(lively music) - This is on Hodiamont and Minerva just south of the Wellston Loop.

- [Anne Marie] Jim Kirchherr is retiring from Nine PBS after more than 30 years of exploring the city.

- But what's great about it is the sort of... - [Anne Marie] Of meeting the history-makers whose names are not in the history books.

- [Jim] That's you here, right?

- [Cal] Yeah, this is me here with my back.

- You gotta remember now back there, everything was slide rule and pencil.

- [Anne Marie] And going behind the scenes to see just how things get done.

- [Curator] But I tell you, this case that holds the Foolish Dog Society headdress is going to be one of the knockout cases.

- Just a few of our favorite guy's favorite stories, it's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) In 1991, when Jim Kirchherr began working at what was then known as KETC, channel 9, he cemented his legacy as this region's preeminent storyteller.

For the past 34 years, Jim has elevated the issues important to the St. Louis region, enlightened our community with stories of the people, places, and organizations that make St. Louis great.

And through his ability to find just the right word, he has become a history teacher, connecting our past to our present.

We are now in our 22nd season of "Living St. Louis" and I'm here with the Jim Kirchherr to look back at some of his favorite stories that he's told over the years.

Now, Jim, picking your favorite stories must be like picking a favorite child because you can't even remember all of them that you've done anyway.

- Right, but I do remember my children though, yeah.

- You do, you do, yes, yes.

- But certainly, yeah, we've done hundreds of stories, you and I together and I don't know how many, and specials, and documentaries, and town halls, and debates and all of that.

And so, yeah, as I thought back, what do I wanna talk about?

Well, I want, first of all, I remember how much fun I have had doing this job.

So I've explored a lot of places that most people don't get to see.

I've been in Cherokee Cave, that was fascinating.

I explored the city sewers, the big tunnels under Forest Park.

I rode the tram that was under the Poplar Street Bridge just 'cause I wanted to.

- [Anne Marie] I mean, who knew there was even a tram under the Poplar Street Bridge.

- Yeah, it was a piece of film and I thought, "Maybe I can do that."

And then I climbed the Union Station Clock Tower again just because it was an idea, and I thought maybe they'd let me.

So we signed some release forms and I got to climb the Union Station Clock Tower.

- Well, speaking of film, you know, some of the ways that we've come up with these stories is that we come across film and think, "I gotta make a story out of this.

I need to use it."

Or sometimes it's just a great story and you happen to come across the film that helps you tell it.

So this next story that we're gonna see here, it's both, it's a great story and it has amazing archival film.

How did this story come about?

- Yeah, it's interesting because the archival film was there, but what you want when you've got an image or a piece of film is you need a person.

And so this is really not exploring a place, it's exploring history, but it's also exploring the people who sort of made that history.

They're not famous people, by the way.

And that's what made this interesting.

I got a phone call one day, as we often do, and somebody said, "I think I've got a story you might be interested.

We're having a reunion."

And I said, "Well, who's coming?"

When they told me who was coming, I said, "Yeah, we're gonna be there."

This is the story.

It's a Saturday afternoon in a modest neighborhood in Saint Ann.

But it's not just another Saturday afternoon because just around the corner, a bunch of old friends have gotten together for a reunion to talk about the good old days when they helped make history.

(inspirational music) Everybody knew the first American astronauts, the Mercury Seven they called them, Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, Schirra, Slayton, Carpenter, Cooper.

But thousands of other people were involved in this.

- [Facilitator] Okay, John.

- [Jim] When an astronaut climbed into the Mercury capsule, he was climbing into a craft built in St. Louis by workers at McDonnell Aircraft.

And the last people the astronauts saw before blastoff were McDonnell employees who bolted on the hatch.

That's you here, right?

- [Cal] Yeah, this is me here with my back.

Hair was a little darker.

- [Jim] Cal Moser came up from Texas for this reunion.

He had worked with the space capsules after they arrived at Cape Canaveral to prepare them for the space shots.

- We're just doing some modification, and putting some brackets on for some wiring.

And this was before John Glenn's flight.

