- [Jim] When it made its debut back in 1933, this was a vision of things to come.

How's Buckminster Fuller's car of the future holding up today?

In Jefferson county, the efforts to tear apart a piece of the Big River and put it back together.

- It's on the complicated end.

There's a lot going on here.

- [Jim] In post-war America, two Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights came out of St. Louis, and Tennessee Williams was not always the more famous one.

- In some ways, if we just look at their work in the 1950's, that Inge was the more celebrated playwright.

- And we look at a job that is in demand.

Yes, one with plenty of openings.

It's all next on Living St. Louis.

(upbeat music) I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we're about to take a ride unlike any other, because the man who designed the vehicle, Buckminster Fuller, best known for the geodesic dome, designed a lot of things unlike anything else.

Anne-Marie Berger on the car of the future, that's now, almost 90 years old.

(upbeat music) - [Anne-Marie] More environmentally friendly vehicles.

Those that emit less emissions and aren't dependent to run on fossil fuels is a huge trend, but this idea of sustainable living, sustainable driving, isn't a new one.

Almost 100 years ago, Buckminster Fuller was looking into the future when it came to nature, to our environment, and he saw what was coming.

- One of the earliest people to use that term, that we need to be on a sustainable path.

Buckminster Fuller began talking about these topics back in the '20s, and just analyzing it from a data standpoint, and saying if we continue on the current trajectory, we're gonna be in trouble.

(quirky music) - [Anne-Marie] Fuller was an architect, an inventor, a futurist.

- [Benjamin] Buckminster Fuller's entire life and his legacy was about finding out what one human individual could do to affect the greater good.

- [Anne-Marie] He's most known as the guy behind the geodesic dome.

- He provided it as a solution because it used the least amount of construction materials to enclose a volume of space architecturally.

- [Anne-Marie] There's a few of them in our region, and the Center for Spirituality and Sustainability is a dome designed by him on the campus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

- Buckminster Fuller designed this geodesic dome for the Southern Illinois University campus in 1971.

So we're celebrating and honoring his legacy here on this building's 50th anniversary, and trying to draw as many different connections across the artifacts and inventions that he designed including the car.

(upbeat music) - [Anne-Marie] Before Fuller devoted himself to improving human shelter, he worked to improve the efficiency of the automobile.

This is the Dymaxion car.

The teardrop shape created less wind resistance, it had three wheels, rear wheel steering, and was about 20 feet long.

Its body was aluminum.

Fuller designed it to have maximum output with minimum material input.

This was literally a car for the future.

It had wheels for ground travel, and Fuller anticipated that future, yet developed, technology would allow the Dymaxion to fly.

Three were built between 1933 and '34.

The only surviving prototype of this revolutionary car lives at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada.

- [Benjamin] The version of the Dymaxion car that we have visiting the Fuller dome today is the 1933 prototype version that Jeff Lane of Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee rebuilt.

So he fabricated the parts and made it a perfect replica of the 1933 version of the Dymaxion car.

- It's really fun.

I've been a fan of Buckminster Fuller for a long time.

Just his work is inspirational.

- [Anne-Marie] The Nunez-Shown family came out to see the Dymaxion in person and their son, Artie, was very impressed.

- It feels like an airplane that's taking off, kind of.

And also when it honks, it makes super loud!

- [Anne-Marie] But was it awesome?

- Yes, very!

- Okay, going for my ride in the Dymaxion.

Let's see how I get in.

We get in, oh!

This is- - [Jeff] It's a big step up.

- [Anne-Marie] This is very- - [Jeff] And it's not a big door.

- [Anne-Marie] This is ... - [Jeff] Once you're in, it's not bad, right?

- [Anne-Marie] This has got some nice leg room.

I like this.

- It does have some nice leg (indistinct).

- [Anne-Marie] We're ready!

- All right, we're off!

- [Anne-Marie] Okay.

(engine running) How does it run?

- [Jeff] I mean it runs good.

It drives, because of the rear steering, it drives kind of weird.

Kind of like a forklift, right?

So you gotta be careful because the back end swings out.

