Nice Work!

Best Place to Act Like An Animal

The Saint Louis Zoo

By Jeannette Batz Cooperman

Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

When you work at the Saint Louis Zoo, the residents set your clock. Today, associate veterinarian Martha Weber arrives at first light, determined to examine the eruptions on a female rhino’s hide before the morning mud-wallow. The splinter’s safely out of the goat’s nose; now Weber must anesthetize Tamari, a 10-year-old lion-tailed macaque (sliding back now-passive lips to reveal truly frightening yellow canines) and remove that pesky hernia dressing. Only then will Weber reach the day’s peak experience: prying open the wide, tightly compressed mouths of the tiny Puerto Rican crested toads to take mucus samples. She wants to confirm the necropsy lab’s latest CSI triumph: a technician detected a parasite burrowed into the nasal cavity of a toad cadaver and realized that the parasite could be what’s making them sick.

Weber did her residency at the zoo, then went off to work for Disney. She returned because she missed the camaraderie (where else do people put hissing cockroaches in their mouths for effect?) and dedication. “We have never been told, ‘No, you can’t do that CAT scan—it’s too expensive,’” she says. “Besides, I’m not a very good corporate employee. Here, if I didn’t like something [zoo director Jeffrey] Bonner did, I could go tell him.”

Anne Bartin, zoological manager of the Children’s Zoo, arrives at 7 a.m. to check the weather, decide whether the pygmy goats should play outside, make sure there are enough frozen rats in the freezer to satiate the birds of prey and set schedules. Who will take Schneider the squirrel through his paces on the jungle gym in the employee restroom? And who will lure—she might save this plum job for herself—the female Matschie’s tree kangaroo close enough for the excited crowds to get a peek at Little LaRoo, still ensconced in her mother’s pouch but with front paws and face now showing?

Penguin keeper Frank Fischer gets off to a late start this week, an indolent 8 a.m., just in time to grin at the other keeper, who’s been submerged in the frigid exhibit pool for an hour already, his wetsuit scant protection against the chill as he scrubs rock and vacuums up penguin droppings. Fischer is on kitchen detail this week, and he looks like a hybrid galley cook–mad scientist as he rinses thawed herring (hand-fed to the kings), capelin (a favorite of the Gentoo, which shoot straight out of the water and land on their feet), trout (preferred by the Humboldts) and lake smelt (for the tiny rockhoppers, crowned with yellow tufts of feathers). The sink shines with iridescent capelin—lavender, burnt orange, taupe and silver—as Fischer rinses off the fishes’ protective coating so that it won’t crust at the corners of the birds’ beaks. As he works, he tosses aside body parts: “Penguins like their fish whole. They wouldn’t come across a headless fish in the ocean.” He slides vitamins behind the gill of each fish, checking a whiteboard to see who gets what. Then he turns to the puffins’ chop, reaching for pink squid tentacles and a thawed block of krill and adding a squirt of thiamine paste, and dipping into a dog food–cricket mix for the Eider ducks.

Fischer has worked at the zoo for 20 years (a record not unusual among the zoo’s 300-or-so full-timers), so his entry-level penury has grown respectable. “Working with the animals, I don’t worry about being laid off,” he says. (How many other scientists would scrub fish before beginning the day’s complex data documentation?) He gets five weeks of vacation and great benefits—including the fierce affection of Double, a Gentoo penguin who sidles along behind him as he scrubs the highest boulders, snapping at any other penguin who approaches. Double and her sister, Trouble, hop out of the exhibit so frequently, the keepers have placed a ramp out front so the birds can waddle up and dive back home again.

If possible, Fischer will meet his wife for lunch. (They’re one of many zoo couples; she’s a keeper at the Antelope House, and she adores the smell of antelope manure but is less fond of her spouse’s pungent, nose-tingling, densely fishy aroma. Parent-teacher conferences right after work are amusing.) The khaki-clad keepers live by their animals’ schedules, though, so they don’t form the cheerful lunch cliques one sees in the Living World cafeteria, where today’s staff gossip is the baby tree kangaroo. A woman from administration sneaks over to the Children’s Zoo after lunch to catch a glimpse. Soft-voiced, patient as a safecracker, Bartin ignores the gathering crowd and uses sweet potatoes to coax the mother down, inch by inch, from the highest branches. But only if she wants to come.

