- [Jim] They're a big part of American history, even family history.

Trains are big, but only a few are this big.

(train chugging) (light music) It always existed, but for a long time rarely acknowledged or accepted.

But efforts are now underway to tell St. Louis's LGBTQ story.

- The project just became this great community effort to preserve and promote our local history.

- There may not literally be gold in them thar hills, but recycling scrap metal is a big business.

We look back at our visit to a family-owned operation that has been bought by a major national company.

It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(upbeat music) I'm Jim Kirchherr, and it was about 20 years ago I was introduced to the world of chasers, specifically train chasers.

We did a program called "Locomotive," the National Museum of Transportation's Frisco #1522 had been brought back to life and was making one of its final excursions.

And all along the way to Hannibal you would see them, the chasers, riding along where the road paralleled the tracks and racing ahead to the next crossing to take pictures and videos.

This is a thing.

And as Ruth Ezell found out, 2021 turned out to be a pretty good year, not just for chasers, but for anybody who wanted to experience whether once again, or for the very first time, this blast from the past.

(train horn blows) - [Ruth] What could possibly compel thousands of people to flow into downtown St. Louis on a sweltering, muggy August day and stand in long lines to see something other than a Cardinals playoff game?

It was to see the World Champion of the railroad industry, Union Pacific's Big Boy Locomotive.

The largest steam locomotive in the world and retired for decades, the restored Big Boy was on display at the Amtrak Station August 29th, 2021.

St. Louis was one of the stops on a heritage tour of communities Union Pacific serves.

- [Dale] I've never seen anything like this.

- [Ruth] That's retired Union Pacific employee, Dale Larsen, reacting to the large turnout for Big Boy.

- I'm the third generation of four generations to work for Union Pacific.

- [Ruth] We'll have more on the Larsen family's history with Union Pacific in a moment.

First, Big Boy's backstory.

During World War II, Union Pacific acquired 25 of those locomotives.

Each weighed in at 1.2 million pounds.

They were used to haul heavy machinery in support of the war effort over the Wasatch Grade route, between Evanston, Wyoming and Ogden, Utah.

In 2013, one of the Big Boys still in existence, number 4014, was brought to the railroad's Cheyenne, Wyoming facility for restoration.

- Can everybody feel the heat off of that locomotive?

- [Ruth] Ed Dickens is Union Pacific's Manager of Heritage Equipment and Lead Engineer for Big Boy.

At a question and answer session during the St. Louis tour stop, Dickens explained how the railroad was able to replace unavailable parts for an historical industry icon.

- We make all those parts and we source them from the drawings that we have.

The Union Pacific was forward-thinking in 1975, they just didn't throw all of the old stuff in a dumpster.

Well luckily, nearly all of the steam locomotive blueprints were microfilmed, and very thankfully the Union Pacific Historical Society went through and very painstakingly scanned those drawings into a format that we can use today.

And that's how we are able to duplicate these components.

- He's the mover and shaker behind this locomotive.

- [Ruth] Dale Larsen is proud of Ed Dickens' leadership of the restoration, and of the heritage of a railroad that's employed four generations of the Larsen family, starting with Dale Larsen's great uncle Fred and Dale's grandfather, Andrew.

- [Dale] Andrew worked his entire 43 years for Union Pacific in the car department, the people who repair rail cars in Council Bluffs' yard.

Fred was the superintendent of the yard.

- [Ruth] Dale Larsen's father Blaine also put in 43 years with the railroad.

Pictured here with him are Dale, his twin brother, Don and older brother, Dan.

Dan became a conductor.

He worked at the old Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad before joining Union Pacific in engineering.

Dale started his career with the railroad in 1980 as a clerk.

- And then I was promoted up into the IT department and I traveled the country implementing computer systems for Union Pacific.

In 1984, we bought out the Missouri Pacific Railroad.

Guess what?

They had the best computer system in the world.

- [Ruth] Eventually, Larsen traveled the world training workers at foreign railroads that purchased the coveted state-of-the-art computer system.

He continued as a trainer until his retirement in 2010.

The fourth generation of Larsens at Union Pacific is represented by Dale's nephew, Todd.

He's a journeyman machinist in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

For decades, the Larsen's history has been intertwined with the railroad's history.

Union Pacific's Experience Car, a museum on wheels, toured the country with Big Boy.

Its exhibits highlighted landmark events like the completion of the transcontinental railroad.

Dale Larsen's knowledge in this industry is so extensive, he could have probably curated the Experience Car himself.

- And as you see, I'm still a proud Union Pacific person, even though I'm retired now.

- I've always been a railroad guy, I've loved trains.

All of us on the crew, everybody wanted to be a railroader.

