- Our summer of living St. Louis favorites takes us to the ballpark.

The players, they come and go, but one thing stays the same.

- On in 1922, the birds appeared on the uniform.

- How some homemade banquet centerpieces became the birds on the bat.

We tell the story of Wainwright, not the one from the sports pages, but the front pages.

Well scandal may have tainted this Wainwright's life, what he left the city has plenty of fans.

- That's probably the finest piece of tomb architecture in the United States.

- And he had a guitar, he had a method and Mel Bay taught the world how to play.

- Did you ever study the Mel Bay books?

They will either say yes I did Or no I didn't, but boy I wish I had.

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

(upbeat music) I'm Jim Kirchherr.

And we're going to begin this week's show from the archives with a story about, well, once you see it, you know, immediately, it's about St. Louis.

It's not about the arch, it's about something much older than that.

Anne Marie Berger's story is about the birds on the bat.

(upbeat music) - Baseball's been around for a long time and a lot has changed since those early days.

The equipment, the style of the uniforms, the stadiums, but there is one thing that has remained the same for more than 80 years, our beloved Birds on the Bat.

♪ Put me in coach ♪ I'm ready to play ♪ The game.

- The baseball Cardinals logo, the red birds on the bat, is one of the most recognizable major league sports logos around.

Our team is lucky, we're named after a pretty bird.

Blending its image to represent us as opposed to the color of a pair of socks.

(instrumental music) Actually, the Cardinals had been around for a few years before the red bird had anything to do with the team.

The Cardinals were originally known as the national league St. Louis Browns.

Not to be confused with the American league St. Louis Browns that played in Sportsman's park from 1902 to 1953.

In 1898, the national league Browns had new ownership and they changed the color of the uniforms, which of course meant changing the name of the team.

- We were known as the St. Louis perfecto, for one year, and they came out on the field with red trimmed uniforms.

And the story is that Willie Michale, who was the sports writer for the St. Louis Republic, is seated in the stands and somewhere nearby him within hearing range, is this anonymous woman that just makes a comment what a lovely shade of Cardinal referring to the red trim, the new red trim on the uniforms.

And as a sports writer, he picks up that comment and he writes about it in his column, referring to the team as the Cardinals.

Maybe he didn't like the perfecto name.

I'm not sure a lot of people did because by 1900, at the beginning of that season, they were officially named and known as the Cardinals, henceforth.

- So if the Cardinals were named for the color on their uniforms and not the actual Cardinal birds, where did the birds on the bat come from?

The team mascot, just like the team name was introduced accidentally by a woman.

When an important Cardinal baseball executive came for dinner.

- Branch Ricky was going to be a guest speaker at the Ferguson Presbyterian church.

There was a young girl that was a member of the church, Allie May Schmidt.

And she was in charge of the table decorations for this dinner, that branch Ricky was coming to.

And so she was in a process of trying to figure out, what table decorations should I have?

It was February.

- So she didn't really know what to do.

So she was at home up there on Clark street in Ferguson, sitting, looking out the window and it was winter and snowy.

And she saw little Cardinal birds come landing on the lilac bush outside of her window.

And she sat there a few minutes and then she thought, oh, cardinals, I always thought cardinals were birds anyway, not the color of stripes, on somebody (chuckles) socks.

- She makes little cardboard cutouts and paints them red of cardinal birds.

And she gets brown yarn, and she runs that across a length on the table and has the little cutouts of the birds placed.

And when Branch Ricky walks in, he's very struck by the impact of these red birds on this white tablecloth with the string across him.

And it just happened that Allie May's father was a commercial artist.

And so Branch Ricky talks to her father about drawing this up as something that he could put on the team's uniform as a logo.

- Her father made a number of suggested drawings, sent them to Branch Ricky.

And then as Allie May always said, we never heard anything more about it until in 1922, the birds appeared on the uniform.

(laughs) - She must have been very surprised.

- She was.

(both laugh) - Surprised and thrilled, at that time, Allie May Schmidt who after she married was known as Allie May Keaton had no idea what an impact her little birds would have on Cardinal baseball.

