- [Jim] This city church looks well, it looks like just another church, but it is not just another church.

- Today we have gathered to celebrate Trinity's inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

- [Jim] This is more than just a fancy garden.

These plants have a history in science, food, medicine, and a local society devoted to herbs.

- [JoAnn] It's a wide variety of people with lots and lots of interests and lots and lots of talent.

- [Jim] The history of the Gateway Arch often focuses on the design, the construction, but when it came to getting people to the top, well, now that's a story.

We're not talking about a big engineering firm?

- No, we're talking one bad one man.

- [Jim] We're talking about one guy.

- [Bob] One man.

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

(upbeat music) I'm Jim Kirchherr and over the years, we've done lots of stories about all kinds of people, doing all kinds of different things, passionate about all kinds of different things and that's how we're going to start.

Ruth Ezell's story is about people who have taken an interest in something that's been around a long, long time, has a great history and it's always growing.

- When I moved in this house 16 years ago, there was nothing here, but it was flat and it was sunny.

And I thought, now I can do whatever I want here, so I did.

- [Ruth] Did she ever?

Mary Hammer grows many different vegetables, herbs and flowers in her Creve Coeur backyard, but she has a particular fondness for lavender.

- This is where my lavender likes it best.

It faces south, it's under an eve.

There's just a little strip of dirt.

And as you see, there's the driveway and a patio, so it never gets any direct water and it really is happy here.

Hammer has learned a lot about herbs in general, over the years that she's been a member of the St. Louis Herb Society.

- St. Louis Herb Society's mission is to further the use and knowledge about herbs.

So, and we're celebrating our 80th year this year, by the way.

- The St. Louis Herb Society was founded in 1941.

It's a chapter of the Herb Society of America, but in the mid 1950s, the chapter broke off from the national organization and became an independent not-for-profit.

Its sponsor, the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Andrew Wyatt is MoBots senior vice president of horticulture and living collections.

- The Herb Society was founded by Edgar Anderson, who was a director of the garden from 1954 to 1957, originally a geneticists that came to the garden in 1922, and then eventually became director for the three years and he founded it.

He was president of the National Herb Society at that time and he founded the St. Louis Herb Society and that's what began the relationship.

- [Ruth] We met up with Andrew Wyatt at the Oertli family nursery.

The botanical gardens new 13,500 square foot greenhouse, where all manner of herbs and other plants are grown.

- Prior to botanic garden's understanding and that scientific knowledge that came out of the Renaissance, plants really were characterized based on the way that they look and there's a really good example here.

This is pulmonaria lungwort and it looks like the interior of a lung.

And so it was presumed in a lot of the texts in medieval times that this would be used to cure lung disease, not necessarily true, but botanic gardens were able to bring the science to that, as well.

There are about somewhere between 50 and 80,000 plants that are used for medical purposes worldwide, and about 50,000 plants that we eat out of the 350,000 that we know.

And I think that the history of the herb society and the history of the botanic gardens plays in very, very well to preservation and understanding of ethnobotany.

- [Ruth] The Herb Society maintains its own display garden behind Tower Grove House.

Herb Garden president JoAnn Vorih.

- In 2004, we renovated the entire garden and raised a lot of the money for it through our own members and some corporate matching gifts.

And at that time there was an in ground sprinkler put in, but it's always been designed with a Victorian feel.

Would you say that, Lucyann?

- Yeah, I would, and of course, I would go back to Henry Shaw's time so that the garden would be compatible with the type of garden that would have been, you know, very common in the late 1800s.

- [Ruth] The St. Louis Herb Society made major adjustments to its 2021 herb sale after being forced to cancel the event the year before because of the pandemic.

For the first time purchases were made and pick ups scheduled entirely online.

Customers came to the botanical garden as usual to get their plants, but it was done drive-thru style.

Proceeds from the herb sale were donated to support the Oertli family nursery.

The society's volunteer experience brings JoAnn Vorih a lot of satisfaction.

- It's a wide variety of people with lots and lots of interests and lots and lots of talent.

- [Ruth] People like Mary Hammer, who heads the society speaker's bureau and who's always learning from lessons plants teach her.

