- He was a man of millions of dollars and few words, a man who was once in charge of the United States Army, but who is best remembered for a silver bowl called the Davis Cup, but the rest of the story is pretty much forgotten.

He not only changed how St. Louis played, but who could get into the game.

There is another story of a long, long climb from the toughest of beginnings to the very pinnacle of success and why with all the glory and the medals and fame around the world, did she come back home?

And what still makes Jackie run, she died thinking her greatest work was a failure, a controversial novel, dismissed as dirty and dangerous, but readers far into the future would discover her words and they would ask in astonishment, "How could she have known?"

They won the Nobel Prize for solving one of the great scientific puzzles of the day.

And that might not even be their most remarkable achievement.

Theirs is a story of inspiration, genius and love.

These are the stories of the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

For every star in the St. Louis Walk of Fame here in the University City Loop, somebody had to summarize in about a hundred words, some pretty amazing achievements in some pretty interesting lives.

We're going to be able to get a little deeper into just a few of these stories, and we've chosen people not just because of what they did, but because they left us something that continues to make a difference.

We start with an author who left us a little book called "The Awakening"," and a main character that people are still trying to figure out.

Edna Pontellier, the unhappy wife and mother who falls in love with one man, has an affair with another and ends up committing suicide.

A little book became something of an overnight sensation.

It's just too bad that by the time it happened, Kate Chopin had been dead for about 65 years.

It was around 1970 when feminists began to read this book, and they said, yes, this is what we're trying to say.

And they wondered who was this forgotten voice from the past?

Who was Kate Chopin?

- To me, she's great grandma and a lot of people, I've heard them say, well, she was so ahead of her time and how did she know?

You know, about the women's movement and this and that?

And I honestly don't think she was ahead of her time.

I think she was dealing with societal issues that we deal with today and that I guarantee they were dealing with a hundred years before her time.

- [Jim] She was born Catherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis in 1850.

It was a time when the city was recovering from a cholera epidemic, rebuilding from the great fire, and it was as busy as it had ever been.

Every day, a stream of newcomers was arriving on the riverfront, a lot of them heading to California where gold had just been discovered.

But inside this bustling, rough and tumble gateway to the American West was an older French settlement, and you could still hear it and see it.

Kate O'Flaherty was a product of this old and new St. Louis of old status and new money.

Her mother came from a French Creole family that had been here since the old trading post days.

Her father, Thomas O'Flaherty, was an Irish immigrant who had made his money supplying settlers, soldiers and prospectors.

They lived in a fine home.

They had a few slaves as servants and young Katie barely seen in this old faded photograph, was starting a proper education at the Sacred Heart Academy.

And then her life and the lives of many families in the city changed in a tragic instant.

In 1855, the Pacific Railroad had been extended from St. Louis all the way west to Jefferson City, and the first trip would be a great celebration of progress.

Thomas O'Flaherty was one of the many prominent citizens invited to ride on this inaugural run.

But when the train reached the Gasconade River, the new bridge collapsed.

Some 30 people were killed, many of them community leaders.

One of the dead was Thomas O'Flaherty.

You wonder in how many ways St. Louis's history changed that day.

What might have been accomplished, good or bad, if these men had lived, and what Kate Chopin's life might have been like if her father had survived.

But she would now be raised by three generations of widows who never remarried.

Her mother, grandmother, and a Creole great-grandmother who had her own ideas about men, women, marriage and independence.

- The great-grandmother really did oversee Kate's education.

And rather than making it a typical one, which might have been grooming a woman for marriage, she really wanted her to be exposed to everything.

You know, in terms of language and literature, but especially the history.

She had told her stories about early St. Louis where things were a little freer than they were in the 19th century.

- [Jim] Kate O'Flaherty graduated a top student from Sacred Heart.

She was a good writer, talented musician, clever and pretty.

And when she entered society, she was quite the center of attention at the social events at Oakland, the country estate of the Benoit family, where she was probably more than a match for most of the young men she met, those she wrote, "Who had nothing to say, and whose only talent was in their feet."

- If you read her commonplace book, she resented having to attend balls and parties, and she resented that.

But on the other hand, she played the role really well.

- [Jim] But there is nothing in her writings about the night she met a relative of the Benoit up from Louisiana about what attracted her to Oscar Chopin.

The man who courted her, married her in 1870 and took her away from St. Louis.

After a three month honeymoon in Europe, they set up house in New Orleans where Oscar was starting up in the cotton business.

Kate would spend the next 12 years in Louisiana, connected in background and culture, but still something of an outsider observing and exploring, but also busy with new responsibilities.

In the first 10 years of marriage, she would give birth to six children, five boys in New Orleans, and a girl when the family had to move after Oscar's business failed, they moved to the Chopin Family Estate in a small town in Natchitoches Parish, the heart of the Louisiana Creole plantation country.

