(gentle music) - [Anne-Marie] He's retiring after 34 years at Nine PBS, so we asked Jim Kirchherr about some of his favorite stories about St. Louis and St. Louisans, the American soldier and the Polish countess, each with their own World War II medals.

- "Your duty is to fight.

Your only compensation will be Poland's freedom."

- [Anne-Marie] The one about the kids who grew up with, but never grew out of, their model airplane phase.

- [Jim] Do you think it's that Lindbergh generation or- - I'm sure it is, all through up to our age now.

(model airplane buzzing) - And the St. Louisans who made it big, the man behind the counter in a famous "Twilight Zone" and the widow who married the vice president of the United States, of all people.

It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(laid-back upbeat music) (laid-back upbeat music continues) (laid-back upbeat music continues) You're joining me for part two of my conversation with Jim Kirchherr about just a few of his favorite stories he's told over the past 34 years at Nine PBS.

If you missed the first one, don't worry.

You can find it and so much more of Jim's work on the Nine PBS YouTube channel.

So Jim, this next story, I'm pretty sure you picked it because it is my personal all-time favorite story that you've told.

As a young up-and-coming producer/storyteller at the time that you did this, it really set the bar high for me.

It was around the time we were telling stories and interviewing veterans of World War II.

- And home-front folks as well.

We were doing a lot of work with a lot of people who are no longer with us.

So that was a fascinating time.

- I just love the way...

There's just something about it.

I don't know if it's the story itself or how you weaved it together, but this one I've always loved.

- [Jim] Like a lot of stories we go out, you don't know how good it is until you're done with it.

And this is a World War II story, but it came in the most almost mundane way.

A coworker said, "I have a neighbor who's got an interesting story."

It happened to be a neighbor who was also a Polish countess.

And this is a story of war, of survival, of bravery, all wrapped up in a love story.

Finally tonight, the story about an elderly couple here in South St. Louis.

He's long retired from the diamond business.

She used to teach school.

They have a nice house.

They've got grandkids.

They like to read.

She walks the dog.

These sound like perhaps ordinary lives until you hear about all the dangers they faced, all the risks they took many years ago for a chance to have any lives at all.

- That's it.

(bottle clinks) - [Jim] They've had a long life together.

Isham Reavis is 95, his wife Bisia, 10 years younger.

And in early 2007, they would celebrate 62 years of marriage.

And stories?

Believe me, they've got some stories.

- But not a normal life, what I would say, (laughs) by all standards what you can call normal.

It wasn't normal.

- [Jim] Like a lot of couples, they have old photos and mementos, but these tell a story that at times even they've had a tough time believing, the note written by an escaped American POW, the forged identification papers, and the medals.

On the right is his Silver Star for gallantry in combat.

The other two, those are hers, awarded by the Polish government to a resistance fighter who was born in a castle.

You see, Bisia, that's the Polish equivalent of Betsy, was and technically still is a countess.

- Elzbieta Maria Karolina Teresa Sichina, Countess Krasicka.

(laughs) Oh, here is me.

- [Jim] Her family is featured prominently in a book on Polish aristocracy.

Growing up in the 1920s and '30s, life for the little countess was quite good, governesses, private teachers, language lessons, a hunting lodge, forests, and, of course, the house, a 16th-century castle overlooking the San River in southeastern Poland.

But the life of the countess and for all of Poland changed in 1939.

(artillery booming) Just before Bisia's 18th birthday, Hitler's army invaded Poland, defeated its army, and occupied the country.

A Polish government in exile was set up in London, and the Polish resistance began to organize in secret.

Bisia's father helped people escape and move about by giving them documents saying they were on his land to do business.

And one night in the forest, Bisia too joined the resistance, taking an oath she remembers to this day.

- "I will maintain total military secrecy no matter what may befall me, so help me God."

Then the man who swore me in said, "Now you are a member of the Polish Home Army.

Your duty is to fight.

Your only compensation will be Poland's freedom.

Every treason punishable by death."

- [Jim] German forces were all around, but as a member of a prominent local family, Bisia was able to move about the area.

- I was mostly a reconnaissance person.

I transported ammunition and guns.

- [Jim] On one mission, she was driving a wagon load of weapons hidden under straw.

Sometimes the roads were clear, but not this time.

- And there are three Germans with the automatic and (speaks in foreign language).

- [Jim] She carried under her coat her identification card and a loaded gun.

She decided to try to talk rather than shoot her way out of this, and handed over her papers with a smile.

- Then one goes around, poke his fingers in the straw and asks me (speaks in foreign language), "What do you have underneath?"

And I with laughter said (speaks in foreign language), "Surely a machine gun."

So we began to laugh and- - [Jim] The soldiers looked no further.