- [Anne-Marie] Just like it's creator, the Dymaxion was ahead of it's time.

It debuted at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago, but it was hit by another car and the driver was killed.

Investors weren't interested in the car of the future after that.

- If you were designing a car for an economic reason to have a profitable business, you would do focus groups and find out what it is people wanted and give that to 'em.

That wasn't his motivation at all for any of his inventions.

He wanted them to be artifacts that would change the trajectory of human behavior towards a sustainable future.

(upbeat music) - She wants a picture.

- [Anne-Marie] Are you like The Beatles drivin' around in this car?

Is this like fans everywhere?

- People see this car and they're like ...

I think she probably know what it is.

- [Anne-Marie] Well, Artie was right.

It's loud and very awesome.

- Our next story is also about designing and engineering and building something, but in this case, when it's done, it won't be turning any heads.

Last year, Brooke Butler went to Jefferson county where they're fixing a river.

(machine beeping) - This project is, as far as bank stabilization and small streams goes, it's on the complicated end.

There's a lot going on here.

(slow music) - [Brooke] Located in Jefferson county where the Calico Creek meets the big river, there's a lot going on like Joe said.

As a hydraulic engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, Joe Collum and the many other teams we'll talk about later have spent a lot of time at this confluence.

And although there's a lot of moving parts with multiple sites and organizations and teams, everyone and everything is working toward the same goal.

To restore and stabilize eroding areas along the big river that have been affected by hazardous lead contamination.

- We have a few different approaches that are different, but these features are all ones that we're familiar with.

There's guidelines and specifications for how you go about designing for these things.

It's just to put them all in one site, one project, all at once, it does add some complication to it.

- [Brooke] So let's talk through some of these features.

(upbeat music) The restoration project has three sites that each use different approaches.

Here is site one.

The approach used here was to restore what was previously a second channel for the Calico Creek to flow into the Big River.

By adding what is, basically, a second lane of traffic for the water to flow, it prevents high water levels from further eroding the riverbank.

Site two uses something called wayward weirs, which are these rock structures that stick out into the river.

- In simple terms, if you had an obstruction in the river, the river's gonna flow over it like this, and if it's tilted like this, the river, if it's going this way, it's gonna turn and flow over it like that.

So what these weirs do is they're tilted upstream and it will turn the river as it goes through this bend so that it's no longer eroding the outside bank.

Instead, it's focused more towards the center of the channel.

These weirs actually point the final flow as it finishes going through this bend directly into where we want it for the next bend.

- [Brooke] The next bend is site three, where they're implementing a toe-wood structure.

A toe-wood structure utilizes layers of timber and rock and vegetation to restructure and stabilize the riverbank.

This area was once heavily covered in brush, and it's common for landowners to cut it down, but that area of vegetation called the riparian zone is essential to keeping the ecosystem in balance.

That's why, at each site, they're also creating areas for new growth to take place.

- So what happens is when the river comes up, some of the sediment that the river's carrying will actually float over into that space between the rock structure and the bank.

Whether it's good sediment or bad sediment, it will deposit there and over time, you'll actually see vegetation start to grow up there, and you'll get to see some more habitat, and just a lot of good river things happening there.

(laughs) - [Brooke] So Joe knows about the hydraulics of the project, but like I mentioned, there are a lot of organizations involved to carry out their area of expertise.

(slow music) That brings us to Steve Herrington with the Nature Conservancy.

- This is an area that's had a long history of lead pollution.

Projects like this do a really good job of greatly reducing the amount of lead that continues to load into the system.

- [Brooke] Now, we've met Steve before a few years ago on a similar project at LaBarque Creek.

That used a lot of the same techniques we've talked about here, but on a much smaller scale.

The work at both LaBarque Creek and Calico Creek are considered pilot projects, which allows everyone involved to learn what works well and what doesn't, so they can apply it to future projects.

- Merrimack river basin, including the Big River, has amongst the highest bio-diversity in this entire region of the United States, particularly in the Midwest region.

So doing projects like this that can help reduce stream temperatures over time by adding shade that can help create in-stream habitat, by having habitat for those fish to find places to hide and find food to eat.