- I worry about this placement a little bit because it's not raised, but so far so good.

(cheerful music) - I'm one of those people who will pull off to the side of the road, certainly cross the street to read a plaque or a historical marker, and there's a new one in town.

And this one commemorates events in my own lifetime.

Brooke Butler was there for the unveiling.

- Three, two, one.

(audience cheering) - Today we have gathered to celebrate Trinity's inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.

(audience cheering) - [Brooke] On the corner of Euclid and Washington in the central west end, Trinity Episcopal Church now showcases an official plaque for their inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, but it's not the architecture that deems the church worthy of preservation.

Having notable involvement and advocacy, the church is recognized for their significance in St. Louis's LGBTQ+ history.

Trinity hosted an unveiling event where church and community members gathered to celebrate this historic moment.

Because not only is it the first site in Missouri to be recognized for LGBTQ+ history, it's also the first Episcopal church in the country.

So what was this pioneering work that Trinity led to have such great impact?

As far back as the 1950s when white upper class families fled to the suburbs, the central west end area quickly became integrated with more black and gay residents.

The area that Trinity is located was actually St. Louis's hub for gay bars and coffee shops.

With plummeting attendance, the church briefly considered shutting its doors, but instead they embraced a new identity by reaching out and inviting the local members of the community.

But what really came to be a milestone moment for Trinity was one Halloween night in 1969.

- So Halloween 1969, a whole bunch of my friends and I were getting dressed up to go out for Halloween as women.

So we went and got all dressed up.

We went down to a bar on Olive called the Onyx Room.

And at one minute after midnight, I was walking out, the police came and grabbed me and I think eight other people, threw us in the back of a paddy wagon.

And I had no idea of why we were going and getting in this paddy wagon until we got downtown.

And then they said that they were charging us with masquerading.

I remember it was one minute after midnight on Halloween.

- [Ruth] At the time, and actually up until 1980s, St. Louis had laws against masquerading or wearing clothes of the opposite sex.

A few months before this Halloween incident, St. Louis' first gay rights group called the Mandrake Society was formed.

As membership quickly grew, Trinity would be the one to host their monthly meetings at the church.

The Mandrake Society provided general support for the gay community, in addition to legal aid, such as raising bail money for exact instances that Greg found himself in that night.

- So I'm getting ready to leave and the policeman says, I'd take that wig off if I were you.

Take that wig off and walk out of here like man.

I said in a purple dress and gold pumps, I don't think so.

I got out my top hat, teased up my wig, and said I'll walk out the way I came in and I go.

- I remember walking out of a service one day, coming down the front steps, just as the very first pride parade passed by here.

- [Ruth] Ellie Chapman has been a member of Trinity Church since 1969 when her late husband, Reverend Bill Chapman was a leader in these progressive events.

Serving as rector for 20 years, Reverend Chapman also led efforts to care for the first AIDS patients in St. Louis in the 1980s.

- It just means so much, I think, to the speakers who said what it had meant to them personally in their development and their acceptance, but I think it's been wonderful for this whole community to be part of something that has moved us all to be more open and more loving.

- We're going to stay on the theme of people stepping forward to do what needs to be done, usually without much recognition, because, well, they're just doing their jobs.

It reminded me of a story we did about the Gateway Arch and something of an unsung hero because the arch really wasn't finished, wasn't open for business until both trams, north leg and south leg were running at peak capacity.

And while we have Eero Saarinen to thank for the magnificent design of the Gateway Arch, when it came to getting people to the top, he had no idea, not a clue.

Yes, it's Eero Saarinen's arch, but this tram?

This is Dick Bowser's tram.

Eero Saarinen worked and reworked his designed for the monument on the St. Louis riverfront.

And always part of his plan was for some sort of observation deck at the top.

But on one of his early drawings, all he had was a door on the lower level, simply marked elevator.

- No one knew how.

You know, the Saarinen firm had contacted engineers.

They'd contacted all the major elevator companies.

The elevator companies wanted nothing to do with it.

- [Jim] The job of designing a unique transport system, for a unique building would fall to a guy who was at the right place at the right time.

The place was Moline, Illinois in 1960.

