- [Jim] Missourian Helen Stephens won gold at the 1936 Olympics.

The press called her the Fulton Flash.

But when she got home, the questions just wouldn't go away.

- That's what started the whole, let's call it a decline, in Helen's morale.

- [Jim] It's an industry with a long history in St. Louis, but it never looked like this.

- St. Louis has the most technologically advanced flatbed knitting facility in the world.

- [Jim] And long before he came the head of the Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter Raven was just a young person who really liked plants.

- My first thought was probably to teach high school and keep doing it as a hobby.

I wasn't ready to plunge into it professionally at all.

- Peter Raven talks about his life, his autobiography, and the work that still has to be done.

It's all next on Living St. Louis.

(upbeat pop music) I'm Jim Kirchherr, and it's an Olympics year, an unusual Olympics year.

And our first story is about another unusual famous/infamous Olympics, the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin.

A Missourian did quite well at those games.

And that's one part of Brooke Butler's story.

The other part is what happened when she got home.

(triumphant band music) - [Announcer] Gloom descended on Germany when a member of the German women's 400 meter relay race, pride of the fatherland, dropped the baton.

A jubilant crowd short of another gold medal saw victory turned into tragedy and defeat.

The girls proved they were genuine women by bursting into tears on the field.

- [Brooke] Did you catch that?

The girls proved they were genuine women by bursting into tears on the field, but we'll come back to that later.

Let's see who won the race.

- [Announcer] Helen Stephens was a key member of the winning American team.

- [Brooke] Helen Stephens, ever heard of her?

She was once the fastest woman runner in the world, and she was from Fulton.

(upbeat music) She won two Olympic gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, had a sketchy encounter with Adolf Hitler, and this was all at the age of 18, but even at 68, she was only four seconds slower than her 1936 record when she competed in the Senior Olympics.

In fact, she never lost a race.

She was the first woman to create, own, and manage a semi-professional basketball team, paving the way for countless women athletes.

So why isn't she more recognized?

Was this the Olympic diary?

- This is the Olympic Diary, 1936.

- [Brooke] That's Sharon Kinney Hanson.

And we're at the State Historical Society in Columbia, Missouri, looking through the Helen Stephens collection.

- [Sharon] Look at these.

They're huge.

- Wow.

Sharon is Helen's only authorized biographer who studied many of these items, putting together the detailed life story for her book, "The Fulton Flash."

Logging over 70 interviews with Helen herself, they grew to become close friends up until Helen's death in 1994.

- Helen knew what she wanted to be when she was young.

She wanted to be an athlete.

She wanted to get a job in that area.

That was atypical for a girl.

The best she could do is join a basketball team that the church offered, because her school did not have any athletic programs for girls.

- [Brooke] It was while Helen was playing on the basketball team, that the Fulton High School's track and field coach, Coach Moore, observed Helen's incredible speed and intense competitive nature.

Coach Moore decided to test her athletic capabilities by gathering a group of girls to run the 50-yard dash.

To his surprise, Helen ran the dash in just 5.8 seconds, which was the world record at the time.

Shocked at this discovery, he had her run it again.

5.8 seconds.

His stopwatch wasn't broken.

He had just discovered an athletic prodigy.

From there, as you can imagine, Coach Moore did everything in his power to shape Helen into the star competitive runner he knew she naturally could be.

After some pushback from the superintendent, who wasn't keen on sending a young girl to such a publicized race, Helen was entered to compete at the National Amateur Athletic Union at the St. Louis Arena.

Although a complete beginner, 17-year-old Helen was confident even among the seasoned Olympians, who would also be at the race, including Stella Walsh, who was the first woman to run the 100-yard dash in under 11 seconds.

A native to Poland, Stella was nicknamed the Polish Flyer, and was a crowd favorite.

That is, until Helen entered the game.

With first place wins in the shot put and standing broad jump, the bets were on as Helen lined up against Stella in the 50-yard dash.

Helen took the lead, and victory was hers in just 6.6 seconds.

- At the end of the finish line, the reporter rushed up to her and said, "You know what?

You've just done it."