But she was a loyal fan for life.

- The Cardinal birds were her love.

(laughs) 'My birds' she always called e'm .

(fans cheering) - And her birds were there in 1926 when the Cardinals won the world series.

And the following year when Charles Lindbergh raised the red bird flag and celebration.

(fans cheering) So is there a difference between the emblem with one bird versus two birds on the bat?

- Well this is an interesting Jersey because this shows the world champions.

So this is a 1927 Jersey.

It's after our first world championship in 26.

And this is actually the last time major league baseball allowed sort of bragging rights for world champions.

Because they basically said, no, it's not okay to put that on your jersey the following year.

So you got a ring, you got to hang a pendant in your stadium, but you didn't get to have the names world champions on your uniform jersey.

- Implementing the birds on the bat logo was a brave thing to do in those days.

Apparently it was an expensive endeavor.

It cost $3 and 75 cents for the embroidery, a price, no other professional sports team had invested in their uniforms.

Just like art you can study the little details of the birds, and notice all these subtle changes that have been made over the years.

But the concept has always remained the same.

- So there are years when the birds are more aggressive.

Like in these, they're kind of, heads out towards each other, their tails are up In the 50s, tails are down and they're kind of more laid back and they're more straight up and vertical.

- There was one year that the changes weren't so subtle, the organization removed the birds on the bat altogether.

- There was one year and that was the birth of Slugger bird.

I believe it was 1955 or 56 that they came up with just the Cardinal script.

Like so many of them, the Braves have the little swoop thing, underneath.

So they did that with the Cardinal's name and they put a slugger bird on the sleeve.

- Well, needless to say, Allie May was not happy about that, but even more so the fans weren't happy about it.

And by popular demand, after only one year, the birds were back on their bats.

(fans cheering) (instrumental music) Allie May lived to see her little table decorations become not just a symbol for her local baseball team, but practically an icon of American culture.

But it wasn't until after her death that the Cardinals management began to realize that this wasn't just a trademark.

It was a gold mine.

- Selling caps and shirts and souvenirs is so lucrative, that major league baseball now controls the licensing of all team names and logos.

And splits the proceeds equally among the 30 teams.

With each team getting maybe $10 million.

It means though that if the Cardinals want to make a change to the birds on the bat, even they have to get permission.

(instrumental music) And to think that Allie May Schmidt just pretty much gave her idea away.

One year the Cardinals gave her a special pin to honor her contribution.

But as a true fan, she was given the best they had to offer.

A free pass into the ballpark for the rest of her life.

♪ Put me in coach ♪ I'm ready to play.

♪ Today ♪ Look at me.

♪ I can be ♪ Center field.

- Since we're talking about baseball, it brought to mind a couple of stories I did about Wainwright and Molina.

But not the ones from the sports pages.

No, the Molina I did a story about is a Nobel prize winning Mexican scientist, Mario Molina.

Here he is getting a Cardinals Jersey at St. Louis university's climate summit in 2018.

And this is the Wainwright from a story we did in 2010, never pitched to shut out as far as I know, but his name, is well known.

- Art historians consider this probably the finest piece of tomb architecture in the United States.

And that's based only upon the outside.

- When Carol Shepley wrote her book, Tales from Bellefontaine Cemetery, Movers and Shakers, Scalawags and suffragettes.

She knew she would include Ellis Wainwright, but she put him in this Scalawag section.

And that was because of all the trouble he got into as a mover and shaker.

(instrumental music) He was one of those 19th century capitalists.

In the beer brewing business he made a lot of money and then made a lot more investing it.

And then luckily for St. Louis, he decided to build himself in office building downtown.

Wainwright hired architect Louis Sullivan of the Chicago firm, Adler and Sullivan.

Which was just beginning to design and build tall buildings, with internal steel skeletons.

The first skyscrapers.

(instrumental music) The technique of raising a steel framework and then covering it with stone or brick or glass would transform American cities.

