- This is your life's work.

There's a new home in Sainte Genevieve for Guy Darrough's dinosaurs, and not too far away, paleontologists continue to dig into the Missouri dinosaur story.

- We actually don't know how far this deposit might go and just how many dinosaurs might be in there.

- [Jim] This former American Idol contestant has opened her own business, the result of just trying to figure things out in her life.

- And coffee just came up.

- [Jim] There are scores of craft and microbreweries in the area, but 30 years ago, Tom Schlafly was jumping through legal hoops to be the first.

- Our business model was illegal under Missouri law.

- [Jim] And baseball players aren't the only ones who go through spring training.

The zoo's sea lions can learn all kinds of tricks for the daily show, but only if they want to.

- Completely up to them whether they want to participate or not.

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

- There we go, nice job.

(upbeat music) - I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we've come to Sainte Genevieve on a rainy spring day.

We've been here before, usually to explore the great French colonial history here, but this time we've come for a story that is much, much older.

This is not one of the reasons Sainte Genevieve is now a national historical park, but the new Sainte Genevieve Museum Learning Center is an added attraction with a focus not on what happened here centuries ago, but what happened here tens of millions of years before that.

We're entering the Hall of Giants, which is, I guess, a giant dream come true for you.

- It's a dream come true.

It's a place where I'm able to display my fossils, my dinosaurs, and a lot of other neat things for the public to come view.

- You say your dinosaurs.

You mean your dinosaurs.

- My actual dinosaurs.

I physically made it from scratch, all these, yes.

- [Jim] This all wouldn't be here if it weren't for Guy Darrough, who years ago got into the business of building dinosaur models, renting them out for displays and exhibits at parks and botanical gardens, zoos, that sort of thing.

This is your life's work.

- Yes, it's taken a long time to gather this much material to be able to do this.

- [Jim] There's more to this place than dinosaurs.

It's incorporated the old local history museum displays, but the whole town is really a museum, and the Shank family came here from St. Louis on a day trip with more interest in cretaceous than Creole history.

- So I guess we have two kids that really love dinosaurs.

My wife found this place online.

We decided to make a trip down from St. Louis to check it out.

- Looks like the guys are interested.

- They are.

They're very interested.

They love their dinosaurs.

- My favorite is the paralofish.

- Parasaurolophus.

He's only two and a half, so he's two and a half and he can name some of the dinosaurs.

- He can name you a bunch of dinosaurs.

- Yeah, we read at least one dinosaur book every day.

- Dinosaurs are people magnets.

They've kept me in business forever, and I've still got my little dinosaurs that I had when I was a kid.

Now they've just gotten bigger.

It's just the same thing.

You know, I'm the same way.

- Haven't lost interest.

- No.

- [Jim] If there's a star of the show here, it's this, Missouri's official state dinosaur, and Guy Darrough's more than just the model maker.

He's also a self-taught paleontologist who's played a pretty big part in the dinosaur story, which began with a chance discovery 80 years ago about 50 miles from here.

It was in 1942 outside the town of Marble Hill, Missouri, near Glenallen in Bollinger County when a boy named Olie Chronister told a state geologist that they'd found some old bones while digging on the family farm.

What they thought might be cow bones turned out to be fossilized vertebrae from a dinosaur tail, but it wasn't until further investigation of the site in the 1970s that paleontologists started really putting the pieces together and identified the find as a kind of duck-billed hadrosaur, now designated Parrosaurus Missouriensis.

When it lived, what is now North America was divided by a great sea, and most fossils today are found out west.

Dinosaurs lived in the east, but the rocks and bones mostly just wore away around here.

The Missouri site probably survived by falling into a big sinkhole.

In the 1990s, Guy Darrough took over the site himself and just kept digging.

And now when it comes to dinosaurs, Missouri is no longer flyover country.

- The cool thing is we're working with the Field Museum and the University of Minnesota.

- We started digging there in 2017.

We've been back six times.

- [Jim] Peter Makovicky has traveled the world finding fossils, and frankly never expected to find such a site so close to home.

