(light bouncy music) - [Jim] It may not be for everybody, but beekeeping has a very devoted following.

And good thing.

- This year, we'll sell almost 900 starter colonies.

- [Jim] An exhibit at the library downtown takes us back to the days of sock hops and malt shops, when PROM Magazine covered local high schools in post-war St. Louis and carried a lot of advertising.

- Miller, who started publishing it, realized that teens were a big market.

Right after the war, they were an exploding market.

- [Jim] And this week in history, future Hall of Famer, Rogers Hornsby, was in the news in juicy stories on the front page.

It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(playful upbeat music) (playful upbeat music) (playful upbeat music) (playful upbeat music) - Good evening, I'm Anne-Marie Berger, and we have a great show for you tonight.

First up is a story about one of those things that I'll admit I'm probably not gonna get involved with but I sure am glad other people are.

Brooke Butler brings us a story about bees and the people who keep them.

(light bouncy music) - [Brooke] Save the bees.

It's a phrase we've been hearing for years now.

But what exactly does that mean?

Why are the bees in danger and how do we save them?

These are the questions we brought to Jane Sueme, who just this year has helped populate the St. Louis area with 45 million new bees.

So, we figured she might know a thing or two about all the buzz with the bees.

- And Missouri actually has a really densely populated diversity of native bees as well as honeybees, which we have learned to appreciate.

- [Brooke] Jane and her partner, Scott Klein, work around the St. Louis area and even greater Midwest to educate people on the importance of bees.

If you've seen the hives at the Botanical Gardens or Grant's Farm or their most recent installment at Warm Springs Clydesdale Ranch, that's the result of Jane and Scott working hard for their honey.

All of this work is headquartered at their store in Fenton called Isabee's.

It's evolved over the years to be a place where beekeepers can come to buy or rent equipment, use the space to extract honey, take classes on the latest beekeeping practices, and utilize the retail space to sell their honey and honey products.

Plus, the bees themselves are even available for purchase.

- This year, we'll sell almost 900 starter colonies, package bees in what we call nucleus colonies.

That's a starter colony.

There are about 10,000 bees in a starter colony.

They can grow to 50, 60, 100,000 in the peak, like in July.

Well, we started, at the time we were gardening, and my partner Scott and I looked at each other and said, "What is it that we need to add to enhance the garden?"

And we realized that we had had a season where we didn't see any pollinators.

So, we made a phone call and learned that there was a beekeeping organization and we were encouraged to go to a meeting.

Then we're gonna have some announcements, and then I'm going to present on the Saint Louis Beekeepers' queen rearing project.

Okay, so we're gonna start with "This Month in Beekeeping."

- [Brooke] That organization was the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association, which Jane became very involved with.

And later Jane and Scott co-founded the Saint Louis Beekeepers.

The two organizations currently combine their monthly meetings.

And if you're like me, you're probably wondering, why are there so many beekeeping clubs?

Well, as Jane tells us, beekeeping is a hyper-local activity, and the meetings provide conversations around best practices, which can vary depending on what area you live in.

- We realized it took two years of having honeybees in our garden, in our yard to realize that they were not the pollinators of everything that we grow.

In fact, they don't pollinate tomatoes, they're not great at small plantings.

- [Brooke] Honeybees are good for pollinating mass plantings of one crop, called monoculture.

In fact, it's common practice for agriculture businesses to cart truckloads of bees around the country to serve large-scale crop growth.

The problem with this, however, according to beekeepers, is that providing bees with one nutrient source results in poor health.

Not to mention the stress of transporting their hives and going against their instincts to search for diverse food sources.

- It made us appreciate the native bees that we did see in the garden, like bumblebees, leafcutter bees, mason bees.

- [Brooke] No idea that there's so many different kinds of bees.

- The cool thing about honeybees, which kind of drives all this behavior that you find so fascinating, we all do, is that eusocial structure where there's one female that is reproductive.

So, this is honeybees, ants, and termites.

They have a queen.

The queen is the female that is reproductive.

So, this is from a swarm that left a managed hive, and we can tell that because the queen is marked.

Right here.

- [Brooke] Oh!

- [Jane] So, she's longer.

She has a long abdomen.

The middle body part is called the thorax, and the other bees' thorax has hair on it, and hers is hairless.

- [Brooke] What's the lifespan of a queen bee?

- So, our queens now are living one or two years.