And Helen, using her Midwestern drawl on purpose.

"I think I won," she said.

She knew who Stella Walsh was, but she had said, "Who?"

"You just beat Stella Walsh."

"Who?"

And she knew who Stella was, because she had a picture of her in her room, and she was throwing darts at it.

She intended to beat her, and she did.

- [Brooke] It's the definition of an underdog story.

Helen had become famous overnight with newspaper headlines, attention from elite athletic clubs.

She was even thrown a ticker tape parade on what Fulton High School declared Helen Stephens Day.

And, of course, being hailed her famous nickname, the Fulton Flash.

Having proved herself a natural champion, she was an obvious choice to join the US Olympic women's track and field team.

But as Helen kept up her rigorous training, there was growing controversy over where the Olympic Games were being hosted.

- [Helen] This is Helen Stephens speaking.

- [Brooke] This audio recording of Helen was collected by the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum in 1984, as part of their oral history project.

Helen wasn't Jewish, but her experience during the Berlin Olympics was worth collecting.

- [Helen] President Roosevelt did not want us to go to Berlin.

He was opposed to it, because of the policies of Adolf Hitler.

- [Interviewer] "Mein Kampf" was well known at that time, I assume.

- [Helen] Well, let's say I think it was published, but people tended to shrug it off and say, "It's none of our affair.

It's not our business.

That's their problem."

- [Brooke] But, of course, Helen and the US Olympic team still attended.

She claimed the athletes earned a right to compete, regardless of any political connotations.

And while we're on the subject, before we get into Helen's gold medal wins, let's talk about her encounter with Hitler.

During the Olympics, Hitler became known to invite certain winners after their events into his private booth, where he watched the competitions.

Helen was most likely the only member of the US team to receive the invitation.

As press caught wind of these intimate meetings, a photographer snuck in and snapped a picture just after Helen greeted Hitler with a good old fashioned Missouri handshake.

And when I say intimate meetings, I mean, Helen recalls Hitler making a pass at her, and even inappropriately touching her.

- He had his troopers that were around him, protecting him, throw him out and grabbed his camera.

But somehow, the film made it.

- [Brooke] And that caused some controversy.

- [Sharon] Yes, it did.

- [Brooke] Because they see this picture.

I think she was asking for his autograph in the picture.

- Yes, yes.

- [Brooke] And you know that, to people, doesn't send the right message.

- No, but the fact is she was getting autographs of everybody that she could, as was the custom then.

Autographs were big.

And can you imagine what that little booklet might be worth today?

Oh.

- [Brooke] It's true.

Helen requested autographs from almost everyone she met: J. Edgar Hoover, Jesse Owens, and even her arch rival, Stella Walsh.

Ever since Helen outran Stella in St. Louis, there was growing tension and anticipation for the two sprinters to face off again.

After a couple of no-shows from Stella for a rematch prior to the Olympics, it was finally time to prove whether the feat was a fluke.

And, of course, Helen won.

Not only did she outrun Stella that day, she stripped her of her world record title by running the 100-meter dash in 11.4 seconds.

- Can you imagine an 18-year-old?

She must've felt glorious.

She was nervous, she said, on top of it, and standing on the podium when she was being crowned, and given the medal, and said her knees were knocking, and she was very proud, and she stomped Stella again, which was her goal.

- [Brooke] Helen was on top of the world.

She was welcomed back to the United States with parades and parties and mobs of fans.

Coming back to Fulton, however, swiftly brought the celebrations to an end.

- When she came home, one of her girlfriends sent her a page from the Look Magazine that had a foldout, and in it was Helen running in her stride.

And underneath Helen's picture was, is this a man or a woman?

That's what started the whole, let's call it a decline, in Helen's morale.

(suspenseful music) - It wasn't just Helen who was facing controversy over her gender.

Remember this clip?

The girls proved that they were genuine women by bursting into tears on the field.

During the Olympics, it was customary for the women athletes to get physical exams before competing, to ensure they were, in fact, the gender they claimed.

Most women athletes could brush it off, but here's the problem for Helen.

She was a lesbian.

