- [Jim Kirchherr] We're looking back at nearly 20 years of archives this summer, and we're finding some pretty interesting people.

- [Jack Dorsey] The word, "tweet" was pretty annoying early on.

- [Jim] This young St. Louis native named Jack Dorsey, talking about this thing called Twitter and what it might lead to.

Another, and very different kind of entrepreneur, Anne Marie Berger's visit with the quirky guy who made some money, bought some land, and knew just what he wanted to do with it when he was gone.

- I had to do something about it or else my melon-head cousins from out of nowhere would come out of the woodwork and sell the joint in over a weekend or something.

- [Pastor] This is a celebration of life.

- [Jim] And that year, we noted the passing of a St. Louis legend who never made much money but kept on playing the blues right up to the end.

It's all next, on the Living St. Louis Archives.

♪ All my money gone (upbeat music) - I'm Jim Kirchherr.

In the 19 seasons of Living St. Louis, we've done a lot of stories about interesting and important people, and they'll be a big part of this summer's "Best of Living St. Louis," like Ruthie Ezell's story 13 years ago of a young St. Louis native who was making news and still is.

Jack Dorsey was a rising internet entrepreneur, and Twitter was just really beginning to catch on.

♪ When my sugar walks down the street ♪ ♪ All the little birdies go tweet, tweet, tweet ♪ - [Ruth Ezell] In these times of emerging technologies, a tweet is an instant message of 140 characters or less sent to friends and followers through twitter.com.

- Pre-active with my tweets.

- St. Louis University Junior, Mitchell Johnson, loves tweets so much, he owns two cell phones to send and get them.

- It's a good way for a new level of networking.

So, I have people from my job, or you can see like celebrities or even different companies and keep up to date.

- I tweet quite a lot.

I would say probably every four or five hours.

It depends on what's going on.

- The word "tweet" was pretty annoying early on to the company.

- [Ruth] Meet the co-founder and chairman of Twitter, St. Louis native, Jack Dorsey.

His social network and micro blogging service has revolutionized the way we communicate.

- Our biggest thing right now is just spreading out around the world and integrating technologies that are coming up, particularly like SMS and mobile, where, you know, in places like Kenya and Iraq, there is no internet.

There's only SMS.

So, speaking to that experience, allowing people to participate in the network and consume the network, is a big move for the company.

- [Ruth] Dorsey was honored by Webster University where he received its 2009 Person of the Year Award in September.

Members of the audience posted tweets during the award event, which was billed as a "Tweet Up."

Webster's Dean of the School of Business and Technology, Benjamin Akonde spoke in laudatory terms of Twitter's impact on society.

- Twitter is becoming the definitive equation of our time, not just for its simplicity, but also for its exponential potential of increase.

- Jack Dorsey traces Twitter's roots to downtown St. Louis.

As a teenager in the early 1990s, Dorsey worked for a local dispatch company, developing software.

He was always fascinated by the way information flows in companies that provide couriers, limousine and taxi cab transportation, and emergency services.

In 1999, Dorsey developed software that enabled him to send email blast to his friends via a first generation Blackberry.

- And my friends did not want them, and they also were not able to contribute.

So it just wasn't any fun.

So I stopped that immediately, and I decided to get a real job.

- The job that served as Twitter's launchpad was at a podcasting company based in San Francisco.

It was 2006.

Dorsey, with help from one programmer, created in two weeks time, a Twitter prototype for use among company employees.

The following year, Twitter was spun off into its own company.

- We became very good listeners to how people were using the system.

And more importantly, we became good editors of that listening.

So we have a bunch of feature requests.

We have a bunch of different usage cases for this technology.

When Barack Obama gave a speech to the house, and we had Senators, Congressmen, Congresswomen, including Senator Claire McCaskill, updating about what he was saying in front of them.

I have never felt closer to my government than that moment.

- [Ruth] In late 2009, about 18 million people were Twitter users.

They include students at Bishop Dubourg High School in South St. Louis, where Jack Dorsey went to high school.

- That's one of the first fun facts you hear in recent times is that the creator of Twitter is from Dubourg, and it's kind of a prideful thing for the school.

- I think it was a good idea.

I wish I would have invented it.

(giggles) But it was good.

I love Twitter.

- I don't know how people lived before they had all this stuff.

Like being without my cellphone, I'm lost.

Being without my computer, I'm lost.

- Certainly amongst the faculty, I mean, both the idea that... ...a person accomplished that much, who graduated and is an alumni from here, that's significant, and we take pride in it.

- [Ruth] The challenge with new technologies, like Jack Dorsey's Twitter is figuring out how to generate revenue from them.