- [Jim] McDonnell Aircraft signed the contract to build America's first space capsules for manned flight in 1959.

And some here were part of it from the very beginning.

- They took us all off the airplane and they sort of skimmed off the best, started astronautics and then we all worked from there.

- [Jim] What were your thoughts at the time?

- I didn't think it'd work.

(Bo chuckling) - [Jim] McDonnell built jet planes, but space capsules had to withstand greater stresses, the blast-off, the vacuum of space, the intense heat of reentry, and the splash down in the ocean.

(pensive music) McDonnell's contract was for 20 capsules.

Only seven were planned for manned flights.

The others would be used for various tests.

The capsules were small, just nine feet high, six feet in diameter at the base, (capsule whooshing) just enough room for a single astronaut who could do little more than move his head and arms.

(pensive music continues) It made it a challenge for those who built these capsules.

As work progressed in the capsule, filled with equipment and controls, only one worker at a time could get inside with progressively less room to maneuver.

(pensive music continues) It was demanding work.

We were trying to catch up to the Soviet Union in the space race and they would put the first man into orbit around the Earth.

- And we were always, always rushed, always pressed, long hours, good crew, you know?

And everything was being done for the first time.

- Now, you gotta remember now back there, everything was slide rule and pencil.

- [Narrator] The first manned spacecraft was delivered in December 1960, only 23 months after the company had received the contract.

- [Jim] Those involved remember the demanding deadlines and the long hours, but they also remember the teamwork, the dedication, the problem solving.

They were pioneers.

No one had been here before.

No one could tell them how to do it.

And I imagine every space program built on what you guys did.

- Yes.

And we kind of had a saying that it was the Model T of the space world.

- And back then you didn't have all the red tape that you had to go through 15,000 signatures to get something done.

And we did it, you know?

It was all just done like that.

Well, later on in the programs, you couldn't do it like that because it got too involved.

(hopeful music) - [Announcer] It was February 20th, 1962 that John H. Glenn entered his spacecraft.

- Something else they couldn't do after those first few space flights was hide souvenirs inside the space capsule, not after they got caught.

The ground crew would stash dollar bills before blastoff.

They'd be signed by crew members and astronauts and framed, verified as having orbited the Earth.

Signed by John Glenn.

- [Interviewee] Yeah.

- [Jim] NASA officials were none too happy when they found out.

- Yeah, right.

It was a scandal.

Remember that, the guys coming down and investigating the dollar bills and the $2 bills.

- [Joe] I wasn't in on it.

- Don't you lie to me.

(Cal laughing) You were in on it.

He is the one, Joe is the one that logged all of these $2 bills.

- [Jim] That's Joe Tramell on the right.

- He hosted this reunion.

His memories of those important and exciting times are slipping away.

He's in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and he wanted to see his old friends while he still remembered them.

His wife, Ruth, made all the arrangements.

- Go ahead.

- I really appreciate you people coming out for this and being with us.

The best group in the world.

And I love all of you.

God bless you.

(hands clapping) - [Attendee 1] We love you, Joe.

- [Attendee 2] Wouldn't miss it (indistinct).

Wouldn't miss it, bud.

(attendees applauding) - [Jim] It's been a long time since the first days of the space program.

They remember the good things now and mostly laugh at the bad.

They're proud of what they did and proud of how well they did it.

- I had so much faith that we built it, it was gonna work.

And that's what I went on.

- Even though I was kind of apprehensive when I first started, but now the best thing that's ever happened to me in my life.

(reminiscing music) (indistinct talking) - A lot of us have died.

We have members that are 91 that just couldn't make it.

And most of us have one illness or another.

But it put us back together probably for the last time.

(inspirational music) (spaceship roaring) (spaceship roaring continues) (pensive music) (pensive music ending) - All right, I could say this about the story we just saw, but this next story, it's just so you.

You saw things that we all see every single day.

In fact, you see these on buildings in towns and cities across America.

But you saw something and said, "There's a story here."

- Yeah, absolutely.

I think this is one of those...

