Photograph courtesy of Yogi Berra
YOGI BERRA
The Hill
Along with being one of the most quoted Americans (“It ain’t over till it’s over.” “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” “It’s déjà vu all over again.”), Yogi Berra was one of the best catchers that the game ever saw. He won five World Series in a row with the New York Yankees, in addition to winning five more rings over the course of his career. He played with Joe DiMaggio, Whitey Ford, and Mickey Mantle. You also probably recognize the picnic basket-stealing homage to him. He had a record–breaking career in the majors, lived in New York and New Jersey, and is a living legend. But his favorite subject is still St. Louis. Born Lorenzo Pietro Berra, Yogi grew up in The Hill, across the street from former Cardinals catcher Joe Garagiola. His father helped build St. Louis Arena, and he’s played golf with Stan Musial. Even today, he laments the absence of toasted rav on the East Coast. —Rosalind Early
My dad and mom came from the old country [Italy]. My dad came over first. He worked in a brickyard with Joe [Garagiola’s] dad. At 4:30, when that whistle blew, we stopped doing everything and would go and get his can of beer. My dad was very strict with us; we listened to him. He was pretty tough, but he made sense when he talked to you.
Growing up, whatever was in season, we played. I loved soccer. See, when we were kids, you know the schools, we played against each other. They don’t do that now. When we were off in the summer, we’d play Mason [Elementary School] and all them. We pitched horseshoes, played softball, volleyball, and dodge ball. I played softball in the morning and baseball in the afternoon. Sublette Park and Tower Grove Park, we played there. We used to play at Creve Coeur Lake, too. We did everything. Wherever a field was open, we played in it. Sometimes, we’d get chased off the fields.
I sold The St. Louis Globe–Democrat. Joe Medwick [Cardinals left fielder] would always stop at my corner. The papers were only 3 cents then, and he gave me a nickel and say, “Keep the change.” I liked that. Two cents tip. It was great. He was my favorite, you know, my favorite ball player.
Later Stan Musial, Joe Medwick, and I used to go play golf together. Stan was pretty good. So was Medwick. I think I was the has-been. Joe Garagiola and I were invited to try-out for the Cardinals at Sportsman’s Park. [Cardinals General Manager Branch Rickey offers neighbor and childhood pal Joe Garagiola a $500 signing bonus. He reluctantly offers Berra $250. Berra turns him down.] I wanted the same thing Joe got. I wanted to play with either the Cardinals or the Browns. When the Cardinals didn’t offer me anything the Browns said, “Well, they don’t want to give him anything. We’re not going to give him anything.” I would have played with anyone. I would have loved to play in St. Louis.
After my first year [playing with the Yankees] I worked in a Sears and Roebucks [in St. Louis]. I went in for lunch at Stan Musial and Biggie’s restaurant and I saw Carmen [his future wife] and I said—I asked Biggie who’s she? I says, “I’m going to ask her for a date.” She says, “I don’t go out with married men.” She thought I was married.
Carm and I would go to hockey games. I double dated with Joe Garagiola. [Once, Yogi practiced with the St. Louis Flyers, the hockey team of the era and he publicity photos made it into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch] When George Weiss [General Manager for the New York Yankees at the time] saw me on them skates like that he called me on the phone and said you better get your butt off of them skates.
I had three brothers and a sister. My sister Josie played with us when we needed a guy to play ball. She played right field. My eldest brother was the best one in the family, Lefty [Tony]. My other two brothers could have played professional ball too and my dad says, “You go to work. You aren’t going to play baseball. You better bring that check home.” They told him, “We’re all working pop, let him [Yogi] go play ball.” I always teased him when he was still alive. I said, “Dad, you could have been a millionaire if you let your sons play ball.” He said, “Blame your mother.”
PHYLLIS SMITH
Lemay
Phyllis Smith grew up near Lemay, just beyond Carondolet Park, where she attended Blow Elementary and Cleveland High School. In the ’70s and ’80s, she worked as a dancer and burlesque performer—until a knee injury ended her dancing career. Smith eventually moved to L.A. and became an actress and casting associate, landing the role of Phyllis Lapin-Vance on The Office and recently starring in the Cameron Diaz flick Bad Teacher.