Instead, they gave the young lady a drink of schnapps from their canteen, shared a cigarette, and sent her and unknowingly her shipment of guns on their way.

- It was scary, but you were young.

Therefore it was simpler, maybe.

I don't know if I would do it now.

- [Jim] Eventually the Germans would be driven from Poland by the advancing Soviet forces, but the resistance fighters soon found that while they had the same enemy, the Russians did not consider them friends.

- "Hands up.

Throw your guns," and led us as prisoners.

- [Jim] They gave them a choice, join the red army or remain a prisoner.

Bisia wanted neither and used her wits and her language skills again to avoid capture in Soviet-occupied Poland.

And this is where Isham comes into the story.

He too was a survivor, an American Army lieutenant who'd escaped from a German POW camp.

He was almost shot, almost froze to death.

But when he finally hooked up with the Russian allies, he was safe.

While waiting for transportation back to the American forces, he was in a club in the Polish city of Lublin sitting with some Polish girls who happened to be there to meet their friend, the countess.

- When Bisia walked in there, that was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.

And with the arrogance of being a lieutenant, they're pretty arrogant people, I told her I was gonna marry her.

- Now, believe it or not, 10 days afterwards, we were married.

- [Jim] And 10 days after that, Isham had to leave and couldn't take her with him.

But he left her with a note to the American authority saying he would send for her as soon as he could and asking them to do everything they could to facilitate that.

He gave his mother's address in St. Louis.

But it was up to Bisia to get to the Americans, to get out of Soviet-occupied territory.

And so one night, carrying Isham's note and a forged document identifying her as a Belgian refugee, she made her move.

- We decided that the best way is to do it on the boxcar to the border.

Climb on the top of a boxcar, flat on the stomach, not a good ride, don't advocate that.

- [Jim] It took time, but she did make her way to the Americans and showed them the note, and they did help the officer's wife.

Now with legal identification, she headed for America and St. Louis.

It had been a year since she had seen the husband she had barely known in the first place.

They weren't even sure they would recognize each other.

- He met me, and we recognized each other.

- Good thing.

- Luckily, (laughs) luckily.

But it was strange.

- [Jim] There were not many happy endings in Poland during World War II.

The war raged back and forth across the country.

It was a place of death and destruction and sorrow.

But many people, like the countess who had lived in the castle and the American GI who'd escaped from the prison camp, figured out how to survive day by day.

And one day with the war nearly over, their paths crossed, and in an instant, they made a decision that would define the rest of their lives.

- And then as you grow older, you get to thinking, "Oh my God."

But she was young too, see.

- You know, (sighs) what a strange life.

(laughs) - [Jim] Worked out fine, I think.

- It worked out great.

(Isham speaks indistinctly) - Cheers.

- Cheers.

(glasses clinking) - Cheers.

(Jim and Isham laugh) (gentle classical music) - Jim, you get a lot of praise and attention for all your stories about history, but you also have a knack and a talent for finding things that are simple or quirky and making them must-see TV.

- Yeah, it's, you know... We always talk about community, right?

And that's an important thing.

But I've been fascinated by, I am gonna call them micro communities, right?

So I've done stories, and, well, you did stories about mushroom hunters, for example, coming from all different walks of life, but with a passion for hunting morel mushrooms.

I've done stories about historic dancers, the Recorder Society, because they love to play recorders.

The Banjo Club, one of the first stories I ever did, and the Harmonica Club.

This story appealed to me.

First of all, it was a beautiful day, and it was outdoors, and it was about a hobby.

And most of the guys doing this, they were guys, had taken this up as kids and continued on through adulthood, and they were retirees.

And the interesting thing to me as we talked about it was, this was a generational hobby, wondering if it was going to survive because it came at a particular time in history where they grabbed onto this, and they never let go.

(upbeat music) They come here because what they do requires a lot of open land and open sky.

They build and fly model airplanes, not the elaborate full-powered remote-controlled planes that take off under their own power.

Although there can be power involved to get the planes up in the air, after that, it's mostly about gliding.

(hobbyists chattering) You'll see guys launching planes with a slingshot.

(upbeat music continues) Another kind of plane gets its altitude like a kite on a string, which is then detached, and the plane flies free.

- [John] There it went.

Okay, now it's hooked up.

- [Jim] But the most common type of model plane here is a propeller plane powered by a rubber band.

- Kind of spiral up.

Let's do it this way.

Here we go, into the wind.

(model airplane buzzing) - [Jim] Small motors can also be used, but they are timed to shut off after, say, 15 or 30 seconds or so, and then the plane flies free.

They all end up gliding.

If there's no remote control, it is what's considered free flight.

And how long they stay up depends on whether they catch an updraft, or thermal, which is how they got the name of this club.

- Thermaleers is the name of the St. Louis Thermaleers, used be called the Kirkwood Thermaleers.