In the meantime, for Mitchell Johnson and millions of other users, the tweet goes on.

What are you tweeting about right now?

- I just tweeted that I am doing an interview right now.

(chuckles) ♪ The little birdies (trumpet playing) - Now a story from 2009 that's about another local entrepreneur, but somebody who comes from a very different time and place, Certainly not Silicon Valley.

No, for this story, Anne Marie Berger drove deep into the woods to a place that now goes by the name Don Robinson State Park.

(gentle, cheerful music) - [Don Robinson] 43 years, I was off a year.

- [Anne-Marie] Meet Don Robinson.

He's a funny guy.

- We won't let you fall, 'cause we don't want blood everywhere.

(Don laughs loudly) - [Anne-Marie] But Don's reached that point in his life where he needs to decide what to do with his stuff.

- [Don] God knows what's happened in this room over the years.

- We'll just keep that to yourself, Don.

- Right, that's why I just made that vague statement.

(Anne Marie laughs) - No shower stories.

And by stuff, I mean his earthly possessions, after he, well, you know, dies.

- I had to do something about it or else my melon-head cousins from outta nowhere would come out of the woodwork and sell the joint in over a weekend or something.

- [Anne-Marie] How old are you Don?

- In 18 years, I'll be 100.

(Don chuckles) - 82.

- Yay for the lady.

- I didn't even need to use a calculator.

(banjo music) Don lives a simple life in a simple home.

His house was built in 1928, and he only has heat in his upstairs bedroom which he calls the comfort zone.

I bet it's cold in here in the winter.

- Oh it is.

How'd you guess?

- Cause it's cold in here, and it's August.

- Yeah.

Right.

- [Anne-Marie] So he doesn't fit the typical profile of a guy who has affairs to get in order.

I have to say, it's a little spooky.

- It's a cut above camping, but I like it.

- [Anne-Marie] But it's not necessarily his house that Don Robinson's concerned with.

It's the property it sits on.

- Inside of four years, I had 843 acres, which is exactly what's in central park to the acre.

- [Anne-Marie] Don's 843 acres is located 38 miles southwest of St. Louis in Cedar Hill.

His property is in the upper watershed of LaBarque Creek.

The watershed covers 13 square miles in Northwestern Jefferson county and includes both private and public land.

It's considered, by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, one of the most unique areas in the state.

- LaBarque Creek is an exceptional, high quality stream.

It's a cascading bedrock stream with small pools and waterfalls throughout its length.

It has a tremendous diversity of fish life in it.

Nearly 40 species of fish are known in LaBarque Creek.

- [Anne-Marie] The entire watershed is about 8,000 acres, and that includes Don's 843.

Should I have brought a flare?

There are two ways to get around on Don's property.

By car, on what he calls roads... - [Don] Now, here, you want to go to the right.

You don't want to go through all that mud.

- [Anne Marie] Uh huh.

- [Don] (sighs) Oh God, you're doing it, anyway.

- [Anne Marie] There was a big rock!

(Don grunts) You're kind of a backseat driver, Don Robinson.

- [Don] Well, I'm telling you what, the road... (Don makes silly noises) (Anne Marie laughs) - [Anne Marie] And there's the more peaceful way on foot.

- We really go that way.

- Do we have to come back up this hill?

- [Don] Yeah.

Going down's not the problem.

- [Anne Marie] Don, his friend, Nels Holmberg, an ecologist and regular explorer on property, and I went on a hike in search of what Don calls the Green Gulch.

What is Green Gulch?

- Well, it's a big box canyon like place.

Moss-covered walls.

It's a real jewel.

(upbeat music) - [Anne-Marie] Don grew up in University City, later lived in Kirkwood, and he bought his first patch of land here back in 1964.

- This... 320 acres was for sale.

We came out here, and it was so cold, the beer was freezing on top of the can.

So I thought, "Well, this is really prehistoric, you know.

I just gotta get it."

Well, I bought it for $21,250, and I paid that off in a year.

Under two years.

Well, and other stuff became available, and I just didn't want to... (clears throat) ...you know, have neighbors, for God's sake.

(upbeat music) - [Anne-Marie] In 1978, Don moved from Kirkwood to his Cedar Hill getaway permanently, and he's made his living since 1952 selling off a Super-Duper Stain Remover.

- [Don] No, it's not good for salads, sandwiches, chest rub, athlete's foot, V.D.

or mange, but it does do all this stuff.

Takes spots out of clothes and carpets.

- No ringworm or psoriasis removal?

- Mm mm.

Mm mm.

No.

(Anne Marie laughs) We're not claiming that.

Well, that's the product... - [Anne Marie] In fact, Don produces it himself underneath his now defunct swimming pool using the same dough mixer since the early 50s.

