St. Louis
I am from St. Louis Missouri – an odd town where everything is 20 minutes away from everything else, and people act like its a small town when in fact 1.5 million people live in the metro area. When I was a teen, I couldn’t wait to leave the place. It wasn’t cool enough for me, nor as cosmopolitan as Chicago. Even during my twenties after I had left the place behind I had nightmares of being stuck there.
Well, here I am pushing middle age and I haven’t lived there in close to twenty years. So why do I get freaky when I learn that Tradesports is ranking the St. Louis Cardinals as the favorite of the 2004 World Series? Is it because I can still hear Jack Buck’s voice, “Here’s the windup, and the pitch… He struck ‘im out!” or Mike Shannon recommending KMOX listeners to pop open an ice cold Busch?
Maybe it’s because you can take the boy out of the town, but you can’t take the town out of the boy. Will I be doomed forever to mix up my “ar” and “or”, so that when I say words like “horse”, “corn”, and “born” I sound just like my Irish immigrant ancestors who settled in St. Louis in the 1840s? Will Ted Drewes be the standard by which I judge all soft ice cream or frozen custard forever?
I would trade Krispy Kreme for Steak and Shake, and the wide open stretches of 55 for the claustrophobic 95 in a heartbeat. I would rather have a house in Ladue than the Philly Mainline any day. The haughty attitudes of the New York Times and Washington Post are annoying, compared to the mainstream Post Dispatch (and oh, if only the Globe Democrat were back from the dead…)
There’s a certain humility, naivete and frankness the combination of which you don’t find anywhere else. What you see is what you get, and St. Louisans don’t understand that the people outside of their area aren’t like that.
St. Louis suffers from tornadoes in the summer, and heavy snow in the winter. Globalization has taken away its industries and employers, yet it stubbornly persists and even better, thrive. Its son, Dick Gephardt stands as a symbol for what the city is: honest, hard working, polite and underappreciated. Gephardt deserves to be president just like St. Louis deserves to be celebrated for what it is: a wonderful place to live. It’s also a wonderful place to be from too.
So go Cardinals!
