1 of 11
Photographs by Whitney Curtis, Wesley Law, Jonathan Pollack, and Dilip Vishwanat; Illustrations by Monica Hellstrom
2 of 11
3 of 11
4 of 11
5 of 11
6 of 11
7 of 11
8 of 11
9 of 11
10 of 11
11 of 11
In high school, it’s easy: You pick a brain as valedictorian, a populist as class president, a schmoozer for student government, and a cute couple as homecoming king and queen. But when you grow up, the honors grow vague: visionaries, leaders, geniuses, entrepreneurs, hot people, cool people, people of the year…
We’re about to add to the confusion.
When we looked around the St. Louis landscape, there were plenty of candidates for the aforementioned categories. But the quality we wanted to recognize was warmer than vision, nobler than coolness. It had to do with light; with people whose ideas glow so brightly, they illuminate a path for the rest of us.
They’re Luminaries.
And in the shortest, darkest month of the year, we’re awfully glad they’re here.
HE FOUND HIS THRILL
Joe Edwards
Developer, Civic Leader, Consummate Host
In 1972, when Joe Edwards opened Blueberry Hill on Delmar Boulevard, he wanted it to be a bar and restaurant where everybody felt comfortable. He stocked it with his beloved pop-culture memorabilia, so first dates would have something to talk about, and he booted anybody who was rude or threatening. “We almost went out of business three times in the first two years,” he admits, “because I banned two-thirds of the customers.” The outlaw motorcycle gangs finally gave up, and Edwards began the slow process of reclaiming the Loop.
In 1972, when Joe Edwards opened Blueberry Hill on Delmar Boulevard, he wanted it to be a bar and restaurant where everybody felt comfortable. He stocked it with his beloved pop-culture memorabilia, so first dates would have something to talk about, and he booted anybody who was rude or threatening. “We almost went out of business three times in the first two years,” he admits, “because I banned two-thirds of the customers.” The outlaw motorcycle gangs finally gave up, and Edwards began the slow process of reclaiming the Loop.
Along the way, intrigued by all the cool St. Louisans he knew nothing about, he considered creating a hall of fame museum—but decided instead to make it a Walk of Fame, so it would be accessible to everybody, 24 hours a day, at no cost.
In 1994, he picked up his newspaper and saw a photo of the Tivoli Theatre box office with a handwritten note: “Closed forever.” “That just pierced my heart,” he says. “I could not imagine that building being torn down.” He started a renovation so elaborate, it took him years to break even. But the Tivoli reopened with a parade that convinced St. Louis the Loop was back to stay.
Three years later, he was worrying about the east side of Skinker Boulevard. Other business owners suggested banners and flowerpots, but Edwards says he “knew it would take something big to get people to go across Skinker, ‘risk it,’ in their mind.” So he built the Pageant, a concert venue the right size to lure all the touring musicians who kept bypassing St. Louis. He made the hall wider, rather than deeper, to bring everybody closer to the performers, and he spent a fortune to avoid using columns that might block somebody’s view.
Next door, he created a martini-lounge bowling alley called Pin-Up Bowl. Inclusive as ever, he commissioned Asian, Hispanic, and African-American pinups, a little revisionist nostalgia that, once again, made everybody feel welcome.
Most recently, he took the biggest risk of all, building the Moonrise Hotel. No chain would do; “it had to be something Loopish.” He wanted it luxurious but casual, even in its fine dining, to put everyone at ease. And he put a giant moon on top of the building, half ivory with mountains and craters and half silver and black, “so even in the daytime, everybody could see the moon go through its phases.”
Now Blueberry Hill is about four times its original size, and people are continually telling him they fell in love there. Teachers bring kids to the Walk of Fame to do rubbings of the stars that inspire them. Pollstar named the Pageant one of the top 10 concert nightclubs in America. On Delmar, the city-county divide that paralyzes everyone else has dissolved. And when the American Planning Association started recognizing, every year, 10 Great Streets in America, Delmar made the first list.
What do Edwards’ old pals at John Burroughs School think of his accomplishments? “I think they, as am I, are surprised at the magnitude of what I’ve gotten involved in,” he says. “But I don’t know that they would have been surprised at the direction—music and cocktails!” Growing up, he hung around with kids from about 12 different schools—“It allowed us to get into different types of trouble!”—and he watched, puzzled, when prejudice started building walls between his friends.