Still works like new?

- Well, it refuses to die.

It just is amazing how they built stuff then.

- [Anne-Marie] What makes Don's land so unique isn't its size.

It's what's on it, and how well it's been preserved.

- Mostly because of the deep sandstone hollows in it that harbor a whole bunch of very interesting, some rare, plant life: the mosses, the bryophytes, the vascular plants.

106 mosses, we've found so far.

And there are more that we... - I thought you said 135.

- 135 bryophytes.

- Oh.

So, that includes... - [Anne-Marie] Get it right.

- [Nels] the mosses, the liverworts, and the hornworts.

You have one hornwort.

- Oh.

Is that good or bad?

- Oh, it's good.

- Oh.

- Nobody ever finds hornworts.

- Oh.

- And yet, they're here.

- [Anne-Marie] Did you know you had all this?

- Well, it's pretty big.

I mean... ...when you spread all this stuff out, you're talking about a lot of ground.

(upbeat guitar music) - [Anne-Marie] So, what's an 82 year old man who's never married, has no children but has melon-head cousins, to do with 843 acres of prime natural resource?

- It's the most depressing thing I've ever had to do is to figure out what to do with this.

But after all, it is the last chapter of the book, isn't it?

You know?

And they say, "Well, what do you care?"

Well, what the hell do you mean, "What do I care?"

If you enjoy being dead, you know?

That's what's gotta happen first 'cause I'm not leaving.

(laughs) - [Anne-Marie] After much thought and consideration, Don has decided to give his home to those who will continue to take care of it.

Don Robinson is leaving every inch of his land to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

- It's all given to the DNR.

- [Anne-Marie] Currently, there are 50 Missouri State Parks in the system.

Don Robinson State Park will make 51.

- [Bill Bryan] How generous and how thoughtful it was of Don to leave this legacy for the people of Missouri.

It was generous because the land is very valuable.

It was thoughtful because Don could have done anything he wanted with this special place, and he chose to share it with all of us.

- [Anne-Marie] In addition to the 843 acres Don is leaving the people of Missouri, he's providing the resources to ensure the property will be well preserved.

- Don has provided a trust fund to ensure that we have the funds to properly manage and care for this special place in perpetuity.

And funding is a challenge for all government operations, but particularly for parks, so having something set aside like this to ensure that future generations get to enjoy the special places is really tremendous.

(crickets chirping) - [Don] I mean, as long as it's there, you know.

- You can't really cover St. Louis without doing stories about music and musicians and musical heritage.

This story is from 2006.

It was the year that a great blues musician died.

Once again, we bring you the life, the music and the words of Henry Townsend.

- I, first of all, would like to share with you that this is not a funeral.

- [Congregation] All right.

- This is a celebration of life.

- [Congregation] Amen.

♪ People, all my money gone ♪ And I don't have another dime in sight ♪ - [Jim Kirchherr] Henry Townsend was already a blues legend.

When this documentary by Kathy Corley and Legacy Productions aired on Channel Nine in 1986.

♪ You know, I've got to do something right now ♪ ♪ Really, when you know it's not right ♪ - [Henry Townsend] People classify the blues as a sad occasion, you know what I mean?

Something where the guy's really down.

But not necessarily.

I think singing the blues is something that just amuse... You can amuse your mind, or you can put your mind in a real bad spot singing it too, thinking some bad things that happened in life to you, you know?

♪ All my money gone What has the blues done for me?

The blues have put bread on my table.

That's one of the major things.

And it has put money in my pocket.

Not a whole lot.

But being in the music world and playing the blues, it's enabled me to survive.

♪ When he was too young ♪ I didn't quite understand ♪ He looked like the old man ♪ Says he's coming to be a little man ♪ ♪ Now I'm satisfied... - [Jim Kirchherr] We interviewed Henry Townsend again in 1998, just before his 90th birthday, to talk, not so much about his music, but his life and his city.

He came to St. Louis, it was 1918 or 1919.

He had run away from home to avoid a spanking and hopped a train in Cairo, Illinois, hopped off in East St. Louis, and walked across the bridge into the big city.

He was nine years old, and he came all alone.

He would later be given the nickname, Mule.

- You just have guts and goals, that's all.

(chuckles) I don't know, I just followed my instinct.

And number one, I went to the union station, and right away tried to seek me a job.

- [Jim] And there he was stopped by police officers who said they were going to take him in for trying to steal the clock in the station tower.

Maybe they were just trying to scare the boy or amuse themselves.

They let him go.

But he knew how things worked.

And Henry Townsend said the changing of the old ways was one of the most important things that happened in his lifetime.

- But everything is improved.