- To be honest, I was floored when I saw how much material had come out.

I was expecting scraps, not entire skeletons, and the dinosaur fossil record for that time period east of the seaway is very meager, so to have a site that's producing complete skeletons and multiple complete skeletons is actually unique for the entire eastern half of the country.

- [Jim] Big sections of clay containing fossil remains are encased in plaster of paris and moved to laboratories at Chicago's Field Museum.

A couple of smaller pieces came to the Sainte Genevieve Museum, where you can watch the process.

- We've been working on it for a long time.

We found this guy here probably 10, 12 years ago or something like that.

This right here is a shoulder blade.

Going across the top here are vertebrae.

These are thoracic vertebrae, and if you look at this piece here, it's called a zygapophysis, kind of a mouthful, but see the bone marrow in there?

- [Jim] But the real prize at this site was a full sized hadrosaur skeleton, and pieces of other dinosaurs have been found.

- Early in his work there, Guy and his team found a couple of meat-eating dinosaur teeth, a smaller one that would fit very nicely in the jaws of an animal like Velociraptor, and a slightly bigger one that probably was some kind of tyrannosaur.

Not T-Rex itself, but one of its somewhat smaller and earlier cousins.

We actually don't know how far this deposit might go and just how many dinosaurs might be in there.

So for me, it's very exciting.

- Nothing was known, and that's what our little dinosaur site is.

It's a very rare little site.

It's actually an entire ancient environment preserved.

- [Jim] And while the dig site is not open to the public, the Sainte Genevieve Museum Learning Center is.

It's a nonprofit supported by local businesses, volunteers and admission charges, but success is not a sure thing.

And yet, this is a town that is now a national historic park, and with the pandemic easing up, things are looking up for just about everybody in Sainte Genevieve.

- It's a big deal.

I hooked our cart to a good horse, is all I can say, you know?

- A good horse and a duck-billed dinosaur.

The last couple of years have presented a lot of people with a lot of things to deal with at home, at work, with life in general.

Anne-Marie Berger takes us to Cherokee Street for the story of somebody who thought taking on all these changes and challenges should begin with a good cup of coffee.

- [Anne-Marie] I don't have any specific data on this or anything, but I'm confident in saying most people wake up each morning with the same thing on their mind.

(alarm beeping) Coffee.

And if you have information that proves otherwise, we can meet over a cup and discuss it, and I have just the place.

- Coffee is something that I like.

I enjoy, it's a nice joy.

- [Anne-Marie] This is Aloha Mischeaux.

She's the owner of Black Coffee.

- My menu is very short.

I do not have a long list of stuff.

- So I can't get the triple venti soy oak milk latte?

- I'm sorry, I ain't got it, and I ain't gonna get it.

- [Anne-Marie] Her simple coffee offerings, cream, sugar or black, are very intentional.

Since September 2021, Black Coffee has been tucked inside The Luminary, an art gallery on Cherokee Street.

Using coffee, Aloha has created a space for people to gather, connect, focus, to center one's self.

- This is my favorite quiet spot.

It also allows me the opportunity to watch people and listen to Aloha sing.

♪ Smile even though it's aching ♪ ♪ Smile even though it's breaking ♪ ♪ Even a tear - Did I mention Aloha is also a singer?

A former contestant on American Idol, in fact.

I gotta throw it in there, come on.

You know I have to.

- I was.

- You were.

Uh huh.

- Oh my God.

Y'all didn't tell me you was gonna say that.

- [Anne-Marie] When the pandemic hit, she was actively performing and recording music.

- I'm a singer, songwriter and producer, and I was doing a lot of work in that industry, so I thought that I would be traveling all over the world singing songs, writing songs like I normally do, and time changes things.

- What happened when the world shut down?

What did that do for your line of work?

I mean, that wasn't something that was possible for you to earn money, to work at all in any capacity.

- It was daunting and weird and also a little depressing 'cause being an artist, I would say myself, I'm very sensitive to the world and what it's giving me, and at that time it was giving me a lot of, like, it's over.

So I had to figure out how to cope through that.

