Photograph courtesy of Seth Poppel/Yearbook Library
Nearly two decades after Quantum Leap’s final episode aired, Scott Bakula still seems able to time travel: Though his most recent sitcom was titled Men of a Certain Age, he has the same dashing looks that made him popular in the early ’90s and he continues to perform in plays as he did at Kirkwood High School. In early November, Bakula reminisced about his hometown from London, where he was playing the lead in Frank Oz’s production
of Terrible Advice.
I moved to Kirkwood when I was in the third grade. We were the first house built in our subdivision. That meant we got to watch a whole neighborhood being built around us. My sister, brother, and I could get stuck in the mud of freshly dug foundations, climb in and out of new construction, ride our bikes down empty paved streets, and make new friends as families moved in. We would come home after school, throw down our books, and head outside to play till it got dark. We had a neighborhood football team, and we played at the local old-folks home, where we cut the grass in a field, lined it with chalk, and built old goal posts out of scrap wood. We played hockey, when it was cold enough to freeze the ponds in the woods behind our house; we played until we fell through the ice—most ponds were only a few feet deep.
When I was [at Keysor Elementary School], the music teacher asked me to audition to sing with the St. Louis Symphony choir, and that led me to sing with the choir at her church, First Presbyterian Church in Kirkwood. Those experiences started me on the road to musical-theater work, which eventually led me to New York.
[During high school], since I had a rock band, I spent lots of time in people’s basements, which is something everybody has in St. Louis; we don’t have them in L.A.
What do I miss most about St. Louis, besides family? Cardinals games. Even though I was in London through this whole crazy playoff run and the World Series, I stayed up and watched the box scores update every few minutes on my iPad.