Kate Chopin would later set many of her stories here, drawing on the people, language and customs.

In 1882, Oscar Chopin died of fever.

Kate stayed for a year, but the little town was not a place for an outsider, a widow with independent and worldly ways.

- She astonished people there with the kind of her, the freedom that she took, for example, to ride a horse down the street by herself, that kind of thing.

Maybe here because she was from St. Louis, she felt more comfortable.

So I would think that it was a practical decision on her part to have come home.

- [Jim] St. Louis in the 1880s was no longer the gateway to the frontier.

It was now a big city, a smoky industrial center filling with immigrants, but it was hardly a cultural backwater.

It had a vibrant, artistic, intellectual and literary life.

And it was here that Kate Chopin began to write.

She published some stories locally and then began to sell them to national magazines.

Her special specialty was the local color genre, her rich depictions of life in Louisiana.

As a popular national writer, she became something of a celebrity in St. Louis society.

She was known as a free spirit, a non-conformist who might smoke a cigarette now and again, and who drew some of the most interesting people in town to the weekly gatherings in her parlor.

- As far as I can gather from dad, it was a pretty interesting life.

Kate Chopin was a woman.

She enjoyed life to the hilt, and I think she enjoyed moderately shocking people.

- [Jim] In the mid 1890s, she published two collections of her Louisiana stories.

But even these pieces might deal with passion and sex and marriage and social taboos.

And we now see the seeds of "The Awakening" and the coming controversy.

When critics would object to this lady in St. Louis writing a book that read more like one of those objectionable French novels, Kate Chopin probably didn't see it coming.

She was just writing what she knew.

- She's not talking about New York, she's not talking about the Pilgrim father.

She's not dealing with ancestral Calvinism in the way that New England writers had to.

She's looking at a part of America, both in St. Louis and in Louisiana.

That is old world.

She goes into locale, but when she goes deep, she goes out the other side of the planet in a way into France and into the European background.

It's a part of her past that she's always ready to tap into.

- You've probably heard some version of the story about how when "The Awakening" came out, all of St. Louis was scandalized.

The book was banned from libraries, Kate Chopin kicked out of the ladies clubs and went into a deep depression and died.

Problem is, it's oversimplified, it's exaggerated, and in some ways it's not even true.

But there's no question a lot of people were shocked by what they read and they disapproved, but there's no need to beat up on St. Louis.

That was pretty much the reaction to "The Awakening" from all over the country.

And it's not just because of what Edna Pontellier does in this book.

I mean, it's not like the people of 1899 didn't know about these things.

You could read about that kind of thing every day.

Scandals involving sex, drugs, bigamy, murder, suicide.

The richer the people, the better the story.

But that was newspapers.

A lot of people thought books, novels should be better than that.

.In this age, before movies and television, popular fiction was considered by many to be what we would call family viewing.

Books should entertain and inspire, teach the right lessons, especially to young readers.

"The Awakening" was not that kind of book.

- It's ahead of its time if you compare it with popular writing, but the objections to a woman taken in adultery or something, that's really pretty old stuff.

And when people object to "The Awakening" sometimes what they're really talking about is an unhappy ending, is something that's morbid as they would say, or unhealthy or not exemplary.

- [Jim] In the end, the unhappy adulterous Edna swims off to her death.

But Kate Chopin doesn't pass judgment.

It was beautifully written, but there seemed to be no clear moral to this story.

- And it just has to do with the more realistic sense that closure in a novel is always artificial.

Happy ending is especially artificial, and Chopin doesn't give that to her readers.

- The review of "The Awakening" in the Post-Dispatch written by a friend of hers praised the writing, the intelligence, the maturity of the story.

It also warned that this was not a book for the young person who wouldn't understand it, or for the old person who has no relish for unpleasant truths.

And that was about as good a review as she would get if Kate Chopin was depressed by the national reviews, she had good reason.

"The Awakening" was called repellent, unpleasant, vulgar dismissed as sex fiction.

One reviewer called it gilded dirt.

Kate Chopin had written a critical and commercial failure.

She moved to this house on McPherson in 1902.

Some of her grown children were still living with her, but she wasn't writing much or getting published.

Some of her old spirit was gone and she was less active, but hardly a hermit.

And in 1904, when the World's Fair opened in Forest Park, not far from her home, Kate Chopin bought herself a season ticket.

- She was a woman who had loved life and she loved the world about her.

And when the World's Fair came to St. Louis, while that was her oyster, and she was over there just drinking in all these exotic sounds and everything.

- [Jim] After one long hot day at the fair that August, Kate Chopin came home complaining of a headache.

She slipped into a coma and died of a brain hemorrhage two days later at the age of 53.

