Photograph by Mike Defilippo
Below is a collection of memories about the late Bob Cassilly. For more about Cassilly's creative genius, pick up the January 2012 print edition of St. Louis Magazine.
• Neighbor Thomas Danisi remembers going with Bob, back in the 1970s, to see a limestone entranceway on Sarah that would make the perfect courtyard fountain. The next thing Danisi knew, Bob was up on the second floor chipping plaster away from the doorway. Somebody yelled a warning. “I’ve got it under control,” Bob yelled back. He gave one kick, and the entire brick front collapsed—leaving the doorway intact.
• “The only thing I noticed that had any semblance of order was his sculpture tools,” Danisi says. “They were always in a row. He’d say, ‘C’mon in the shop and talk. I have to cut something up real quick.’ He’d be cutting with a big old saw and turning around and talking to me.
“‘Uh, Bob, I think you should, uh…’
“‘I know what I’m doing. What do you think?’
“‘It looks like a box.’
“‘No. It’s more than a box.’”
• He raided demolition sites regularly. When Ralston Purina wanted to expand, Bob and his friend J. Walter Scott “went down and literally pulled up the brick alleys,” used them for pavers.
• “We went on sailing trips when he didn’t know how to sail, capsized and had to be rescued,” says his second wife, Gail Cassilly. “There was just a whole history of rescues.”
• Bob was hardly the overgrown child people made him out to be, though. “He was always thinking in an intelligent way and reacting,” Gail says. “There were storehouses of files. It was always ‘Oh, I always wanted to do this!’ as if he’d been living 400 years. I’d say, ‘Where did this come from? I never heard this before?’ and he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I always wanted to do that more than anything!’ There was this whole stockpile of stuff always waiting to surface. When the pieces suddenly fell into place it was, ‘Oh, yeah, this is for this thing I always wanted to do.’”
• “One Friday night, we were both supposed to be someplace with our wives,” partner Tim Tucker recalls, “but we dropped some stripper in the front hall, and it ate through the concrete, and we discovered this incredible marble inlaid floor. An hour and a half later, we’d revealed a 2- by 2-foot section that showed the pattern. The whole crew spent the next two months removing concrete.”
• “What you see is what you get,” Tucker adds. “The least seen thing about Bob was his leadership skills. The way he empowered other people to be better or think bigger. He taught me how small I thought.”
• When City Museum took on momentum, people started giving him stuff—which wasn’t quite as much fun, but still useful. “He had everything catalogued in his head,” director Rick Erwin says. “There’s stuff on Jefferson, on 6th, on 7th…” Currently in the museum garage: the world’s largest seesaw. Basketball flooring from St. Louis University High School. Vines from trees in a cemetery—Bob was wrapping columns in them. A rusty chain from an anchor…
• "He didn’t walk around with his hand out saying give me public money,” notes City Museum’s former photographer in residence, Mike DeFilippo. “He said, 'Give me your trash, and I’ll build something cool out of it.' He started out with clay models and went way past that.... There wasn’t enough time in the day for everything that was busting out of him.”
• Graphic designer Tom Kavanaugh, who rented space from Bob, remembers watching from the window, “that long sidewalk along the south side of City Museum. Bob had told me he was going to put in a brick sidewalk. Sure enough, they dug the whole thing out and his workers put down sand. Someone would say, ‘Tom, take a look at this’: Bob would be down there putting the bricks in a certain pattern. His workers would completely finish the entire thing. Two weeks later, he would pull out all of the bricks and start a different pattern. And he did that at least three times.
• “When City Museum was opening,” Kavanaugh says, “he had this huge mirror about 10 x 10 and the top was cut sharp, and it was leaning against the wall, and all I could think of was that it’d slide out or one of the kids would pull on it. I said, ‘Bob, aren’t you worried about this?’ “‘Nah, it’s not gonna go anywhere, it’s too heavy.’ “‘But what if somebody knocked it down? It could kill somebody! I hope you have a lot of insurance…’ “‘Nah. I don’t have any. If somebody dies we just close it and start something else.’”