But the first skyscraper builders from Chicago, had seen steel used successfully years before, in St. Louis - Sullivan was fascinated with the Eads bridge and Sullivan came down from Chicago quite often to watch it being built.

And they speculate that that's how Wainwright, met Sullivan.

And that's how he came to commission him.

- While his office building was under construction, Wainwright's wife, Charlotte died suddenly at the age of 34.

He decided she would be buried in Bellfontaine cemetery with an impressive and expensive monument.

And he hired Sullivan to design it.

This too would be unlike anything in the neighborhood.

And people eventually would stop coming to pay their respects to the deceased and just come to admire the structure itself.

So this was sort of a Taj Mahal.

- They called the Taj Mahal.

Frank Lloyd Wright was a draftsman in Sullivan's office.

And he claimed that this is actually his design, - Is that right?

- And Wright had no small ego.

So if he claimed it, his design, you know, he liked it.

- And it's the decoration here, the freeze that really.

- That's marks it as Sullivan.

- Yeah.

- It's the simple massing of elements That's more similar to Frank Lloyd Wright star.

- And people really do come to see.

This.

- Oh, architects, artists from all over the world, come to see this, 'cause it is so remarkable.

And that's based only upon the outside, but today we're going to get to go inside.

- We'll get to the inside of the tomb, after we get a little more of the inside story of the man who built it.

And find out more about the way St. Louis was back then.

Because by the time Ellis Wainwright was buried in that tomb, his life had taken a lot more twists and turns.

And it started when crusading circuit attorney Joseph Folk began an investigation into corruption in city hall, just after the turn of the century.

St. Louis had been featured prominently in Lincoln Stephan's muckraking writings about corruption, about bribes and payoffs that were common in American city governments.

In St. Louis, they called it Bootle.

St. Louis University professor, the late George Wendel, said that none of it was really a secret.

- It just became that you had to pay for everything.

That's when they come up with the price list, see they come up with price lists and they would simply show you the price list and say, oh, you're asking the..

Here's what the price is for that this one's 10,000, this one's 25,000, you decide.

- Under Joseph Folk, there were investigations into the city lighting contract, the garbage contract, and two big investigations into the awarding of streetcar franchises.

Some people paid bribes to get the franchise so they could build a streetcar line.

Others paid bribes to get the franchise so that they could then sell it at a very big profit, to somebody else.

What Joseph Folk did though, was not just go after the politicians who were taking the bribes.

He also went after the business leaders who were paying them.

And when the indictments came out, there was the name of one of the directors of the suburban railway company, Ellis Wainwright.

He had signed a $135,000 note money that was used to pay bribes.

- And his defense was, he didn't know what he was signing.

Oh sure.

(laughs) But he was lucky when the indictments came down, he was traveling in Egypt.

So he spent 10 years on alarm in Paris, living the high life with the income from the rentals, from the Wayne ride building.

And then, when the chief witness against him died, he came back to the United States.

He landed in St. Louis and he said, 'Oh, it's grand to be back in the best city in the United States.'

And then two or three weeks later, he took off for park avenue.

(laughs) - He always had his supporters who believed his story and stood by him as an active and generous civic leader.

And he never went on trial.

But even in his later years after he moved out of St. Louis, Ellis Wainwright managed to keep tongues wagging.

- He never remarried but when he was in his seventies, he adopted a beautiful young course girl in her twenties.

- Wainwright eventually came back to St. Louis and lived out his final years, something of a rec loose.

Always knowing that this would be his final resting place, which is only rarely seen from the inside.

- I still, I mean I've been in here a hundred times and, just those twinkling stars really get me.

- There's as much detail to appreciate inside as out.

Mosaic marble, intricate designs, grill work, Ellis Wainwright died in 1924 and was buried next to Charlotte, in the tomb he had built for her more than 30 years before.

And as it turns out built for all of St. Louis.

The bootling, corruption, maybe he was part of it, maybe he wasn't, maybe it's just the way they did business in St. Louis back then.

Anyway that's old news.

More important today is that Ellis Wainwright didn't just have the money to hire Louis Sullivan.