- But it was that afternoon at the World's Fair, I believe that really did her in that, who knows what more she could have accomplished if she'd had more lives left in her, more years left in her life.

- [Jim] Kate Chopin left behind a lot more than a single great book because once scholars read her in the early '70s, they wondered if there weren't more forgotten women writers out there.

And there were.

- And now in fact, besides Kate Chopin, dozens, two dozens, three dozen of writers previously neglected whose voices are beginning to be heard just makes it a kind of emerging field.

And Kate Chopin is, I dunno if she's at the center of it, but her rediscovery in some ways really initiated the whole movement and made a lot of things possible after that.

This could be the base of certain kind of feminist reading.

- [Jim] "The Awakening" is now old news required reading.

Women's Lib is a chapter in these students' history books.

But the character Edna Pontellier is still giving rise to interpretations and arguments and raising questions.

And Kate Chopin is still refusing to offer easy answers.

- I think one of the reasons it'll still be read is that it's problematic.

- Chapter six.

- If it was just about, I don't know, women's liberation, if it was just about self discovery, I'm a poet, I'm an artist, ladi da, you might have a limitation of time on it.

Not just because of the costume or the setting, but really because there wouldn't be the quality of depth of puzzle.

The sense that generation by generation, somebody might discover something else in it.

I think it's got that possibility of a return by each generation of readers.

And for that reason, I would expect students, critics, scholars to be reading it for a long time.

- There are three couples sharing stars on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

I and Tina Turner, by the way, got separate stars in separate years.

Those appearing together are Dred and Harriet Scott, the slaves who sued for their Freedom Masters and Johnson, who studied human sexuality and a couple whose names are probably not quite as familiar.

Carl and Gerty Cori, they won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1947, which is pretty impressive.

But beyond that, they were really quite remarkable and memorable people.

They were dedicated to science, they were dedicated to teaching and they were dedicated to each other.

- The thing which being an only child I realized was that they truly loved one another.

Great model, great thing for a child to grow up seeing people that liked one another and had a good time together.

- Most of us are a combination of outstanding people who've influenced our careers.

And I was very fortunate.

I have had a number of outstanding mentors, but none could approach the Coris.

They were the most impressive people I've ever met.

- [Jim] Theirs was a true partnership, a personal and scientific elaboration that had started years before in another city on another continent.

They had both been born into families of culture and education at the end of the old century, in one of the great old cities of Europe, Prague, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they both to medical school in the city's famous university.

That's where Carl Cori and Gerty Radnitz met, and where they both decided that rather than practice medicine, they wanted to do research and they wanted to do it together.

- Well, my grandfather, that is my mother's father, toward the end of his life, became diabetic.

And he said to his daughter, who was a doctor, find me a cure.

And that allegedly so says the family myth is why they started to work on sugar.

And so they were interested really in their whole life, in sugar metabolism, how sugar is used in the body and then, and then any diseases that related to that.

- [Jim] By the time they graduated from medical school and got married in 1920, the old Europe of their childhood had been torn apart by the Great War, there were new countries and new borders, economies had been laid to waste.

There were refugees and widespread hunger throughout central Europe.

There was ethnic and political unrest as democracy, communism and fascism battled for supremacy, it was a difficult and uncertain time to start a career and plan a future.

Although Carl was able to find a position at an Austrian university.

- But Carl knew that Gerty who was Jewish, didn't stand in a chance of getting appointed.

Indeed, he was one of his mentors who he described as brilliant, but antisemitic would never give her an appointment.

So they decided to come to this country and never regretted it.

- [Jim] They came to America in 1922 to work at a medical institute in Buffalo, New York, where they began their groundbreaking research and where they became US citizens.

In 1931, the Washington University School of Medicine offered them the opportunity to give even greater attention to their research.

Actually, they offered the opportunity to Carl, but he made it clear that even though the university had a policy against appointing spouses, they would have to find a position for Gerty as well.

And they did.

- He had demand it.

I mean, she wanted it, but he was the one who really sought to, you want me?

You're gonna take my wife.

That was the best deal we ever made.

- [Jim] Carl Cori was once advised that it was un-American to have his wife working with him and that it would hurt his career.

But this was not the case of the brilliant doctor and his assistant.

These were two brilliant doctors, and both of them knew that they could achieve more together than they could on their own.

- They were a remarkable pair.

Gerty would have flights of fancy, she'd come up with extraordinary ideas.

Cori had the ability to put them into concrete questions to answer, and therefore, as a team, they were extraordinary.

- And neither one of 'em slept very much because I think when you have that kind of mind, it's pretty hard to turn it off.

In I was born in 36 and allegedly my mom dashed over to a maternity hospital, had me and dashed back again because she was doing some pretty interesting work.

- [Jim] It had been known for a long time that the human body stored sugar as glycogen, and then when energy was needed, it broke it down into glucose to be burned as fuel.

