by Mary Poletti
Perhaps nothing validates the existence of St. Louis as much as the famous people who hail from the area. You’d be hard pressed to find another town larger than, oh, I don’t know, Jefferson City that so values its famous native sons and daughters, no matter how trivial their fame or tangential their connection to the Gateway City.
St. Louis Walk of Fame (magazinUSA.com)
No one will deny the cultural contributions of some of St. Louis’ most famous products: Tennessee Williams, Joseph Pulitzer, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, and more. In the lower tiers of celebrity, though, we are all too quick to claim and honor our own. When I was a kid, a high-profile billboard on Highway 40, the one in front of the old Pumping Station G gasometer on Newstead, advertised the classic sitcom Roseanne with a grinning picture of John Goodman and the words “The Big Man from LA (Lower Affton).” Still more recently, there’s The Office‘s Pam Beesly, Nerinx Hall and Truman State grad Jenna Fischer, the female lead on a show beloved or possibly lamented by millions for popularizing ubiquities like “That’s what she said” (my trivia team would have no collective identity if it weren’t for that one). Don’t think for a minute that there’s a St. Louis rock fan who doesn’t still, on some level, mourn the breakup of The Urge (why else do you think so many people still go to former frontman Steve Ewing’s shows?) or tune into Christian music just to hear Jars of Clay, who got their start down the road at Greenville College. And not even Wild Wild West could diminish St. Louis’ love for Kevin Kline. Much.
We’re especially inclined to love people who show their love for St. Louis. A little later in my life, there was, of course, Nelly, and my first view of him, an iconic split-second shot from below of him rapping with the unmistakable silver curve of the Arch splitting the blue sky above his head. St. Louis’ love for Nelly and other Gateway City rappers like Chingy and Murphy Lee, I’d argue, is based on their willingness to shout his pride for St. Louis from the rooftops, the same way 2Pac did for southern California or Jay-Z does for New York. Look, guys! We can be a big-shot hip-hop city, too! There’s also good old Uncle Tupelo, precursor to Wilco, who have a common denominator in Belleville, Ill., native Jeff Tweedy; Wilco’s repertoire includes tunes like “Casino Queen,” Laclede’s Landing tribute “Heavy Metal Drummer,” and my personal favorite, the Belleville lament “Sky Blue Sky.” The highly prized St. Louis shout-outs aren’t limited to music, either. Kitschy art mainstay Mary Engelbreit, the visual art equivalent of a Vera Bradley bag, is loved nowhere as much as she is in her native St. Louis (my high school volleyball coach once pointed out her house on the bus ride to an away match in Ladue) because she creates so much art about St. Louis and for causes like the St. Louis Public Library. Spielberg spouse Kate Capshaw, in her one notable movie role as Indiana Jones’ female foil in Temple of Doom, gives a shout-out to Missouri at the end of the movie. And in a remarkable wink to her hometown, Karen Allen, who pretty much hasn’t aged since Raiders of the Lost Ark, played the female lead in a 1987 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, which is set in St. Louis. Well, actually, even though my dad swears she’s from Webster Groves, Karen Allen is from Carrollton, Ill., which is a solid 50 miles north of St. Louis, but whatever — it’s close enough for most St. Louisans to claim her.
St. Louis’ love of sports merges perfectly with the city’s love of its own to enshrine its native athletes as minor gods. I’m looking at you, various mid-20th-century Cardinals and Browns. You, too, Mizzou football standout and Philadelphia Eagles rookie Jeremy Maclin. The first glimpse of a Maclin Eagles jersey in Missouri set many hearts aflutter: Make us proud, our dear Kirkwoodian!
Oh, and God forbid a St. Louisan should show up on a reality TV show. The first Bachelorette was the jilted Trista, whom my Chesterfield-reared college roommate swears her sister knew in high school. And if Kansas City is still gripped by David Cook fever two years after his win (I’m not kidding — the Examiner, the community paper of record in the eastern suburbs of Kansas City, still had a David Cook section on its Web site when I profiled the paper for a media management class last semester), can you imagine what St. Louis would have done if Cardinals great Ozzie Smith’s son, Nikko Smith, had won American Idol?
It’s not just about the Walk of Fame in U City. It’s not just about cheering for a St. Louis shout-out in pop culture. It’s about knowing that people who grew up in the same place we did, who at one time called home the same place we called home, got out there and made some kind of cultural contribution. Um, such as it may have been.
Mary Poletti is a journalist and graduate student in Columbia, Mo., a native of Belleville, Ill., and a former resident of Maplewood and the City’s North Hampton neighborhood. She wishes St. Louis would have shown a little more loyalty to Stir.
stuff st. louisans like 