Best Place to Catch Up On Current Events

KMOV

By Matthew Halverson

Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

The first thing you notice as you walk into the newsroom at KMOV—aside from Virginia Kerr and her knee-high boots—are the clocks. Big and digital, with red numbers that keep time to the second, they hang at the top of each wall, in plain sight of every desk on the floor. “Oh, that’s nice,” you think to yourself. “What a lifesaver for the putz who’s prone to forgetting his watch.” But then as the evening news approaches and the room gets a little bit smaller with each passing second, you doubt their benevolence and get the feeling that even when you’re not looking at them, they’re looking at you, their angry crimson digits burning a hole in your back.

“It’s not as intimidating as you think,” producer Patti Smith tells you, and this comforts you. The fact that she says it without looking away from her computer does not. (To make matters worse, you discover it was a slightly skewed assessment anyway, because she reveals that she does not need a clock to tell time: “You’re either born with it or you aren’t.”)

The clock is there in the conference room, where you file in with the others at 9:30 a.m. to hash out what will appear in the 5:00 p.m. newscast, but it has yet to bear its teeth. Reporters straggle in, pick up assignments and casually wander out again. Their ambivalence toward the ticking taskmaster disturbs you a little, and you’re more than a little surprised when they all stop—mid-sentence—for Donald Trump’s announcement on CNN that he’ll let Miss USA Tara Conner keep her crown as long she enters rehab. “I knew it!” executive producer Bill Siegel yells with a laugh and slaps the table next to you.

The clock is not there on the street in front of a burned-out shell of a house, where Stan Kostecki is filming Russell Kinsaul for a story about arson fires, but when Smith calls from the newsroom for a status update, you learn that it’s 1:00, and time feels like a factor again. You do your best to stay out of the way until you realize you couldn’t possibly screw them up. They have done this before. You watch as Kostecki puts the camera on his shoulder and Kinsaul starts talking. Kostecki puts the camera down again, and they walk back to their white Ford Explorer with the grinding breaks. “The nice thing is that at the end of the day, I go home with a clean slate,” Kinsaul told you earlier in the day, and you remember it now, here in the SUV with the grinding breaks, when he admits that the hardest part of the job is entering a family’s moment of grieving to ask questions for a story.

Back in the newsroom, as 3:00 becomes 4:00, the urgency is immediate, and you wonder what exactly acting news director Genie Garner was talking about when she told you she occasionally walks out into the newsroom to relax. Then, as Smith is talking about her love for the challenge, news has the audacity to happen: A report comes in that there’s been a fatal car wreck at St. Louis Ave. and N. Grand. It’s too juicy not to lead with—something about a drag race gone tragically bad—but the only way to do it is to scramble a team and report live from the scene.

And in the control room half an hour later, watching Kara Kaswell calmly tell the story on Grand, you remember that director of operations Jim Rothschild warned you this might be a “slow day.”

Best Place to Sucker A Sedge

Shaw Nature Reserve

By Stefene Russell

Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

You don’t hear kids boasting that they’re going to be horticulturists when they grow up. That’s because they don’t know the word—and they don’t realize that on warm days in December, as sullen office workers stare at the tweed on their cubicle walls, the horticulturists are outside, speaking Latin.

“Hystricina … hystricina … hystricina …” Cindy Gilberg peers at the markers in Shaw Nature Reserve’s experimental sedge garden, looking for what you or I would call porcupine sedge. A misty rain is falling, but it’s warm enough to go coatless—warm enough to have awakened the spring peepers, little frogs that normally come out of hibernation when early-spring bulbs are sending forth blooms.