And that's an issue because they used to live longer.

- [Brooke] Research is looking at various components that could be shortening the lifespan of queen bees.

Things like chemicals from pesticides, nutrition, and environmental changes all may be contributing factors.

Another factor, and this may be good news to those gardeners out there, is that people are keeping their yards too tidy.

- As we develop areas, housing, roads, parking lots, we are eliminating their habitat.

- [Brooke] So, keep it messy.

Don't mow so much.

- Don't mow, don't use chemicals.

- [Brooke] The good news is that in addition to the work of local beekeepers, technology is providing opportunities for better education.

There are a number of popular TikTok and YouTube accounts that showcase beekeeping practices, which some, according to Jane, are just showing off and shouldn't be replicated.

But there are plenty of helpful, legitimate resources.

- That's the evolution which we're excited about because we like that people are gonna be responsible beekeepers.

And we want people to be successful.

That's gonna help our business, that's gonna help the community.

- Okay, that's good enough.

That's great!

(light upbeat music) - Jim Kirchherr recently went to the library to check something out, but not any books.

No, he went to the public library downtown to see an exhibit that is about as St. Louis as you can get, "Where You Went to High School."

- [Jim] The exhibit is entitled "PROM."

Subtitle, "Where Did You Go to High School?"

It's in the Central Library's Great Hall, and the title comes from the title of St. Louis's PROM Magazine.

From 1947 to 1972, it chronicled the activities, the sports, dances, the opinions of St. Louis high schoolers with a lot of photos.

And over the years, the library has been able to obtain almost every issue, important documents of styles and trends from very different decades.

- So, we built an exhibit around it, around high school and the teen years, the '40's through the '70's.

And so of all the thousands and thousands of photographs that PROM published between the '40's and the '70's, we had to choose somewhere around 300 for this exhibit.

So, that took a lot of pain to decide which ones to choose.

- [Jim] The photos were of school dances and activities, sporting events, and every school had a student reporter.

This was all the idea of a man named Julian Miller.

He wasn't merely serving students, he was building an audience of readers for advertisers.

This was not a business built on 10 cents an issue.

- Miller, who started publishing it, realized that teens were a big market.

Right after the war, they were an exploding market.

- [Jim] It was in one sense the dawn of a new era, the teenager, although the word itself was not all that new.

Search back in St. Louis newspapers, you will find it in the '20's and '30's, but almost always being used in ads for clothing.

And these are not directed at teens, but at their parents, often parents with money.

This ad mentions tea dances and supper parties.

It's not about teenage culture, it's just an age group.

But in the 1940s, teenagers were in the news in a very different way.

And when the war was over in peacetime and prosperity, the world, the country, was a very different place.

And with newfound independence, teenagers begin to show up not just in ads, but in articles and commentaries about teenage problems and attitudes and about crime and teenage drinking and heavy petting.

And they were on TV and in the movies.

They had their own music, their own fashions.

Many had money to spend and more were finishing high school, more were going to college.

This 1960 article was about teenage charge accounts.

Julian Miller's PROM Magazine had plenty of ads to sell.

- Clothes, records, even automobiles were targeted at them.

And so the advertisements paid for the magazine and made it possible.

And so that was a new thing, literally, in the 1940s.

And the magazine traces its beginning and how it went through the '70's.

- [Jim] Another thing Miller did was include everybody.

Even in the days of segregation and then after, Black or predominantly Black high schools like Sumner were covered.

When former TV anchor Julius Hunter was at Sumner, he was PROM's reporter.

- The concept behind the magazine, behind PROM magazine, was all St. Louis High schools.

So, Miller was forward-looking in that way, and it makes it a more valuable record of St. Louis itself because it really looks at everyone.

- Do you see a lot of changes in terms of the content that was in the magazine from, say, 1950 to 1965?

- Quite a bit, yes.

And then on to the '70's.

It started out almost stereotypical of the performances of "Oklahoma" and the sock hops and the enormous cotillions and dances.

- And malt shops.

I saw one article, "Where Do You Hang Out?"

- And all the kids on the floor in bobby socks listening to the records.

All of those things went on.

As it moved on, the world really was changing, and you could see it happening around.

And up until the '70's when students were having a lot of questions and there were a lot of concerns, you can see that reflected in the magazine.

- [Jim] Nothing perhaps says that more dramatically than the March, 1970 cover.

