- [Jim] It's baseball with a beep: the game where keeping your eye on the ball is against the rules - Playing a sport with your ears, it's not easy.

(chuckles) - [Jim] It's no longer enough to just pick up our trash.

St. Louisans are joining an effort up and down the Mississippi to record what and where the trash is and where it might be going.

And he earned a lasting place in the history books for his role in the Lewis and Clark expedition, but when it came time for Missouri to elect its first governor, William Clark's hero status had dimmed somewhat.

- So there was an interesting little blurb in the newspaper during that year, "We're heartily sick of hearing about Lewis and Clark."

- [Jim] It's all next on Living St. Louis.

(funky jazz) - I'm Jim Kirchherr and to introduce this first story by Kara Vaninger, I kept running through a lot of old sports cliches and I finally came up with, "It's a whole new ball game."

But in fact, this very special version of baseball?

It's been around for years.

- So this is a beep baseball.

It's a one-pound Chicago-style softball.

So in it, it has a pin that's kind of suppressing the speaker, and at the bottom, you have your speaker here.

This is what they sound like.

(ball beeps) (bat hits) (upbeat music plays) - Everything we've been taught about the game of baseball has been see the ball, hit the ball, look the ball into your glove.

I'm doing this now, coaching myself for T-ball.

So when I heard about Beep Ball, I was fascinated.

- [Kara] Beep Ball is an adapted version of baseball for players who are visually impaired.

Since there are varying degrees of visual ability, almost everyone is required to wear a blindfold.

Although the sport was designed to be played without relying on sight, a few positions like the pitcher require it.

- Your pitcher does not want to strike anybody on this.

The opposite.

- [Kara] Because in Beep Ball, the pitcher and batter are on the same team.

- The most challenging part is getting right to where their bat is, and them getting down my cadence.

Ready, set, pitch.

- The batters have to keep their swings consistent but it's the pitcher's job to get the ball where that bat's hanging.

- [Man] When the ball is put into play, they'll run to a padded first or third base, which makes a buzzing sound.

- They're kind of these tall foam, I call 'em like tackle dummy-looking things.

- So it's completely random.

You'll either go to first base or third base.

There's a specialized umpire that's flipping that switch - But they need to make it to that base before the blindfolded fielders are able to retrieve the ball.

- [Kara] Now at this point, those who haven't played Beep Ball people might think the game is starting to sound a little dangerous.

After all, fielders are running, sliding, and diving to catch a ball they cannot see before the runner makes it to a base they can't see.

(person cheers) - Well, we wear pads.

You can't see 'em but I have pads on.

It is a contact sport, sometimes.

- I've never seen anybody get hurt playing the game.

I'll put that one out there.

- [Kara] Working together through verbal communication and the guidance of two sighted spotters, the players defending the field stick to their zones to avoid collisions.

But those pads still come in handy when diving for the ball or base.

- A lot of teamwork-involved communication is a big part of it, but playing a sport with your ears, it's not easy.

- [Kara] Which means the audience has to adapt, too.

- We kind of have to teach people when the ball's hit into play, the crowd's supposed to be silent, your teammates are supposed to be silent while the play is going on so the fielders can field the ball, the runners can hear the bases.

After the play's over, cheer your head off.

(team cheers) - That is safe!

- [Man] Safe!

- [Kara] While the rules might be different, Beep Ball inspires just as much devotion, trash talk, and satisfaction as the game it was adapted from.

- One of my friends asked me to come out and sub in.

I subbed in and I never left.

I became a pitcher, started my own team, I've been doing it every year since then.

- It doesn't get any better than, you know, like laying out for a ball and stopping it, getting somebody out.

I think that's the best feeling.

- It's intimidating to be in the field completely blindfolded, not knowing what's around you, and it's so much fun, after an inning or two, that fear goes away, and now you're just like, "All right, I want to get the ball."

- All of a sudden you make contact.

It's just a rush of adrenaline and you hear the base buzz and you just run for it.