Gilberg and fellow horticulturist Terri Brandt hunt down their specimens, gingerly slicing into the wet earth with flat spades to cut out four or five clumps of each plant. They’ll return to the “headhouse” (where seeds are cleaned, sorted, stored and documented) to wash the roots, separate the crowns and gather the seeds for the reserve’s annual native plant sale in May, the busiest time of the year. There’s plenty to do in every season: seed collection in the fall, for instance. This year, they were not able to gather all the seeds they needed, which is why they are spending the morning digging up samples of “aggressive suckering sedges,” used in erosion control. Damp paper in hand, they check off their list: Carex lanuginosa (woolly sedge), Carex buxbaumii (bog sedge), Carex emoryi (Emory’s sedge), Carex lupulina (hop sedge).

“‘Sedges have edges.’ That’s what you learn in botany. See how the stems are triangular? That’s one of the main ways to tell the difference between a grass and a sedge,” Brandt says, twirling a sprig between her fingers.

In the ’20s, when its most delicate plants began to die as a result of exposure to coal smoke, the Missouri Botanical Garden purchased this 2,500-acre parcel in Gray Summit to house them. The pollution abated, and now MoBot uses the acreage for research and educational outreach (though some of the orchids live here, too). It’s now a green island surrounded by sprawl, but once you’re inside the gates it’s easy to forget how proximate you are to subdivisions, gas stations and fast-food joints.

As Brandt and Gilberg dig, a botanist wanders over to chew the fat. He complains that rabbits are eating his prairie violets before he can collect the seeds, asks whether one of the women can cat-sit for him while he’s on vacation. Then he spies it, hardly an inch out of the ground: a honeysuckle sprout, right by the heel of Gilberg’s shoe. She rips the interloper from the ground and hangs it, dirt clods and all, on the chain-link fence.

“Like coyotes,” she says, chuckling, “when you hang the skin on the fence, to tell them to keep out.”

Once all the Carex specimens have been loaded on the truck, the two women return to the headhouse by way of a quick dodge down a paved public road on the edge of the preserve. Later, chitchatting as they take a shortcut through the wildflower garden, the topic returns—as it almost always does—to green, growing things. Rather than talk TV, they talk about their gardens.

“I have some kind of Dracaena—it’s not marginata, but it’s some kind of Dracaena—it’s about this big, and it’s got flowers on it!” Brandt marvels. “It’s starting to bloom.”

“Is it pot-bound?” Gilberg asks. “That’s when they bloom. They’re, like, ‘Omigod, it’s a little tight in here—I’d better spread some seed before I die!’”

And that’s the vocational acid test—interest in what you’re paid to do when you’re not being paid to do it. At the end of the day, a horticulturist still wants to go home and grow stuff.

Best Place to Play “Heavy Metal”

Lunar Tool

By Stefene Russell

Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

Lunar Tool is right off I-44, behind O’Connell’s Pub, on the other side of a parking lot filled with American trucks. The company’s name conjures images of astronauts with oversize platinum calipers collecting pinches of moondust; in reality, Lunar Tool repairs and fabricates parts for heart catheters, turbines, rock-crushers, steam locomotives, printing machines and so on. A slogan on president Bob Farrar’s business card explains the name: “We work into the night to serve our customers.”

That’s a good thing if you’re a power station in Trinidad and Tobago and you need new collector shells. (Because the small, specialized machine shop has become a rare beast, Lunar Tool makes and services parts for companies all over the world.)

“Usually by the time we get final dimensions they almost want a 72-hour turnaround,” says plant manager Randy Travers, who arrives at work at 5 a.m. and goes home around 4 p.m.—with a stop-off at O’Connell’s. “We work around the clock to make that happen. When we service the pump on a nuclear power plant, I think they can only have that pump down for 24 hours.”

(We who power our hairdryers with the split atom are very glad Lunar Tool has a third shift.)

