of St. Louis's steamboat inspector became an acclaimed Hollywood star in the thirties and forties, a versatile actress and singer who added an E to her last name.

She made some 40 movies best known for her screwball comedies.

She was nominated five times for an Academy Award and was said to be the best actress never to have won an Oscar.

(lively music continues) Her biographies would often skip over her years as a St. Louis schoolgirl.

After Joseph Dunn's death, the family moved to her mother's hometown of Madison, Indiana.

But the movie star from Hollywood's Golden Age who died in 1990, she always looked back fondly on those years in St. Louis.

She once said, "No triumph of either my stage or screen career has ever rivaled the excitement of trips down the Mississippi on riverboats with my father," who died 111 years ago.

This Week in St. Louis History.

(gentle music) We showcase a variety of subject matter on this show, but it's all connected to St. Louis in one way or another.

After all, it's in the name "Living St. Louis".

And sometimes we cross paths with people who remind us to love St. Louis.

(light music) - We filmed this 10 years ago.

And then the most recent edition of The Spotlight Series was filmed in the same location, but now it's a gourmet ice cream sandwich shop.

- [Anne-Marie] Chris Ryan is a short form documentary filmmaker.

His company, Once Films, takes him all over the country, sometimes to places across the world.

But St. Louis is where he calls home and where he has a soft spot for genuine human storytelling.

You've seen his work on "Living St. Louis".

- I make woodcuts about the downfall of society.

Something will get painted, I just don't know what.

- Let's have a glass and celebrate, right?

I got this great whiskey.

- He's the man behind the lens of the STL.org Spotlight Series.

And while we know there are many things about St. Louis that need improvement, I sat down with Chris Ryan to talk about why he believes in St. Louis and why his passion project is to tell the stories about what make it special, its people.

And you are a St. Louisan- - Yes.

- through and through, but you came via somewhere else.

- Yeah, I feel like while I am a transplant, I'm also a hundred percent STL made.

I was a military kid, and so I moved around a fair amount.

I had the luxury of seeing different cultures and meeting lots of different people.

- Because you talk about sort of exploring St. Louis and meeting the people and finding all of the things that are special.

And I think that St. Louisans love St. Louis.

That's why those of us that grew up here, we're raising our kids here.

We're making our lives here, but at the same time we have an inferiority complex, that's not new.

We talk about that quite often.

Somebody from Greater St. Louis, Inc. said that when they did a survey to find out outside of St. Louis what people thought of St. Louis, they either didn't know anything about it, or they had negative impressions of it, because people that live there gave them that impression.

- Right.

Not that I have any necessarily power to do so, but it is really important that we have and start to project a real positive sensibility of ourselves.

I mean, it's civic self-esteem.

You know, I mean, you're not gonna change everybody's mind.

I can't go person-to-person and say, feel better about St. Louis and say good things.

But there is a growing group of people that have become real St. Louis boosters, and those are my people.

- I feel like there's this gap, and maybe it's because of what I see on social media.

And I think because everybody's pulling out their phones that there's just so much more that people know, that everything seems like it's all going downhill.

And so you've got the people that are this, the boosters, and then you have the people that are the, well, that's typical, of course this is happening, crime- - Right.

- education.

All of those things need to be addressed, and there are issues.

But there's either you can't say anything nice, or you sound like you're drinking too much of the Kool-Aid.

- For sure.

For sure.

And, well, there is an advantage of hardly ever being on social media, that I get to sort of exist in my own echo chamber and not worry about it too much.

But it's a whole lot easier to be a cynic than it is to be an optimist.

And, you know, I think for a really long time, we as Americans have enjoyed being contrarian.

And so anytime there's good news, there's always somebody right there to tell you all the bad things.

Those exist of course, right?

It would be a really boring world if it was binary, like just like everything was good.

We know it's a complex situation.

But I also feel like my role in the conversation isn't to try to unpack that complexity, it's to just try to tip the scale.

And so a lot of the stories I'm involved in telling, you know, are generally positive and optimistic, because I feel like that's part of the scale that just needs that extra tipping, that needs that little bit of help.

- Well, explain to me, using your platform, you're not telling people St. Louis is great.

- Right, absolutely.

- You're using your skill and your talent and the stories of people to create a different narrative and picture.

So explain to me what that is.

- For sure.

I think there's two ways to look at it.

One is that the work I do didn't start out as being pro St. Louis.

Like that wasn't really the intention to come out and say, I'm gonna tell these stories about St. Louis, and then people are gonna love them or they're gonna love St. Louis more.

Really what it started with for me, it was being that transplant and like just discovering the city and finding really interesting people, and just things I'd like to visit and people I love to talk to.

And obviously a natural extension of the work I do was to say, can I film some of this?

Can I hang out with you for a few days or a couple of hours?

Can I talk to you on camera maybe about the kind of work and your mentality and thinking process about your work?

The other conversation you could have is the work as it exists today.

I think coming at it and just trying to be overtly pro St. Louis doesn't really tell the story, because the question should always be just like a 5-year-old, why, why, why?

And the why for me are the people.

The people make St. Louis, St. Louis doesn't make people.

So if we start with St. Louis, and we try to find all the reasons it's great.

Instead if we just look at it and say, well, who's here?

If I think it's great, why do I think it's great?

And then go to like the base level of that conversation and lift that story up from the bottom instead of trying to pull it up by the handle.

(light music) - Finally, a while ago, Brooke Butler headed to Columbia, Missouri, to talk with a couple of musicians who also happen to travel the world for the PBS program, "Now Hear This".

The fifth season of the mini-series is about to air, and so we offer this encore.

(energetic music) - [Scott] I'm Scott Yoo.

Come with me to discover the greatest music ever written, like you've never experienced it before.

(engine revving) - Whoo!

