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Photographs by Dilip Vishwanat
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The Electric Poet - K Kurtis Lyle
WITH TOP-FLIGHT UNIVERSITIES AND STRONG COMMUNITIES OF SCIENTISTS, ARTISTS AND ENTREPRENEURS, ST. LOUIS HAS MORE THAN ITS SHARE OF BRILLIANCE. BUT WHEN WE ASKED LEADERS IN CIVIC LIFE, MEDIA AND ACADEME TO NAME INDIVIDUALS WHOSE ACHIEVEMENTS LEFT THEM IN AWE, THEY BEGGED FOR TIME, PONDERING THE QUESTION LIKE A CHINESE PUZZLE. THEN THE NAMES STARTED FLOWING. WE WOUND UP WITH A LIST OF MORE THAN 50. MANY OF THOSE INDIVIDUALS WILL FIND THEIR WAY INTO THESE PAGES IN FUTURE ARTICLES. FOR NOW, EACH OF THE 10 PEOPLE PROFILED HERE HAS A PARTICULAR SPARK OF GENIUS, AN ABILITY TO SEE A PIECE OF THE WORLD SO CLEARLY, AND WITH SUCH PASSION, THAT IT INFORMS THEIR ENTIRE LIVES AND CHANGES THE WORLD FOR EVERYONE AROUND THEM.
THE MAN FROM MARS: RAY ARVIDSON
You wouldn’t know from looking at his workspace that Ray Arvidson has his head in the clouds. His office, located in the Earth and Planetary Sciences building on the Washington University campus, contains neither a map of the stars nor an antique astrolabe. But walk down the hall to his lab and you’ll see walls strewn with maps of the surface of Mars and computers that track the information received from the Mars rovers he’s helped to put into space.
In addition to teaching classes and chairing the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Arvidson is also the deputy principal investigator for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission. He works with a colleague at Cornell University to run the day-to-day operations of the two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and ensure that they are taking the atmospheric measures that will allow researchers to determine the nature of ancient life on Mars.
Though he originally set out to go into marine geology, Arvidson happened across the chance to work on NASA’s Viking mission (which ultimately flew in 1976) and hasn’t looked down since. He arrived at Wash. U. in 1974 as an associate professor and rose to the rank of chair in 1991. His goal, he says, was to help the department realize its potential.
“We have one of the strongest planetary groups in the country, and we’re first-rate in the geological sciences,” he says. “In response, we have gotten some amazing students.”
In his lab you’ll find pictures of Arvidson and his amazing students on trips to such locations as the Mojave Desert and Spain, where he helps them get a hands-on geological look at the world. It’s these experiences, he says, that give his students a taste of what drives him to succeed.
“It’s true exploration and discovery,” he says. “It’s still a thrill to sit down at the console and see images that prove we’re discovering new things on each drive. Learning about past environments on other planets really helps us to discover more about Earth.”
The work Arvidson conducts for NASA will help scientists plan subsequent missions to Mars that could provide further evidence of any prior life. But he may have already single-handedly unearthed a telling clue. In planning where the two rovers would land on the planet’s surface, Arvidson chose a flat plane for Opportunity that now looks to be an ancient shallow sea unlike anything we’ve seen on Earth.
And as if teaching and MER weren’t already enough, Arvidson says he’s booked until 2011 with three different exploratory projects: two light-imaging missions (one with the European Space Agency) and Phoenix, a small lander that will sample ice in Mars’ high northern latitudes. Not bad for a man who was the first in his family to graduate from high school.
THE ELECTRIC POET: K. CURTIS LYLE
“The act of making magical art through experiment by lightning.” That’s how Will Alexander describes K. Curtis Lyle’s poetry in his introduction to Lyle’s latest book, Electric Church. The cover image is a snapshot of a little boy on a tricycle (Curtis himself), his head thoughtfully tilted to the right. It looks like a standard ’50s snapshot, although there’s a flaw in the film: Smudges and scratches surround the boy’s head and arms. On closer inspection, they almost appear to form a fiery aura rendered in black and white, suggesting that Lyle’s call to poetry was early and transcendent.