An executive at an elevator company there had just turned down Saarinen and the arch project when in walked a friend of his named Dick Bowser.

- And when he walked in the door, his friend pointed his finger at him and said, I didn't even think of you.

- [Jim] Park Service Historian, Bob Moore heard the story from Dick Bowser, himself.

- The friend dialed the Saarinen firm and when they got someone on the phone and put Dick on the phone, the first question they asked him was can an elevator go around a curve?

That was the big stumbling block, you know, to trying to figure this out.

- [Jim] Bowser was an elevator guy, but not your run of the mill elevator guy.

He and his father were in the mechanical parking garage business.

Instead of ramps, their Bowser System garages moved cars on elevators up and down, horizontally, diagonally.

Yes, Bowser said what Saarinen had wanted was possible.

And after thinking about it for a while, he agreed to give it a shot.

- So he had a two week deadline to come up with a concept.

- [Jim] Two weeks, wow.

- Two weeks and he went back home, worked in his basement, worked almost, you know, 18, 20 hours a day.

His wife feeding him coffee and just going on pure adrenaline.

And he went through a lot of mental gymnastics to try to come up with something that might be workable.

- There were only a few criteria that had to be met.

One was the system could not distort the exterior of the Gateway Arch.

The other was that it had to be able to move thousands of people in an eight hour period.

And as Dick Bowser sat at his drafting table, he literally spelled out the problem.

Ideas that were okay for loading were bad for viewing, others were bad for loading, but okay for viewing.

His goal, a system okay to load, okay for viewing.

- So, these are showing when he was doing multiple elevators.

- [Jim] Of course, the first option was an elevator, but a traditional elevator only goes up about 300 feet before the curve gets in the way.

In fact, there is a service elevator that gets about that far.

People could transfer to a second angled elevator halfway up, but you'd need equipment there and an observation deck for people waiting to transfer And adding windows, by the way, was not the deal breaker.

The real problem was the second elevator would have to be smaller, carry fewer people and that would mean a bottleneck.

- [Bob] You know, you've still got to have them waiting around and they're kind of building up in these observation rooms.

- [Jim] Bowser's conclusion about standard elevators impractical.

He considered a series of escalators, but he would need too many and a price too big.

- [Bob] This is the Ferris wheel concept and you can see people riding in the chairs.

- [Jim] He started working out a system that would provide a continuous ride up and down and under the arch.

People would be on Ferris wheel style seats, but he immediately saw a problem there, jotting down this note, the free swinging feature would be a temptation to daredevils.

He started working on different enclosed seating compartments that could carry a number of people and you begin to see the emergence of the pod concept.

And instead of spacing the seats continuously, like on a Ferris wheel or a ski lift, he started grouping together the seats.

Here in five different sections.

At the bottom, one group would be loading, one group would be unloading.

At the top, one group would be enjoying the view through windows, but two groups would be stopped halfway up and halfway down.

- To keep people from being claustrophobic, they would actually put windows in the leg of the arch at the two points where people would stop midway in the leg.

- [Jim] So that sort of messes with Saarinen's beautiful concept though, doesn't it?

- [Bob] Well, it did and there were a lot of things that are surprising to us today that they were considering.

The arch itself was still in flux at the time.

- [Jim] In his Ferris wheel system sketch there's a single motor driving the entire operation and Bowser figured chains or cables would have to be a half mile long, too long to be practical.

Plus this conveyance would have to be centered inside the arch so that when it got to the top, there wouldn't be any room for equipment or emergency stairways.

- [Bob] At first, he was using the whole triangle of the arch.

- [Jim] Which gets smaller and smaller as you go up.

- Right, but that was one of the biggest things that during that two week period, Dick was wrestling with was, you know, everything that he tried to put into the leg of the arch, by the time it got to the top, it was too big.

So his eureka moment was I've got to design something that fits at the top and have it come down.

- [Jim] Bowser's solution combined the Ferris wheel and elevator.

It would have rotating seats like a Ferris wheel, but they would be inside these circular pods and those would do the rotating within a fixed ring.

The rings would run on curving rails with cables and counterweights like a traditional elevator.

And, this wouldn't be a continuous circular ride.