- Join me on spectacular journeys around the world to "Now Hear This".

I get chills reading Vivaldi's handwriting.

This is Liszt's piano?

- That's Liszt's piano.

- Holy (beep).

Oops.

- So I'm sitting here with Scott Yoo and Alice Dade of "Now Hear This".

We love the show.

Everybody loves the show.

It's just amazing how the journey you take us on in each episode.

I mean, talking about, of course, music and history, and cultures and architecture and cuisine, all, I mean, everything jam-packed.

But I wanna say when people see you on TV, they're used to seeing you in these grand, beautiful historic places around the world.

But here we are in Columbia, Missouri.

(Brooke and Alice laugh) That doesn't stand out as a grand significant place for music history, but tell us about living in the Midwest.

- Well, when Alice and I started dating in 2012, we decided to not do it long distance.

- And because you're a professor at the University of Missouri, and they have a really great school of music.

- It's great.

There's a lot of new music here, which is kind of surprising, but a lot of new music going on.

There's a festival in the summer, and there's a new music ensemble throughout the year.

We have three large ensembles, actually, four.

So it's a big place for musicians and people especially who want to go into music education.

- I conducted the Minnesota Orchestra a few months ago, and the clarinetist in front of me was a graduate of the University of Missouri.

I mean, it's pretty neat.

- There you go.

So let's talk about, there are four completed seasons of "Now Hear This".

Tell us about how the show idea started in the first place.

- Well, at my festival in California, it's called Festival Mozaic, we have a audience that's really rabid about their classical music, but they profess to not know much about it.

And so I created a series of concerts sort of that kind of deconstructs pieces of music.

And we took one of those on the road.

It was comparing the three Brahms piano trios, and I was arguing that you can almost trace Brahms's maturation through those three pieces of music.

One of them he wrote as a kid and then rewrote at the end of his life, and you can kind of see, oh, even a layman can see that he had grown up.

And anyway, writing that script took me about 10 days.

And at the actual event in Austin, Texas, I think there were seven people.

(Alice laughs) - [Brooke] Oh.

- And four of them were my college classmate and friend and her family.

So there were three other people.

And I felt like, oh my, I've just spent more than a day per person in the audience.

(Alice laughs) But one of them was Harry Lynch who came up to me after the concert and said, he said, "I'm Harry Lynch.

I'm a producer for PBS, and we should make a TV show."

(sprightly music) Eight months later we were shooting the pilot in Milan, and that was it.

I'd never been on camera before.

I mean, it was a very strange situation to have cameras pointed at me.

Both of us are experience collectors.

We like to experience something new, eat something new, drink something new, meet a new person.

And so it's kind of an ideal job for both of us.

And we get to do it together, which is great.

So it's been amazing.

- And you're reaching more than seven people, now, in that first instance.

- We hope so, yes.

- Much more.

I love the way you say like deconstruct for the average person listening.

I'm thinking about the very first episode and Vivaldi "Four Seasons".

And you're out in the field recording the birds and the dogs barking and relating that to why the music is the way it is.

- This way.

- And like sticking your boom in there and seeing if we can get a cuckoo.

- Yeah.

- The passage is describing a very sort of primitive animal, this cuckoo, right?

And it's just two notes, but he adds enough notes, enough other notes to make it sound cool.

Right?

- Right.

(energetic music) - These pieces of music tell a story that is relevant to us today.

I mean, there is a reason why this music has survived until 2023.

There is a reason.

The experiences of these composers, maybe they don't involve TikTok or an iPhone, but they still have human experiences that are unchanged for centuries and really millennia.

- Actually eating food that Beethoven ate, his favorite meal, that makes Beethoven more three-dimensional.

He's not just this idea that we have.

And I think that music gives us another perspective of people, of culture.

It's unfortunate that sometimes people who haven't had the opportunity to be around music, they may kind of be put off by it.

But the hope is that this show will reach a larger audience.

- And this is not your full-time job.

You're teaching, you are conducting in Mexico City.

And I mean, that's really exciting for viewers to know that there are more episodes coming, but it's very demanding on your schedules.

And how much longer do you think you will continue?

- I mean, you know, when I spoke with my bosses at PBS and WNET, they said they want this to continue for a very long time.

And we are very happy about that.

I mean, WNET and PBS, they've been like the greatest.

As you've experienced yourself, they've been the greatest people to work with.

I mean, they're all really kind and thoughtful people, and they have really only the best intentions.

They just want things to go well, and they want to try to enrich America.

- What's one episode you're looking forward to for the next season?

- Well, we just finished shooting an episode at Alice's alma mater at Juilliard.

And we followed around this little 8-year-old boy.

- Oh my goodness.

- He was so cute.

Like a little comedian- - [Brooke] Oh my gosh.

- and an amazing pianist.

- [Brooke] I love it.

- Excellent.

- Wilson Liu.

We played a Mozart sonata, violin and piano.

That was the first piece that I played in public when I was eight.

- [Brooke] Wow.

Full circle moment?

- Full circle.

And the mother was really cool.

- Yeah.

- And hearing you both talk about all these relationships and people that you've met around the world, I mean, I think that speaks even more so to the fact that music connects us all.

Right?

You don't have to be in the same culture and speak the same language, but you all bond over music.

- Universal language, I mean, that's overused.

But really you can actually be mute and still play music with somebody else 'cause it is a form of communication.

- Well, we're looking forward to the next season of "Now Hear This".

Scott Yoo, Alice Dade, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thanks, Brooke.

- Thank you, Brooke.

- It's an honor to be with you.

(upbeat music) - And that's "Living St. Louis".

We've got some stories in the works that were suggested by our viewers, so keep them coming to NinePBS.org/LSL.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Jim Kirchherr.

And we'll see you next time.

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