“I’m drawn almost spiritually to the sound of things,” Lyle says, adding that he often pays more attention to the lilt or cadence of someone’s voice than to what the speaker looks like. Music is a theme in his work, and his poems have been adapted to music for decades, including a collaboration with saxophone player Julius Hemphill, a friend, on The Collected Poem for Blind Lemon Jefferson. (His poetry text Drunk on God was recorded by Hemphill’s Big Band for the Asylum/Elektra label). Music follows Lyle around: He has played chess with Ray Charles and traveled with Bob Marley and the Wailers on their tour bus.
Lyle, who grew up in Los Angeles and was one of the founding members of the Watts Writers Workshop, moved to Missouri when Washington University invited him to help establish the school’s Black Studies program in 1969. Although his first stint in St. Louis lasted just four years, he participated heavily in the famed experimental-arts col-lective known as the Black Artists Group, whose members in-cluded Quincy Troupe, Hamiet Bluiett and David Sanborn. Lyle returned to St. Louis in ’88 to teach creative writing at Lindenwood University after more than a decade on the East Coast, where he wrote Drunk on God and 15 Predestination Weather Reports, both underground classics. Michael Castro—a respected poet himself and founder of River Styx—says Lyle “is one of the best surrealist poets in the country, but he is also one of our best performance poets. His tonalities, rhythms and aesthetic reflect the indigenous American forms of jazz, blues and the oratorial styles of the black church. How to classify an artist of such abundance? Why even bother, especially when the next poem, the next book, the next performance is likely to surprise you, to expand your mental world rather than confirm you in it?”
Lyle’s heroes are Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. Like them, Lyle says, “I’ve bet the whole farm on my art.
“I’ve been writing poetry since I was 16, and I’m 61 now,” he adds. “The thing that has driven me to stay with poetry is that I understand that it is the basis for my developing consciousness ... I never feel exhausted or tired when I’m reading or writing. I’m never depleted. I feel like it leaves me with an enormous amount of energy and power.”
THE ROCK JOCK: TIM KUSKY
You can keep your cushy corner office with the feng shui–friendly workspace and your ergonomically accurate desk chair with the lumbar support; Tim Kusky would just as soon hunker down with his laptop on a craggy piece of volcanic rock. Kusky—the Paul C. Reinert Chair of Natural Sciences at Saint Louis University and an all-around geology guru—spends nearly a quarter of the year hacking through mosquito-infested brush and digging in the dirt for rocks that will provide insight into the Earth’s early days, and he’s yet to complain to human resources. “What a great place to work,” he says wistfully while looking at a picture of himself on a jagged mountaintop.
It was on one of those overseas trips in 2001 that Kusky dug up some fossilized proof of plate tectonics (geology-speak for the mechanism that causes continents to drift around the globe) that slightly adjusted the established geological timeline. (By “slightly,” we mean a billion years.) With his discovery that things got moving much earlier than previously believed, the science community is that much closer to understanding exactly how, when and where life first formed. “Science is made of so many small pieces, and everyone makes small discoveries that add up to something large,” says David Crossley, a professor of geophysics at SLU, “but this is a significant contribution and a much larger step in the process.”
You could forgive a guy who initiated a severe paradigm shift long before he reached the age of 50 for taking a little time off or maybe cashing in on his newfound credibility by writing a second-rate science-fiction novel, but Kusky still wakes up at 3 or 4 every morning and starts working. He does write, but he sticks to nonfiction; Geological Hazards, published two years ago, eerily predicted Hurricane Katrina’s devastating effects on New Orleans. The book, which would normally rest in the wall-length bookcase in his office, sits next to his phone these days, still dog-eared and flagged with Post-It Notes from the weeks when major news outlets were calling for his comments on the storm’s wrath. “I was getting a lot of requests for interviews for a while there,” he says.