Without the advanced laboratory technology available today, the quarry's designed experiments and invented new techniques that would enable them to break down and define the complex sequence of chemical reactions.

They then replicated the process, synthesizing glycogen in a test tube.

The Nobel Committee called that Beyond Doubt, one of the most brilliant achievements in modern biochemistry.

- So they isolated some of the key enzymes involved in how you use glucose and worked out the systems in which they operate.

That forms the basic training we give second year, as a matter of fact, kids learn in high school that stuff.

- [Jim] In 1947, the Cori's got some news from Stockholm, Sweden.

They had been awarded the Nobel Prize.

- And I can remember this.

They got a phone call and it was early in the morning, probably at seven o'clock.

And obviously whatever had happened had excited them greatly and they were in high spirits.

- [Jim] When the news was made public, the university insisted they hold the news conference that day and they told newspaper reporters, they were pleased, overwhelmed, and too busy to celebrate.

The report in the Post-Dispatch said they were modest and seemed in a polite way as if they'd like to be getting back to work.

Gerty, who was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize, was described as charming but shy.

- Gerty wouldn't tolerate anything.

Gerty was gracious, but you knew Gerty was not to be pushed around.

- What was it like being a woman in academia?

I never heard my mother complain.

I never heard her say anything that was negative.

She was just very thankful that she had this chance to do things and do things that she loved.

And I think she was very happy to have had that.

- They were among the greatest scientists of their generation.

They were also among the greatest teachers.

Six people who worked in the Cori's lab here at the WashU Medical School would go on to win their own Nobel prizes.

Six more Nobel laureates.

That's an astonishing achievement.

One of them would recall that the highest praise a young scientist could get in the Cori's lab was for Gerty to call you a good worker.

They chose just a few young promising scientists to work in their small laboratory.

They welcomed input and comment.

They were generous in giving credit where it was due and the place was bubbling with ideas and discussions.

- [Jim] And Carl was a fabulous intellect.

Carl never forgot anything he ever read.

He spoke about six or seven languages.

He remembered his Latin and Greek from his classic training in Hungary in Prague.

And whenever you would talk to him, you had his full attention.

- My mother, both of them were voracious readers.

My dad read poetry, literature and history, and my mother read novels, poetry and history, politics.

And she borrowed books from the old Mercantile Library, five a week on a steady diet.

- And we'd all sit around eating lunch and then we'd have esoteric discussions about art, music, politics.

And anybody who was famous in biochemistry would visit.

They were always invited to lunch.

So the young graduate students and the postdocs would be sitting there eating their sandwich.

That was an environment which was purely intellectual and stimulating.

- [Jim] The year they won the Nobel Prize, Gerty Cori was diagnosed with a rare disease.

And this woman who had always loved the outdoors, loved hiking in the mountains of Europe and America would grow progressively weaker over the coming years.

But the commitment and devotion the couple had forged years before was there till the end.

- And at one point she got so weak, she had trouble walking down the corridor.

And you'd hear her yell out, Carly, he get up, walk down and pick her up and walk her back for lunch.

I mean, it was an extraordinary pair and it had its effect on everybody that was working there.

- [Jim] Gerty Radnitz Cori died in 1957.

Carl Cori later moved to Harvard where he continued to do research until his death in 1980.

They had made major discoveries, which have been put to use in countless ways that will live on, less obvious and perhaps soon to be forgotten altogether are the contributions they made as teachers and mentors of the next generation of scientists, the next generation of medical discoveries.

These were the partners behind the prize.

Nobel Prizes are usually awarded years after the work is completed.

But in sports, the rewards come right away.

You win the game, you win the race, you get a trophy, you get a medal.

And a lot of athletes struggle with the question, what now?

When you St. Louis native Jackie Joyner-Kersee always knew the answer to that one.

She won six Olympic medals, three of them gold, the world's greatest female athlete.

You might think she succeeded in spite of being born and raised here in East St. Louis.

But her version of the story is that she succeeded because of East St. Louis, because of the community and the people in it.

And so, the answer to the question to what now was simply, now I go back home.

♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ ♪ Happy birthday dear Jackie ♪ ♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ (audience applauding) - I thank you for all the cards and you could talk about 40, but I'm feeling great.

(audience applauding) East St. Louis has always been home, and that was the foundation.

And growing up, I always knew that wherever my successes may have taken me, that I will always come back home.

- [Jim] The beginning wasn't promising.

Jackie was born in 1962 in East St. Louis, Illinois.

Just as the city was beginning to be abandoned, losing population, industry and business.

Jackie would grow up in what would become one of the most disadvantaged cities in America.

She was the second of four children born to a couple of teenagers.

