We eat thin pizza and say “show-toe” for Chouteau. We do not flinch at the high school question, and we are unfailingly polite in traffic. Sometimes we find one another and comment on the niceness of everyone, the flat “a” pronunciation, the native tendency toward cliques. There is no Google stat on how many of us are here. We are scattered throughout the neighborhoods, at church and at school, in the audience. We are not from here. But we are staying.
It was July 1993, and St. Louis was flooding as we skidded across the bridge from Illinois, a two-car caravan of native New Yorkers moving to Missouri.
Ahead of me in traffic, the husband and children appeared to be cheering. “I can do this for two years, I can do this for two years; I can do this for two years,” I chanted as the dog whined in the back seat. What was he worried about?
As corporate migrants specializing in start-ups, we had zigzagged from New York to the Southeast to Florida and, now, St. Louis. The brown-brick city silhouette did not match my cinematic imaginings, and I gripped the wheel, wishing I’d done a little more homework on the area. All I knew about the Midwest was stereotypical, compounded by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s preppy novels in which heroes were always hiding their Midwestern roots.
But fitting in is not first on a newcomer’s list—housing is. Kirkwood was not for sale; Webster had only Victorian shells and Ladue had dark ranches. Several “towns” later, we moved into Chesterfield, and, with the family off to work and school, reality banged at the door: Learn to fit, or not.
Had I known native St. Louisan Jean Wessel then, she would have told me, “This can be a tough town to break into.” What you need, she says, is a point of connection: a job, involvement in the arts, something. High-school credentials and country-club memberships matter here. And some neighborhoods are more difficult to penetrate than others.
“It is exactly the philosophy of breaking into a small town,” she says—in other words, it’s about who’s who and who’s doing what. “Making it depends on the areas you intend to crash.”
Some outlanders come in swinging—a bat, a baton or a fist. Remember the dramatic arrivals of St. Louis Symphony Maestro Leonard Slatkin, slugger Mark McGwire and Saint Louis University reinventor the Rev. Lawrence Biondi?
But some of us don’t crash. We ar-rive quietly.
“Everyone is very nice,” the family agreed at the dinner table. How was it at school? “Nice,” our children said. They joined Little League and Scouts to break through the best-friend alliances that had begun long before we arrived. Quietly, quietly we wove ourselves into the local fabric, sometimes wishing for the sound of seagulls or the view from a mountaintop. By chance and one by one, I found other outlanders.
Maxine Goldstein grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, and she didn’t plan to stay in St. Louis more than a year or two when she arrived in 1982. She loved the Symphony, the Hill area, the row houses. But she was traveling 90 percent of the time, had no family here, was making no friends.
Flying into Lambert one night after a business trip, she looked down on the city lights and realized that she could be returning to any city, anywhere. “I need some permanency in my life,” she thought.
She joined the World Affairs Council, started going to the Art Museum for lectures. Then she had a brainstorm. A Smith College alumnus, she formed a group she called Minds Over Matters, gathering local alumni of Seven Sisters, Ivy and Little Ivy colleges for social and cultural programs.
At first, she wasn’t sure it would work. “Everyone in St. Louis has connections,” she thought. “Maybe they won’t need this group.” At the first meeting, she was stunned to see 500 people standing in line to come in. Members were all ages, single and married, natives and transplants, all as eager as she to form and maintain ties.
Next, at the urging of a Minds Over Matters board member, Goldstein accepted a blind date that blossomed into marriage—to a University City native.
She missed a few things about the East Coast, such as going for drives—“in six hours you can do six states”—but she did not miss the pace. “The East is a lot more frantic,” she says. “People talk faster, walk faster. I was more aggressive there.”
In 1987, Goldstein started her own St. Louis PR firm, Beyond Concepts. Then she moved her parents here.
“The sooner you make a commitment to the city,” she says, “the sooner things start happening.”
If you’re one of the hundreds of physicians who do their residencies in St. Louis, “you don’t have time to worry about belonging or not belonging,” says Dr. Frank Simo, a facial and plastic surgery specialist. “Your work day is 36 hours long. You belong from day one.”
A Miami native, Simo came to Saint Louis University in 1984 to do his residency, planning to return to Florida as soon as he finished. His fiancee, ReGina Trull, a Memphis native, was flying into Lambert on weekends, juggling a career analyzing corporations’ human-resources needs. When they married, she didn’t give her move from Memphis to metro St. Louis a second thought. It was only a 4.5-hour difference—how difficult could it be?
Six months later, she told her new husband, “We have to move.”
He stalled. They stayed. St. Louis won.
What was initially so different for ReGina Simo was the social aspect. Their neighborhood was quiet: no knocks on the door, no cookies, no excesses of Southern hospitality. “My neighbors, most of them older, were all in their own element,” she recalls.
“People didn’t know what to talk to me about once they found out I wasn’t from here.”
She also found an odd mix of manners: at the grocery store, cart drivers so ruthless they’d run her down if she wasn’t careful; on the highway, drivers so genteel they’d risk an accident to let you into the lane ahead of them. Salaries were low, and Chicago repeatedly beat her out at winning job candidates. She was surprised at the prominence of “business casual.” And what was “the lard’s day,” anyway?
Gradually, the strangeness eased, and the couple was embraced by the community. Ten years later, ReGina has shed her slight drawl, built an HR network and made herself at home.
John Hoal hails from Durban, South Africa, where he was an urban planner before coming to Washington University on a Fulbright scholarship in 1987. His plan for St. Louis? A one-year stay.
“This community doesn’t come to you,” he says, 19 years later. “You have to do something that contributes in a positive and extraordinary way. If you believe it, you have to live it.”
As an urban planner for the city, Hoal masterminded the Forest Park renovation. Now, from his H3 design studio, he is directing work on the Confluence Greenway. “Every community is different,” he observes. “In this community, the leadership requires a rigorous approach to projects. They’re conservative—they want a project demonstrated to be worthy.” Once it has been, he adds, “you couldn’t ask for a better client.”
Hoal is reminded daily, mostly by language, that he’s not “from here.” Traffic lights, to him, are “robots.” Many of his figures of speech are met with puzzled glances. “But the community has accepted me,” he says, “and St. Louis is one of the most livable cities in the world. It’s remarkable for a city this size to have this level of culture.” His twins have him enamored of the Muny, ballet and sports, he adds. “But can you imagine me teaching my son baseball? I grew up with rugby and soccer. Now and then you hit these walls.”
We decided several years ago that we are staying. It happened when our daughter graduated from high school, when our son helped win a baseball tournament, when our neighbors asked us to pet-sit, when we would talk about a retirement paradise and burst into communal laughter.
I finally ask my husband for his spin on fitting in. “St. Louis is a hard town to break into,” he says. “It’s a cautious town; it’s about known commodities. People prefer to deal with people they know or those referred or introduced by people they know. St. Louis has one central irony: You have to prove staying power to earn staying power.
There have been times when I stood back, not claiming St. Louis: When the downtown voting was snafued in the 2000 election and we were all suspect. When the Cardinals had a chance at the Series but I cheered for the Yankees. When I’m wishy-washy about saying where I’m from, depending on who I’m talking to.
But we have been here more than a decade, and we no longer discuss where we are going next—except in terms of a house on the Hill or a loft on Washington Avenue. We travel for our ocean fix, for a view, for Broadway and the Pac Coast Highway. We come back.
So what if the streets are not in a nice grid and there’s a preponderance of “no left turn” signs? So what if the natives are prone to speaking in acronyms?
St. Louis has a way of making itself anybody’s home.