I had a Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best childhood. My parents could not have been better parents. My dad worked two jobs all the time, sometimes three. My mother cooked three meals a day, seven days a week; The only time she didn’t cook was Friday night, our big night out. We started out at Courtesy Diner. Then we went a few blocks to get really good fish at Tip Top’s. Eventually, when my brother worked there, we went to Steak ’n Shake. When I return home now, I still go straight to Steak ’n Shake. I get a double-cheeseburger with onion, fries, and cup of chili. Occasionally, if they have it in the coupon, I take a shake to go.
Growing up, I always wanted to be dancer. My mom says I used to dance in my crib. I can remember an older cousin of mine took dance, and she gave me her old tap and ballet shoes. My dad had a piece of plywood, and I would take it outside; it was like a person with a drum set who doesn’t know how to drum. I took dance lessons at Stanley Herbert’s studio, at Wydown and Hanley [in Clayton]. My dad, who worked at Bly-Moss Furniture off Lindbergh, used to drive to south St. Louis to pick me up and take me all the way to Clayton. He would sit in front of the studio for three hours while I danced—that had to be the last thing he wanted to do, but he never complained. I also used to try out for The Muny. I was like Kristine in A Chorus Line. I was the dancer who could do it all, but when it came to singing, they would say, “Thank you. Next.”
After graduating from UMSL, I worked at a J. C. Penney warehouse, on McKenzie and Reavis Barracks, where I’d tag bowling balls, lampshades, fishing lures—you name it. I worked with a bunch of great people there, and we collected recipes; my best recipes are from my days there. Working at Penney’s afforded me to the time to earn the money to do things that I wanted to do.
There’s something about St. Louis… I just love it. My heart is there. My family is there. My mom lives in the same house that she lived in before she was married—it’s where I grew up… I just bought a sofa patterned after the one that we had when I was growing up. And for my birthday, my mom gave me the ceiling lamp in my bedroom. As you get older, it’s the little things that you remember that become important.
A.E. HOTCHNER
University City
In St. Louis, most readers identify with him as Aaron, the smart-mouthed 12-year-old narrator of King of the Hill, Hotchner’s wry, colorful memoir of growing up here during the Great Depression. If you’ve not read the book—or seen Steven Soderberg’s movie—the plot involves young Hotchner locking himself in a hotel room for a summer to prevent the family from being thrown out of their hotel room when they are unable to pay rent. Hotchner (or “Hotch,” to pals), attended Wash. U. law school, practiced for a few years, served in the Air Force during World War II, then left for New York to be a writer. His adult life has held at least as much adventure as that hungry summer in the Westgate, where he literally ate pictures of food out of a magazine out of desperation. He lived in Paris during the war; met met Ernest Hemingway in Cuba while working as a “literary bounty hunter,” for Cosmopolitan, and stayed fast friends with him till his death in 1961; wrote plays for the New York stage; founded a salad dressing company with Paul Newman; scripted TV dramas; and published more than a dozen books. And at 91, he is still actively writing and publishing, with more adventures yet to come.
The first time we came to St. Louis, I was little. Well, I was born in St. Louis. But we went somewhere to live with my mother’s parents. I think it was Chicago. At that time, my father owned an affluent fur business; St. Louis was a great hub of fur. When we came back, we stayed at that hotel, the Westgate Hotel, but at that point, it was a very solid family hotel. This was before the Depression, before it fell into terrible disrepute. That was my first memory of St. Louis, coming there when I was 6 or 7 years old, and staying at the Westgate, which was at Delmar and Kingshighway. Now, when I came back to St. Louis for the publication of King of the Hill, on a book tour, I asked the person who was taking me to whatever bookstore I was going to sign books, whether we could go by Kingshighway and Delmar—I wanted to see the hotel once more. We went by, and at that very moment, there was a huge crane with a wrecking ball, and it was knocking the hotel down. So that was rather a traumatic moment.