Her mother had been just 16, her father 14 when they started their family, they lived with Jackie's great-grandmother in a small home on Pickett Avenue.

This is how it looked years later, after it was gutted by fire and before it was torn down.

It wasn't much, but it was a home.

There was love, there was discipline, there just wasn't always heat.

- I remember when we used to have to like sit in the kitchen and turn the gas stove on, and we was all in there.

You know, we used to have to put these green blankets around it because we had a couple windows where it was broke.

- The rule in the Joyner home was when the street lights came on, you came inside.

The neighborhood with its street corner pool, hall, and liquor store.

Could be rough, but it was their world and it was their playground.

And then in 1969, there was a new place for the kids of East St. Louis to go the Mary Brown Community Center.

And it changed Jackie's life.

She was seven years old and remembers herself as a human sponge.

- It was those people over there that was like our extended family.

And the doors was always open to all of us.

And it was just really, really a place to go that kept you outta trouble and that your parents felt secure enough to know where you were all at all times.

The center exposed me to things that I went on there, been exposed to like the library arts and craft, learning how to be a dancer.

Those things I went exposed to having a mentor that would take us to the symphony to see the opera, take us to the Cardinal Games.

- Jackie started doing dancing, and then we start doing karate, and then we start traveling with, then they start having these women's sports programs.

- [Jim] When Jackie was 10 years old, she signed up for the Center's track program, figuring if her legs were strong enough for dancing, they'd be strong enough for running races.

And that was the start of it all.

This was the place.

And these were the people like the young track coach, Nino Fennoy, who taught her about winning and losing.

They would send her on her way and they would earn her lasting loyalty.

- He would always be my friend, my mentor, my dad in a sense, because at a very young age, he saw something in me that I didn't know I had.

- Jackie wasn't the first one to cross the finish line in her initial years of competition, but she was very, very, very determined to stay the course defeat only energized.

- [Jim] Jackie began to excel in track and field, and people began to take notice.

Her brother Al, was a little jealous at all the medals and trophies she was bringing home.

So he decided to challenge her to a race.

- And it was a close race, but Jackie beat me.

And that day on, I think suddenly I became, I was one of Jackie's biggest fans because I made all my friends go to all her volleyball games, basketball games, and track meet.

You know, I had never went to that many women in sports events until Jackie.

- [Jim] At East St. Louis's Lincoln High School.

Jackie started breaking records, local, state, and national records.

She played on the state championship girls basketball team.

She was named the St. Louis Globe Democrats girl athlete of the year, three years in a row.

When she graduated from high school in 1980, Jackie Joyner could have left East St. Louis and never looked back.

It was a good time to be a top female athlete.

Title IX had just passed and universities had to treat women's sports programs equal to men.

Jackie got a full ride to UCLA to play basketball, and she ran track as well.

She was fulfilling one of her mother's dreams, not for her kids to play sports, but for her kids to go to college.

One of the tragedies of her life was that her mother never got to see her graduate.

Her freshman year, Jackie's mom contracted a deadly bacterial infection.

Jackie came home to East St. Louis where she and her brother Al had to make the decision to take her off life support.

Mary Joyner was just 38 years old when she died.

- The biggest challenge in my life, and I've always looked at my life as being a challenge, is really losing my mom.

Because you think your mom gonna live forever.

- And she was very wise.

We had a very special mom.

She taught us so many things that she said.

She start always said that I may not be here one day, so you tell me that I was right, but I'm gonna prepare you.

Treat people how you wanna be treated, and you'll go a long way in life.

- [Jim] While Jackie was home for her mother's funeral, she received another shocking blow, another loss.

The place whose doors had always been open to her, the Mary Brown Center was now closed permanently.

- And I remember going over to the center, to maybe go shoot some basketball, do something, something different, just get outta the atmosphere of people being depressed and down.

But when I went there, the doors were padlock and I was like, wow.

Woo, that was devastating, you know?

'Cause I'm like, where do the kids go?

- [Jim] After her mother's funeral, Jackie went back to UCLA that same year she met Bobby Casey, who became her new track coach, and later, her husband.

He helped turn the young college track star into a world class athlete.

(gun shot thudding) In her first Olympics in Los Angeles in '84, she won a silver medal in the Heptathlon.

Al Joyner won a gold in the triple jump.

The kids who had raced each other on Pickett Avenue became the first brother and sister to win Olympic medals in track and field.

Jackie was still a champion long jumper, but it was her all around skills in the seven different events of the grueling heptathlon that would shatter world records and earn her the title of the world's greatest female athlete of her generation, perhaps of all time.

Although she suffered from asthma, she competed in four different Olympic games, medaled six times the world, grew to love watching her run and fly and smile.

- I would say that Jackie is as responsible as almost anybody that you can think of, for putting women's athletics at the level where they are today.