Now people fly in from the coasts to try to figure out Edwards’ secret: How do you create a street that’s so inclusive (all ages, races, classes) and so collaborative? “To have people from all economic strata interacting is as healthy as it can be,” he remarks. “You hear the trials and tribulations of everybody that way.”
Outsiders don’t realize that the heart of the formula is Edwards himself. If the Loop needs something and nobody’s stepping up, Edwards just does it himself. And if a building needs saving, he buys it.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a typical businessman,” he concedes. “That’s why certain things get done in the Loop that might not get done anywhere else.”
There’s an innocence about the guy, a child’s belief in the possibility of joy. That and the absence of greed make him an unusual—and brilliant—developer, keenly aware of what makes people happy, deft in getting them to cooperate, smart about urban planning. Washington University, Saint Louis University, and the University of Missouri–
St. Louis have all awarded him honorary degrees, and the city of St. Louis has proclaimed not one but four Joe Edwards days. (He takes such honors humbly: When he was selected to carry the Olympic torch, he ran the entire way, huffing and puffing by the end, because it “just didn’t seem right” to stroll along.)
Edwards’ newest project is a fixed-track, vintage trolley that will run through the Loop to DeBaliviere and across to Forest Park. He’s projecting ridership at just under half a million people a year, both visitors and residents.
Everybody’s welcome. -J.C.
Conversation Starter
In Army basic training, Edwards kept his shaving gear in a metal Superman lunchbox. Drove his company commander crazy.
EDEN, UNSIGNED
The Gateway Foundation
Urban Benefactor, Arts Patron
Citygarden is a big, lush, nonlinear poem signed “Anonymous.” At least it was—until October 8, when philanthropist M. Peter Fischer accepted the 82nd St. Louis Award on behalf of the Gateway Foundation.
Gateway’s spent years funding little parks here (the Ethan A. Shepley memorial at Harris-Stowe), lighting projects there (the Bissell Water Tower, the Old Courthouse), and working hard to stay sub rosa. Until this year, its projects were modest and scattered, which made it easy to stay off the radar. But on June 30, when Citygarden was dedicated, people blinked hard and asked themselves how, in bureaucratic, Mother-May-I-Take-Two-Baby-Steps-Forward St. Louis, where even fancy charrettes and large sums of money often fizzle into mediocre solutions, well, how did this happen?
In only 18 months, with just $30 million, Gateway transformed a 2.9-acre mud pit into a public space that won some serious column inches in The New York Times. That $30 mil, by the way, was just for the grounds—including more than 10,000 feet of pipe, a serpentine “meander wall,” a Mies van der Rohe–inspired glass-walled café, and native plantings of goatsbeard, indigo, Joe Pye weed, and serviceberry. Gateway won’t say how much the art cost, but just taking Keith Haring’s Ringed Figure into account, it was clearly considerable.
But the money is beside the point. There’s nothing like Citygarden anywhere else in the country—even New York must be jealous—though the vernacular is uniquely St. Louis. The mound on which Mimmo Paladino’s Zenit sits alludes to the Mississippian Indians; the central bluestone walkway traces the path of a long-gone alleyway; and the garden’s borders follow old, now-erased property lines. We love Tom Claassen’s giant, chubby rabbits, and we are beyond impressed at the sight of Léger’s Femmes au Perroquet on the wall of The Terrace View. But even more important is how Citygarden functions as a 21st-century City Beautiful project. It shows us how to weave together our past and present without getting trapped in pearlescent, opioid World’s Fair dreams. It’s also a stark indictment of the bureaucratic dithering and lazy defaults to third-best that have held this city back for decades. And there’s more to come: In his speech, Fischer revealed that Gateway has funded a master plan for the mall, to be implemented by a conservancy with “a board of directors made up of people who have a clear, demonstrated love of and concern for St. Louis,” rather than “persons who have a financial or political interest in the outcome of the mall design.”
Fischer won’t be making another public appearance soon, and in two years, many people will forget his name. That’s his preference. He’d rather that the “young adults, not so young adults, rich people, not so rich people, persons of virtually every color, people who like trees, flowers, sun, shade, tranquility, and sometimes chaos,” go to Eighth and Market and look for Gateway in the same way we look for Walt Whitman, another lush and nonlinear poet: right under our bootsoles. -S.R.
Conversation Starter
In his wonderfully irreverent, sometimes irascible acceptance speech, Peter Fischer revealed the identities of Gateway’s 10-member board, including his children, Martha, Matthew, and Michael, as well as local arts figures like Gyo Obata and Paul Ha. All told, Citygarden received input from 150 different people—none of them glory seekers.