I worked a lot of jobs in the summer in St. Louis. Now it’s hard for kids that age to get jobs. Or anybody. [Hooverville] was under the Eads Bridge, that whole area under the bridge. It was all set up with makeshift shelters, cardboard, and at the time, it seemed like half the population of St. Louis was under the Eads Bridge.
[The Westgate] was a real fleabag [hotel] by that point. But they were trying to kick us out, and the whole point of the book was that I had to stay in that room because if I left, we would have been locked us out, and we would have joined the people under the Eads Bridge. So that was the battle of that summer. It was one of those super-terrific St. Louis summers where you could barely breathe it was so hot, and there was no air conditioning at that time. The only thing you had was a fan. First of all, you had to be able to buy a fan, and the hotel wouldn’t allow it because they wouldn’t allow you to use their electricity. So even if you had one, they would police it. You couldn’t have any kind of a refrigerator because that also would use electricity. Even when the weather got cooler, you would try to keep things on the windowsill, but they would spot it from the outside, and raise hell. It was very difficult living for a family to be living in a hotel like that. There were [families living there] in the beginning, but slowly everyone got locked out, because no one could pay rent.
In the couple of years I practiced law before I went into the military, I would go, I guess I was living then with my family in University City. When you went downtown, we were on Pine Street, in the telephone building. You would take, in your briefcase, an extra shirt, because by lunchtime, your shirt was black with the soot of the city. So you always changed shirts before you went to lunch… you’d put your fresh shirt on, and by the end of the day it was black again, but primarily in the morning when all of the furnaces fired up. So by noon, the city was really coated. It was pretty repulsive.
One thing that I was able to do, when I went to Washington University, way back… every year, there was a quadrangle club. It was devoted to producing an original musical comedy, using all the departments, the dance department and the music department, and an original book was written, and original music, composed by the students, who did all the casting, though they used a professional director. And that would go every year, and some very talented people went on from doing Washington University’s quadrangle clubs to being very successful professionals. The year before I did the quadrangle club, a man named Shepard Mead wrote the book of the musical, the lyrics, which I did. And Shepard, when he got out, wrote How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. [In 1940], I wrote the book, and then I wrote the lyrics, and there would be a songwriter. I wrote some of the lyrics, there was a contest for the songs, and a contest for books, I’d forgotten who made the judgments, I guess it was the drama department people. Mine was a show called Down in Front. It was about a guy who is down on his luck and he owes bills, and he meets this big guy who is also down on his luck, and he decides he’s going to make him the heavyweight champion of the world. And so that’s really the basis of it. It became a prizefight musical. The dance department choreographed as a ballet, with the people watching the prizefight. It was really quite imaginative. There were a couple of wonderful songs, and a couple of people with really good voices, and it was covered by the Post-Dispatch.
There was a course called English 16, with a professor named Carson, it was under his aegis. You studied playwriting. Instead of an exam at the end, you wrote a one-act play. You worked on the elements of it all through the year. The best three were produced on the stage there. It went for a year, or two semesters, and the second semester, you did your play. And in my class was a very talented playwright, at least he showed his talent along the way, named Thomas Lanier Williams. We wrote little sketches that were to eventually to become our play. He wrote little sketches about his mother and his crippled sister. They were very lyrical, and everybody was sure that he was going to be one of the finalists, if not win it. For some reason, he didn’t write that play—he wrote a terrible potboiler called Me, Vashya! It wasn’t even selected. And Tom, who later on become Tennessee, was so pissed at that he quit school and went to the University of Iowa.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
East St. Louis
Heptathlon and long-jump world champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee, voted the greatest female athlete of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated:
The greatest thing about living there was that you knew there was a lot of love in the house. I mean, you felt that. It was what we call a shotgun house, very small. The dining room was a bedroom for one of my sisters and my grandma, they slept on a roll-out couch. We had a porch with steps—I’d jump off the banister into the grass, that’s how I practiced my long-jump form. Then my sister and I started going to the park across the street—it had a see-saw, monkey bars, and a sandbox—and putting sand in potato-chip bags to bring home so I could make my own long-jump pit. We never ever garnered enough sand that would allow me to jump without hurting myself, though, and my dad noticed because the sand was messing up the grass.