So we're very fortunate, we're blessed that we have this opportunity.

- It's easy to find old films and photographs and memories of railroads.

They've been such a big part of everyday life in American history.

But there are other parts of our history that are more difficult to research and chronicle.

One example is the history of St. Louis's gay and lesbian community.

It's always been there, but it was for a long time secret, hidden, underground.

Brooke Butler on one man's efforts to set the record straight, or maybe we should rephrase that.

- [Brooke] How do you document events that have already happened?

Events that have not only already happened, but built around fluid identities with very little evidence left behind.

- We have very few records, public records, we have a few, of people who were what we would call today, out.

But most people lived in the shadows, and so we don't have, sadly, a lot of those histories.

- [Brooke] Documenting sexual and gender nonconformity has traditionally had a controversial reputation.

But local historian Steven Louis Brawley has committed a lot of his time to tracking down artifacts, photos, stories, all to preserve and promote the history of St. Louis's LGBTQ+ community.

- We have some amazing images that we have come across, some of these are in my book.

This one's pretty cool, it's a lesbian wedding from the 70s, you can kinda see the outfits.

But again, just...

I'd had some elder friends pass away and over the years they had told me these amazing stories and I just regretted not capturing those.

So I started this little blog about local LGBTQIA history, and it just became this forum for people to share stories and their memories and to start, "Well, I have some things, what do we do with them," and from that, the project just became this great community effort to preserve and promote our local history.

- Is St. Louis significant when you look at our country's LGBTQ+ history, does St. Louis stand out?

- St. Louis has an amazing LGBTQIA history that like a lot of history you have that sort of fly over state mentality of, you know, gay history is, "Oh, that's San Francisco" and "That's New York."

It's those big cities.

St. Louis was this mecca of people coming from rural areas to the urban area.

You can't use a modern prism of using the LGBTQIA alphabet to go back and say in 1840, this person would identify as trans or this person would be bisexual, 'cause those terminologies, those concepts, weren't there.

- [Brooke] In his book, "Images of America: Gay and Lesbian St. Louis," Steve highlights the people, places, events, and groups that we do have proof of for their significance in LGBTQ+ history.

Some might not have been recognized or celebrated at the time, either because of controversy for keeping documentation, or simply because those involved thought what they were doing wasn't anything significant.

And while the book covers a lot of ground, the LGBT Mapping project covers even more.

- St. Louis is rich with an inventory of LGBTQIA historic spaces, and it could be faith-based, it could be a business, it could have been a bar.

The mapping project that is being led by Washington University, at last count, they were pushing toward 900 locations on this map that you can go on the web and find a spot and click on it and learn more about it.

- [Brooke] One site in particular that's featured on the map recently put St. Louis on the map.

Trinity Episcopal Church in the Central West End was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, making it the first site in Missouri to be recognized for their historic support in the LGBTQ+ community.

In the late 1960s and early 70s, Trinity hosted monthly meetings for St. Louis's first gay rights group, the Mandrake Society.

The Mandrake Society provided general support for the gay community, in addition to legal aid, such as raising bail money for exact instances that Greg Smith found himself in one Halloween night in 1969.

- So Halloween 1969, a whole bunch of my friends and I were getting dressed up to go out for Halloween as women.

So we went and got all dressed up, we went down to a bar on Olive called the Onyx Room, - Yeah!

- Yeah.

- And at one minute after midnight, I was walking out, the police came and grabbed me and I think eight other people, threw us in the back of a paddy wagon.

And I had no idea why we were getting in this paddy wagon, until we got downtown, and then they said that they were charging us with masquerading.

Now remember, it was one minute after midnight on Halloween.

So I'm getting ready to leave, and the policeman says, "I'd take that wig off of you.

Take that wig off and walk outta here like a man."

I said, "In a purple dress and gold pumps?"

(crowd laughs) I don't think so!

I got out my compact, teased up my wig and said, "I'll walk out the way I came in!"

- [Brooke] It's stories like Greg's that Steve has found to be the best way to preserve our local LGBTQ+ history.

Many times he's encountered an instance where a disapproving family member would discard letters or photos, leaving only memories to rely on.

- When you get into oral histories, that's when the stories come out.

So a lot of folks will kinda think through "I was just living my life, I didn't think it was a big deal."

And then sometimes you'll see they start to talk about something and they kinda hit a wall, you can tell they're upset or it's triggering a memory because they've now thought about something they had maybe never thought about maybe being discriminated against, or being arrested or, you know, being bullied or harassed, or losing a partner without any support.

I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

- [Brooke] A more recent approach that Steve and the LGBT History Project is using to collect these oral histories is through a video series called "In Our Voices."