So she was blazing trails then, but she was doing something else.

She was giving women's athletics some femininity that it wasn't used to, and particularly in track and field.

- [Jim] They cheered for Jackie all over the world, and they always cheered in East St. Louis.

Because from the start, Jackie always shared the credit and shared the glory with the people back home.

- We were all gathered around the TV and when we realized that our little Jackie Joyner-Kersee, had won a gold medal, people were rejoicing, there were tears of joy.

And the one thing that I remembered so very well that remains in my mind is when they had the closing ceremony, the Olympic ceremonies, and we were all waiting to see Jackie come through.

And when she came through, she was carrying a sign in her hand that says, "I love you East St. Louis," which says to me that she has never forgotten where she came from.

- [Jim] Jackie is retired from competition.

She is a businesswoman with a sports marketing firm.

She is busy with personal appearances and motivational speeches.

Bobby is still in demand as a coach.

- [Announcer] We gotta do one lap.

- [Jim] But she has never been so busy that she forgot those padlocked doors of the Mary Brown Center back home, the place that changed her life.

And she never let go of the dream that the kids of East St. Louis would again have some place to go.

They had become rich and famous.

She and Bobby could have lived anywhere they wanted, but he always knew where they'd be going and what they were going to do.

- When Jackie wanted to do something for her community, it was more than just the athlete.

It was more than just the person that grew up there.

It was just more than my wife.

It was a person that had a personal commitment that I need to try to utilize my name, my resources, my influence.

And when I saw that commitment being married to her coaching, her being a part of her life, obviously I had to make that commitment right along with her.

- [Jim] In 1998, the money had been raised and the ground was broken on the $6 million, Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center.

(audience applauding) - Miracle 25th Street.

- 1, 2, 3.

- [Jim] 2 years later, Jackie's dream came true and doors were once again open to the kids of East St. Louis.

- Not a whole lot, just a bit stay shape.

- [Jim] The main mission of the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Center is to provide a safe place for kids to go.

It offers not just athletic activities, but academic, health, cultural, and artistic programs.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee hasn't simply lent her name to this Boys and Girls Club.

She and Bobby play a visible and an active role supporting, mentoring and inspiring a new generation of kids.

This kind of help changed her life and now she wants to do the same.

- They is gonna be her greatest legacy of what she, how many lives she done change.

Jackie just don't know how many people's lives she has touched people that she don't even know.

- And I think that she realizes that her blessings come from giving.

- [Jim] It is a generous gift, but it is also a debt repaid.

- This is something that I always knew I would do, and I always wanted to do this.

This is what I live for.

- There was a time when there weren't very many rags to richest stories in sports because most of the people who were playing in private clubs and competing in the Ivy League.

Dwight Davis was just that kind of gentleman sportsman, but he was also a guy who brought sports and competition to a lot of working class people in St. Louis.

It's just that he's not much remembered for that or for being the US Secretary of War or the Governor General of the Philippines.

What Dwight Davis is best remembered for is the Davis Cup, the trophy that he gave to tennis in 1900, he's that Davis.

Don't feel bad if you don't know much about him.

Even his biographer really didn't know what she was getting into.

- I was amazed to find out that he had had this fascinating life after tennis because he gave the cup when he was such a young man that he had this great stretch of time that he did all kinds of interesting things.

And these days, nobody knows anything about him.

- Oh, I knew him personally.

I got to know him fairly well, and I enjoyed him very much because he was a hell of a good guy, I thought.

- [Jim] Dwight Davis spent much of his life in public service to his community and his country, and he didn't have to do any of it.

He really didn't have to do anything.

He'd been born into one of St. Louis's wealthiest families.

The Davis family money had come from his grandfather's Dry Goods business, which had grown into this big headquarters building in the heart of downtown St. Louis.

In 1893, when Dwight was 14, his father built this mansion in what was the new elite neighborhood of the city, the private places of the Central West End.

Dwight and his brothers were growing up with the best of everything, private schools, clubs, and summers in Seaside Resorts where everybody was playing a new English game called lawn tennis.

- And that's where he learned the game.

And all of the young men who were playing were of a class that had the leisure to play these games.

- [Jim] It was when he went off to Harvard that Davis became one of the top tennis players in the country winning two national doubles titles with his partner Holcomb Ward.

Their success was due in part to their development of a new kind of powerful spinning serve.

- It hadn't been all that long ago that they'd been practically serving underhanded.

So these young Americans were turning the serve into a very strong weapon.

And it's hard to believe that that was the first time it had been seen that way.

When we look at how tennis players usually serve these days.

- Oh, he was a good darn good tennis players.

He had a very good second serve, which was very good way, whale of a cut, and it was hard to get, hard to get back.

- [Jim] But when Dwight Davis was at the top of his game, tennis was declining in popularity.