We had a tree in the yard, and I remember every Fourth of July climbing up in that tree and looking over at the Arch, at the fireworks. I always wondered what they were doing over in St. Louis. It seemed like there was so much happening, and it was a world away from where we were. That drove me, that motivation to see what the rest of the world had to offer.
You would have the men sitting on the corner drinking, but really, they were almost like, I would say angels, in a sense, because they watched over us. We didn’t have a track, so we’d run around the block, and they would give us encouragement. And if we did wrong, they’d tell our mom or dad. They not only were drinkin’ and enjoyin’, they also were the eyes of the community.
I didn’t want to bother eating dinner—it interfered with my time going outside to play. One time my dad caught me giving my dinner to Fluffy [a Pekingese-cocker spaniel mix]. Oh, I got in trouble. Food was scarce. For heat in the winter, we’d turn on the oven and hang blankets to keep the heat in the kitchen, and that’s where we’d all gather. We even slept there, on the floor by the stove. Later I realized how dangerous that was!
I could pick up different skills and movements in basketball really easy, but learning to run without stopping was hard. That’s how I knew I’d like it—it was challenging. The jumping just came ’cause I had strong legs; I’d done African dance at the Katherine Dunham Center. I was just sitting there waiting on the coach while he worked with the jumpers. He had a makeshift long jump in his yard. So I went over and jumped. He said, ‘Do that again!’
We lived at 1433 Piggott. Miss Newman was on the right side, she watched us when my mom went to work. Miss Cole, she was on the left. Her daughter Phelicia was my closest friend, but we were friends with all the Cole kids. We went to school together, played together, were cheerleaders together—although they got tired of me ’cause they said I wanted to be the boss. We had a girl group, Fabulous Dolls. A lot of us were on the junior-high cheerleading squad. We’d come up with routines—“Hey wacky wacky, my friends call me Joker Jackie…”
In high school, I was told I couldn’t be a cheerleader, run track, and play basketball too. I said, ‘But I’m good!’ and my coach said he didn’t care how good I was. I was working at the Wehrenberg movie theater downtown, too, selling popcorn, and I had to quit. I guess I didn’t realize what high school entailed.
I was very successful going through Junior Olympics. To me, I was just having fun, but when my name was in the paper, people would say, “You’re gonna go places, but you gotta keep working hard.”
What goes back to my childhood? Probably a tendency of holding on to too many things. Not having a whole lot when I was younger, so being afraid to throw away anything. And I also feel the need to share a lot. Seeing girls my age get pregnant and have that responsibility change their lives—that affected me. My mom’s philosophy was always trying to make something out of my life. There wasn’t gonna be no boyfriend. She used to make us read The Crusader every week, to know what was happening in the community. Young girls our age, victims of rape—she’d say, ‘You are not immune to this!’ That’s something I carry with me still today, to know my surroundings. And I don’t take anyone for granted, and I don’t take any situation for granted. I know I have to work for what I want. Nothing comes easy.
Sen. John Danforth
Clayton
Despite a law practice in New York, 19 years in the U.S. Senate, and posts as U.S. special envoy to Sudan and ambassador to the United Nations…he’s never really left home.
So what does it mean to be a St. Louisan?
You remember there was something called St. Louis 2004? When we were getting that under way, I went out with a clipboard and just went up to people and asked them questions. When I asked, ‘What do you like about St. Louis?’ do you know what the answer was? ‘We like to live here.’ I really think that that is it. We like to live here, plain and simple. It’s not a totally Type-A place.
Did you ever want to live somewhere perhaps a little more Type A?