THE PEANUT-BUTTER SOLUTION
Dr. Mark Manary
Pediatrician, Humanitarian
Dr. Mark Manary traveled halfway around the world to discover that a lunchbox staple might be the key to fighting world hunger.
First, in 1985, he volunteered at a Tanzanian mission hospital with his wife, Mardi, and saw the raw need: “Something we were doing every day was making a difference between life and death, health and disability.”
Then, in 1994, he went to Malawi and saw malnutrition affecting 70 percent of the children. Healthcare workers were hospitalizing them in order to feed them a milky porridge—and often as not, the hospitalization just exposed already vulnerable children to infectious diseases. Only 25 to 40 percent recovered.
Manary started looking for a food that mothers could offer kids at home: something that didn’t require cooking, didn’t spoil, didn’t foster bacteria, and was full of fat and protein. “Peanut butter qualifies on all four counts,” he says. In clinical trials of his enriched peanut-butter solution, also known as Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), a staggering 95 percent of patients recovered.
So in 2001, Manary launched Project Peanut Butter, reaching out to thousands of children in rural villages in Malawi and, later, Sierra Leone. To date, the organization has touched 200,000 lives, and the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition, the World Health Organization, and UNICEF have proclaimed RUTF the most effective treatment available for severely malnourished children. Manary—a pediatric emergency specialist at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and professor at Washington University School of Medicine—now also leads the Global Harvest Alliance, a collaboration between plant scientists and physicians to create low-cost foods that can prevent and treat nutritional deficiencies.
We thought Manary might get a little emotional talking about malnourished children. Instead, as he packed for a month in Africa, he quoted his friend Dr. Susan Shepherd of Doctors Without Borders: “I just don’t have time for that kind of sentiment. I just need to do something here.”
Conversation Starter
Altruism started early: When Manary was at MIT, he organized an informal “big brother/big sister” program for families living in public housing projects, where substance abuse was rampant. -J.M.
SUSTAINABLE MOMENTUM
Linda Goldstein
Mayor, Environmentalist
Environmentally, one of the area’s brightest lights shines in Clayton’s city hall: Mayor Linda Goldstein. After eight years as an alderwoman, Goldstein assumed the mayoralty in 2007, and she’s already made the county seat a leader in “greening” the metroplex.
Clayton “was one of the first St. Louis County municipalities to implement single-stream recycling,” Goldstein says, “and Clayton recycles 30 percent of its total refuse collection, compared to an average of 14 percent for cities nationwide. We’ve also taken the lead in ‘green’ architecture and zoning, alternative modes of travel, and city operations.”
In February 2008, looking toward the city’s 2013 centennial, Goldstein issued a three-part plan: “Vision 2013: Building a Bright Future.” It includes an emphasis on sustainable practices—reducing fossil-fuel dependency, assessing utility use, adopting LEED certification in the zoning code, expanding municipal recycling, and creating pedestrian-friendly environments.
“We’ve made great strides in all areas,” Goldstein reports. “Visitors will notice our new pedestrian walkways, bicycle paths, and signage in support of alternative modes of travel.”
All that walking and biking haven’t slowed progress one bit: Goldstein says that in 2010, Clayton will increase its hybrid fleet from six to eight vehicles and increase the number of fleet vehicles adapted to use alternative fuels from 83 to 101. “We recycle all products, from oil to tires, used to support city vehicles,” she adds.
Goldstein’s dedication to sustainability grew from experiences at her day job at CI Select, which participated in an experimental carpet-reclamation program with DuPont in the early ’90s. The more she learned, the harder she pushed. This month, she plans to monitor the Copenhagen Climate Conference, the successor to the Kyoto Protocol. “Global warming is happening faster than was originally projected,” she points out, “so hopefully our local efforts for change will be recognized and represented by our leaders at this conference.” —B.A.H.
Conversation Starter
Unlike certain other local pols, Goldstein gets our vote for a potential diplomatic-corps post later in life. On being (in our own phrase) pestered for an interview, she sweetly replied, “You’re not pestering…just being conscientious!”
FROM ALGAE TO THE COSMOS
Ursula Goodenough
Biologist, Religious Naturalist
“Ursula a scientist! How splendid!”
So exclaimed, in the early 1960s, the father of Ursula Goodenough. Young Ursula was halfway through college when her mind was set afire by Zoology 1–2. “In the ’50s, most girls just didn’t take science classes,” she recalls. But she took this one, and the world opened up.