As far as the kids in his neighborhood are concerned, though, the discoveries and press queries don’t mean a thing. After living in St. Louis for five years (he’s originally from upstate New York), Kusky’s known as the guy who knows cool stuff about rocks. “It’s fun,” he says. “I walk down the street, and kids will run up with some rock they’ve found and say, ‘Dr. Kusky, Dr. Kusky, what’s this?’”
THE ARTFUL ADMINISTRATOR: STEPHANIE RIVEN
As a child, Stephanie Riven played all the time. She and her friends set scenes, made up stories, put on plays—all with very little supervision and very few props. She wanted St. Louisans who came to COCA to have the same opportunity.
As founding director of COCA (the Center of Creative Arts, but nobody needs to spell it out anymore), Riven has spent the past 20 years building a tiny nonprofit into the fifth-largest arts organization in the metropolitan area. COCA now has a $4 million budget, a national reputation for excellence and enough leverage to bring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Edward Albee to the grand opening of its new building.
“Today’s world is more structured; there aren’t as many opportunities for real play,” she says. “But the arts can interrupt our routines and make us feel. Art can move the spirit; it can engage us in life.”
Riven developed COCA’s arts-education programs—now more than 500 classes and workshops throughout the metro area—and its urban arts program for 5,000 kids in the St. Louis Public Schools. She travels constantly, searching out playful, beautiful, meaningful performances that she can bring to St. Louis. She hunts for faculty members who want to do more than show off their own talent, who will be selfless and open-hearted with their students.
And she balances the budget.
“Stephanie is very, very focused,” says Richard Baron, co-founder of COCA and chairman emeritus of its board. “She runs COCA as if it were a for-profit company. Yet her service to the community is unparalleled.” Hers is an unusual combination of administrative efficiency, determined fundraising and aesthetic sensibility, and she uses every tool, every flow chart and budget and grant proposal, for a transcendent goal: to bring meaning and joy to COCA’s students and audiences.
“She’s her own worst critic,” Baron says suddenly. “She thinks and breathes COCA every day and most of the night. She can be ... intense. She has very high standards. But she also has a wonderful sense of humor and a great sense of taste. She knows what is really good and what is mediocre.”
She also knows what a difference art can make.
“One of our dancers was a boy who’d never been outside the city limits before,” she recalls. “He’d just worked with a guest choreographer, and the class went out afterward, to some restaurant where you could write with crayons on the table, and he wrote, ‘I love my life.’”
His name was Antonio Douthit. He now performs with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
THE PASSIONATE PLANNER: JOHN HOAL
“Last weekend, driving home through Forest Park, I counted 12 weddings,” says John Hoal. “At the Cascades, the Grand Basin, Post-Dispatch Lake, Pagoda Circle, Deer Lake ... I cast my mind back 12 years and thought, ‘It’s worked.’”
Hoal, whose urban-design projects have received more than 30 awards, masterminded Forest Park’s transformation. And the Confluence Greenway system. And the downtown plan, including the loft district. When he looked around Washington Avenue at 11 p.m. on a Friday and saw “the street teeming with people, new restaurants and galleries, Windows on Washington, Windows off Washington, City Museum open until 10 p.m. and a traffic jam”—he knew that the loft plan had worked, too.
The project dear to his heart, though, is the tiny Mary Meacham historic site, commemorating the courage of a woman who led slaves in an ill-fated escape attempt. “At the 150th anniversary,” he says, “the sun was setting and there were 150 people standing at the edge of the river, releasing balloons to symbolize freedom.”
What he doesn’t add is that he grew up in South Africa. His family moved to New Zealand in protest of apartheid. Two years later they returned, pulled back by the rich red soil of the South African landscape (“it has a vibration, a hum”) and its people’s collective fight. “Those two principles have informed my life,” he says. “The incredible power of place and of people. Put them together and they have this particularity, which is what I’ve searched for in my work. I don’t want to do things that are just general.”