There was one time, well, that the black man was not equal to a child.

When other nation, not only the white man, but anybody with a different skin from him, he had to respect.

And that's a total 90 degree thing.

- [Jim] And yet Henry Townsend, like other Blacks, survived in the system and the city that existed.

- But it used to be, if you can't live in St. Louis, you can't live nowhere.

Because everything was... real... ...easy to get to, easy to have, and you didn't take too much money to do whatever you wanted to do.

And most people considered St. Louis a haven for them.

They could get there, and if they get there, they'd be all right.

Anything that I could have done without stealing or robbing somebody to stay away from work, I done that.

This was my aim in the very beginning is to find a way to stay away from manual labor.

And I was pretty successful at it.

I done a little manual labor, but not enough to talk about it.

- [Jim] The center of his and much of African American life at the time was in the Mill Creek neighborhood west of Union Station, later torn down as part of urban renewal.

Townsend said he hustled Checkers, he ran a shoe shine shop, which was just a front for a backroom whiskey operation, and he got his first guitar and started to learn to play the blues.

And in St. Louis, you could learn an awful lot.

(guitar strumming) ♪ Cairo - Just about every musician.

If he didn't come to way of St. Louis and Stop, he would come to way of Kansas City.

And St. Louis, I think was the most popular.

And every renowned musicianer that was born in the south, at one time, lived here for a short period, if not a long time.

- [Jim] But while St. Louis had a lot of music and musicians, it did not have much of a recording industry.

Townsend went to Chicago to make his first record in 1929.

He came back to St. Louis, but most of the others did not.

- See if he got to be fairly good, right away, he went to Kansas city or went to Chicago.

And they didn't stay the bill on the foundation that they'd built up here.

They moved out.

You see, it was just a few of us that stayed here in St. Louis and went all away with whatever happened.

And that's one of the reasons I could think, you know: the guy gets good, he leave.

By the same token, if he stayed here, he would draw other good musicians to him, here.

But see, it didn't work that way.

They got good and boom.

Right where the recording places was: New York, Chicago, or what have you.

(blues music) - [Jim] Henry Townsend remained in St. Louis and continued to record and perform, but he was hardly a star.

That would be for the jazz and the swing musicians, and later rock and roll and R and B. Blues men almost always needed other jobs.

And then in the 1960s, there was a growing interest in the roots of American popular music.

And old blues men like Henry Townsend would find themselves appreciated by a new, often young and white audience at folk festivals, college campuses, and European concert halls.

- [Leroy Pierson] I became aware of Henry in the early sixties.

There were reissue programs at that time from Origin Jazz Library and a few other companies putting out old blues tunes.

And his were among the first that were reissued.

So after listening to the record, I picked up the phone book to see which ones were still in St. Louis, and Henry was one of them that I called, and he invited me over, and we've been fast friends since then.

(blues piano music) He was fairly inactive in the early sixties, especially musically.

He was doing a little work, collecting bad debts for Sears Roebuck when I first met him.

But he still had a guitar, and he had a piano in his basement that was sort of beat up.

And he ran through the old themes, and it sounded very much like, with a little bit of work, he could be back at the top of his form.

(blues music) ♪ All right ♪ I love the way you smile - He, more than any other person, represented the history of Saint Louis blues.

He carried with him, the sounds of a time that exists no more.

He always made those sounds current.

He was a continuous thread in the long fabric of the history of this blues community.

His life, and as a person, touched every generation that was here.

(guitars strumming) - [Jim] Because of the blues revival, Henry Townsend traveled the country and the world.

And he played until the very end.

He was in Wisconsin to perform and receive an award when he passed away at the age of 96, and for the final time, returned home to St. Louis.

♪ Well, I'm going down Mill Street ♪ ♪ I didn't last where I belong He had said he wondered what he might have accomplished if this had been a different world for a black man when he came into it.

But he also fully appreciated the opportunities he did have, as, as he would say, "a musicianer."

- I've never been... Like, I've seen people be treated.

I've never been treated that way.

And that gives me, I guess the grounds to say that I don't have nothing to be sore about.

If age wise, I'm not talking about being afflicted, but just live so long, you be tired of getting older.

Then, you go ahead and die.

I'm gonna try that.

Live till I get tired of getting older, and that's quite a few years away.

(chuckles) ♪ I want everybody ♪ That's listening to me sing this song ♪ ♪ I want everybody ♪ That's listening to me singing this song ♪ ♪ I want you to remember the old man ♪ ♪ After I'm dead and gone (guitar strums blues ending) ♪ Oh, yeah - And that's Living St. Louis.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we'll see you next time with more stories from our archives.

- [Narrator] 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)