The building looks big from the outside. Inside, it’s cavernous. Formerly home to Banner Iron Works (which forged decorative ash dumps, sewer inlets and manhole covers around 1900), the building’s now split into two parts. There’s the floor where the machinists fabricate the heavy industrial stuff: Several months ago, they repaired a 14,000-pound turbine from Canada’s Hudson Bay dam here. The smell of shaved metal and machine oil hangs in the air, and it’s loud—a chorus of grinding, milling, boring and sawing. On the ceiling there are cranes (whose hooks have a 35-foot clearance, to give you an idea of the scale). Hip-high piles of curly metal shavings—silver, copper, gunmetal blue—are tidily collected, looking for all the world like tinsel for a robot’s Christmas tree. Machinists in goggles are hard at work behind their machines, including a boring mill that’s nearly the size of a merry-go-round.

Step through one particular doorway, and the noise drops by several decibels. The room smells like static and plaster; the walls are white. This is where Lunar Tool keeps its CNC (computerized numerical control) machines, capable of cutting metal finer than a hair. These are used to make finely tuned parts for medical equipment; any of the 20 general machinists employed here need to know how to work in either room, boring holes in 6-foot-thick steel or working with a thread of metal a thousandth of an inch in diameter.

Farrar says machinists make a more-than-decent living, and it’s not a grubby occupation, despite what people think. He wants to add a second shift to the shop, but there’s a machinist shortage; besides, a good machinist takes some breaking in, some apprentice time. “Doin’ it is a whole other thing,” says quality manager Mike Moore with a nod, stroking his white moustache as he peers up from a pile of blueprints he’s inspecting.

“Never a dull moment,” says Travers, laughing, “and, if there is, you’re looking around, wondering what you’ve missed.”

Best Place to Find Model Behavior

TalentPlus

By Christy Marshall

Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

Beautiful people sashay in and out, comedian Joe Marlotti stands around cracking jokes, members of the singing group Captivation croon in the back room and actors wonder aloud about their next gigs. Every Tuesday and Thursday, there’s a half-hour open call for models ages 13 and up, and who knows when an Angelina Jolie lookalike will saunter into the TalentPlus loft?

But day in and day out? “What happens on the inside is far from glamorous,” says agency writer Victoria Parker Satchell, one eyebrow wryly arched.

The office, located just west of Tucker, is a large open space with desks arranged in pods of three. Centro (pronounced “chen-tro,” thank you very much) is the modeling arm; the next pod is for actors; the third is for Spotlight, the music division and speakers’ bureau. Sharon Lee Tucci, TalentPlus’ founder and president, has an office behind a partial wall. “I can hear everything,” she says dryly.

Not that she has all that many people to eavesdrop on. The staff totals 11—once the size of a good Catholic family—and the comparison is apt. “We live, love, fight like any family,” says Parker Satchell.

Chris Hansen, the head of the music division, joined four months ago, the first man in a sea of women. “The office definitely doesn’t have that corporate feel,” he says. “There is a lot of laughter and a lot of passion. Everyone is really excited to be working here.”

The only turnstile job at TalentPlus is receptionist: Both Parker Satchell and Molly Ried, who coordinates the child models and fashion shows, started there before being promoted.

The dress code is casual but hip (lots of designer jeans) and, in Tucci’s phrase, “put together.” The kitchen is well stocked with life’s essentials: espresso and Godiva chocolate.

Other perks? “The people you meet,” says Centro director Christina Klobe, blithely dropping the names of Leonardo DiCaprio, Aaron Eckhart and Justin Timberlake. Other niceties include birthdays off and passes to movies, parties, clubs and fashion shows. When gas prices soared, Tucci footed the tab for a tankful a month per employee.

The hours? How about every hour, every day? “We all have cell phones, so we are all accessible all the time,” Klobe says. “It’s not a 9-to-5 job, that’s for sure.”

When hiring new employees, Tucci takes her time. “I date them before we get married,” she says.

 “Everyone wants to be part of this crazy industry. They think it is really glamorous. We tell them we work 24/7. The management of people is constant.”