Put everything into it, it's nothing like it.

- [Kara] And until 1964, there was nothing like it.

The first beeping softball was invented by telephone engineer Charlie Fairbanks in an effort to include people with visual impairments in recreational sports.

The first Beep Baseball World Series tournament was held in 1975, and in 1976, the National Beep Baseball Association was formed in Chicago.

In St. Louis, Mind's Eye Radio has been hosting recreational Beep Ball tournaments as a fundraiser for the past 11 years.

- Mind's Eye, they've been around since the mid-70s and they were called the Radio Readers Network and they had a body of volunteers that would read local publications, some national and produce a radio station for a print-impaired audience.

- So we read newspapers, magazines, books, grocery store ads.

- [Kara] Mind's Eye also offers audio description services at sporting events, the zoo, and other St. Louis attractions.

- We go into theaters and museums and provide description of visual elements, of productions and exhibits.

- We have such a rich and great arts and culture scene here in the St. Louis area.

It's part of the experience in this community, so we want to make sure everybody can enjoy the experience fully.

- [Kara] And of course, in a town like St. Louis, the same goes for baseball.

- There's not a whole lot of team sports that somebody with visual impairments play and that's something that the Mind's Eye can give back to people.

- [Kara] Mind's Eye creates awareness around visual impairment and the sport by providing Beep Ball demos at schools and businesses, to people of all abilities.

- I think it's bringing notoriety to the hard work that the people without sight do, and it's also allowing the people with sight to know what they go through.

- [Kara] Due to the growing number of players who wanted to compete nationally, Mind's Eye launched the Gateway Archers in 2020.

- My goal is keep this team completely home-grown where it's St. Louis players, people who live in this region playing for the Gateway Archers against teams from Indianapolis, Boston, all the way as far as Argentina or Taiwan.

- I'm really, you know, shooting for the stars.

I expect excellence.

I expect that we're going to represent St. Louis well.

- [Kara] Team captain Chad Dylan had ties to Beep Ball long before playing it.

- When I was 16 years old, I was in the Boy Scouts and working on my Eagle Scout project.

I was presented the opportunity to build the bases that we use, and I built 24 sets of bases that we shipped all over the world.

At 16, I didn't know that I had a degenerative eye disease.

I didn't know that I was going to go blind.

Later in my twenties, I found out that I was going to lose my vision and I started playing ball almost as soon as I became legally blind.

I'm really proud of what I did obviously to earn my rank of Eagle Scout, but I'm as proud of what we've been able to do with this team.

- [Kara] Many of the Gateway Archers have played in the World Series tournaments for other teams and bring those years of experience with them this season.

Mari Blumenthal was just 12 years old when she attended her first World Series with mom, Kim.

- She got to pitch to another girl who was young, too, and this girl had never hit a ball that had been pitched to her.

She'd only hit a ball off of a tee, and the very first ball Mari pitched to her, she hit.

So it was, that was very exciting.

- This will be my ninth World Series.

I've been on a few teams.

I've been lucky enough to place second and third place.

Haven't won the championship yet, so that's my next goal.

- [Kara] As Beep Ball continues to grow in St. Louis, players of all abilities are encouraged to give it a try, with one disclaimer: once you start playing, you might never want to stop.

(bat cracks) - Anyone with a visual impairment or if you have children with a visual impairment I highly encourage you to come out and get involved.

- We realize for people that can't see, or have never been able to see, you know, they may not have any concept of what it is to swing a bat.

- Don't be scared.

(chuckles) It's really fun.

- It's fun and we're all here to help.

- We're pretty serious here, and we want to win games but you know, we're all friends.

- Get to meet other people that are like you, you get to run and be free on a baseball field and experience winning and celebrating with your teammates, all the traditional benefits from competing on a team sport still apply here, you know?

(teams congratulate) - We've done stories about cleanup events before, but they're always local: a street, a stream, a neighborhood, a park, but there are those who want us to think about trash in global terms.

Brooke Butler has a story about how St. Louis is joining with other Mississippi River cities and with people like us to do just that.