- [Anne-Marie] Aloha learned to manage quarantine and find purpose for herself by creating a comforting atmosphere for her roommates using coffee.

- I didn't know what to do but make them coffee.

I thought that that was the sweetest or the kindest thing to do, to just give them a warm cup of coffee, because I didn't know what else to do.

It was just innate, like just a natural thing.

- You're making coffee for your friends because it was filling a void that you had.

- Yeah.

- What was the process to get from there to here?

- It was really simple.

- What?

- It was.

- I wasn't expecting you to say simple, but tell me.

- The thought about it, I just thought about it as simply as possible.

I just tried not to overcomplicate it.

I like coffee.

I like making coffee for people.

I like the way it makes you feel.

When I get a cup of coffee, you get a cup of coffee, and I saw how it transformed the space in my home and I just started researching and I came across a couple local roasters here in St. Louis and I bought their coffee, got a table, bought some thermals, got some cups, got some sugar and cream and I did a popup.

- Okay, so I do have some data.

According to the National Coffee Association, Americans are drinking more coffee than ever.

As of March 2020, 62% of our nation's population drink coffee every day, and the average American coffee drinker drinks more than three cups each day.

And they're a socially conscious group as well.

More than half of coffee drinkers, 53%, want to buy coffee that is certified good for the environment and good for coffee farmers and communities.

Aloha is also one of those people.

Let's talk about the coffee.

You talk highly of it, you're proud of it.

Does it matter to you where the beans themselves are coming from?

- Well, yes.

And because I'm still learning this, I say it's coffee college, right?

So when I first think of coffee, I think of Africa.

And so I went to Africa and got coffee.

(upbeat music) I end up going to Ghana and sourcing coffee from there.

I found this farm in the Volta Region district, and there's a farm of women who are harvesting this coffee, and they invited me to come and pick it with them, and I did not turn it down at all.

Now I just have this coffee, these coffee friends in Africa that's sending me coffee.

(upbeat music) And that was kind of my first collaboration with a small farm.

So far it's pretty cool.

It's helping me see this mission even on a real level sourcing beans, 'cause that was definitely the next step.

- So when I think of black coffee, I think of dark coffee that doesn't have any cream or sugar.

What is black coffee to you?

- It's still very new to me, too.

It's always evolving.

Black Coffee is telling me what it is.

Right now it's love in a cup, because I know that the coffee that was made and roasted and harvested was made with care and from small farms and businesses and people who are living and dying by their coffee.

Come in, you get the coffee.

Now it's about you.

I need you to go take a seat and think this world forward.

Don't make this about a mocha latte, mocha joka whatever.

It's not about that.

It's about you.

- I think beer has gone through a similar evolution as the growing coffee scene.

I mean yeah, you can still get a good cold American lager, but there's so much more now in this era of microbreweries and brew pubs, and in St. Louis, you can mark the exact time and place when that era began.

It was 30 years ago, and Brooke Butler takes us to ground zero.

- If there's anything that brings St. Louisans together, it's beer.

After all, we're home to the king of beers, but it's not all just Budweiser clydesdales.

St. Louis is currently home to 75 breweries, including the popular micro or craft breweries.

But up until 1991, there was only one brewery.

So how did we go from one to 75 in just 30 years?

Technology and social media played a major role, but there was one obstacle that led a couple of people to really get St. Louis's beer scene hopping.

- Part of the fondness for craft beer is a rediscovery of what's local and an embrace of what's local.

- [Brooke] That's Tom Schlafly, the Schlafly of Schlafly Beer.

And as they celebrate 30 years of being the charter member of the St. Louis microbrewery scene, he knows a thing or two about what makes them so popular.

- It's not just an anonymous commodity that's made by an industrial facility somewhere out there.

They can come to any of our locations, see the beer being brewed, but that's just the first step.

The fact that you're local might get people to take the first taste, but if it's not good, they'll go back to what's familiar to them.

- [Brooke] While good beer is subjective, there is no denying Schlafly's success.

Before his entrance into the beer world, Tom was a lawyer in St. Louis.