The pressure is equally unrelenting. TalentPlus’ livelihood relies totally on commissions, so each model or talent is screened carefully to be sure that he or she will be getting bookings and generating income. Diane Schorsch, head of the broadcast division, spends her days on the phone, chatting up actors, learning about all their abilities and occasionally making one’s day with news of a gig. “It’s all pretty much fun,” she says. “You’re kind of up all the time. You just have to be.”

In fact, the company’s only taboo is bad moods. “Everybody feeds off everybody’s energy, and if somebody’s off kilter, it affects the whole office,” Tucci says—so there’s an office “crab hat” for the sourpuss. And if someone’s rockin’ with unfettered exuberance, TalentPlus has a “super Wonder Woman” chapeau as well.

The interdict extends beyond the employees to those who walk through the front door. “I have a policy: Let’s do business with people we like,” Tucci says, and, reinforcing the notion, a sign hangs on her office wall: “Be Nice or Leave.”

Best Place to Eat on The Job

Cardwell’s

By Bryan A. Hollerbach

Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

Now in its 20th year at the southwest corner of Brentwood and Maryland, Cardwell’s has thrived for a number of reasons, not the least of them its insistence on employing the best and the brightest.

“You have to hire right,” says Rich Gorczyca, a man of natural and considerable affability who owns and operates the Cardwell’s in Clayton with his wife, Debbie Gorczyca. “You’ve got to treat ’em good, and you’ve got to expect performance out of them.”

That means intensive training; servers, for instance, face an 18-page written test. Still, such rigorous standards yield results. “I have repeat guests that I’ve been waiting on for years,” notes Geno Martino, a stocky, confident server who’s worked at Cardwell’s for more than a decade. “They hire people that think for themselves,” he says of the Gorczycas, “and the quality of food is really consistent, so it’s not a hard sell.”

Cardwell’s employs roughly 50 people; on average, eight servers work each shift. After diverse prep work—Martino, for instance, has been slicing limes to help a teammate—those servers customarily gather at the back of the restaurant’s first section for the preopening “lineup.” There, in the presence of co-manager Les Dickens and bartender Damien Hamm, chef Joe Hovland paces the mosaic floor, detailing the day’s specials, speaking slowly and often repeating himself—making sure to communicate his message. Hamm and the servers take notes with the focus of college seniors readying for a mortarboard-or-bust final.

Then the lunch rush hits. Parties of varying size bustle past Ernest Trova’s elegant “Walking Jackman,” just outside, and settle into the equally elegant restaurant, with its abundant mahogany, numerous French doors and marble tabletops. From the front hostess station, Debbie Gorczyca greets several regulars: “So many of them, they don’t have to make reservations. I know them, and I hold [places] for them.”

Hovland and the kitchen staff then coordinate closely with Dickens, who acts as “expediter,” and the serving staff, dispensing everything from hearty gumbo to exquisite crab cakes to slices of sinful macadamia–and–white chocolate cake.

At the bar a young couple dines, an older man sips a martini and discusses underwriters on his cell phone and Hamm banters with some of the servers, trading notes on a Fox musical. He echoes Martino’s assessment of Cardwell’s: “It’s one of the few places that I’ve worked where the owners and management actually recognize the hard work that I do and appreciate it.”

Once the lunch onslaught has abated, Hovland, a trim young man in spectacles and a traditional white chef’s jacket, lingers a moment to discuss Cardwell’s. With one hiatus, to attend a culinary institute in Providence, R.I., he has served here since the restaurant’s opening, rising from sous-chef to executive chef in June 2000. He’s learned to balance his own gastronomic leanings and those of customers; by way of example, he calls foie gras a personal favorite but ruefully notes, “You simply can’t give it away.” Other challenges involve an increasing emphasis on affordability and, predictably, lighter fare: “Not so much butter, not so much cream, a little more vegetables and grains.”

Hovland pauses, reflecting on his profession. “It’s a nutty business,” he says. “You have to be passionate about it.”