As a young architect, Hoal worked in—he winces at the word—the slums of South Africa. There he realized the importance of creating beautiful public places where people can form communities. He earned a degree in commerce, a master’s in urban design, a doctorate in architectural philosophy. “Architecture alone can’t bring people together,” he says. “Landscape alone can’t do it. Neither can community development or real-estate development. You have to pull all these disciplines together and shape and modify until a place is authentic.” How do you know you’ve succeeded? “When the community is inhabiting it and they talk about it as their place. The designer becomes anonymous. That’s why those weddings in Forest Park meant so much to me. Those people didn’t know anything about technicalities of design. They knew it was a fabulous place and they wanted to spend the best day of their lives there.
“We could have solved the technical problems in Forest Park—drainage, infrastructure—in a utilitarian way,” he continues. “But design isn’t utilitarian. It’s about capturing the poetics of the place. When you do, people know it instantly.”
THE PHILOSOPHER QUEEN: ELENORE STUMP
Elenore Stump stands in her sunlit office, elegant in a near-floor-length slit black skirt and tweed top, surrounded by cardboard boxes. Her bookshelves—the bookshelves of one of the foremost philosophers of the English-speaking world—are half empty, and Aquinas leans drunkenly against Boethius, hoping for consolation.
As president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, Stump started dialogue programs with China and gave seven seminars at the University of Wuhan. Now these scholars are opening centers for the study of Thomas Aquinas, Western philosophy, Christianity and culture. “They didn’t have libraries,” she says, “so I sent them mine—3,500 volumes so far.”
The phone rings: It’s a former student who’s been working with the archbishop of Canterbury and wants to have tea with Stump when she gives the Wilde Lectures at Oxford University this spring. She agrees with delight. She plans to lecture on the problem of evil, long a favorite topic.
“I think Aristotle is right to say that philosophy begins in wonder,” she says. “It’s not so much a question of when you have your first philosophical thought, but if something happens in your life to stamp out that interest. In my case, that has not happened.”
Medieval Christian philosophy sounds a bit remote in a world of iPods and cybersex, but Stump likes its smartness, depth and uncompromising sense of moral obligation. “Basil the Great says if you have extra and you don’t give it to the poor, it’s theft,” she points out. “You are obligated, in justice, to instruct the ignorant and put up with people who are a pain in the ass. And the big fuss today about gay sexuality? On the standard medieval list, lust is the least of the sins. Gluttony outranks it.”
President of the American Philosophical Association’s central division, Stump has edited a section of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy and received the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, receiving the single largest prize ($200,000) given to an individual for teaching excellence. She smiles, remembering a long-ago fight with her advisor at Cornell University. He wanted her to write her doctoral dissertation on 14th century logicians. “I wanted something juicier,” she says. “After some tumult, we compromised on sixth-century Boethius, who was put to death by torture for his support of truth and justice. So the things he says about logic are somewhat more interesting.”
THE CONSUMED DESIGNER: ERIC THOELKE
If you want proof that Eric Thoelke belongs on a list of geniuses, look at how he spends his time outside the office. When he’s not running his successful marketing firm, TOKY Branding + Design, Thoelke and his wife give themselves yearly projects to stave off the boredom. For kicks, they designed and built a new house this year.
When he is in the office, though, Thoelke is busy leading a dedicated staff of 18 in developing full-scale marketing campaigns for all sorts of St. Louis businesses. “Branding,” he explains, is the “tattooing of attributes of a product or a company into the minds of a target audience ... through words and images and all the other ancillary stuff.” This ancillary stuff includes websites, catalogs, uniforms and store designs—all services TOKY provides for customers such as Bissinger’s and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
“We come in to help consumers understand that there is a difference between products, and often that means helping our customers understand themselves and their distinct personalities in the marketplace,” he says.
His creativity in establishing these distinctions has garnered Thoelke national design awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts and three best-in–show awards for website design at the AIGA St. Louis show. His work has been featured in Graphis, Communication Arts and Print and the “Memphis Manifesto.”