(gentle mandolin music) - [Brooke] Every minute, a dump truck worth of plastic enters our oceans.

That's a very concerning statistic, but when we hear statistics like this about water pollution, the tendency is for people to feel removed, like the problem is happening far away.

The Mississippi River drains about 40% of the United States' waters into the Gulf of Mexico.

St. Louis is the connecting point of the Missouri River, a tributary to the Mississippi that combined in length, ranks forth when compared to other world's rivers.

So no pressure, but St. Louis tends to stand out when considering the challenges and solutions of water pollution.

- Today, we are launching the Mississippi River Plastic Pollution Initiative here in St. Louis.

- [Brooke] Led by the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, St. Louis is one of three cities involved in the Plastic Pollution Initiative that unlike similar projects, relies heavily on community participation.

- This is truly a river-wide effort to clean up, catalog, and control all the plastic waste that is choking our waterways, choking our ecology, and having a terrible effect on our infrastructure and everything that we use this great resource for.

- [Brooke] Sounds like a hefty responsibility to put in the hands of the average citizen and a much bigger problem than a community cleanup event can solve.

So how exactly are they planning to tackle this?

(vibraphone music) - You know, cleanups have been happening for over 35 years, in many cases, and, you know, people were just thinking "This is how we need to manage this material."

- [Brooke] Dr. Jenna Jambeck is a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Georgia.

Around 2010, she had the idea for her students to collect exact GPS coordinates of litter they found in their local environment.

- If we collect data on what we're finding, then you can sort of think more and more upstream, like, why is this, why is this plastic bag here?

You know, is there not infrastructured, are there not trash cans for people to use or is there some sort of activity around here that produces this kind of litter more?

- [Brooke] When smartphones became more widely available, Jenna and her team created the Marine Debris Tracker app that allows anyone to upload the data of what the litter item is and where it was found.

- The litter on the ground is representative of the activities that we're doing, and one really striking example of that is the PPE that we have started wearing because of the pandemic and especially right away a lot of the disposable masks, wipes, and gloves that were being used, our participatory sensing network with Debris Tracker showed us that that was entering the environment within a week.

- Just by a show of hands who has at least downloaded the Marine Debris Tracker app?

All right.

- [Woman] All right!

- Okay, that's really great.

- [Brooke] This cleanup event in Madison County was one of the many events that utilize the Marine Debris Tracker app as part of the Plastic Pollution Initiative.

The app will create a plastic pollution map which is publicly available for anyone to see and will ideally be used to create solutions.

- It was kind of the breakthrough when we realized that we could do this by enlisting ordinary people as scientists.

- [Brooke] Barbara Hendry is the director of the North American office of the United Nation's Environment program, who is a leading partner of the Mississippi River Plastic Pollution Initiative.

- This will be, as far as I'm aware, the first time that there has been a data map of plastic pollution along the river.

We have the capability to do a brand audit, to understand are there particular kinds of plastic that are showing up more than others?

And with that data, we hope then through the mayor's offices and through our citizens' groups to actually do something about it, that's the point of the initiative is to try to reduce the amount of plastic that's flowing into the Mississippi River and through the Mississippi into the Gulf and then into our oceans.

- So what do you say to the people that might be thinking, you know, so what?

We've got plenty of space in the ocean, you know, what is that importance of not only cleaning up that plastic but preventing further plastic pollution.

- It's huge.

So, for example, you may not know, but our oceans around the world create 60 to 80% of our atmospheric oxygen.

If we choke our oceans with plastic pollution, we're choking ourselves, plus the fact that plastic never disappears.

Virtually all of the plastic that's ever been produced since the 1950s is still with us, and a majority of that is in our environment.

What happens is it breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces, into microplastics that release toxins into the environment, into the drinking water, into us.

So there's a very direct relationship between human health and plastic pollution.

- [Brooke] Although keeping plastic out of our waters is the obvious objective to this initiative, Jenna and the Plastic Pollution Initiative team intentionally placed a particular piece of plastic directly into the Mississippi.