It was introducing a multi-page, multi-part series on drugs, much of it handouts from the government's anti-drug campaign but also with student comments.

And yet, in the final years, PROM was still true to its roots, with pictures of athletes and cheerleaders, dances and student councils.

PROM magazines were printed on cheap paper, and they're often today in very fragile condition.

But the library has digitized every page of every issue it has as well as a vast collection of original photographs.

They can be found on the library's website.

But the exhibit in the library's Great Hall is a good place to start and offers so much more context to this story.

There are the prom tuxes and dresses from different eras, from the demure to the daring, a list of the most popular records from different eras, and maps of every high school that is or was.

"PROM: Where Did You Go to High School?"

It will be here for the rest of the year.

(playful upbeat music) (keyboard clacks) This week, 100 years ago, St. Louis Cardinal's second baseman and future Hall of Famer, Rogers Hornsby, was in the news but not on the sports page.

Back then like today, people loved juicy celebrity gossip and scandal and so did the newspapers, and Hornsby's name came up in a rather nasty divorce case.

It had to do with a letter sent to a 23-year-old St. Louis store clerk by the name of Jeanette Pennington, a letter signed, "Rog."

Now, she had just gotten a divorce from her husband on the grounds of assault, non-support, and indifference, but the letter had come while she was still married, and now her ex wanted the divorce decree set aside.

The Rog who signed the letter, a love letter, he said, was the married baseball star.

In what seems like a carefully crafted statement, Hornsby said he knew little of the case but would make his defense at the proper time.

He didn't need to, the ex-husband's case was dismissed.

But the story wasn't over.

The next month, Hornsby's own wife, Sarah, filed for divorce, describing the baseball star as quarrelsome and indifferent.

Hornsby denied that but said he would not contest the divorce.

Mrs. Hornsby said the settlement was more than generous and said the love letter was not a factor.

The following year, Rogers Hornsby ended the season with a .424 batting average.

In 1926, he led the Cardinals as player-manager to the team's first World Series championship over the Yankees, and Hornsby had a new wife.

Shortly after his own divorce, he had been very quietly married by a judge in the old courthouse to, you guessed it, Jeanette Pennington, who had received that letter, signed, "Rog," that was in the news 100 years ago this week in St. Louis history.

- A few months ago, I got up abnormally early to shoot this next story.

I arrived groggy, but when I left, I was completely energized and inspired to do better, to be better, to leave a positive impact on those around me.

All because of the actions of a 10-year-old boy.

- [Fatima] Here's Miss Erica.

Good morning!

- [Anne-Marie] Fridays are great for just about everyone, but at Trautwein Middle School in the Mehlville School District, the second Friday of every month is extra special.

In fact, these Fridays are so great that kids at this school happily arrive an hour early.

- Good morning, Iman.

How are you?

- [Anne-Marie] Why?

For the Buddy Club.

Now listen closely.

The description of this club is so simple yet so brilliant, you may miss it.

- You play with all the kids that don't have friends, and you give them a friend and have someone to play with.

- [Anne-Marie] Yep, that's it.

This is a club where kids who may be struggling to connect with other kids come together to become friends.

That alone is pretty amazing.

But what's even better is who came up with this idea.

It wasn't a parent, it wasn't a teacher, it was nine-year-old Draigon Schmidt who saw a need in his school and wanted to do something about it.

- My friends, Zaden and Erica, they didn't have anyone to play with.

- Draigon, one of our third-grade students, came to me and said that he noticed that some kids were not being included or not played with at recess.

And so I told him to think about something that he wanted to do to alleviate that problem, something to do to help.

- [Anne-Marie] So, Draigon developed the Buddy Club as a way to connect his friends with and without disabilities so no one would be alone on the playground.

- It makes all the difference in the world.

- [Anne-Marie] Dina Merry's 10-year-old daughter, Chloe, has Down syndrome.

- Everybody always says, "Oh, kids with Down syndrome, they're so happy."

And they are, but they also have real feelings too.

And so if people don't like Chloe or don't know how to interact with Chloe, Chloe feels that.

And she wants to play with others.

I just think that she shies away from it because other kids just don't know how to interact with her.

So, this has given them the opportunity to teach the other kids how to interact with Chloe.

- [Anne-Marie] The timing couldn't be better.

Since COVID, connecting with people of any age or ability has been a struggle for many.

- We're calling it the COVID slide.