An extraordinary career began: earning a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard in 1969; authoring the 1972 textbook Genetics, which was taught internationally for the next decade; snagging a tenure-track position at Washington University in 1978, where she’s been ever since; teaching science, by request, to the Dalai Lama (“His Holiness seems like a really, really cool guy”); and writing The Sacred Depths of Nature, a wise, humane, and much-praised book that introduces modern scientific concepts followed by the author’s related spiritual reflections. It’s a slender volume, but large in ideas.
This science-and-spirituality marriage is critical to Goodenough, a nontheist who invites us all, as she puts it in Sacred Depths, to “experience a solemn gratitude that we exist at all, share a reverence for how life works, and acknowledge a deep and complex imperative that life continue.” A former president of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, Goodenough gives talks on this subject throughout St. Louis, and she’s appeared on The History Channel and public radio’s Speaking of Faith.
With all this, it’s easy to forget how significant Goodenough’s scientific contributions have been. Earlier this year, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in large part for the pioneering research she’s done on the green alga Chlamydomonas; over the course of decades, she and her lab colleagues have made the organism one of the best-understood sexual systems in the world. While that research continues, she’s begun team-teaching an interdepartmental Wash. U. course called “Epic of Evolution,” and she’s finding ways to use her long-studied alga as biofuel. “At my age, one is not supposed to start out in a brand-new search direction,” she offers wryly.
One more convention Goodenough has overturned: the notion that a prestigious, globe-traveling scientist has little time for family. She considers that part of her life—raising “five great kids,” who’ve brought her five great grandkids—one of her greatest accomplishments.
That she’s steered this stellar career as a St. Louis scientist—that’s one of our city’s accomplishments. A splendid thing, indeed. —S.S.
Conversation Starter
For Goodenough, lab time’s followed by dance time: “My boyfriend’s a really good ballroom dancer, so we waltz and tango,” she says. “I also just like to go to bars and shake my booty.”
WE ARE THE WORLD
Cecilia Nadal
Sociologist, Nonprofit Arts Exec
St. Louis has gone from provincial to global in a few decades, and Cecilia Nadal has subtly eased the shift. When she came to St. Louis in 1968, she met people who’d never lived more than 20 miles from the house where they grew up. By then, Nadal—an Air Force brat whose black Puerto Rican father spoke three languages—had lived in 12 states and three different countries. Appalled by the insularity of her mother’s hometown, she earned a master’s in urban sociology from Webster University and started building, not just bridges, but transporters and catapults.
When tension flashed between African-American and immigrant kids, Nadal used an arts program to bring them together. She started a nonprofit arts organization, Gitana Productions, that helped bring the China National Orchestra to Powell Symphony Hall. She invited African-American and Chinese leaders to a supper at the Scott Joplin house. She organized a St. Louis Roma (Gypsy) Music Festival in Forest Park.
Now, she runs an annual St. Louis Festival of World Sacred Music, reaching from Lakota flute music to Celtic songs to Yoruba ceremonies to ancient dances that can be performed only by Buddhist priests. She once included gnawa (the music of African slaves taken by Arabs to Morocco)—and paired it, onstage, with Jewish rock.
She loves the arts because they enlighten without intrusion or confrontation. In early 2008, Gitana staged Complacency of Silence: Darfur, which won five Kevin Kline nominations; that spring, Nadal produced My Heart Keeps Shaking, drawn from refugees who’d come to St. Louis from Afghanistan. Next May, watch for Eye on the Sparrow: The World Within St. Louis. For the script, Nadal’s been looking for stories about “common people that have done extraordinary things.”
She might check the mirror. —J.C.
Conversation Starter
Maria Chappelle-Nadal took her mom’s values into politics: She’s on her third term as a state representative.
AN INCREDIBLE CAPACITY
Eric Greitens
Humanitarian, Veteran, Social Entrepreneur
Eric Greitens’ idea of a college summer abroad was living in a refugee camp in Croatia, helping aid organizations work with “unaccompanied children” whose parents were dead or missing. He was majoring in ethics and public policy at Duke University, and he started observing the ways aid organizations succeed or fail—and the needs that go unmet.
The next summer he worked in Rwanda with children who’d survived genocide; then in Bolivia with street children. There he started doing documentary photography, trying to capture the spirit that lets humanity prevail under impossible conditions. A Rhodes Scholar, he earned a Ph.D. in development studies at Oxford University, spending summers on the Gaza Strip and in Chiapas, Cambodia, Albania, and India.
