By Martha K. Baker
Photographs by Ashley Heifner
In the 1960s, “white flight” from city to county sounded like an 1860s cattle stampede across the American plains. Angie Kloepfer, a white mother of eight, went door to door in her Normandy subdivision to rally her fellow residents around the Jarretts, the new black family in the neighborhood. “You have to make these people feel welcome,” she said to her neighbors on Augusta. “The only way the neighborhood will change is if you move out.”
Today blacks make up 66 percent of the residents of Normandy. Not only do blacks and whites live together in harmony, but the North County neighborhood also has its share of interracial married couples. “They feel welcome here because they are welcome here,” says Terry Gannon, one of Angie Kloepfer’s children.
If there’s any division in Normandy, it’s north vs. south, with Interstate 70 as the Mason-Dixon Line. Although City Hall is in the southern half, most mayors have come from the north side of town, and the southerners sometimes feel as if the northerners get first dibs on city-provided goodies like new trash bins.
T-r-a-d-i-t-i-o-n!: For 46 years, the promise “Meet you at the Sprenke” has rung throughout Normandy. The Monsignor [Fred] Sprenke Soccer Tournament runs Sept. 5–23. “It’s a chance to come back to
St. Ann’s parish,” says tournament director Pat Ebert. When soccer-famous St. Ann’s marks its 150th anniversary this fall, Bob Kuban and his band will be there.
CAN-do: Citizens for the Advancement of Normandy hang flowers along the streets of Normandy Heights. CAN preserved Normandy’s “heritage and soul,”
says Angela Green,
CAN president and a library media specialist for the Normandy School District. She and her husband moved west to Normandy from the city. “When we invite people to our home, which was built in 1898, they can’t believe how lovely this area is,” she says. “Of course, those are people who’ve never driven north of I-44 or 64 or east of I-270.”
Re/Developments: The old St. V.’s, the leery nickname for the gothic St. Vincent’s Sanitarium, was cleansed of ghosts and turned into Castle Park Apartments.
• Cardinals Care helped redevelop Hoelzel Park so that 16 Redbird Rookies teams
(up from eight last year) could play ball.
• The multimillion-dollar, mostly commercial development of the Natural Bridge corridor will run mainly along the south side of Natural Bridge. This spring, Terry and Jim Gannon and Tim and Pat Dulle purchased 7520 Natural Bridge to house, among other tenants, Oscar’s, a family restaurant, and a third office for RE/MAX Cornerstone, where Terry Gannon is an owner/broker.
Normandy bills itself as the “Little Rome of the West”—even though its name refers nostalgically to a part of France.
Statistics: Incorporated: May 1945 | Population: 5,153 | Area: 1.8 square miles | Boundaries: They’re too hard to explain ... but there’s a nice map in the City Hall office of city administrator Brent Bury showing Normandy stretching east to Lucas & Hunt Road and west to East Drive on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus—sort of.
Bargains: Few resell-it shops can beat the prices at the Caritas Thrift Shop (7500 Natural Bridge).
Where to Find The Guys: Gossiping at Schulte Hardware (7204 Natural Bridge) on Saturday mornings.
Concrete Celebrity: Normandian Ted Drewes started serving ice cream in the Wedge (the V where Florissant Road meets Natural Bridge).