And so our students came back, and staff came back just not knowing how to connect naturally and not knowing how to connect without using a device or without being behind a screen.

And so now social-emotionally, students are one grade level, sometimes two grade levels behind.

- [Anne-Marie] At Buddy Club, all students are developing skills to use when interacting with new friends.

This includes different communication strategies to use when playing with friends of different abilities and how to interact in different settings throughout the school day.

- Communication, like I said, comes in all shapes and sizes and forms.

You can be using sign language, you can be using all sorts of different language.

Hi, bye.

Open, more, please.

All of these are so welcome and so loved.

- Zaden, what do you wanna be when you grow up?

- YouTuber!

- You wanna use your talker?

- Yeah.

- [Talker] YouTube.

- Oh, a YouTuber?

- Oh, a YouTuber?

- Yeah.

- Jinx.

- Ah, shoot!

(light bouncy music) - But these kids, they're putting in the work.

Through the Buddy Club, they're making face-to-face connections, new friends, and making an impact in the lives of others and themselves.

- Do you love the Buddy Club?

- Yes.

It's my first club I have ever been in.

We are learning how to be with a buddy, and if there's like a new student, we can like show them around just like school.

- How do you think that makes the students feel?

- Like they're family here.

They're royal, loving.

- I think you're a pretty neat kid.

- Thank you.

- [Anne-Marie] It's been a year since Draigon launched the Buddy Club.

He's now 10 and in the fourth grade, and the word exclusion is not in his vocabulary.

Who can be a part of this club?

- Anyone.

Anyone can.

- [Anne-Marie] Anybody of any ability?

- Anyone.

- I think we all benefited from having the Buddy Club in our building, and we're trying to make sure that it's a culture.

- [Anne-Marie] And for us adults, it would do us all some good to be a little bit more like Draigon.

- Very happy to see other people happy.

Every time I see someone happy, I might shed a tear or two.

- Next is a story from our partners at stl.org.

This episode from their "Spotlight" series features Ben Lowder, a collector and creator who understands the value of things, the heritage behind everyday material, and the importance of giving it new life.

(ethereal string music) - I believe that the geometry of natural growth structures presents to us order that's intelligible in an otherwise seemingly like chaotic world.

Mathematics and geometry, I've heard, is the language of form.

And it's comforting.

There's this level of continuity and unity throughout all parts of it.

Where was I going with that?

I had a specific story I wanted to share, but I got to watching that Monarch butterfly, to be honest.

(ethereal percussion music) I've been a collector as long as I've been an artist, which is as long as I can remember.

I would go to auctions on a bicycle and have my grandpa come like pick me up afterwards.

And I'd be like, "Oh, I got this, I got that."

It really made me want to understand the value of things that you might find at auction.

Taking things that could be perceived as trash and then making them seem strange and wonderful.

That got born out of having a creative impulse to make things and not wanting to contribute to creating more crap in the world.

I'm initially drawn to the patina of the material objects, kind of the factor of time being expressed through the rust and age of the wood and just thinking about the life that it had.

Taking all of that and turning it into something that references my own personal interests and values and things that I want to share.

But people don't want to be bored with someone going on ad nauseum about sacred geometry and ancient wisdom traditions and math and things like that.

(light banjo music) It constantly feels like there's more left to share or express.

The wildness and the unpredictableness of the material that we're working with will never look pristine.

It'll always look a little bit, the Japanese say, wabi-sabi.

it has patterns of wear through its usage and age that create almost like a fingerprint.

I love the material heritage of sourcing the old vintage metal signs and the reclaimed wood.

How it wants to bend or how it wants to move contributes to the creative process.

It's heavy, it's splintery, it's sharp, it's rusty, but that's why I loved it in the first place.

The choice in using these materials to create a new sign or a symbol that points people in a different direction back to nature.

Follow the little breadcrumbs through the geometry back to the unmanifest source of things.

(Ben laughs) (no audio) - Finding new life for old things can be fun for everyone.

What's the best find you've ever made in an auction, a yard sale, or even your own basement?

Let us know on Facebook or Instagram.

And that's all the time we have tonight.

We'd love to hear from you.

You can get in touch with us on any of our social channels or send us an email at livingstlouis@ninepbs.org.

And don't forget, you can watch all of our stories at ninepbs.org/livingstlouis.

I'm Anne-Marie Berger.

Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

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