I think we might call this drive-by stories.

I mean, we've all driven by something 100 times and sometimes thought, "What's the story there?"

And there's almost always a story.

But part of this was finding somebody, as we often need, who knows more about this than we do.

When we did this, and I hope when people see it again, they are going to drive through the city seeing things they never noticed before.

(lively music) (lively music continues) They are messages from the past.

They are clues to a city's a neighborhood's, a building's history.

And they're all over the place.

They're called ghost signs.

And very often they do appear as something of an apparition.

Not quite there, but not quite gone.

Like this sign for the Sager Feed store on North Broadway.

(lively music continues) A lot of times they're just patches, and there's very little left to read, just tantalizing bits of letters here and there.

And often as they wear away, you'll see the remains of two, even three signs that were painted over each other over time.

The old signs on this near North Side building give a history of changing times from making buggies to making piston rings.

You see it on this South Side building too.

The sign by the door says Motorworks, but across the top you can just make out the Grand Livery & Boarding Stable.

(engine rumbling) The Wellston Loop was once a bustling business district, and this building needed a directory painted on the side, a heating company, a notary, a real estate agent, and an architect.

But a warning, once you start looking for ghost signs, it's hard to stop.

William Stage is somebody who got hooked on these things years ago.

- I began to photograph them 'cause I was curious about 'em.

- [Jim] Stage is a freelance writer and photographer you might know from the "Riverfront Times."

He actually published a book years ago called "Ghost Signs" and he met us in Soulard to show us one of his favorites.

- And Dr. Hoffman's Red Drops, we have to assume it's a patent medicine of some kind.

- [Jim] Right, right.

- And there's a line down below, it's hard to read, that says, it purports to cure, what I can make out, colic, cramps and cholera.

- Yeah.

- You know, you can definitely see the C-H and the L-E-R-A.

Now, that's curious to me because, you know, the last serious cholera epidemic in St. Louis was 1866.

This sign could easily be 130 years old.

(lively music) (traffic whooshing) - [Jim] St. Louis is a good city for these ghost signs.

It is old and there are a lot of brick walls.

A business could put up its own name and rent space to another advertiser.

Even residential property owners could get in on this.

- The bigger companies would send men out to take a lease on a barn or a wall.

You know, they might be gone for two, three months at a time in the summer, and they'd go from town to town and they purchased leases, and they would pay with a combination of money or their product.

(car whooshing) - This street has clearly seen better days, but it is the location of a very colorful and well-preserved painted sign.

This is on Hodiamont and Minerva, just south of the Wellston Loop.

And it's a bread sign, Heidland's or Heidland's Gold Medal Bread.

But what's great about it is the sort of extra added attraction of the artwork.

This is a baseball player or what's left of a baseball player.

And up above it says, "Making a home run with Heidland's Gold Medal Bread."

How old is this sign?

It's hard to say exactly, but city directories show that Frederick W. Klaet, that's his name at the top, had a grocery store here in the teens.

And the Heidland Bakery was in business in the neighborhood at the same time, but doesn't show up in the directory after 1935.

Whatever its age, it is in great shape, probably because a building went up next door and protected it for a long time.

And you can use a computer to see even more details.

A few adjustments, and that baseball player pops out, and he appears to be carrying a loaf of bread.

(lively music) But more common than bread signs in Old St. Louis were beer signs.

That hasn't changed, only the names, and there are plenty of the old brands left on the old walls.

On this South Side corner, there's the Griesedieck logo.

You can make out the big G pretty clearly.

(lively music) In Dogtown, there's an old saloon sign that, as it chipped and faded, revealed two different beer brands.

And you'll have to take my word for this, there are remnants of a pre-Prohibition brand grown beer, which was probably painted over with Alpen Brau, another local brand that lasted a lot longer.

The Dogtown Historical Society actually plans to restore the Alpen Brau sign and bring back a bit of local history.

(lively music continues) But while buildings in whole neighborhoods can be designated as historic, painted signs generally are not.