He also had an appreciation for innovation and what was then a modern style of design.

And he gave this city two irreplaceable and invaluable treasures.

Which continued to keep St. Louis and Wainwright featured on architectural tours and maps.

And in books like the one by Carol Shepley.

Who appreciates a good tomb and a great story.

(instrumental music) We've done a lot of stories about famous home towners in our 19 seasons.

Some of them became world famous.

But I think the subject of Ruth Ezell's 2007 story might not immediately come to mind, but there are people around the world who know the name, Mel Bay.

- Let's start at the beginning and just let me hear play a couple notes.

Just let me hear what you got.

- When Stephan Otis of Ballwin teaches guitar to his students, he uses the same method books as when he was a student, the Mel Bay method.

- They're the best books out there.

They're the best books to take a student step by step through a graduated process.

A methodology that's going to hold them in good stead for the rest of their guitar playing lives.

If you run into a really good guitar player somewhere, and you just go up and ask them, did you ever study the Mel Bay books?

They will either say, 'yes I did or no I didn't but boy, I wish I had.'

- Melbourne Bay began life in the Ozarks.

Specifically, the town of Bunker Missouri in 1913.

Bay was 14 when he started on the guitar in ukulele.

Instruments originally given to his brothers as gifts.

Bay learned his first guitar course from a local fiddle player.

Who then recruited the teenager to perform at area dances.

But Bay's plans for the future did not originally focus on music.

- He actually was going to become an engineer.

He was gonna be a civil engineer and he helped survey.

I think it was Washington state park, when they laid it out.

And the depression came and his folks didn't have money.

So he wasn't able to go to school.

And that kind of drove him his whole life.

So he came to St. Louis and started out playing in different taverns for tips.

- Bay, who was gifted on the banjo as well as the guitar, started giving lessons out of a self St. Louis music store.

Word of his abilities as a teacher spread quickly.

- So he would teach 75 to 100 students a week.

He plays six to seven nights.

But back then, that was before television.

Every restaurant, every entertainment place, they all had live music.

So it was not unusual for a musician to work six, seven nights a week.

- Mel Bay success is a teacher was based in large part on concepts he developed for guitar instruction.

Following world War 2, many veterans wanted to learn to play guitar and banjo.

And the US government had learned of Bay's theories.

Officials asked him to put those theories down on paper, then paid him under the GI bill to give lessons.

It was then Bay realized there might be a larger market for his work, and the Mel Bay method was born.

Bay's guitar instruction books became the cornerstone of Mel Bay publications, which was launched in 1947.

For several years he traveled across the country, selling his books directly to other guitar teachers and to music stores.

Bay was forced to go on the road because the major music distributors, weren't interested in his products.

- There were three big music distributors in New York city.

And if they took on your book or your products, you pretty well had worldwide or at least nationwide distribution, but worldwide too.

And he went to see all three of them with his guitar methods and books and they.. we laugh about it now but they all turned him down cold.

They said, 'no, there was absolutely no future for the guitar.'

- Little did they know who was just around the corner.

♪ Well get outta that bed ♪ wash your face and hand.

Elvis Presley's phenomenal rise onto the music scene, sent millions of young people rushing to buy his records and the popularity of the guitar soared.

Mel Bay was in a perfect position to take advantage of this cultural shift.

In addition to his private students, Bay was invited by schools and Webster Groves, Kirkwood and other districts to share his expertise with their students.

That's Bay on the right with boys and girls in Webster.

- The first mistake you made in the piece that he had assigned, you went back to the beginning and you played again, until you made another mistake.

- Steph Otis was among the scores of youngsters who learned the Mel Bay method from Mel Bay himself.

- And if you didn't do it at that lesson, then that was your assignment for the next lesson.

And you came back and you played it until it was perfect.

And then you moved on.

- And then if you didn't get it right real soon, he'd say, 'Here, give me the guitar.'

And the minute you put the guitar in his hands, that was it.

I mean, your lesson was over, 'cause he would play and he'd play and he'd play.