She had been having romantic relationships with women for years by this point.

Controversial for that time, but Helen never suspected it would affect her athletic career.

But, of course, it did.

At the time of the Olympics, Helen was attending William Woods University on an athletic scholarship.

But when word got out about the article in Look Magazine, and rumors of late-night female visitors, she was called into the president's office where he called her an embarrassment to the university, revoked her athletic scholarship, and forced her to move off campus.

But Helen was resilient, and the university clearly came to realize her important contributions to the field of athletics by naming their sports complex after Helen.

(suspenseful music) - I talked to Helen about how I did not want to out Helen.

I wrote the book when gay people were in the closet, and Helen was in the closet all her life.

And I did not want to be the one to out her.

I wanted to tell her story, her contributions to women in the field of athletics, which is what I did.

But after I got into the book quite deeply, I said we cannot leave out Mabel.

- [Brooke] Mabel was Helen's life partner of 40 years.

And although their relationship was known to the people closest to them, they didn't want it to be widely publicized, but Helen included details of her romantic life in her diaries.

And as Sharon said, she couldn't tell Helen's story without including those details, because, after all, it was part of her identity.

After some time playing professional basketball and softball, Helen met Mabel in the early days of what would turn out to be her long career as reference librarian at the Aerospace Center in St. Louis.

But she always maintained her athletic involvement, and was ultimately inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.

- [Brooke] What do you hope people learn from Helen?

- Well, I want them to recognize that she was definitely the pioneer in women's athletics.

There were others, but Helen stayed in the game all through her life.

She was in the Show-Me State Games, the Senior Games.

She was the self-appointed secretary for the Midwest Olympic Committee, raising money for other women to go to the Olympics.

She gave clinics, free without cost, in St. Louis for young aspiring Olympian women.

She was advocating politically, writing letters to legislators, trying to help the women get what they deserved, respect and entrance into the Games.

It's a different generation.

I guess we have to expect that not everybody enjoys history, right?

But women athletes will know her name.

(upbeat music) - If I say Washington Avenue, you might think, yeah, Wash Ave, restaurants, shops, loft living.

An older generation, though, they might still think Garment District.

So many of those places that people eat in and live in today, those were places that were once warehouses and busy factories, with thousands of workers turning out all kinds of clothing.

This film is from one of our old children's shows, when we got a tour showing how coats were made at the Elder Company Factory.

Those are now residential lofts.

That's a big part of St. Louis' history, but Gabrielle Hays' story about the apparel industry, it's not about the then, it's about the now.

- [Gabrielle] On the edge of Grand Center lies a place so high tech, (machinery grinding) it would make your head spin.

It's called Evolution STL.

Evolution St. Louis is the most technologically advanced flatbed knitting facility in the world.

- Jon Lewis started Evolution with his friend, John Elmuccio.

- Do people ever get your guys confused?

Because you have the same first name, does that get confusing?

- Well, we're referred to locally as the Johns.

- [Gabrielle] The Johns?

And together, they created a high-tech 3D knitting company, but in all actuality, what it does is much, much bigger.

- It is like 3D printing, except 3D knitting.

We design everything on the computer, send it out to these great knitting machines that were developed and made by Stoll, which is a German supplier.

And they knit sweaters and shoe uppers and medical equipment.

It's really anything we program into the machine.

If we can program it, we can make it.

- [Gabrielle] He's talking about these machines.

They are made in Germany and can print all sorts of things.

- So we planted every stitch, every shape, every detail in digitally, and basically, then it sends to the knitting machines, and they knit it.

- Now, there are about 32 high-tech knitting machines right here at the location on Washington Avenue.

However, they already have their sights set on the future with the new location at the riverfront, but not only will they have 240 new machines, but also 140 new jobs.

The founders say job creation is just as important as what they're creating right here.

- John and I really wanted to build something that created real jobs, right?

And we talked a bit about that before.

- [Gabrielle] The facility officially opened in February of 2020.

And for this duo, job creation was always an important piece of the work.

- It's important to recognize these are all net new jobs.

They didn't exist before.

We're not pulling from someplace other industry, or we're not building a better mousetrap.