Rules regarding historic preservation and tax credits have to do with structures for the most part, and something painted on and painted over and over again isn't part of that, even if it's historically interesting.

On this building on Delmar, there are two signs, one for a grocer that might be from the early 1940s, vegetables, poultry, game, and fresh fish on Friday.

But above that, a faint sign reading Horse Shoer, which is interesting on its own.

But check the 1905 city directory and you find it was one of eight scientific horse shoer shops, the new improved style of horse shoeing.

But more than that, it was owned by Ed Butler.

He was one of the most powerful and corrupt political bosses of his day.

He got rich on bribes and payoffs, boodle they called it.

And they called him the Millionaire Blacksmith.

(lively music continues) Still, any of the owners of this building over the years could have gotten rid of that sign, and maybe they did paint over it, and that coat of paint just wore away.

These signs survive in part because they're just too much trouble to get rid of.

They can be charming reminders of the days of neighborhood grocers, dry goods stores selling Red Diamond overalls and corner saloons.

But they can also be sad reminders of better and busier days.

Still, St. Louis never stops remaking itself.

So you might wanna catch the old signs while you can.

You may find somebody giving an old building a good scrubbing.

And for a city, that may be an even better sign.

(power washer whooshing) (lively music continues) - After seeing that story, it's almost impossible for anyone not to pass a ghost sign and take a second.

- Yeah, I think, you know, when we do stories about St. Louis, in so many ways, you hope people do view the city differently, whether physically viewing it or understanding it in a different way.

- If you were to put together "The Jim Kirchherr Storytelling Bible," how to tell a story, I know that in the first chapter it would say, "Don't call us at the ribbon cutting.

We wanna be there before that."

- Yeah, so much of what an important event is, like a ribbon cutting, a grand opening or something, is how it got there.

What thought went into the process?

What planning went into the process?

And this was the perfect example of that.

So this is about a museum exhibit, and I think going through a museum exhibit is a great museum experience.

It's not a great TV story, it's not a great TV experience.

So this was from 2004, the first season of "Living St.

Louis."

It was the bicentennial of the beginning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

And the Missouri History Museum was putting together a national exhibit about Lewis and Clark.

And I wanted to know not all that was going into it, but I thought, "How do we tell this story?"

And the focus was on a single artifact.

And I thought that was a really interesting way to go.

And again, as with so many stories, you need some really smart people to tell you about this who know way more than we do and listen to them.

And I love this story because I learned so much.

This past summer when the Lewis and Clark exhibit was still just a plan on paper and an empty room, hundreds of artifacts chosen to be part of the exhibit were beginning to arrive in another part of the museum.

In this nondescript room, the shelves were filling up with rare, priceless, and irreplaceable pieces of American history.

(latch clicking) On this day, exhibit registrar Diane Mallow is opening a crate from the North Dakota Historical Society.

Among the artifacts lent to the exhibit is a Shoshone Foolish Dog Society headdress, a warrior's headdress.

As of now, what happens to this prized object is her responsibility for the next few years.

- You look at the object to make sure it's stable.

When you pick it up, you have a nice clean area prepared for it to set it down.

You don't wanna have it in your hands and realize you don't have a place to put it.

So you wanna do that in advance.

You look at the packing materials themselves to make sure little parts of it haven't fallen off during transit.

If they have, you keep 'em, maybe you can reattach 'em.

(paper rustling) What you were looking at was a split horn bonnet, which was the kind of headdress that a warrior would've worn in Lewis and Clark's day.

- [Jim] As the curator of the bicentennial exhibit, Carolyn Gilman spent years scouring the country for just the right artifacts.

Sometimes she knew what she wanted and where it was, but she had no idea that this headdress was in a museum in Bismarck, North Dakota.

- And this was one of the things that we just happened across in their storeroom.

And we realized that this was a very old style of headdress.

When Lewis and Clark met a very prominent chief or a prominent warrior, he would've been wearing a split horn bonnet like the one that we have in the exhibit.

- There's horns, porcupine quills are wrapped around, I believe this is horse hair, on the end of the horns.