Then he became a Navy SEAL.
“When I took my oral exams, one of my examiners said, ‘Mr. Greitens, tell me about your theory of ideas,’” he intones. “A couple weeks later, I had a Marine Corps drill instructor screaming in my ear, telling me I had to learn to tie my shoes!” He sobers. “I felt strongly that in situations of ethnic cleansing and genocide, the international community should respond—and in order to save lives, we sometimes have to respond with force.”
He served in Southeast Asia and Africa, then commanded counterterrorism and special-operations units in Iraq. “I realized that every human being has an incredible capacity for courage,” he says, his voice quiet and steady. “We are capable of so much more than many of us ever think possible.”
Greitens eventually commanded an Al Qaeda targeting cell in Fallujah, where he suffered minor wounds from a suicide truck bomb. Back home, he visited men who’d fared worse, losing both legs or part of a lung, and found himself asking what they wanted to do next.
“Return to my unit,” they all said.
“And—if you can’t?” he asked tentatively.
“Every single one of them wanted to serve in some way,” he recalls. “They had a long string of visitors coming to thank them, but what they needed to hear was ‘We still need you.’”
So in 2007, he donated his combat pay to found The Mission Continues, a St. Louis–based nonprofit that gives fellowships to wounded and disabled vets so they can begin to serve again, in nonprofits here at home.
NBC anchor Tom Brokaw filmed Greitens’ work at The Mission Continues for a documentary on the American character; national organizations have ranked it as one of the country’s finest examples of social entrepreneurship. The Obama administration recently asked Greitens to lead a working group on the Veterans Corps. “My long-term vision is that we will actually reshape the way the country says, ‘Welcome home’ to its veterans,” he says.
“I learned doing humanitarian work that sometimes the greatest thing you can give someone is a challenge. Because that lets them know you believe in them.” —J.C.
Conversation Starter
Strength & Compassion, Greitens’ book of documentary photographs and essays, won the Grand Prize at the 2009 New York Book Festival and was named Photography Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine.
BLUEPRINTS FOR THE FUTURE
Patricia Whitaker
Interior Designer and CEO
Good architecture undoubtedly illuminates—but not in the way one might expect. While flashy iconoclasts capture our imagination, it’s those who understand strategy that survive. Strategic building plans—and alliances—are crucial.
As the strategist at the helm of architecture and interior-design firm Arcturis since its inception in 1977, Pat Whitaker has taken her company from a one-woman outfit, designing doctors’ and dentists’ offices, to the region’s largest interior-design firm and a top-20 architecture firm. When St. Louis’ most influential companies—including Energizer, Edward Jones, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Nestlé Purina PetCare—break new ground, Arcturis gets called into action.
In 2000, Whitaker added public-sector clients to the roster: universities, local governments, and nonprofits, including Rex Sinquefield’s Chess Club and Scholastic Center and the Girl Scouts of Greater St. Louis. As others foundered on the recession’s shoals, Arcturis quadrupled its revenue and more than doubled its staff. Its listing among Interior Design magazine’s 100 Interior Design Giants this year placed its valuation at $231 million.
Whitaker’s clearly never forgotten her humble origins; Arcturis’ benefits packages remain tops in the area. It’s not just any head honcho who’s able to please employees and clients, year after year, but Whitaker manages it. This year alone, her firm’s forward-looking civic designs won awards from the St. Louis RCGA, Mayor Francis Slay, the Prestressed Concrete Institute, and the International Interior Design Association’s Midwest arm—and Whitaker herself scored the St. Louis Forum’s 2009 Trailblazer Award.
Whitaker serves on a slew of nonprofit boards, including the YMCA, the United Way, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, and the RCGA. In 2010, look for her to bring her civic involvement and business pursuits into even closer alignment: Arcturis has proposed a green home-building initiative to help revitalize northeastern University City, and it’s also been involved in the planning stages of Paul McKee’s proposed NorthSide Regeneration project and the city of Clayton’s bold new police headquarters. —M.B.
Conversation Starter
Whitaker knows how to combine practicality with ambience, and in one of her favorite assignments, the ambience was practical: a meditation space for a police station in Illinois, so officers could regain peace and perspective after high-stress situations.
A PRINCE AMONG MEN
Albert Pujols
Sportsman, Philanthropist
They call him Phat Albert, The Machine, El Hombre.
But his given name is José Alberto Pujols Alcántara, and he’s St. Louis’ reigning King of Swat.