• Those breathtaking photos of Bob standing on one leg on top of the water tower on top of City Museum? “That didn’t impress me as much as just how tough he was,” City Museum carpenter George Diehl says. “He’d grab this damn thing that was so heavy, a big steel beam. You were going to get help and he’d say, ‘Just pick it up!’ and already have one end. And the way he made things happen: dragging this multi-thousand-pound tree through the building, using an electric fork lift to nudge it, cranking it up an inch at a time with a big chair hoist to get it in place. The big pencil [world’s largest], we took out a window on the third floor and just swung it in with a big crane.”
• “The latest thing they did on the 15th and Lucas side, they built an addition in that corner, put in a big spiral side,” recalls Diehl. “We had one of these walls up. This glass was like channel glass. We had the wall built, we had the glass in it, and he changed his mind. He just thought it’d look neat if we did it differently. He wanted a little walkway up there. We’d say, ‘Oh, well, it’ll be better the second time.’ Some days he’d be so apologetic: I know you’re gonna hate this, but we’ve got to redo it. And then other days he’d walk in with his jaw clenched: ‘What’s everybody doing? Everybody in this building is goofing off!’ He was happiest when there were 30 people running around doing his bidding.”
• “He loved the big gesture. He’d say, I want to be a benevolent dictator like Idi Amin,” laughs Jean Larson Steck, deputy director of the museum in its early years. “Internal rules? Everything I can think of, he broke. Except—you don’t litter. He’d go crazy if someone littered.”
• “Bob enjoyed being an admired artist,” says friend, neighbor, and occasional spokesman Richard Callow, “but it was a half-hearted enjoyment. He put a million details in his work that no one would ever notice. The most ardent admirers of his art—children—didn’t know it was art and thought nothing about the artist.”
• "Bob loved and hated and loved again and hated again most pictures of his own work,” notes Callow. “Eventually, the staff stopped telling him how to find his own website.”
• “I’ve learned almost everything from him. I don’t know what I haven’t learned,” says Kurt Knickmeyer, who worked as Bob’s right hand. “Certainly work ethic. I come from a very laidback family; it was a real contrast. And I’m so thankful for it. I feel much more motivated than I ever would have. You are with him for that long and it sticks with you, and you start thriving on that too. and then you start building it yourself.”
• “There was always a tension with Bob,” recalls former manager Matt Philpott. “In the early days, there really wasn’t anybody to tell him no. It was maybe just ‘You’re out of money today so no building today.’ It got much harder when more money was spent and there were other people that had expectations about what we were doing. I think he viewed me as a foil. On the good times, he once referred to us as Master Blaster, from Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome: a midget sitting on a giant’s shoulders. The giant was the muscle and the midget was the brains. He saw himself as the muscle: a big guy doing all the hard work.”
• “I used to fight with him over where walls would go,” Philpott says. “He’d push the 2x4s aside and bring in a giant piece of steel, because he couldn’t visualize it on paper or even with 2x4s. I’d scoot it over six inches, say, ‘I need a bathroom.’ He’d say, ‘No, it can’t go there. The curve won’t work. There will be a flat spot.’ Everything had to have a curve that died into a flat wall. He hated hard corners. And he hated drywall.”
• After Cassilly’s death, Erwin led a reporter around City Museum. “He’d do little drawings and leave notes for us. See?” He pointed out scribbles on walls and columns: color instructions, “serpent” for a future mosaic, the word “shells” as a placeholder (he brought shells back from every vacation). “One day he was watching the fish, and he said, ‘We need an island for the turtles, so they can sit out here in the middle.’”
• “He was highly disciplined,” says his widow, Giovanna Cassilly. “He worked so hard and was so focused for long periods of time. I’d think, ‘He’s been carving a hillside for 14 hours and I’m complaining about painting for three hours!’ Discipline kept that drive going. Whatever he was meant to be doing, he did it. There was a really clear connection—whether it was to the divine or the muses whatever, it was an undisturbed constant in his life. That never got severed. He used it. No matter what emotions came up, what crises, he just kept using it.”
• “Things really shifted in his head in the later part of his life,” Giovanna adds. “People weren’t around him as much in the last 10 years. That sense of time urgency—he really developed that over the past two years. I’ve had bone-chilling moments since his death. I don’t think I would ever question destiny again. I honestly believe he was aware something abrupt was going to happen.”