By gathering people associated with a particular group or place and just letting the cameras roll, the energy from this type of reunion gives a good sense of what it was like to be there in that time in history.

(upbeat pop music) - The Zebra Lounge reunion, which was a bar right down from College Church on Olive they had had a couple of reunions, and I went to them and, "Well gosh we should be really filming this, this is kinda cool."

And it was just an amazing experience, I was like "We're onto something."

That's a thing now, so we're gonna be continuing the series as long as we can keep up with the stories and they just keep coming to us, you know, all the time.

- [Brooke] The stories, the clothes, the photos, the posters, Steve says anything and everything is important to collect to shed light on those hidden histories.

Those histories that have an entire month devoted to spreading more awareness.

And in fact, we can thank fellow St. Louisan Rodney Wilson for creating LGBT History Month.

That's another story for another time, but Steve's hope is that one day these stories will become just a regular part of our history.

(upbeat music) - Maybe you saw the story of an old St. Louis family business being sold to a big national corporation, but the sale of Grossman Iron and Steel sent us to our archives, and the time Anne-Marie Berger went to the industrial riverfront north of downtown, where we saw what looked like just big piles of junk.

Little did we know.

(intense music) (machine rumbling) - Let's say Channel 9 wanted to, ooh, I don't know, invest in some new vans.

Well, one way to dispose of the old ones would be to bring them here, to Grossman Iron and Steel where in only seven seconds this 7-passenger, all-wheel drive van would become unrecognizable.

(intense music) Let me introduce you to Betty Jane, a machine that is powered by an 8,000 horsepower motor.

You see all these items here ready to be scrapped?

Well for Betty Jane, this is just a snack.

- [Cap] The machine's literally eating that material at the rate of 300 tons an hour.

So that's five times every 60 seconds.

(metal clanking) - Betty Jane and her car shredding capabilities are new to Grossman.

However, Grossman isn't new to the scrap industry or St. Louis.

It was in 1920 when Abraham Grossman started the business from scratch.

- He had one horse and one wagon, and he went around collecting junk, literally.

Some of it was scrap metal, some of it was hides and furs and bones and glass and things like that.

In the early 1920s, he kinda began to focus on scrap steel as his business.

And all that material will be redirected to... - This is Cap Grossman, he and his brother Skip, who was in Brazil looking at more equipment on the day I visited, are third generation proprietors of the family business.

A lot of people, you know, have family businesses, the family store, the family law firm, the family medical practice, and you have the family iron and steel company.

Is that something that was like, "Oh great I'm going into the family business" or... - There there was always a lot of resistance, but that sense of underlying manifest destiny was definitely there.

- Well let me tell you, this family scrap business is a lot more glamorous than at first glance.

(metal crunching) Okay, maybe glamorous isn't the right word, but it is really cool.

(upbeat music) Okay, so here's how it works.

Trucks come in carrying all this scrap and it gets weighed.

Now this scrap can fall into one of two categories, new and old.

- The first category is what we call industrial scrap.

And that comes from manufacturing plants.

It's oftentimes referred to as prompt scrap because it's delivered to the marketplace every day, they're stamping parts and machining things and fabricating things every day.

And we pick up that scrap and bring it into our plant to turn it into a product that's usable by the steel mills.

- [Anne-Marie] Uh, yeah.

I had Cap dumb that down for me just a little bit.

He compared it to something I understand.

Cookie dough.

You know how you can cut shapes into it and there's always something leftover?

Well unlike cookie dough, you can't eat these leftovers.

So they are brought here to be recycled.

- The other major category of scrap, we refer to as obsolete scrap.

And that is an overarching category that includes a lot of things that have lived their useful life out in society.

Cars, - That's the junk.

- Yeah well, some people call it junk.

And to many people it is, but it's recyclable for the most part.

And it comes to market, so to speak, at the end of its useful life.

When a car is worn out, it goes through a salvage process and then ends up at a facility like ours.

- [Anne-Marie] The salvage process is very important.

It's not just for retrieving workable parts, but for guaranteeing safety.

All the cars must be emptied of gas and Freon, basically anything that can cause an explosion.

Even batteries need to be removed.

If a battery is left in the car and the car meets Betty Jane, lead would be distributed into the product and they don't want to do that.

(machine whirring) These cars arrive at Grossman thoroughly salvaged, but they get tossed around a bit for good measure.

By doing this by the claws, is that a technical term?

Am I making that up?

- Well yeah, it's a grapple, but you can call it a claw.

- I'll call it a claw, when the claw comes in and does all that stuff, that's how they're inspecting it?

- That's correct, yeah.

- Okay.