Incorporating these nature-based solutions by getting green, live plants.

That provides corridors for insects, birds, mammals, and just creates more so that there's greater resiliency into the future with the changing climate.

And all that has a benefit as we reduce the pollution that goes downstream into our waterways, into the Merrimack, and potentially, into the St. Louis area.

- [Brooke] It sounds simple.

Just putting some extra rocks and trees around the water, and using bio-engineering techniques is supposed to look simple to the average person because they mimic the way nature intended the process to look.

But by just waiting to let nature take its course, we'd be losing a lot of bio-diversity waiting for that to happen.

- We have threatened and endangered species such as freshwater mussels.

We refer to those as indicator species because they do tell us the quality of the watershed and the river, and we're losing those mussels.

So that tells us that now is the time.

If we do nothing, those species will be eliminated.

Other species will be greatly impacted.

- [Brooke] Matt Vielhaber is the project manager with the Army Corps of Engineers and above all else, he emphasizes that the collaboration between the organizations is essential to this project.

- One of the coolest parts about this project, it is, by definition, collaboration.

We have three Federal agencies.

We have a state agency.

We have NGOs, or non-governmental organizations such as The Nature Conservancy.

I'd be remiss if I didn't also point out that the collaboration is absolutely tied to the land owners.

All of these projects are planned for privately owned lands.

We understand that these land owners purchased this land for themselves and their families to be able to enjoy this beautiful habitat and recreate, and we're not looking to impact that.

It's also important to note that these issues are along the Big River now, if we do nothing, it will migrate to the Merrimack and ultimately, to the Mississippi.

So greater area of impact, more species will be impacted, it's a big deal.

- Next up, kind of a jaw-dropping story.

One you can really sink your teeth into, and I apologize for the puns, but as part of our pathways to work initiative, we've been looking at all kinds of jobs.

Those that are really in high demand these days like dental hygienist.

Ruth Ezell takes a look.

- [Ruth] Dental hygienist, Vanessa Rosas, is the first line of defense for her patients at Legacy Dental Care in Balwin.

Rosas compiles medical as well as dental histories.

She takes X-rays and performs other diagnostic tests and exams.

She performs teeth cleaning procedures to remove tartar buildup.

And educates patients on proper oral home care.

Rosas' career was born out of a need to help others.

- I grew up in a very small, rural town in Southwest Missouri and we didn't really have very many dental offices close to us.

We always had to travel a little bit.

So I thought I want to be someone that can make a difference and have people feel like they matter, like their smile is important, and I wanted to make that happen.

- The career of dental hygiene is a wonderful field.

It's very overlooked and underappreciated, I think, but it is a very, very good field.

- [Ruthie] Doctor Amanda Darling of Legacy Dental.

- I'd like to think I'm the most popular person in the practice, but it's really the hygienists that are the backbone of the practice.

That's who spends the most time with the patients, that's the relationships the patients identify with, and they trust the dental hygienist, and I rely on them because they're in there earliest.

They're seeing the patient's charts and histories, and they're seeing their X-rays and records, and they are the ones I walk in the room, they download to me what it is I need to be looking for.

- Vanessa Rosas is a graduate of the dental hygiene program here at the Forest Park campus of Saint Louis Community College.

In August of 2019, the program moved into the campus' newly constructed Center for Nursing and Health Sciences.

- We actually worked with the architects and the engineers in the design, and they took our concept and just ran with it, and it's more beautiful and more functional than we could have ever imagined.

- [Ruth] Kim Polk directs the dental hygiene program.

It runs two years and combines classroom and laboratory work with hands on experience in the program's public dental hygiene clinic.

Graduates earn an associate in applied science degree and become eligible for board exams to become a registered dental hygienist.

Polk, whose mother also graduated from a dental hygiene program, explains the pre-requisites.

- Our students have to take anatomy and physiology one and two, chemistry and microbiology as pre-requisites, and maintain a 3.0 or a B average when they apply to the program.

The only other barrier I can think of right now is that there is a lot of demand for dental hygiene education.

So in our case, we have a two year wait list for students to start the program that have met the qualifications.