This is a brand new venture.

There's no one else in the country that's doing what we're doing.

So they're all net new jobs.

- [Gabrielle] But it's not just about creating jobs.

It's also about creating jobs for a little bit of everyone.

- People are working in the warehouse and doing packing, and then people are running the machines, the machines, then actually, there's people programming the machines and doing the design.

So there's all different, from creative skill sets to manufacturing, to operations.

There's all different types of jobs here, which is important, right?

And you can hire from different diverse parts of the community to do that.

And you don't need a four-year degree to do most of the jobs here either, but yet, you can still make a sustainable wage.

You can make enough to buy a house and raise a family, and we wanted a workforce too, that reflected the community around us.

(gentle piano music) - [Gabrielle] So why bring this to St. Louis?

Well, Jon and John say the reason they ended up here has a lot to do with how they started.

- I actually started my retail career here.

- [Gabrielle] Yeah.

- Working for a famous bar back in the day.

- St. Louis people are gonna be like, "Oh my God."

- Oh my God, there he is!

I remember them as well, right.

- [Gabrielle] They'd come back years later and never leave.

- Yeah, we'd come to St. Louis over the years, because St. Louis was always kind of like a regional hub for fashion, right?

- Sure.

- Especially in apparel.

Couple the fact that now, if you think about it, there's a lot of heritage here as well, too.

So the city really understands it.

It was really the St. Louis fashion fund, and Susan Sherman from there, that convinced us to even look at St. Louis again.

And when we looked at it and came here, we realized it was the perfect suit.

- [Gabrielle] And to do it with green manufacturing in mind.

- That's important about what we do.

Obviously there's a big sustainability factor here in what we do, 'cause it's not just about manufacturing to us.

It's about manufacturing with a really low carbon footprint.

- Talk to me about how you all sort of exude that principle of sustainability.

- That's a big part of why we chose the machinery that we did.

Our machines operate with less than 3% waste.

This is a building that we rescued.

We took it down to the walls.

Every light, every pipe, every boiler, all the HVAC systems are all energy efficient.

- [Gabrielle] So now the work continues, with new ideas constantly coming their way, and though the essence of what they do has to do with codes and tech, it all starts where the history of fashion begins.

- So there's something organic still about it.

It's still a fashion, it's still a design.

You're still kind of creating something.

And a lot of the product ideas come from our clients to us in paper form.

They could be sketches.

They could be technical packages, specifications, whatever the case may be.

And we take all that information and put it into digital form.

- [Gabrielle] Creating something on the edge of Grand Center in the city of St. Louis in the heart of the country.

- We wanted to not just build a kind of a cool little small batch manufacturing thing in the US, and talk about how cool we are, and have coffee, and think, isn't that great?

Made in USA.

Yes, we wanted all that, but we also want something meaningful.

We want scalable manufacturing.

We would want to say that we can be the poster child, if you will, for either education world and environment or the city or investors, or whatever, how it can work, right?

Because how you could make manufacturing work, and how you can put it right in the heart of the city.

And we want to offer that as a beacon, right, but also as an example.

I mean, Missouri is the Show Me State.

You gotta show me, we're showing it, right?

So build it, they will come.

And that's exactly what we've done.

And that's the message to the community.

Come see what we're doing, understand what we're doing to other businesses and other people out there.

You can make it work in St. Louis, and we'll be there to help.

- Finally, I had the chance this summer to sit down with somebody who just wrote his autobiography.

Of course, I knew Peter Raven from his years here at the Missouri Botanical Garden and as a leading environmentalist, but I didn't know how he came to be what he came to be.

- Well, let me start at the beginning.

I was born on a warm night in Shanghai.

(Jim laughs) No.

- [Jim] Well, we had time together, but not time for the whole story.

But in fact, that is where the story starts.

His family, for years, had business in China, and at the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937, they had to move to San Francisco.

Peter was a year old.

It's all in his autobiography, driven by nature, a personal journey from Shanghai to botany and global sustainability.

But the story of Peter Raven is still unfolding at the age of 85.