Separate trams would run up and down each leg, at the top, stopping just short with steps leading to an observation deck.

This was the idea Dick Bowser brought to Eero Saarinen.

- [Bob] At the end of this two weeks, he came up with the concept that we currently use in the arch to take people to the top.

- [Tram Announcer] Welcome to the top.

Please exit the tram cars now.

- And the other thing that he did that the architecture firm and the designers loved was he decided that because of the general size he was getting with this capsule, he could make it so that he would only utilize half of the triangle inside the arch.

So that allowed space for an emergency stairwell, all of the infrastructure, whether it be, you know, the electrical or whatever else, could go on the other side of the triangle.

So this was all done in a 14 day period.

- [Jim] And we're not talking about a big engineering firm?

- No, we're talking about one man.

- [Jim] We're talking about one guy.

- [Bob] One man.

- After the initial concept was approved, there had to be some changes.

Bowser originally had 10 cars on every tram and each capsule only sat four people, but he had to decrease the number of cars.

And he had to squeeze in one extra seat and you can blame Eero Saarinen for that.

- What happened was Saarinen changed the shape of the arch.

- [Jim] The arch legs originally had been further apart.

Saarinen pulled them closer together, but that made for an even tighter curve at the top.

And Bowser's stairs now interfered with the end of the 10 car tram.

- So they could only fit eight at the top.

- [Jim] To keep each tram carrying 40 people, Bowser had to now arrange seats to accommodate five butts and 10 knees.

And now the question was efficiency.

Could people squeeze in and out fast enough for these trams to move enough people per hour.

- There were some things that didn't work quite right that needed to be ironed out.

And so they decided to hire Dick and bring him in just as a full-time employee so that he could be here standing by and could make sure everything was working properly.

- [Jim] Dick Bowser died in 2003 at the age of 82, and he is honored at the arch if you look for him.

When they put up the mural called The Builders, there, along with Saarinen, Luther Ely Smith, Mayors Dickmann and Tucker, US Representative Leonor K Sullivan, and others is Richard Bowser.

- He was a very humble kind of guy and he didn't want to toot his own horn too much, but you can tell how amazingly proud he was of his achievement.

And you know, one of the most memorable times I remember with Dick was when his destroyer crew had a reunion here in St. Louis and he was able to bring them down to the arch and we took them all up and he could open the panels and show them all the different things that he had invented that made this work.

It was a very happy day for him.

- Finally, 40 years ago, there was this pilot program being tried out here in Missouri that turned out to be something pretty big.

Parents as Teachers, from Missouri it spread to all 50 states and foreign countries.

Brooke Butler on what it does and why it works.

- I have it, stop clicking the buttons, oh hold on.

- That's okay.

- Do not click the phone.

But see how like, I'm trying to talk to you.

- Yeah.

(child squeals) - Are you still there, are you still here?

- [Brooke] Any parent of a young child can surely relate to this situation.

No matter how much attention you give, they seem to demand more as soon as you shift your focus to something other than them.

- Like I mentioned a little bit ago that she's in the egocentric phase, so she like thinks that the whole world revolves around her.

- A hundred percent.

- Yeah, you have to set that boundary.

You have to allow yourself to set that boundary with your child too, because I know you, and I know that you have mom guilt.

- [Brooke] Guilt, another relatable feeling that so many parents have struggled with over the past year in dividing their attention between virtual learning, working from home and just the state of the world.

This communication you see between a mom struggling to create boundaries and a parent educator providing guidance and support is just one of the many benefits provided by the program, Parents as Teachers.

Using what they refer to as an evidence-based home visiting model, Parents as Teachers engages with parents and caregivers to increase their involvement and understanding in their child's development.

- It's so important to invest in early child development, because even from prenatal to age three, that rapid brain growth is happening.

Those neurons and wires are connecting.

Children are these magical sponges that are absorbing all of the great things that are happening around them.

So for a parent and the role of Parents as Teachers, helping them understand tasks and strategies that they can perform with their child and also understand what the developmental milestones are.

- [Brooke] The Parents as Teachers' home visiting model involves four components.

Personal visits or home visits, although it doesn't necessarily need to be at your home, involve a parent educator engaging in educational activities with the child and caregiver.