It was during a law conference in Oxford, England that he noticed what seemed like a brew pub on every corner and thought why doesn't St. Louis have these?

- By coincidence, I saw a former law partner, Charles Kopman, and I told him the story.

I said there I was at Oxford, but I learned more about English beer than I did about English law.

At that point, Charles said you need to meet my son, Dan.

- [Brooke] Dan Kopman, co-founder of Schlafly, at the time was traveling around the United States selling beer for a London brewery.

He noticed that certain areas of the country that bought imported beer also sold what they called micro brewed beers.

- And so Dan introduced me to the concept of micro brewed beers and told me that he thought the idea would work in St. Louis.

- [Brooke] So we're talking about St. Louis a beer city.

I mean, that's a pretty brave thing to do.

- There were a couple major obstacles to our opening the business.

First was the attitudinal resistance among some consumers, and secondly was the fact that our business model was illegal under Missouri law.

- [Brooke] That's a big obstacle.

- It was a major obstacle.

- [Brooke] Following the prohibition in 1933, Missouri lawmakers made it so breweries could not have retail liquor license to operate their own taverns.

Luckily, Tom had the law background to navigate this obstacle.

- So what we had to do was get the Missouri law changed to allow us to open initially as a brew pub, and we were able to do that in 1991.

And there was, as I said, tremendous interest because people just never thought of another brewery opening in St. Louis.

- [Brooke] But just a few weeks after the grand opening of the Schlafly Taproom, they were completely sold out of beer.

As successful as it was as a brew pub, Schlafly didn't stop there.

After several inquiries about selling Schlafly Beer in other bars and restaurants, Tom revved up to overturn another Missouri law.

Basically those same post-prohibition laws made it so you could operate as a brew pub and sell beer on the premises or a brewery that distributed to other establishments, but not both.

- And my legal background came in handy again.

So that was 1993 when the law changed, and it was an important milestone where we were able to sell beer not just on these premises at 21st and Locust, but to sell to any other retail establishment in Missouri.

- For our first three and a half years, we were almost kind of lonely.

Like where is everybody?

- [Brooke] Steven Hale is Schlafly's founding brewer.

You'd recognize him from the kilt.

And for the past 30 years, he's had a front row seat to St. Louis's growing beer scene.

- It was three and a half years before Trailhead opened in St. Charles, and then in about four years after we opened Morgan Street on the landing.

And then after that, more breweries started to slowly open.

Does everyone get along with everyone?

I would say accurately, not quite, but almost.

There are no secrets in the beer industry.

Sure, there are a couple.

I'm not gonna list every ingredient to every beer.

Well actually, those are listed on the website, the ingredients.

Maybe the process is different or something.

- [Brooke] And after all, it's the ingredients that make microbreweries unique from macro brewing companies.

We all know that person who claims any mass manufactured beer is inferior to their neighborhood pub.

However, Steven was quick to point out the difference in quality versus variety.

- To make light beer worldwide and keep it consistent and taste the same all over the place, most craft breweries would have a challenge doing that.

We couldn't compete in the arena of lighter lagers, which larger breweries pretty much dominated.

They owned that category for a long time.

Over the past 30 years, many breweries have entered that market, as well as a plethora of beer styles.

The list is too long to list, but choice, variety, I think that's what the consumers want.

- This is our Schlafly Beer beer color wall, basically.

You can see we've got from the palest yellow all the way down to basically the darkest black.

Craft beer drinkers are always evolving themselves and wanting to try something new.

It's striking that balance of honoring the classics and then also innovating and helping us move forward.

- [Brooke] Jared Williamson is the current lead brewer at Schlafly.

Some actually call him Steven Junior, but no kilt yet.

And while Steven got his start with home brewing, like most people in the industry, Jared came to St. Louis 10 years ago with experience from working at a brewery in Kentucky, so he knew about the reputation that Schlafly had already established.

- This became an incubation hub for talent.

The St. Louis Brewers Guild is about a 70 mile radius, and there's close to 100 breweries in that guild now, and probably at least almost half of them have some connection to this brewery.

Either they were an intern here or they worked here.