Equipped with a GPS tracker, this bottle tag will provide more data to support what is already being collected from the Debris Tracker App.

- So in 2015, I worked to develop a model of how much plastic was entering our oceans globally, and that number at the time was 8 million metric tons, but this was an estimate and a model that we built based on some available data, and so this tracker is going to provide real data of how far a plastic item that makes its way into the river could actually travel.

- You know, we have a massive biodiversity crisis.

The problem is of a huge magnitude but actually every individual citizen scientist who goes out can add up to a cumulative impact on the problem.

So it's, it is possible for people to change things.

- When Missouri became a state 200 years ago in 1821, it already had its government in place.

It had elected its first governor the year before and the name of the winner is hardly a household name today but almost everybody's heard of the loser, William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark fame.

Famous now, famous then, and yet when it came time to elect the state's first governor, William Clark was, to put it mildly, trounced.

The Lewis and Clark expedition, the Corps of Discovery was an amazing achievement which the people of that time probably realized even more than we do.

It made Lewis and Clark national figures, national heroes even, but then they stayed on in St. Louis, not as heroes, but as territorial officials.

William Clark first handled Indian affairs, and then after Merriweather Lewis' death, Clark became the territorial governor.

So in 1820 with the first governor's race coming up, he had his admirers, he had his detractors.

- There was an interesting little blurb in the newspaper during that year, close to the election, and it said something about Lewis and Clark, "We're heartily sick of Lewis and Clark, hearing about Lewis and Clark."

Clark was really the head of a political faction in St. Louis.

He was, we would almost consider him to be like a political boss today.

- [Jim] His opponent in that first governor's race was Alexander McNair.

- But McNair wasn't like a mortal enemy of Clark or anything like that, but I think a lot of the things that Clark had done while he was territorial governor kind of became issues in the campaign.

- [Jim] There were issues, but slavery wasn't one of them.

Missouri was entering as a slave state and Clark himself was a slave owner.

The bigger issues dealt with settlers and Indians.

McNair had been a land agent working in the interests of settlers seeking more land, but Clark's job was to work with the Indian tribes, at times preventing encroachment on their tribal lands.

William Clark was seen as soft on the Indian question.

- But the people in the state felt that their best interests in terms of American Indian affairs would be represented by having a governor that it wasn't sort of tainted by having been part of the federal regime.

- [Jim] Much of this story took place in the new state's biggest city and population center, on what is now the Arch grounds.

In 1820 Alexander McNair was taking his campaign to the people, to the taverns.

Clark's campaign?

Halfhearted.

His wife, Julia, was seriously ill and was back at her parents' home in Virginia.

- So Clark actually took a trip to Virginia and spent much of the year with her and she died that year.

So by the time he got back to St. Louis, a lot had gotten out of hand in terms of, you know, how he was being represented.

- [Jim] It wasn't even close.

McNair got more than twice as many votes, 6,576 to Clark's 2,556.

William Clark stayed in St. Louis and remained important, serving as the federal government superintendent of Indian affairs during America's westward expansion.

McNair served his one term as governor and took a job as an Indian agent, but he died a short time later at the age of 50.

He's buried in Calvary Cemetery.

A new stone was placed here as part of Missouri's Centennial in 1921.

But Alexander McNair today is something of a bicentennial trivia answer, and the winner of that first governor's race comes in a distant second when it comes to monuments.

Just across the road is the impressive grave of William Clark.

Clark's life is under constant re-examination: his role of the treatment of Native Americans and his resistance to freeing his slave York who served with the Corps of Discovery.

But this is still the most visited grave site in Bellefontaine Cemetery.

The Lewis and Clark expedition has also been reinterpreted over the years.

Today, there's greater emphasis on the Native American point of view, but there've been various versions of the Lewis and Clark story almost from the day they returned to the St. Louis riverfront in 1806, and we were here 200 years later to tell the story again.

