No joke: It was a Saturday evening—the weekend before shipping this magazine—and I was at home with my wife, working at our dining room table on finishing up this November issue. If only I could find something interesting or original to say about the concept of power ... hmmm …
Just as my chin-scratching was becoming phony even to me, we had a family mishap—a piping-hot mug of tea tipped and toppled, its contents spreading quickly over our glass table and up through the back vent of my iBook laptop. We shrieked. Then we lifted, we dried, we dried one more time, we … cautiously celebrated our luck in not frying this machine on which everything—everything!—seems to depend. A few minutes later, back at work on this issue, an alert blipped on-screen and disappeared. The screen went black, and a mechanism deep inside made a chilling series of beeps—like those Mars rovers making sourceless noises in deep, deep space. Then it went completely dead. We’d celebrated too early—and I’d been dealt a lesson by the machine gods: Think you know something about power? Let’s see how you feel when you have none.
The 52 St. Louisans in this cover story (p. 90), however, have plenty. Produced by editor-at-large Malcolm Gay, the power package explores the state of St. Louis influence today—nearly two years after the magazine last did so. There are politicians (a former senator and an ascending one), philanthropists (supporting the biggest institutions and the smallest), CEOs and education leaders, media movers and civic champions. As Gay notes in his introduction, it’s not just about station, or just about wealth; there’s an X-factor with these individuals—hard to define, but easy to spot—that enables them to really change our city.
Of course, by the time we do this again in a few years, the landscape of influence will have shifted once more. As with this year’s list, there will be new individuals entirely, but also, we expect, resurrections of influentials we thought had come and gone. F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong—second acts are always possible.
Even with machines. On Sunday morning, mid-mope, I jabbed my iBook’s power button with a snarl, expecting the same cold deadness it had shown since we drenched it 12 hours before. It started right up.