He and others thought it needed some kind of boost in public interest.

And one idea was an international competition with a trophy like America's Cup in sailing.

So Davis paid $750 out of his own pocket for the creation of this big silver bowl.

The International Lawn and Tennis Challenge trophy, what his friends dubbed Dwight's Pot and what we call the Davis Cup.

In 1900, the all Harvard American team, including Dwight Davis, challenged and defeated Great Britain in the very first tournament.

Dwight Davis would see in his own lifetime that Davis Cup competition achieve what he had hoped, an event with international participation and popular interest.

And he would forever be known as the Davis Cup Davis, no matter what else he did.

- I think he hoped he had made some additional contributions to government and to the world.

And I think he was always, it was a little rueful at some points I think, about how all anybody really knew was the cup.

- [Jim] Today, the tennis center in Forest Park is named for Dwight Davis, not just because of the Davis Cup or because he was Secretary of War, but because of the years between Harvard and Washington, the years he spent back home in St. Louis, he had come back to go to law school, but he never really became a lawyer and didn't really need a job.

But there were a lot things a rich, well connected young man could do in the city.

Boards and committees to serve on, and of course there was politics and Dwight Davis was coming back home to St. Louis at a very exciting time in this city's history.

St. Louis was getting ready for the World's Fair, and it was working hard to clean up its image.

An anti-corruption campaign was being led by the circuit Attorney Joseph Folk and government and business leaders were being indicted for bribery and corruption.

There was also a push to do something about the terrible conditions in the city's slums.

A lot of this reform was spearheaded by women, social workers and reformers backed by well-to-do society ladies like Dwight Davis's mother.

She was involved in the group that was pushing to have playgrounds built in the overcrowded city neighborhoods and to build and operate public bathhouses.

Dwight got involved and he began to make a real difference, not so much as an innovator or a visionary, but as the man who could make things happen.

- In some ways, Dwight Davis ends up behaving, I think, as much like the wives of businessman as he does a businessman himself.

I think that one of the things that's really important about him is his position in St. Louis society.

You know, again, he has the wealth to give his time to the public, and that's very important.

He also though, has the connections to get things done.

He knows how to play the game, which is something that the women who set up the Vacation Playground Association didn't know how to do.

- [Jim] The real spark plug in the reform movement in St. Louis was Charlotte Rumbold, who had investigated overcrowding and unhealthy conditions in city slums and campaigned for playgrounds, bathhouses, and summer youth programs.

She found in Davis an important ally in the fight for change.

They both believed that outdoor recreation would make healthier and better citizens.

When Davis became the city's parks commissioner in 1911 with Rumbold as secretary, they built ball fields in public tennis courts and set up citywide baseball and soccer leagues.

No longer were parks, places to be gazed at and strolled through.

Dwight Davis took out the keep off the grass sides.

He said, if it came down to a choice between people and grass, he'd sacrifice the grass.

- He manages to allow those things to happen, provides funding for them, and it's a push that otherwise they wouldn't have gotten from the people at the top.

- [Jim] It was under Dwight Davis's guidance that the rebuilding of Forest Park after the World's Fair was completed.

It had the landscaped in pretty places, but Davis also filled much of the rest of the park with his public ball fields, tennis courts, and a golf course.

Although some, but not all racial barriers were still in place.

There was much greater emphasis on public access and use, and there was much greater economic and social diversity now in the city's parks.

- And he even noticed that a lot of the people who were out there playing golf and tennis were doing it in work clothes and some of them even barefoot.

And he thought that was a good thing.

This is something that a lot of his elite friends didn't approach the quite the same way.

- [Jim] In 1914, Davis and Rumbold organized the pageant and mask an epic production and Forest Park portraying the history of St. Louis.

It was the biggest event in the city since the World's Fair, everyone was invited and 400,000 people came.

- Dwight Davis ends up being one of the driving forces behind a new patriotism among all classes and all ethnicities in the city in terms of belief in the their own city.

And calling St. Louis their own city.

- [Jim] Charlotte Rumbold said, "The city that plays together shall work together."

That was Rumbold's philosophy, and it was Davis's job.

By the time he left the job in 1915, this man who had a private tennis court behind his mansion on a gated street had helped democratize St. Louis' parks.

- You know, that was one of the things that people said about him having attended a series of private schools, he comes out a nice guy, and I think that that's one of the reasons why he was able to do so much work.

And it seems to us today, like so much of it is behind the scenes when again, he could have stood in the way of so many projects, regardless of who they belong to.

And he didn't, regardless of who started them.

- [Jim] It's typical of Dwight Davis that when America entered World War I in 1917, he answered the call at the age of 36 and ended up not behind a desk, but at the front.

He ended the war a lieutenant colonel with a distinguished service cross awarded for extraordinary heroism and courage in battle.