It's ermine skins, owl feathers that have been dyed with something.

There's some wool and some glass beads.

- [Jim] The registrar goes through an extensive inspection and condition report, making sure that what they got is what they expected to get, and that it would be returned in as good or better condition.

She will do this for all 450 artifacts.

The exhibit planners knew that they wanted to use the headdress to help tell of the important moment when Meriwether Lewis and Shoshone Chief Cameahwait not only met but exchanged clothing.

- So we thought we would collect a lot of Indian clothing and a lot of Euro-American clothing and kind of compare them.

So that's what we did.

But when we had assembled all of those artifacts, and this headdress was one of the artifacts that we assembled, we realized that the artifacts were saying something to us.

They were speaking to us, and they were saying to us, "You haven't thought about this enough."

We realized that the clothing was really symbolizing things.

It was all deeply symbolic of the role of the warrior and the soldier in society.

- [Jim] The Foolish Dog Society headdress on this day was ready to be mounted in its case.

It's in a section called Dressed in Courage.

And in the case there are two figures, the Shoshone chief in his ceremonial warrior garments and Captain Lewis in his dress uniform or his ceremonial warrior garments, both wearing feathers in their caps.

- The concept of military heroism was one that Lewis instantly understood and Cameahwait also understood.

And they also understood that each of them used artifacts and articles of clothing to symbolize military heroism.

And they used those articles of clothing to communicate their sameness to each other.

- [Jim] If an authentic 1804 military uniform exists, they simply couldn't find it.

So they had a replica made, but that in itself took extensive research to get the details right, down to the buttons and the cuffs.

Which was more difficult, the Lewis uniform or the Indian uniform?

- Well, they were both pretty difficult because what people don't realize about Indian dress is that it is also subject to style and to change and evolution.

Indian dress changed during the 19th century, just as much as Euro-American dress changed.

And so you can't put an Indian of 1804 in a costume that an Indian of 1870 would've worn.

It would look totally ridiculous to the people.

- [Jim] And people would know.

Some people would know it.

- [Carolyn] Some people would know.

- So you're happy with what you've got here.

- I love it.

I love the whole thing.

(Diane chuckling) It looks so beautiful.

- [Jim] This is not the only place in the exhibit where the Indians and their stories stand side by side with the explorers.

That's something that makes the 2004 telling of the story different than the one you would've gotten in 1904.

- I didn't represent the Indian part of the story because I thought it was a politically correct thing to do.

I did it because I thought it was the most interesting part of the story.

I thought that the social and the cultural landscapes that Lewis and Clark had to traverse were just as dramatic and just as difficult, and just as challenging as those geographical landscapes and... - [Jim] 'Cause either one could have killed them.

- Absolutely.

But I tell you, this case that holds the Foolish Dog Society headdress is going to be one of the knockout cases.

And it comes very close to a kind of pivotal turning point in the story that I hope people will be able to appreciate because I think that the moment when Lewis meets the Shoshone is the moment of maximum communication, maximum bridging of cultural boundaries.

And that was the moment when the expedition really became the core of discovery.

They really discovered what was making these other people tick, and they were able to communicate across those cultural divides.

(indistinct talking) - [Diane] There we go.

- Jim, before we saw that piece, you mentioned something very interesting, which was we find people that are smarter than we are to tell those stories.

It's not about us.

- Unless I'm climbing Union Station Clock Tower, - Then it's all about you.

- Then it's about me.

But no, I think the best experiences have been allowing people to inform us.

We learn along with the audience.

I think that's our job is to learn these things and pass it on.

Sometimes they're experts and sometimes they're just people with incredible life experiences, like the people who built the Mercury capsules.

So that has been just fascinating to me.

It's what keeps us going day after day to learn more about this city and its people.

- We do have the best jobs, that's for sure.

And we only got through three stories from your entire career.

(Anne Marie chuckling) So while this is a wrap on this conversation, there will be a part two, so keep an eye out for that.

For "Living St. Louis," I'm Anne Marie Berger.

- I'm Jim Kirchherr.

- [Both] Good night.

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