It's one of the oldest clubs in the country, and I think at '38 or '39 it was formed.

After Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, everybody went (chuckles) bonkers over aviation.

The kids' models came up from everywhere.

- [Jim] Most of the club members grew up in that exciting age of aviation between the World Wars, the age of Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart and record-setting flights.

People were taking flying lessons.

Kids were building models.

Some of those kids would fly in World War II or become commercial or private pilots, and others simply would never lose the childlike wonder of flight.

And now they're all pretty much back where they started, building model planes.

(device squeaking) - This is a scale model of a World War II trainer of the German Luftwaffe.

In World War II, it was a trainer plane.

- [Jim] How did you get started in this?

- [Norman] (laughs) When I was a kid.

- [Jim] Do you think it's that Lindbergh generation or- - I'm sure it is.

It's almost like a disease.

It's a generational passion that you'll see photographs back in the 20s and 30s, the young guys and all through up to our age now.

(model airplane buzzing) - [Jim] Today Don Crosby was flying a plane that could be steered by remote control.

The small engine gets this plane up pretty high, but then it runs out of fuel, and he can still steer it in and out of the thermals and keep it flying a long time.

- [Don] And you get in lift, you can work these things up.

Well, I've lost this airplane a couple times, go out of sight.

- And if you can get in one of those thermals, these airplanes will stay in it, and it'll ride that thermal out of sight, so.

(laughs) - [Jim] Then how do you get the plane back?

- You put your name on it and hope somebody will call you.

- [Jim] The planes are adjusted so that they will fly in circles, but with updrafts and winds, that's sometimes still not enough.

There is a low-tech but very clever feature on some of these planes.

You'll see them light a wick, a slow burning fuse that will at some point bring down the plane.

- [Don] That's what pops this tail up.

That's what gets it out of the thermal.

When that fuse burns the rubber band in half, that pops up.

- [Jim] These guys seem to love just about anything that flies, and today, Roy White brought out a kite, and not just any kite, a 14-foot-diameter kite that he built after seeing a picture of it in a magazine.

On a day like this, it was tough to keep it on the ground.

(upbeat music) - [Roy] What do you think?

- I'm impressed.

(Don laughs) That's cool.

That's very cool.

Well, what did you think the first time you saw it going?

- [Roy] Oh, well, when I first put it together, we had a nice little breeze, and I just tipped it up, and up it went.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- It's just awesome, man.

It's the neatest kite I've ever built.

Got it there.

- [Jim] It is about the building and the flying and the challenges, but it's also about the comradery, just getting together with a bunch of guys on a nice day and getting in a bit of exercise chasing down your airplane.

A lot of the members of the Thermaleers are now in their 70s and 80s, but they haven't given up hope that a new generation will discover what they did when they were boys.

- I go around to the school, and we build these small gliders at school.

- They're interested for a while.

Then they disappear.

They get a car and a girlfriend, and they're gone.

- [Jim] Maybe today it's computers or video games, a generation before, rockets.

But for them, it was and always will be airplanes.

And they realize there's a good possibility that when they go, the Thermaleers Club may well go with them.

- [Don] I think so because there's not many kids coming behind us.

What you're looking at here, if you look at the age of the guys around here, it's a generational thing.

When we're gone, it's gone.

(upbeat music) - Jim, only you can make model planes cool again, so congratulations.

- Yeah, I almost took it up myself 'cause it was so much fun.

- One of the things that we hear all the time, and we consider it one of the best compliments we can get, which is, "I've never heard that before."

"I didn't know that happened."

And this next story definitely falls in that category, a story about a sitting vice president marrying a St. Louis girl in St. Louis.

- And becoming the second lady of the United States.

So I first told this story years ago.

I reversioned it when we started doing the "This Week in History."

So I waited for November, which was the anniversary of the wedding.

- You had it circled, their anniversary circled on your calendar, your paper calendar.

- Right, my paper calendar and in my Rolodex, yes.

And the "This Weeks in History" I've really enjoyed because sometimes they've been serious.

Sometimes they've been historical.

And sometimes they're just really, really quirky.

So we've got two.

One is about the wedding, and the other one is about a St. Louisan who a lot of people don't know he was a St. Louis, they might recognize his face, but who's best remembered as a Martian.

(lively music) (typewriter clacking) - [Announcer] All the world loves a lover, and that old saying holds true for America, where Vice President Alben Barkley and the former Mrs. Carleton S. Hadley were joined in matrimony in St. Louis.

The groom was the first vice president of the nation ever to be married while in office.

- [Jim] This week in history, November 18th, 1949, Jane Hadley, a 38-year-old widowed St. Louis secretary, became the second lady of the United States.

She married 71-year-old Alben Barkley, the longtime Kentucky senator, who that year had been sworn in as Harry Truman's vice president.