He also saw some action on the tennis courts of France.

He played in this army tournament while he was waiting to be shipped home after the war.

It seemed that Davis, this athlete, businessman, civic leader, and war hero should go back home and run for public office.

But he was a man who thought his record should speak for itself.

- He never posted about himself.

He was rather shy that way.

- [Jim] In 1920, he entered the Missouri Senate race, lost in the Republican primary and never campaigned for office again.

Davis got to Washington anyway, appointed by the new Republican administration to serve on a federal board.

In 1923, president Calvin Coolidge named him Assistant Secretary of War.

His job fixed the problems America had had mobilizing private industry in World War I. Davis was after all a man who knew boardrooms and battlefields.

- He saw so many shortages of shoes, of harnesses, of even horses while he was serving in France, that he felt from personal experience that it was crucial that the country be ready the next time with suppliers.

- [Jim] The result was the army industrial college where officers would be trained not in battlefield tactics, but in procurement and supply.

Typically, it wasn't Davis's idea, he was just the one who made sure that it got done.

- Whatever he was interested in, he pushed and so on in a quiet manner.

He was quiet in the way he went about things.

- Davis also was serving as the president of the US Lawn Tennis Association, and he got President Coolidge out on the White House lawn in 1924 to draw the pairings for the Davis Cup competition.

Davis would make more controversial headlines the following year.

The issue was American Air Power and the relentless criticism of the army by Colonel Billy Mitchell for failing to build the Air force he was convinced would be key to winning the next war.

Mitchell was a popular public figure, and he was right in much of what he was saying.

In 1925, Davis.

Now the acting Secretary of War ordered Billy Mitchell discipline for his scathing public accusations about his superiors.

The court marshal and special hearings were front page news and Davis's cool testimony and handling of the explosive situation helped convince Coolidge to promote him to full Secretary of War.

Davis was a man who would take the heat for the president, but never steal the limelight.

- Well, I think Davis was really very secure in his position in life, and I think he was very comfortable letting other people take the credit.

And when people would talk about his war service, he would talk about, oh yes, but the rest of the men were, they were all valiant.

- [Jim] In 1928, secretary Davis and two of his daughters set off on an official tour of the American Pacific Territory, the Hawaiian Islands.

It was a leisurely on the USS Pennsylvania with Army Signal Corps photographers capturing the athletic secretary in a game of deck tennis.

During the visit, he inspected troops and barracks, attended receptions and a traditional Hawaiian feast, and he hit a golf ball into a volcano.

(audience applauding) Dwight Davis wasn't going to make much history as a Secretary of War during peace time and isolationism, but it was more than a job of tours and public appearances, like this demonstration of a pre Jeep rough terrain vehicle riding up the steps of the Army War College.

Davis did promote development of technology, including tanks, and he laid the groundwork for the mobilization, which would help win the next war.

- And get the job done.

That's a pretty good way of expressing it, and he'd work on whatever he was doing.

He'd go at it and see to it, and you could depend upon him.

- [Jim] And that's why Dwight Davis ended up halfway around the world.

In Manila, in 1929, the new president, Herbert Hoover, sent him here to be the Governor General.

The United States had controlled the Philippines since the Spanish American war and had mixed feelings about being a colonial power, promising independence on the one hand, and battling freedom fighters on the other.

30 years later, when Davis arrived, independence was still just a promise.

Davis's job was to balance American military and economic interests in the Pacific, but not at the expense of the Filipino economy or its hopes for independence.

This was a job that was hard to do well, easy to screw up the perfect job for Dwight Davis.

- He had a nice attitude about working with people from other cultures.

And I don't think you always found that in American politicians of that era.

For instance, he started having these fine Filipino players come over and play with him on the courts there at the Malacañang Palace in Manila.

And the Filipino people were just so impressed by this.

He said, I just did it because I wanted good exercise.

But it has had benefits way out of proportion to what I did.

- [Jim] It was consistent with his whole life.

In Manila, at Harvard, back home in St. Louis, Dwight Davis was a believer that good things can come from people playing together, from competition between neighbors and neighborhoods, cities and countries.

The Davis Cup was just the first and most famous example.

Teams from all over the world are still playing for that cup.

And tennis players are not for themselves, but as representatives of their countries exactly what Dwight Davis had meant it to be.

He died in 1945, a few months after the war ended at the age of 66.

He started his life as one of the richest kids in town, and he might have ended up with nothing more than a big, impressive tomb overlooking St. Louis, a monument to the wealth and position that he was born into.

Instead, his grave is marked by a much simpler stone in Arlington National Cemetery.

Well, these are just a few of the stories on the St. Louis Walk of fame.

We hope you've enjoyed getting to know a little better who some of these famous St Louisianans are and why they're here.

(upbeat music)