Group connections are when multiple families gather for a shared learning experience and also to encourage social connections.

Resource networking provides families with necessary information on medical, educational and social services in their community.

Child screenings performed by the parent educator show a record of general health along with developmental milestone progress.

The Parents as Teacher home visiting model has been tested in numerous peer-reviewed studies and has proven results in improved parent knowledge and practices, early detection of developmental and health delays, preventing child abuse and neglect and increasing kindergarten readiness.

But with the past year of restrictions, due to the pandemic, in-person home visits, a major component of the model were put on hold.

Luckily they were already well on their way to implementing a virtual home visiting option for families.

- So for four years, we piloted delivering Parents as Teachers through interactive video conferencing.

All four components of the model, all were done through video conferencing.

What that did for us, it was an efficacy study to see if parents were one, receptive and if there were benefits still to delivering home visiting in that way.

Because of the learnings from that pilot, when we shut our office down in March of 2020, we immediately got guidance out to our entire network of affiliates and professionals.

So to support them in delivering virtual visits, we never stopped, we never closed.

- Hi, Chris, are you ready?

Okay, we're going to do picking up pompoms today.

Do you got your tweezers?

- [Brooke] Megan Maier is a parent educator with the Ferguson-Florissant Parents as Teachers program, where she can serve up to 65 families at a time.

- People don't quite understand what we do.

You know, sometimes my daughter says, you're not a real teacher, are you a mom?

And I'm like, oh, thank you.

You know, but we don't go into a classroom and the kids come and then the kids turn around and leave.

We're on 24/7, like if that family texts you, we respond.

You know, like, hey, I need diapers, do you have diapers?

Yep, I'll bring them tomorrow.

It could be eight o'clock at night.

Zoom is great for if we're feeling sick or if a family is feeling sick, we don't have to necessarily cancel our visit.

But we kind of see so many concerns right now with some of that early intervention that we're missing because we're not there.

And parents, you know, may have the speech concerns or they are concerned their kids are tip-toe walking, or maybe they have some sensory issues and if we're not there to see it and see if it's progressing or it's not progressing, it's a lot harder.

- [Brooke] Megan became a parent educator while using the Parents as Teacher program for her own children.

She especially saw the importance of the program when determining if her son could benefit from early intervention with his speech development.

With a consistent parent educator tracking developmental progress, Megan was able to receive the feedback and resources she needed instead of seeking outside help.

From 2019 to 2020, almost 37,000 children in the Parents as Teachers program were identified with potential delays as a result of child screenings.

Without the parent educators, caregivers might not know how to recognize developmental delays and then how to address them.

And without early recognition and intervention, those potential delays could develop into lifelong learning or health challenges.

Vanessa Arnold is one of the moms that has benefited from Megan's awareness of early intervention.

- She has given me so many tools because especially in this pandemic, you know, you could be ready to pull your hair out of your head, if you don't have activities that are benefiting the child, especially with my son.

I mean, he has not been around anybody in this last year.

And her being able to tell me like, yes, he is on track or no, he needs to do this or, you know, this activity would help him a little bit more in progressing in this way.

There was one point in time that, you know, he didn't talk a lot and so I was concerned.

I'm like, is he going to talk?

Before he turned three, I'm like, he's not going pee on the potty.

I'm like Selena was going pee on the potty at 18 months.

What am I doing wrong?

You know, she gave me those encouraging words to know that it's okay.

And you know, you're still developmentally on track.

You know, things might be a little bit behind because of the circumstances, but you can get through this.

- When a parent looks at their child, we see joy.

So to have a professional to kind of support things that you may not necessarily be looking for or understand how to look for and just to help you see them and say, I see this, you may not see it.

Let's see if we can get some support for this.

And I think that is the powerful thing about home visiting.

It's not a replacement for a childcare or child development center.

We want more families to have access to high quality childcare.

The combination of early home visiting and high quality childcare is where the most powerful outcomes are for children and families and making sure that children are healthy, safe, and ready to learn.

- 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 possibly by the support of the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation, Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A Jordan Charitable Trust and by the members of Nine PBS.

(upbeat music)