Best Place to Get Stuffed

Build-A-Bear Workshop

By Matthew Halverson

Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

Here’s the thing about trying to explain the environment at the corporate offices of Build-A-Bear Workshop: It takes some kind of superhuman willpower to resist the temptation to throw around really bad puns. This is, after all, a place where trainers are called “professors of teddyology” and the main conference room is named Bearemy’s Board Room.

It’s also damn near impossible to avoid using words such as “cute” and “nice”—in the most saccharine of senses. “Cute” because if you’re still frowning after you get past the front desk, the décor in the rest of the office will slap your sour puss back to Pouty Town. (Example: The clock in the lobby features words such as “love,” “friends” and “hugs” instead of numbers.) “Nice” because those cute decorating touches—in another example, the walls are adorned with “Bearisms” such as “Take time to paws for thought”—seem to have succeeded in infecting everyone with an “all smiles, all the time” attitude.

“When you start working here, you expect to hear a rimshot after every bear reference, but then after you’re here for a while it’s, like, normal,” says Sherri Karandziff, manager of visual presentation and concept development. “Just today I heard someone say, ‘All of the monkeys are missing.’”

As community-relations bear Matt Pohl explains his daily routine for responding to the hundreds of charities that request free bears, a woman flits by his desk and drops off a plastic-wrapped lapel pin: They’re celebrating their 10th anniversary this year at Build-A-Bear, and, in recognition of the milestone, they’ve dubbed 2007 the Year of Friendship—because apparently the previous nine years were built on fiery animosity. Kathy Duck (a woman whose name is so woefully out of step with the corporate culture that you have to wonder whether she had to lie about it on her application) is excited about her “annibearsary” gift. She’s been there since the beginning, so she’s sure it’s going to be something “pretty special.”

A level-headed outsider can draw one of a couple conclusions here: Either these people drank the Kool-Aid or they’re all just inherently—uncommonly—pleasant, and the latter would represent an inhuman feat of recruitment kismet capable of sending your average human-resources manager into a fit of apoplectic convulsions. (Alternate explanation: Those with even a hint of cynicism quickly find themselves overwhelmed by the niceness and bolt for the door, leaving only the shiny happy people.) The solitary frown on display in the yellow, red and blue “bearquarters” on a sunny January day came after word spread on the help desk that several stores were having trouble with their stuffing machines—but you have to admit that, as technical glitches go, that’s a cute one.

It’s hard to begrudge these people their happiness. They can wear what they want, their desks are literally piled with teddy bears and they can bring their dogs to work. Heck, even the receptionist—check that; “first-impressions bear”—has the über-stressful task of dressing the dolls that sit on her desk. For someone of a less jovial nature, though, it can be a little difficult to … bear. (Dammit! So close.)

Best Place to Keep Taps on That Ex You’re Convinced Is A Terrorist

National Geospatial Intelligence Agency

By Katie Pelech

Photograph by Frank Di Piazza

“Mohan here.” I grin at the gruff greeting I receive when I call the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense. Jim Mohan’s no-nonsense veneer is shielding, I’m quite sure, a warm, caring man who’s willing to risk life and limb for his family and his country—you’ve seen the type in movie after movie. I joke (highly inappropriately) about my status as an immigrant to the United States: “So, I’m a Canadian, you know. Any worries about spies?” and, to his credit, Mohan doesn’t skip a beat. He pauses for effect, then deadpans, “You should be OK. The Canadians are our allies.”

And so, with one faux pas and some ardent pleading, I’m in. But into what, exactly? The NGA isn’t much more than another dry acronym to me. But, though the folks at the low-profile fortress tucked away just east of the Anheuser-Busch brewery do have a yen for acronyms, they are anything but dry. In truth, they are engaged in some of the most fascinating—and essential—work in the country, or, at least, I suspect so. The essence of the work is divulged on a need-to-know basis, and I, mouthy reporter that I am, do not need to know.