“TOKY is a wonderful, imaginative, exciting partner for us,” says Maggie Stearns, director of communications for Opera Theatre of St. Louis, whose sales TOKY helped boost by 85 percent. “Any opera company is eager to go beyond its traditional audience. TOKY has had a major impact on the way we’re seen in the community.”
Thoelke says the drive to design is one part creative, one part anal-retentive. He finds inspiration in all forms of culture—fine, popular and arcane. He says his profession is “like a religious calling.” Good design is the enemy of chaos and disorganization.
“We aren’t like artists, who are into self-expression,” he says. “People can use our brains to solve problems.” Yet Thoelke does express himself in even the smallest details. His office—on Olive in Midtown—is the kind of exposed-brick, Macintosh-filled hub of ingenuity one might expect. A deck features a barbecue grill and jacks for Xbox play, and a lounge on the ground floor boasts overstuffed furniture where staffers can retreat from the luminous glow of their glossy white monitors. It’s this staff of “the smartest and coolest people” that inspires Thoelke—that, and the chance to help make St. Louis the kind of city he knows it can become. “I think the brand of the city should be that we’re the center of great artwork in the middle of the country. If we can achieve that, we will have left a lasting legacy.”
THE CONSTANT GARDENER: BARBARA SCHAAL
As a young girl in Chicago, Barbara Schaal never considered a job in the sciences because she didn’t think they were open to women. She was content to live out her love of plants as a park ranger. When an especially astute high-school teacher suggested she pursue biology in college, Schaal shrugged. She’d give it a try, but she was the first in her family of German émigrés to go to college, and she wasn’t even sure that she’d finish.
Then she started working on research projects with faculty members at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and things changed. For the first time, she could actually see herself working in a lab, wearing a white coat. So she kept going and got her bachelor’s degree—followed by a doctorate from Yale.
That was 30 years ago. Today she’s a professor of biology at Washington University and a nationally recognized researcher in plant genetics who’s helping third world farmers increase crop yields. And this year she became the first woman vice president of the National Academy of Sciences.
Yet Schaal waves away any mention of what her achievements mean to women; she’s more interested in what her discoveries have meant to humankind. For years, biologists thought that cassava (a staple crop for 600 million people in developing countries) originated in Mexico. Schaal’s 1999 discovery that it actually sprang forth from the Amazon River basin made it possible to understand how and why some strains resist disease. Cassava family tree in hand, plant scientists can now work to prevent viral outbreaks that can decimate the crop and contribute to widespread famine. “I got into science because it was fun,” Schaal says. “As I’ve gotten into agricultural work, though, I’ve realized it’s actually making a contribution.”
Ironically, the actual test tube–and–microscope science is taking up considerably less of her time now. She says she’s “living vicariously” through her students, guiding and supporting their research. And she’s leveraging a little of her credibility to show students what she didn’t realize when she was a girl: The sciences are open to everyone. “Her laboratory is a wonderful place for students of modern plant-population biology,” says one of her teaching partners, world-renowned botanist Peter Raven. “Students flock to her.”
THE LIFESAVER: MICHAEL SHERRADEN
Drinking black coffee at a corner table in Washington University’s Holmes Lounge, Michael Sherraden shrugs off the notion that his ideas are revolutionary. “Good ideas aren’t hard to find,” he says. “The hard part is implementing them.”
Sherraden, director of the university’s Center for Social Development, has been hailed internationally for his impact on public policy. The thesis of his 1991 book, Assets and the Poor: A New American Welfare Policy, was that accumulating assets—not welfare—cures poverty. In other words, helping poor people save money is the best way to help them raise their standard of living. At the time, it was an almost shocking concept; today, it’s commonplace. “People use terms like ‘wealth accumulation,’ ‘asset-building’ and ‘asset-based policy,’” Sherraden notes. “None of these phrases existed when I wrote that book.”