And then you'd say, 'well, it's my lesson.'

He said, 'well wait a minute I'm gonna show you something else.'

And then he'd play some but that's the way it went.

- In 1952 Bay opened the Mel Bay music center in Kirkwood.

It carried his series of method, books of course, and extensive line of guitars for sale or rental and other music related products.

His wife, the former May Gableline ran the store and raised their two children.

A talented guitarist in her own, right?

She was once a bass player in an all girl swing band.

Mel and May's store became a popular gathering place for music lovers of all stripes.

Especially when Mel was around.

- If you are lucky enough to be there at one of those times when he was playing for someone, it was wonderful if it was playing for you, it was fantastic.

And that's when he realized how talented Mel really was.

So Mel's standards for himself were very high.

- Bay maintained those high standards and his love of performing throughout his life.

These photos were taken outside his store during one of Kirkwood's fall jamborees in the early 1990s.

Bay was performing with friends in a group they called, Geriatric Jazz.

That's band joist, John Becker next to Bay.

And at the far left on harmonica, a man best known as a major league baseball hall of famer, Stan Musial.

The music store was sold to one of its employees several years later.

In 1996, the guitar foundation of America's international convention was held in St. Louis.

Here at the Sheldon concert hall, three friends and luminaries in the field were honored.

Jazz performer, Chet Atkins, Aaron Shearer, educator and author of his own classic guitar technique series.

And Shearer's publisher Mel Bay.

In 2007, the house that bay built marked its 60th anniversary.

Did you ever think when you first moved in here that your facility would grow this much?

- No I think we were always hoping that it would be a successful move but we never had any idea that we'd be adding on and needing all this space.

- William Bay is president of the Pacific Missouri company, founded by his father.

When he started working here in the late 1960s, Mel Bay publishing had 50 titles, including the signature seven volume guitar method books, and those for other stringed instruments.

(instrumental music) Titles for method books and sheet music now run in the thousands.

The publishing house has carved out niches for itself because of music it's founder encountered in travels around the world.

The international nature of the music business and the expanding diversity of the us market.

Anyone for antiquities of Scottish music, or maybe lullabies for dulcimer.

The Mel Bay catalog contains products for instruments.

You won't find in your local high school orchestra.

- So if someone was to play harmonica, they would come to see us and sure enough we'd have books for it.

You know even today we're starting to put out music for Latin instruments.

We put out a book for Cuban tres.

There's all these things like the tabla, the Darbuka all these middle Eastern instruments.

And sure enough, there are people wanting to play them here.

- There is also a recording arm, Mel Bay records.

- It started out primarily jazz guitar.

And then we expanded, we had always done some concert DVD filming and we decided to take a more active role in that.

And it's one of the real fun parts of the business now.

- Like most companies, staying in business in the 21st century means keeping up with technology.

For Mel Bay publications, that means producing CDs and DVDs to accompany its books, downloadable music and online magazines.

- I think the way we look as a company five years from now, it'll be totally different from what we do now.

- Bill Bay doesn't release specific earnings figures for his company, but says they run from 10 to 15 million dollars a year.

Mel Bay died in 1997 at the age of 84, but his legacy continues through his family.

Son Bill who took up the guitar after years of playing the trumpet, has been head of the publishing house since 1970.

And one of Bill's sons has joined him in what is now a third generation family enterprise.

(instrumental music) Countless musicians from professionals at the top of their field to students just starting out, are all in Mel Bay's debt.

Chet Atkins may have put it best in this autographed photo.

It reads, 'For my dear friend Mel Bay who taught the world.'

- He started it all.

Mel was the first person who had the foresight to see this guitar revolution, coming in America, he got ready for it with his books.

I don't think Mel knew how huge it really was gonna be because it went beyond our shores, it went worldwide.

And Mel was there along for the ride.

(instrumental music) - And from the archives, that's living St. Louis.

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

- [voiceover] Living St. Louis is made possible by the support of the Betsy and Thomas Patterson foundation, the Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan charitable trust and by the members of Nine PBS.

(upbeat music)