And so students often ask what do I do during that time?

And my suggestion is that you work as much as you can and save as much money as you can so you don't have to work while you're in the program.

- [Ruth] And demand for graduates is high too.

- There is quite a shortage, not only in the greater St. Louis area but across the country, of dental hygienists.

With the onset of the pandemic and then a lot of older hygienists retiring, a lot of younger hygienists having to do child care or home schooling, there's been a lot of people that have stepped away from the profession for a while, and so there is quite a shortage.

Over the course of the last six to nine months, I've had 100 different dental offices contact me asking me to share their information with our graduates which I do via different closed Facebook accounts so that they could advertise the openings that they have.

Barely a week goes by that multiple dentists don't contact me.

- Dental hygienists have career paths open to them in addition to working in private dental practices.

For example, they're employed in public health clinics, there's mobile dentistry in which hygienists travel to places like long-term care facilities.

Still more opportunities exist in the business sector and in higher education, but some of those options require additional degrees.

And continuing her education is definitely on Vanessa Rosas' radar.

- I would like to go back to school to get my bachelors, maybe even teaching, eventually.

Maybe clinically teaching.

I think that's on my radar but it's not a for sure thing.

Just keeping my options open.

I'm very happy here and happy with the decision that I made and the accomplishments that I've been able to get up until this moment.

- Finally, the story of a playwright who came out of St. Louis and won the Pulitzer prize in the 1950's.

But it's not a story about Tennessee Williams, but about William Inge.

They were two of the successful post-war playwrights, and their lives were intertwined.

And today, Tennessee Williams still really famous.

William Inge, not so much.

The two men first met here in St. Louis and they knew each other well.

They were friends and sometimes, rivals.

- There's no doubt that Inge was, in some ways, if we just look at their work in the 1950's, that Inge was the more celebrated playwright.

- [Jim] Inge wrote a string of successful Broadway plays that were made into Hollywood films.

Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, Bus Stop, Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and his Oscar winning screenplay for Splendor in the Grass.

How come we don't know him better?

How come Tennessee Williams is this ...

I don't mean just in St. Louis, everybody knows about Tennessee Williams, I think.

I think William Inge has sort of faded away a little bit.

- Yes, yes.

- Maybe not in your world of drama, but in- - No, well, even in my world of drama.

How often are Inge's plays produced?

Not often.

- [Jim] In early 2020, the Webster Conservatory did stage Picnic.

It's set in a small Midwestern town.

The characters include the local beauty queen, her tomboy sister, the rich young man, the spinster schoolteacher with a drinking problem, the hunky drifter who enters their lives.

Molly Burris played beauty queen, Madge.

- I re-read Picnic when we were doing the auditions, and I finished it and I was went oh, okay.

(laughs) I was like this show is dated.

It's got some tropes, but then I have a very, very deep love and appreciation for the character.

- [Jim] It was because of these kinds of plays, the settings, the characters, the themes, that William Inge became known as the playwright of the Midwest.

William Inge was born in the town of Independence, Kansas in 1913.

His father was a traveling salesman, his mother ran their home as a boarding house for unmarried women schoolteachers.

He was a smart, talented kid.

He was teased by fellow schoolboys as a sissy.

He was a collector of movie star photographs and he liked to perform for the adults.

In college, he wanted to be an actor, but he ended up teaching.

First in a high school and then for five years at Stevens College in Columbia, Missouri.

He began to do some writing but not seriously.

He wasn't happy there.

For much of his life, William Inge was filled with self-doubt and depression.

- And he turned fairly early on to alcohol as a way of dealing with that.

- [Jim] For much of his life, Inge would undergo psychiatric treatment and he was, as you pretty much had to be back then, a closeted homosexual.

It was something he had difficulty coming to terms with.

Something that increased his sense of isolation.

(slow music) In 1943, Inge made the move that opened all kinds of new opportunities.

He was hired to be the arts critic for the St. Louis Star Times, reviewing plays, concerts, movies, exhibits, even the Ice-Capades.

St. Louis was really the first big city he lived in.

The first place with a large, underground gay community.

It was, in many ways, liberating.