Never. Never. Never. When I was in the Senate and we lived in Washington, I made it clear to my children, ‘This is not home. Washington is a work station. We don’t live here.’ They go to school in Washington, and their friends are in Washington, and I’m telling them, ‘You can’t root for the Washington Redskins.’ It’s kind of like saying, ‘OK, Fourth-Grader, stand out like a sore thumb in your class.’ But you know how the old St. Louis football Cardinals were just consistently beaten by the Washington Redskins? One Sunday, the Cardinals beat the Redskins. Tom, at the time, was 6. And on Monday morning, he came down to breakfast decked out in St. Louis Cardinals gear. He said, ‘I’m going to go to school like this,’ and he gave this big loud raspberry. I said, “Tom, I wouldn’t. ’Cause they’re gonna win the next one!”
What was it like growing up here?
We lived in Brentmoor Park. There was one other kid in our neighborhood my age, and on Saturdays, we’d walk into Clayton. Coupla miles. There was a drugstore at Forsyth, and we’d stop there and get a cherry Coke. I was in Harold Bauer’s Standard station one time, right where Wydown runs into Hanley, and Marty Marian drove in. Across the street was the Glaser Drugstore, I think it’s a Starbucks now, so I went in and bought a Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comic book, and Marty Marion autographed my comic book. There was the bowling alley, Lee’s Grill for hamburgers, Pevely Dairy for ice cream. Clayton was very different then, really a small town. The buildings were all two-story. There was a trolley, the Clayton 04. And the ball park was the old Busch Stadium. You’d take the streetcar all over the place. Even for a child, there was not a sense of danger.
How’s life different on the East Coast?
Washington was very aggressive. People who drive in Washington, it’s as though they’re filling up every square foot of pavement with cars. Three times in my life I’ve returned from the East Coast to St. Louis—and there’s a message in that, I think. I got out of law school and went to New York City and practiced law for three years. We lived in an apartment on 75th Street, and I was in a law firm down on Wall Street. Riding the subway to work and being hermetically sealed in an office building—it just became more and more oppressive. My wife and I decided we just couldn’t do it. What could you do with a child, walk it to Central Park? So we got a real-estate agent and went looking for houses in Westchester County. The first day, the real-estate agent took us to Bronxville, and we were standing in somebody’s living room, and I turned to Sally and I said, “What are we doing here?” and she said, “I don’t know.” I said, “Let’s go home.”
Are St. Louisans really as “nice” as East Coast types say?
Sure. Yeah. Of course. And they’re very chatty. It’s the same statewide. When I was in the Senate, Missouri had about 5 million people—all of whom liked to talk, and all of whom had strong views which were in disagreement with whatever I was doing! It’s the opposite of “yep” and “nope.” People like to visit.
Are we too nice? Some cities make more room for aggressive ambition…
Yeah, but I think that’s terrible. I think people have a sense of the totality of life here.
What, other than your family, influenced you as you were growing up?
Nothing compares with my family. Nothing. Nothing is close to my family’s influence on me. Of course, my family’s all from here. My grandfather, my great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, were from Charleston, Mo., down in the bootheel. My grandfather came here to go to school, stayed at Washington University, and founded Ralston Purina.
And you’ve stayed, and now three of your five children live here…
It’s home. It’s very comfortable to be home.
Marilyn vos Savant
Kirkwood
“When I was born in 1946, my parents owned a bar and grill on 9th and Lynch. We lived upstairs. No kidding—right over the shop! My father tended bar, and my mother made sandwiches. After that business was in the past, we moved to an adorable little stone house out by the Anheuser-Busch place. I loved it there—rolling hills, fruit trees, a little vineyard plus a vegetable patch, well water, a chicken coop so we could always have fresh eggs, and a huge Dalmation to knock me down frequently. Later, we moved back into the city, this time to south St. Louis, less than a block from Carondelet Park. I recall the peace and leafiness of the neighborhood…the safe and quiet feeling of our street…the glow of the street lamps in the dark. When I saw the lights go on, I knew I should go home. In the summer, I would sometimes bicycle past a fellow wheeling a cart of fresh strawberries. He would call, "Strawww-bare-EEZ! Strawww-bare-EEZ!" They were always such a treat.”