In a nutshell (albeit an excruciatingly cramped one), the NGA makes maps in support of national security: all-encompassing, interactive, constantly updated and exquisitely detailed maps. More than 3,000 people are employed by the Missouri hub of the NGA, which includes a primary center here in St. Louis and a smaller facility in Arnold. Together they convert terrain analysis, as well as vector, elevation and hydrographic data, into incredibly accurate maps spanning the globe.

The NGA’s most ardent analysts emphasize the thrill of ever-evolving technology, noting the invention of the microprocessor chip as a turning point in the field of cartography. Today the ubiquity of satellite and microprocessor technology has led to a deluge of geospatial-imaging jobs. A field that was once dominated by the NGA has now become accessible to hundreds of companies around the world. Google Earth, explains Kevin Boyer as we drive through South America using his GIB (geospatial intelligence for operations support in the battlefield) program, is just one such venture.

Boyer has worked at the NGA for 22 years and has no intention of going anywhere. The employees I meet all boast double-digit careers with the agency. Suzanne Morse, an analyst who taught mathematics before she came to the NGA, explains: “It’s very gratifying, the day-to-day activity, because it’s not like you’re defending your own back yard; it is your own back yard.”

Co-workers nod in agreement. These people could be working in all sorts of other places, often for more money—but they stay here. Working with classified information makes it difficult to share their jobs with their families. Erratic hours, too, can have an isolating effect. During Hurricane Katrina, the members of Morse’s group were practically sleeping in their offices, working ceaselessly to keep tabs on ever-shifting topography. Yet, claims Mohan, “People come to work here and they retire from here.” Why?

For starters, there are perks. The NGA pays for classes and additional degrees so that employees can keep abreast of the technology they find so fascinating. NGA also offers a deployment program, allowing analysts to wade into the field and see the effects of their work firsthand. But, finally, it is the shared belief in the good of their work that keeps people coming back for more. “We turn on the news and see something we’ve affected every day,” marvels Morse. “We save lives—not just our own soldiers but noncombatants’ and enemies’ lives. We can prevent things.”

Best Place to Spend Quiet Time

St. Louis Public Library

By Bryan A. Hollerbach

“This is not a quiet place,” remarks Patty Carleton about the St. Louis Public Library’s Olive Street headquarters. “This is an active, vibrant, alive, exciting place.”

Indeed. Scant hours before, as part of a program overseen by Carleton as director of Youth Services, glorious tumult had erupted in the downtown landmark. Clattering and laughing, their sneakers squeaking, their voices echoing off marble and granite, third-graders from Festus Elementary bounded to a top-floor gallery, where librarian Kathy Muller bewitched them with an African fairy tale.

So much for the stereotype of library-science professionals as nothing more than a “Sssh!” and a glare. From its librarians, who must hold a master’s degree to work there, through technical-services, cataloging and other staff, the Olive Street HQ’s 300 full-time personnel seem to thrive on aiding 2.5 million patrons annually to access the 4.7 million items in its holdings.

“My philosophy is, every year, we’re going to do it better,” says customer-service manager Rose McKinney, who, after almost four decades, remains as dedicated as ever to helping library patrons. “It’s just very pleasing to the innards.”

McKinney’s co-workers share her delight in the library’s 142-year history. Special Collections librarian Jean E. Meeh Gosebrink reminisces about Frederick Morgan Crunden, who headed the library longer than any of its other directors has. “Crunden was a really crusty character,” says Gosebrink, a birdlike veteran of the Library of Congress, laughing as she sketches his achievements with gusto.

Standing amid battalions of barrister’s cases, Gosebrink’s colleague Tom Pearson shows like pride in a trio of treasures from the 25,000 items in Special Collections: a Bible printed in 1611, illustrated manuscript pages from even earlier and cuneiform squares four-and-a-half millennia old. Regarding the squares, which resemble shortbread covered with insect tracks, he smiles thinly and says, “Most of these are business records—‘I owe Shem four bushels of wheat.’”