He was free from teaching, he was writing for a living, and was immersed in the theater world, but he was still drinking too much.

His co-workers knew little about his private life.

They saw he was a hard worker.

They noticed the hangovers.

Inge and Tennessee Williams met for the first time here where Inge had an apartment North of downtown.

It was 1944 and Tennessee Williams had already happily left St. Louis behind, but he would come back to visit his mother.

And he was here on his way to Chicago for the pre-Broadway opening of The Glass Menagerie.

Williams came to Inge's apartment to be interviewed for a story that would run in the St. Louis Star Times, and immediately, they hit it off.

Yeah, they were both gay and biographers generally agree they had a physical relationship at some point, but it was more than that.

They had a lot of shared interests.

Art, music, theater, and similar family backgrounds.

- They both were peculiar kids, but whereas Williams, in some ways, embraced his difference, Inge always felt unhappy.

- [Jim] In late December of 1944, Inge went to Chicago to see the opening of his new friend's play.

The Glass Menagerie was Tennessee Williams' semi-autobiographical work set in St. Louis, and seeing that play was a turning point in Inge's life.

- And I think that was a kind of thunderclap and it signaled to Inge maybe this is possible.

Even though there was not a lot of separation in terms of age between the two, there was a kind of role model, and Inge must have felt if Williams can do this, maybe just maybe, I can too.

- [Jim] By the time Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway just a few months later, William Inge had already completed his own first play, Farther Off From Heaven.

Tennessee Williams connected Inge with his agent who felt the play was good but not good enough for Broadway, but it would be staged in Dallas, and Inge would later rework it into Dark at the Top of the Stairs.

His next play, Front Porch, was put on in St. Louis.

This play would become the basis for Picnic, and in fact, elements of most of his successful work on Broadway really first began to take shape in those years in St. Louis.

As Inge began to focus on his writing, he lost his job at the Star Times to a returning veteran, and was hired here at Washington University as an English instructor, but he really now saw himself as a playwright.

He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and he was determined, desperate really, to succeed.

He sent another play to New York.

He said at the time, "If the play doesn't make it, I'm through."

The play was Come Back, Little Sheba and it did make it.

This was his ticket out of teaching and out of St. Louis and he left for New York.

Come Back, Little Sheba was followed by Picnic, which had one of it's pre-Broadway openings here in St. Louis with a young Paul Newman in the cast.

Picnic would win the 1953 Pulitzer prize for drama.

Just as Williams had done, Inge was drawing on his own life experiences.

The small town, characters dealing with alcoholism, repressed sexuality, aging, discontent.

These were people, these were things he knew first hand.

- We were asked that in a talk back, which character do you think William Inge wrote for himself?

And we came to the conclusion that every character in Picnic has a sort of representation of Inge.

- [Jim] After Picnic, two more successful Broadway plays would follow, and at the 1962 Academy Awards, an Oscar.

But by the mid-1960's, neither William Inge nor Tennessee Williams would achieve the critical or popular success of their early works.

But Williams rolled with the punches.

Became a literary star, embraced his celebrity.

Inge struggled, deeply affected by failure and criticism, and the playwright of the Midwest was beginning to be written off as the playwright of the 1950's.

- For better or worse, Inge's career is perceived, not that he stopped writing, but perceived as being framed by that single decade, and so we associate him with 50's values.

- [Jim] Other Pulitzer Prize winning plays from the same era had had more staying power than Picnic.

Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

But while Inge's plays may not have aged well, in his time, he was at the top.

He'd achieved the success, fame, fortune, but not the happiness he'd pursued.

Always a loner, in the end he felt a failure.

Struggling with drugs and depression.

In 1973, shortly after his 60th birthday, William Inge committed suicide.

The playwright of the Midwest is buried in his home town of Independence, Kansas.

In different ways, St. Louis helped shape two of the most successful playwrights of post-war America, and it was here their paths crossed, and this place, and that relationship, especially for William Inge, changed everything.

He went on to establish a solid reputation that was built on a very fragile foundation.

And that's Living St. Louis.

Thanks for joining us.

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

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] 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.