The family tree of St. Louis craft beer definitely started in this building and the branches and the roots have grown out from there.

- [Brooke] So 30 years and four locations later, the original brew pub at 21st and Locust is still hopping, pun intended, although most of the distribution happens at their Bottleworks location in Maplewood.

Just a few weeks ago, the parking lot was overflowing with beer connoisseurs for their annual Full Moon Festival, so it's not a stretch to say Schlafly can brew up another 30 years of success.

- Remember that we're in St. Louis, and St. Louis is the cradle of jazz.

Jazz is an improvisational medium.

It's not carefully orchestrated like a symphony where everyone knows exactly what to do exactly when.

With jazz, you have to adapt, and I think that's something we've learned over 30 years.

We've been flexible.

We haven't stuck rigidly to a business plan because things change, and while we've grown and we now have hundreds of employees at four locations and we're in 14 states nationwide, I hope that we don't get too big so as to lose the ability to adapt and respond to the customers, 'cause once you lose that, then you're on the downslide.

- Work hard, play hard.

It's what we all should do, and at the end of the day, in the middle of the day, whenever you do it, enjoy a good beer.

Cheers, y'all.

Cheers to you, too.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Finally, a story about spring training, but this isn't about baseball.

No, this is something that takes place at the St. Louis Zoo every spring when the trainers work with their most acrobatic and crowd-pleasing residents.

Veronica Mohesky takes a look at the sea lions at work and play.

- Ready?

(whistle tooting) Good, nice job.

- [Veronica] Meet Mandy.

She's an 11 year old sea lion at the St. Louis Zoo.

- She is probably one of our most excitable sea lions.

She really seems very engaged in her training session.

She really seems to enjoy her training sessions.

One of her unique things is that she loves to talk.

- Nice job, I know.

- She'll get very excited.

The more excited the trainers and the audience gets, the more excited she gets.

So she gets very loud.

She loves to talk to you.

- [Veronica] Ashley Duflo is a sea lion trainer at the St. Louis Zoo.

She says one of the reasons sea lions are great performers is because they're so personable.

- They're very agile, so they can do a lot of these very athletic behaviors.

I think it really showcases them well in a show setting to kind of show off how personable, how athletic they are.

- [Veronica] The sea lions all have different personalities, and Duflo says sometimes they don't want to be in the show, and that's okay.

- Well one thing that we really like about our training with the sea lions is that it's all voluntary.

So it's completely up to them whether they want to participate or not.

There'll be times that maybe they're not feeling it.

Our door to our stage is always open, so they can leave at any point.

- Good.

- [Veronica] And while the behaviors the sea lions perform are entertaining, Duflo says they're also beneficial to the animal's health.

- [Ashley] We really like to show off their natural abilities, so you might see behaviors, for example, like porpoising or fast swimming.

- Good job.

Nice work.

- They'll also do a little bit, we like to show off what we call husbandry behaviors or basically medical behaviors.

Those are actually some of the most important behaviors that we train, and basically it's just getting our sea lions to actively participate in their own healthcare.

So something really simple like opening their mouth so we can check out the inside of their mouth and make sure everything looks good, maybe raising a flipper so we can check out the underside of their flipper.

A lot of our sea lions are also trained to allow us to brush their teeth.

- You're a rockstar.

- [Veronica] Audiences can see many different sea lion behaviors during the show, but one of the most important tricks has to do with conservation.

- One of the things that we really like to talk about is recycling.

Our sea lions actually know how to recycle themselves.

I think that's a really cool behavior for the guests to come and see if a sea lion can recycle, then certainly we can as well.

- There you go, nice job.

- And just a really easy thing that people can do to help out all sorts of animals out in the wild.

- [Veronica] Mandy and the other sea lions will be performing every weekend in spring and daily during the summer at the St. Louis Zoo.

You might be excited to check out the show, but you're probably not as excited as Mandy is to perform.

- Good.

Nice work, I know.

All right, we're gonna head in.

Good job, Mandy.

- And that's Living St. Louis.

Thanks for joining us.

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

- [Announcer] 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)