Since joining the Cardinals in 2001, Pujols has batted a .334 average, been named to the All-Star team every year, won the National League Most Valuable Player award twice, and ranked among the top home-run hitters in the history of the sport. He’s a shoo-in for Cooperstown’s revered Hall of Fame. The Sporting News declared him the MLB Athlete of the Decade. (And this is all for the player selected in the 13th round of the 1999 draft, the 402nd overall pick.)
The 29-year-old slugger has yet another—and we believe it’s his most fitting—moniker: Prince Albert. Putting aside his formidable talent with a bat and glove, Pujols inspires us with what he has done off the field—for the community and especially for those with Down syndrome.
When Pujols married his wife, Deidre, in 2000, his new family included her daughter, Isabella, born with Down syndrome. (Since then, the couple has added Albert Jr. and Sophia to the clan.) Motivated by Isabella’s condition, they founded the Pujols Family Foundation, which is dedicated to the needs of people with Down syndrome and their families. The 50 or so annual events include everything from mother-daughter teas and “Hitters & Splitters” father-son bowling to “Lose the Training Wheels” bike camp, “Albert’s All-Star Game,” and a fall prom.
Every year, the foundation sends teams of doctors and dentists to treat underprivileged children and orphans in the Dominican Republic. And this November, the Albert Pujols Wellness Center for Adults with Down Syndrome opened at St. Luke’s Hospital. (Pujols kicked in $70,000 to get the project started.) The first of its kind in the state, the center gives Down syndrome patients a place to go when they leave pediatric care.
In 2007, Pujols won the highly coveted Roberto Clemente Award, baseball's highest honor, given to a player who “best exemplifies the game of baseball, sportsmanship, community involvement, and the individual’s contribution to his team.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone more deserving. —C.M.
Conversation Starter
Pujols is almost, sorta, a homegrown boy: Born in the Dominican Republic, he moved to Independence, Mo., when he was 16, graduated from Fort Osage High School, and briefly attended Metropolitan Community College–Maple Woods in Kansas City.
EDUCATION THAT BEGAN AT HOME
Rhonda J. Broussard
Educator, Founder
Most conversations about public education in the city of St. Louis either trail off, exhausted and hopeless, or start a fight. Mention the new St. Louis Language Immersion Schools, and the tone changes: This is an experiment that just might work.
SLLIS founder and president Rhonda J. Broussard grew up in Lafayette, La., and her grandmother spoke careful English in public but rapid, emotional French in the intimacy of their home. “It was the language of friendship, gossip, anger, happiness,” Broussard says, “and I wanted to be in that language with her.” Being bilingual made her feel special, connected to the world, resourceful. She went on to study French and education at Washington University, then earned a master’s at New York University’s Institute of French Studies.
Meanwhile, teachers back home had opened a language-immersion school in the kind of low-income neighborhood where Broussard grew up—and a second language made a dramatic difference for those kids, too. “It’s about the flexibility of the brain,” she explains. “Students in language-immersion programs spend all day problem-solving. They also learn what we call the dollar words; they have deeper, richer vocabularies in both languages, and they perform better academically.”
When Broussard and her partner moved to St. Louis, she was determined to have a language-immersion school up and running by the time their daughter, Olivia, was ready for kindergarten. Dragging their U-Haul into town, they saw signs for the Festival of Nations in Tower Grove Park, so Broussard stopped at a Kinko’s and made flyers. Next, she drove to Kansas City to see its language-immersion school, and a teacher remarked, “Oh, someone from St. Louis was just here, a guy named Vince”—Schoemehl. The former mayor had been interested in language immersion for years; soon after he met Broussard, the two started talking to the University of Missouri–St. Louis about a charter school.
SLLIS French and Spanish immersion schools opened this fall, in a converted warehouse in Forest Park Southeast, with 175 founding families. “They’re already forming a community, planning work days, helping design the uniforms,” grins Broussard, one of those rare leaders with the patience to share decision-making. Academic standards are high: SLLIS is the first elementary school in St. Louis to use the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme. In time, Broussard wants to set up campuses for Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Farsi, Russian, and German.
But for now, she’s right on schedule: Olivia starts school next fall. —J.C.
Conversation Starter
Broussard’s local Creole source is the Gumbo Shop in Rock Hill: “Best étouffée I’ve tasted outside Louisiana.”
By Margaret Bauer, Jeannette Cooperman, Bryan A. Hollerbach, Christy Marshall, Jarrett Medlin, Stefene Russell, and Stephen Schenkenberg