- [Cap] They wanna make sure there's nothing hidden in the trunk, you know?

- [Anne-Marie] So once all the scraps have been picked clean, the real fun starts.

(upbeat music) (metal clanking) (upbeat music continues) And, there's the bus.

- [Cap] This machine fragmentizes.

And one of the benefits of doing that in addition to the densification, is that it frees all the material up so that it can then be sorted and the clean steel or metal can be classified and segregated while the trash and any contaminants can be removed.

- A gas cap?

- [Cap] And we'll find... - [Anne-Marie] Obviously Betty Jane sure can work, but she doesn't come cheap.

- A shredder of this size is 2 or $3 million, and all the support, conveyors and whatnot are 4 or $5 million, you know, the motor is a half a million to a million.

- [Anne-Marie] But there is an upside to that price tag, with this car shredder, Grossman's productivity has multiplied seven or eight times at a minimum.

So instead of running 25 to 30 tons of scrap an hour through their plant, they see 250 to 300 tons an hour through this machine.

Well how much is your electricity bill every month?

- As I was talking to you about earlier, we've only got one month of experience and I think the first bill was right around $28,000 and that was an experimental month, we haven't really ramped up.

- [Anne-Marie] But you hope that bill is bigger next month 'cause that means - Absolutely.

- You're doing more business?

- Right, yeah.

- [Anne-Marie] As quickly as it came in, the scrap is sent back out to become part of something new again.

- So by tomorrow, this may be in the furnace at the mill.

It'll be rolled into new steel, within a week it'll be at General Motors or Chrysler and it'll become a new car.

So, I mean, our guys like to think that we don't process scrap, we make Cadillac.

(upbeat music) - Finally, we're going to end with a song, but it's not just about the words and the music, the composer and the singers.

It's about the reason for the song and the people who inspired it.

- So soprano, ♪ We got to hold on And then, ♪ Be strong So it's the same pitch.

- [Ruth] Composer, choral director and vocal coach, Dr. Philip Woodmore is in his element, working with young singers to bring out the best in them.

♪ Here we weighed down with sorrow ♪ ♪ Here we are so deep in pain This rehearsal in April of 2021 was part of a recording session to capture two brand new Woodmore compositions.

He wrote them for a memorial concert honoring St. Louis area residents who've died from complications of COVID-19.

♪ We've got to hold on ♪ Be strong ♪ Pray for a better day Much of Woodmore's inspiration came from transcripts shared by the St. Louis History Museum, of families who had lost loved ones to COVID.

Their stories were meant to comfort others steeped in similar grief.

- And so I sat with those transcripts and really started to dig into what these people were saying, and then I was touched by how encouraging they were to other people.

So they encouraged me, you know, sitting in my home in my isolation, and having not dealt with any loss in my immediate family, but these people are encouraging other people.

And so I took those words and kind of compiled them into this song that I called "Our Story," which is one of the pieces.

♪ May the wind ♪ Rise to greet you - [Ruth] The other piece is titled "Requiem of Light."

It's the musical anchor of the memorial program, and Woodmore's first composition written specifically for a chorus.

- This piece is special to me because it's really just a piece of healing for those that need to take a moment and need to reflect and need to process what's going on.

I use the Requiem Mass, which is a traditional mass for the dead.

- The original venue for the "Requiem of Light" program was here at the Grand Basin in Forest Park.

Thousands of lanterns representing local victims of the pandemic were to line the perimeter of the Basin, but a forecast of severe thunderstorms the evening of October 2nd, forced concert producers to move at the last minute to the Sheldon Concert Hall.

♪ Peace unto you ♪ Love be with you ♪ Blessings be upon you There was powerful music and there were powerful messages from several speakers who have seen firsthand the damage inflicted by the pandemic.

The keynote was delivered by clergy member and community activist, Reverend Traci Blackmon.

- Even if we have not been touched by this trauma, we are humanized when we acknowledge and value and grieve the lives of others, especially those who are suffering.

Perhaps if we can learn to mourn 700,000 people, it won't become 1 million.

- [Ruth] "Requiem of Light" program producer and Washington University professor Rebecca Messbarger was gratified by the audience's response.

- My cousins came from Belleville and I have cousins who are nurses, and actually my cousin Kathy was just weeping.

You know, they have been through it with taking care of COVID patients and watching a lot of tragedy.

And I think just the acknowledgement that what they're doing is important and hard.

And then families have talked to me about how meaningful this was and how important it was to come together.

I could not ask for a more inspiring and beautiful evening.

♪ There is ♪ Light ♪ Light (audience cheering and applauding) - And that's "Living St.

Louis."

Thanks for joining us, I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we'll see you next time.

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

(lively music continues)