Although such wit might shock subscribers to the “Sssh!”-and-glare stereotype, a skewed jocularity characterizes the library staff. Working from references ranging from Burke’s Peerage to Cemetery Records of Macon County, Missouri, Adele Heagney, librarian in the St. Louis Area Studies Center, often fields questions and suggestions bordering on the bizarre: “What we should have done is, every 10 years, someone should have taken a photograph of every building in St. Louis—and then just put it on the Internet.” Heagney pauses a heartbeat before adding, poker-faced, “Absolutely.”

Still, the central library’s downtown location can prompt more than laughter, as librarian Katie LaBarbera recognizes. As a virtual-reference administrator, she staffs the Information Center, between the stacks—gray steel bookcases that rise three stories through inch-thick frosted-glass floors on the structure’s north side—and the central Great Hall, some of whose occupants, frankly, stink. Their BO functions as a reminder that indigents shelter in the library during operating hours. “It’s frustrating, seeing all of the social problems,” confesses LaBarbera, a twentysomething pixie. “We can help them to an extent, but certainly not with the help that needs to be given to the homeless people of St. Louis.”

Her concern seems emblematic. At multiple levels, outreach defines the library. “There really is a mission,” says Carleton, behind whom a bumper sticker proclaims, “Kids Who Read Succeed!” in her cluttered Youth Services office. “People who stay on staff are proud of that mission and want to be part of it.”

Best Place to Ad It Up

Zipatoni's

By Christy Marshall

They call themselves Zippers. They come to work wearing anything they want, with dogs, cats and a pair of rats in tow. When daycare is closed, children come, too.

The elevator doors at Zipatoni’s Washington Avenue office slide open to reveal an oversized anthropomorphized tomato (a globe from an old 905 liquor store, converted into the company’s mascot). The walls of the full-service marketing agency are ornamented with locks from old safes, a lever-and-pulley system from an old theater, switches from an old electric company. One wall is a glass garage door that opens and closes loudly. The light fixtures are mainly old street lamps, with the exception of the conference-room fixture, which is the base of a Mercury rocket. Each workstation is decorated to the hilt, reflecting the eccentricities and passions of its inhabitant. A corrugated-steel igloo has been converted into a game room. (Sony PlayStation is one of Zip’s clients.)

The perks are plentiful: a fully stocked kitchen with Einstein’s bagels every morning, peanut butter–and–jelly and grilled cheese sandwiches at lunch, an open bar at the end of the day. The office closes the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day and at 4 p.m. on every Monday the Rams play in town (employees need to vacate their parking spots). In the summer, the office closes at 1 p.m. every other Friday. After one year, employees get five bonus days added to their 18 days of paid time off (which can be used for vacation, sick days or personal time). Two weeks of parental leave are granted for the arrival of a baby Zip. The company pays for covered parking and reimburses employees $15 a month for any gym membership, which means that the nearby Gold’s gym costs them a measly $5 a month.

The reception desk is manned by Helen Griswold, “the supervisor of happy,” according to employee Nicki Boone. “Do you feel my energy?” Griswold asks. “I’d rather be at work than I would be at home.” Copywriter Travis Ulmer started at Zipatoni three years ago, right out of college, and has no plans to leave. “The culture here is one of openness,” he says. “Anything you think of you can do.”

Especially if it’s funny. When Ulmer returned from his honeymoon, everything he owned had disappeared. “It was like I had never worked here,” he says with a sigh. Another time, his desk drawers were lined in plastic and filled with water … and 30 live fish.

According to Lynn Caiazza, who’s been at Zipatoni for 11 years, “It is like going to work with your best friends. Sometimes you don’t get along, sometimes you do—but Zipatoni always challenges you. I have never felt like I was stuck in a rut here.”

Being a Zipper isn’t for everyone. “There’s no hand-holding,” says creative director Mark Miselnicky. “Some people don’t work out here. The chemistry is key.”

Karen Sauder, president of the agency, concurs: “If you’re a wallflower, this is not a good spot for you. We’re pretty loud. We want people who jump in and have an opinion.”

And who wouldn’t want a rat or two hanging out down the hall?

Edited by Matthew Halverson