She would call this a Cinderella story.

They had met through her late husband's friend, St. Louisan Clark Clifford, who was President Truman's White House counsel.

And when Jane came to Washington, she was invited to a party on the presidential yacht.

Truman wasn't there, but the vice president was.

And when they were introduced, the man they called the Veep barely left her side the entire evening.

- He was smitten, and it didn't take long for her to feel the same.

- [Jim] That's Jane Hadley's daughter, Anne.

In 1949, she had just graduated from University City High School and got caught up in one of the big stories of the year.

- I don't think I was surprised at how much attention it got.

I mean, he was the vice president.

- And the press fell in love with the story.

The romance often made the front page, the 71-year-old vice president, the grandfather, and the woman dubbed the attractive widow.

In late October, Alben Barkley and Jane Hadley, who had known each other for just a few months, decided to get married.

Jane Hadley was living in an apartment here on Pershing when she decided that they would invite the press over to make their big announcement.

I think she still didn't realize how big this thing really was because they had to push all of the furniture aside to accommodate the crush of reporters and photographers to hear the announcement that everybody was expecting.

Yes, they were engaged, and they'd set the date, November 18th, 1949 here in St. Louis.

Even before the press conference broke up, the news was on national radio.

- She had no idea.

She knew it was already news, but she didn't know it was gonna be that big of a thing.

- [Jim] It wasn't a royal wedding, but pretty close.

This footage shot by a newsreel cameraman shows people showing up early outside the Methodist church.

An amateur photographer put himself in the middle of the crush and captured the arrival of the vice president and just a glimpse of the bride-to-be.

And while it was something of a madhouse outside with thousands of people, inside was a small wedding in the chapel.

And then... (onlookers cheering) - Wow.

(laughs) I mean, you couldn't see anything but a sea of people and reporters and newsreel cameras in those days.

- [Jim] This was Alben Barkley's world, pressing the flesh, sparring with the press, giving speeches.

This was his life.

Now it was hers.

- She went from living a rather quiet life to being the second lady of the land.

That is a person whose life changed.

- [Jim] Although Jane had no desire to become first lady, Alben Barkley ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952, losing to Adlai Stevenson.

In 1954, he was elected to his old job, senator from Kentucky.

And two years later, while giving a speech, he had a heart attack and died with Jane by his side.

In 1964, Jane Hadley Barkley died just short of her 52nd birthday, bringing to an end one unlikely and pretty amazing life story, which she put in her memoir entitled, "I Married the Veep."

And that wedding, it captured the nation's attention 74 years ago this week in St. Louis history.

(lively music) (typewriter clacking) (eerie music) This week in history, a St. Louis native provided one of the "Twilight Zone"'s classic endings.

On May 26th, 1961, the episode "Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?"

was broadcast.

And that's Barney Phillips behind the diner counter with something hiding behind that cap.

And despite working steadily for many years, this is probably his most memorable role.

(gentle upbeat music) He was born Bernard Ofner in St. Louis in 1913, the son of Harvey and Lonnie Ofner.

The family was living on the 5700 block of Page in 1920.

Later, when he started making a name for himself in Hollywood as Barney Phillips, there were stories about the hometown boy, his interest in being an actor while at Soldan High School, the acting prize he won as a student at Washington University.

His big break came in 1952, when he was cast in the role of a detective in the popular series "Dragnet."

And from then on, he would continue to work steadily from "I Love Lucy," all the way to "The Dukes of Hazzard."

Never a star, people probably didn't know his name, but they sure knew that face, a face on a "Twilight Zone" that would be hard to forget.

- And if you're still alive- - [Jim] When St. Louisan Barney Phillips removed his cap.

- How we differ.

(futuristic space music) - [Jim] This week 63 years ago in St. Louis history.

(Martian laughs) - How did you know about this Martian story?

- Well, because, frankly, as a kid, I watched "Twilight Zone," and I think people who watch "Twilight Zone" know that particular episode.

I can't remember how I realized that the actor was from St. Louis, and I've done a lot of stories about actors and actresses who came from St. Louis.

You know, recently I interviewed Kathleen Nolan, who was on "The Real McCoys."

I loved that.

I loved finding those people who are, I sometimes say, almost walk-of-fame people.

They just haven't quite made it.

- Jim, you've had a long career, really long, and for 25 of those years, (Jim laughs) I've had the privilege of working alongside you.

I have loved that you've called me kid for the last 25 years, and I thank you for all of it.

So I think it's only fitting that you sign us off tonight.

- Well, thank you, Anne-Marie, for being a colleague, friend, and really a wonderful person to collaborate with on so many things.

So I will say goodnight to you, but not goodbye.

And thanks for joining us.

I'm Jim Kirchherr.

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