This Saturday in late September 2006 was a day to mix the old and the new.

Period costumes and digital cameras.

The crowd was here to greet the return of the men who had retraced the journey of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which had triumphantly, amazingly, made it back to St. Louis 200 years ago to the day.

(canon booms) (crowd cheers) The reenactors were as historically accurate as possible: the day and the time, perhaps even the place of the landing, the boats, the outfits.

And if you were one of the St Louisans who had pretty much stopped thinking about Lewis and Clark since we gave them the big sendoff more than two years ago, well that's kind of historically accurate as well.

- Everybody had more or less forgotten about them.

They, there had been no news from them since the spring of 1804, so it had been two years since any word had been heard from them.

Everybody had kind of given them up for lost.

(crowd cheers) (foghorn honks) They had stopped in St. Charles, and so word had gotten down to St. Louis that they were coming, and so a huge crowd gathered on the riverfront in order to welcome them home.

And the way Clark tells it, the men in the boats fired off their guns as a salute to the city., and then as Sergeant Ordway mentions, the people on the bank responded with three cheers.

- [Crowd] Hip hip, hooray!

Hip hip hooray!

Hip hip hooray!

- And so that was the extent of the ceremony that happened when they actually arrived.

The news traveled all over the country like lightning.

It was huge news.

They were the equivalent of celebrities today.

Everybody realized it was a big story, that it was important.

Everybody was tremendously interested in it but the problem was nobody really knew why it was important.

- [Jim] After all, they hadn't found what they were looking for: that easy Northwest passage to the Pacific but only because it's not there, but they did come back with all kinds of important knowledge about this new part of the United States and the scientific information that Thomas Jefferson had asked for.

But people 200 years were a lot like us.

They liked adventure, and that story pushed the other practical accomplishments aside.

- This document is the prospectus that Lewis issued for the book that he intended to write about the expedition and the book never got written but this prospectus describes the book in great detail and it really shows how Lewis thought about his legacy.

There were going to be three volumes.

Each one was going to be 400 to 500 pages long but only the first part of the first volume was going to be the adventure story.

The rest was going to be about mineralogy and zoology and botany and geopolitics and commerce.

I'm sure this would have been a very valuable book but it really would not have sold very well.

- Mm-hm.

- The book that eventually got written after Lewis' death focused entirely on the adventure story and left out all of the science.

In fact, it wasn't until 1904 that people really realized that they had done any science.

(crowd cheers) - [Jim] The difference between a historic event and the celebration of a historic event is that we always know how this is going to turn out.

We knew they'd be back and when they be back, and this time the city was prepared.

This time, Lewis and Clark would have something they have never had before: a monument, not a grand symbol of westward expansion but something more literal, more personal.

Even before the Lewis and Clark reenactors had set out, the idea for a riverfront statue was in the works and its completion would take nearly as long as the journey.

It was the work of sculptor Harry Weber and his crew of craftsman led by two Russians who took Weber's original model and turned it into a bronze monument, casting it piece by piece in Weber's Sioux Large Studio, and with only weeks before the dedication, they were putting those pieces together.

The week before the big riverfront event, it was time to move the statue, now in just two pieces, out of the studio and to the granite face on the riverfront.

It was the first time Weber's creation had seen the light of day.

- The actual making of this statue was about 18 month process and it's been almost uninterrupted for 18 months.

We figured there was about 7,500 man hours involved in making it.

It's been a very satisfying, long journey.

(gentle piano music) (men cheer) (crowd claps) - Mr. Mayor, it is our honor to present to you and the people of St. Louis "The Captains' Return."

(crowd claps) - [Jim] At the original location, the statue could be nearly submerged during floods and that was starting to cause damage, so it was removed, restored, and relocated to its current spot on higher ground as part of the renovation of the Arch grounds.

And that's "Living St.

Louis."

Thanks for joining us.

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

(funky jazz) - [Narrator] Living St. Louis is made possible by the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation, Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan Charitable Trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.

(funky jazz)