- It seems to me that although you've been retired officially for a while, you're still working on stuff.

Do you have projects yet that you've gotta finish up?

- Well, I've had a long, happy life, and I've taken up a lot of projects and areas and things in it.

And actually I'm still working on some projects in California that I might've started when I was 12 years old.

- [Jim] As a boy, he was something of a prodigy when it came to botany, and with the help of teachers and mentors, he was doing fieldwork.

Here he is, just 14 years old.

- I really enjoyed it.

But my first thought was probably to teach high school, and keep doing it as a hobby.

I wasn't ready to plunge into it professionally at all.

- [Jim] But by college and graduate school, he had taken the plunge.

- Well, there are a couple of stages.

I was first really focused on the plants of California.

I began then working on the evening primrose family based on an exciting discovery of one in the Presidio in San Francisco, and that, in turn, led me to New Zealand to look at other members of the same family, and going to New Zealand really opened a worldwide view for me.

Then when I came back, and particularly when I moved to St. Louis 50 years ago this year, '71, I began to think about plants on a worldwide scale.

- [Jim] Peter Raven's impact on the garden is well-known, guiding its development with a new master plan.

The Japanese garden was added.

He built its budget, its staff, and its profile, and not just as a local attraction.

One of the most important parts of the Missouri Botanical Garden is something few visitors see, but is well-known by botanists and researchers.

Their herbarium is a huge library of dried plants from around the world.

- In the Missouri Botanical Garden, we had about two million when I got here, and we have about seven million now.

- [Jim] And they keep coming in.

- And they keep coming in.

It's one of the best in the entire world.

So it's not only very important as an index to cataloging and sorting out the wonderful diversity that supports the productive capacity of their ecosystems, but it's increasingly, and unfortunately, a repository for pieces of extinct organisms that we assume people will be able, will want to know about for centuries into the future.

So saving them is very important.

- [Jim] But even if he had never come to St. Louis, Peter Raven would still have made his mark.

In the world of botany, there's his work on the evening primrose.

Students know his name from his textbook, which is still in use.

And when he was at Stanford, he and Paul Ehrlich did groundbreaking work describing the process of co-evolution, where two different species, say, a plant and an insect, will evolve in tandem in response to each other.

But it was at the Missouri Botanical Garden that the scientist became a public, and even a world figure, and advocate for the environment, for the earth.

A man described as a global evangelist for sustainability.

- We've all got a lot to do.

And I think this is the message that I've gotten for reading the book, and some of the other things you've done.

- Yes.

- There's, I don't mean you and I individually running out of time, but I get the sense that the Earth might be running out of time.

- Well, the Earth is tending to run out of time.

When I was born, we had fewer than one out of three people for everyone we have now.

And there are very few scientists in the world have thought about it who thinks the world can accumulate the number of people that are in it now.

The problem is we're using up the productive abilities of the Earth in food, and air, and pollution, all those things, faster than they can be reinforced or renewed.

With that, we've gotta make some pretty drastic steps to be able to get along into a sound future.

The thing people have to remember about science is, it's not a bunch of theories.

Somebody once said, do you believe in global warming to a scientist.

He said no, I reserve belief for really important things like religion.

Global warming isn't a belief.

It's an assessment of hypotheses that have been made about an area of science.

That's why it's so extraordinarily important to educate our children, grandchildren, and all about science and what it really is, and how it works.

- You mentioned in your book, so many people that helped you, mentored you, inspired you, collaborated with you.

I imagine there must be hundreds, if not thousands of people, who would say the same thing about you.

- I find my greatest joy in life, in fact, the only real purpose of living is to love and help other people, and that anything that you learn, or gain, or achieve in your life comes through other people.

That's how, regardless of your religious beliefs, you really form a kind of immortality by helping other people to carry on the important messages and developments that you yourself might be able to make.

And it's given me my joy and my purpose all my life.

And yet, there are very many people, and it's very gratifying to me to know that.

(bright music) - And that's Living St. Louis.

Thanks for joining us.

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

(upbeat pop music) - [Announcer] Living St. Louis is made possible by the support of the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation, Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan Charitable Trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.