Ray Boshara of the New American Foundation calls Sherraden’s idea “simple, profound and revolutionary. He is the Copernicus of social policy: His paradigm will forever change the way we understand and overcome poverty.”
Sherraden is also the creator of the IDA, or individual development account, a matching-savings program designed to work like a 401(k). Now in the research phase (what he jokingly refers to as “demonstration alley”), federally and privately funded five-year IDA programs are bearing out what he has said all along. “There’s an assumption that people won’t have enough to eat or that their kids won’t have clothes,” he says, “and that seems logical. But what we found empirically is that poor people save pretty well. And they’re saving voluntarily—it’s not a forced savings. They’re responding to incentives, because they want to improve their lives.” This is no different, he adds, than wealthier folks responding to existing tax incentives to build luxury homes; the problem right now is that the money is allocated unevenly. “It’s not just a do-good thing,” Sherraden insists. “If we have this money to pass out, let’s not put it all at the top. Let’s give it to people who need it so they can make a better life for themselves. That’s not radical; it’s sensible.”
Sherraden recently worked with the British government on the Child Trust Fund Act (a variation on the IDA), which was enacted in April, granting savings accounts to every newborn British child. Now in legislation in the United States is the ASPIRE Act (the acronym stands for American Saving for Personal Investment, Retirement and Education), which, if passed, will provide an account for every American baby born after December 31, 2005. Similar programs are being developed in China and Uganda. “I think of this work in terms of decades, not years,” Sherraden says, “but it’s moving a lot more quickly than we thought.”
THE SPIN MASTER: MICHAEL KATZ
When Michael Katz was 10 years old, his father decided to chase an opportunity and move his family from St. Louis to California, where they knew no one. A year later, Katz’s parents informed him that his mother, Judy Kahn Katz, had breast cancer.
“I was told straight-up what was going on,” says Katz, now a commercial litigator. That moment three decades ago changed his future forever. His mother had surgery and her cancer went into remission, but, 17 years later, it returned with a vengeance. She died on October 3, 1995—one day after her 35th wedding anniversary.
Through it all—doctor visits, surgeries, chemotherapy, metastasis of the cancer to her spine—Judy Katz’s spirit never flagged or faltered, her son recalls. “The thing that struck me about my mom was, once she was diagnosed, her philosophy and lifestyle of giving didn’t change,” Katz says. “It was just affirmed.”
It was only a matter of time before Katz found a way to fashion an appropriate living memorial to his mom. Athletic and fit, Katz was introduced to Spinning by his wife, Raye Katz, (they’re now divorced) and friend (now business partner) Julie Funke. Ten years ago, they brought Spinning to St. Louis; two years later, they held their first charity ride, called the Judy Katz Memorial Ride. Fifty riders spun on bikes and raised $6,400. The next year, the event raised $29,700; in 1999, the total jumped to $67,000; this year, Katz estimates, the 500-bike “Judy Ride” will clear $1 million.
The money raised by the Judy Ride Foundation is earmarked for the early detection of cancer, including the provision of mammograms to women who can’t afford to pay for them. Funds are raised through events (the annual Judy Ride and Tour de Judy; an every-other-year dinner, auction and dance; and sales of pink survivor bracelets and, now, stainless-steel bracelets, each engraved with the name of a survivor).
Katz’s drive to honor his mother by helping others find and fight cancer is part of his psychic makeup. “You take the energy of the Spinning, and Spinning is about self-empowerment,” he says. “There are all these connections of body and mind and spirit and soul, and you talk about things that people don’t normally talk about outside of therapy. You’ve got this energy, and you turn it into an opportunity to help others.”
When he was 11, Katz heard soul-shattering news. Today he has his own take on it all:
“You are either going to take the diagnosis of cancer as a death sentence or a life affirmation. It is a simple choice. You can say a glass is half-full or half-empty, but what I took from everything is, the glass is full, because half of it is water and half of it is air, and you need both to survive.”
