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Adam Scott Williams
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Image of Laura Chisholm
You know that moment at a party when you ask someone, “So, what do you do for a living?” and the person blows your socks off by naming a wildly fun, atypical career that you know you would have chosen if life hadn’t gotten in the way?
Below, you’ll read about 10 St. Louisans fortunate enough to live the dream jobs the rest of us drool over between chocolate truffles or pints of brew at Saturday night gatherings.
You’ll even meet someone who takes a personal interest in those truffles you’re guiltily enjoying: the chief chocolatier at Bissinger’s. And the pints? Yeah, a local brewmaster is part of this lineup, too. So are a ride tester for roller coasters, a World Cup bobsledder, someone who knows how to trick a sea lion into taking antibiotics ...
Which job is the most interesting, the most fun, the most dangerous, the most exotic? The superlatives are your call—with one exception. We doubt that you’ll disagree with our take on which job is the most twisted of the lot.
The Renaissance Athlete | Will Person
A world-class bobsled flies along like a bullet, withstanding the astonishing force of gravity that tugs at it and whomever’s inside the colorful shell.
Having endured this force regularly, Will Person does his best to describe an experience for which there is almost no comparison: “You know the feeling you get in your stomach when you’re driving and hit a bump? Well, you get that feeling in your head. Really, it’s hard to explain the G-forces. There’s nothing on earth that hits 5 Gs like a bobsled, though I’ve heard it’s similar to an F-15 fighter jet when it banks and turns.”
Originally a track and field star, Person, 35, says he was tricked into the sport of bobsledding. He was persuaded—reluctantly—to attend a 20-man tryout for bobsled athletes that was being taped by NBC, and after the tryout, a bobsled driver offered to make him his racing partner. Sounded lucrative. Two days later, Person took his first bobsled ride. Four days after that, he competed in his first international race. Then the driver’s finances fell through—but Person was already hooked on the sport. As a bobsled brakeman, he’s won multiple medals in national competitions and in 2003 placed in the top 10 at the world championships, the annual big shebang better known every fourth year as the Olympics.
The native St. Louisan is a renaissance man on the move. He is once again training as a long jumper, hoping to make the U.S. Olympic track and field team. He’s also a former Hollywood stuntman, representing five characters in Jerry Maguire alone.
Bobsledding has taken Person down ice chutes in Europe and North America and into schools, where he encourages kids to dream.
Life, he tells them, is “an open book. If you can dream it, you can do it.”
The Twisted Juggler | Book Kennison
He holds up an unstrung tennis racket for the crowd to see. Then he lowers it and steps into the rim, first with his right leg and then bringing his head, both arms and shoulders and—voila!—his whole lanky body through. The display starts slowly and finishes so fluidly, there’s no need for flourish. You stare, devoid of comprehension. Confusion about what just happened, and what might happen next, overwhelms you.
Somewhere during the series of contorted displays, Book Kennison will wrap an arm around his back, reaching far enough around to have both hands in front of him, on the same side of his torso (not that he needs both of them for his juggling act). Did he just dangle his leg around his neck? Long before the end of his show, you’re puzzled but smiling: “How the ... ?”
Kennison can’t remember how he started wrapping his arm around his body as part of his “Twisted Juggling” act. “Once you learn to ride a bike, you don’t remember how you did it the first time,” says the 16-year-old sophomore at St. Charles West High School. He just does it—on stages from the Mirage in Vegas to The Late Show with David Letterman. He has spent summers traveling with the New England–based Circus Smirkus and performs frequently with the Everydaycircus at the City Museum. He has logged 700 juggling shows in four years—and his career is just beginning.
“I guess it’s like hearing about gold in California, but I keep hearing about circuses in Europe,” Kennison says. He’s thinking of joining performing friends and traveling Europe after he graduates. Or maybe he’ll attend a circus college. Or, if his parents get their way, he’ll squeeze a “typical” college education somewhere into the plans—twisting it to fit.
Guardian of the Gateway | Chuck Kalert
One of the best views of the city comes from atop the Gateway Arch. You exit the tram car and walk the curving slope to the viewing area. Held safely within the massive 630-foot-tall architectural marvel on the water, you see the city as never before: the skyline to the west, river barges and farmland to the east. Below, pedestrians speckle the grass and walkways of the national park.
But what if you were standing there, at the top, without walls and a ceiling to protect you? What if there were no windows separating you from the sky?
Chuck Kalert, 56, is the guy who changes the 620-watt light bulb on the very tip-top of the Arch. Once each year, he gets the supreme view of the city, free of all obstructions. Only once did he dread it, when wintry weather caused the bulb’s filament to fail and he braved the blowing wind and icy temperatures to keep the Arch and any wayward jetliners apart.
Otherwise, he says, “I look forward to it each year. On a nice day there’s no barrier between me and the horizon.”
The Executive's Hero | James Scavatta
Hollywood loves bad guy–good guy duality. We love it, too, because it’s a two-hour escape from humdrum, squeezed between a sushi dinner and a goodnight kiss.
On the silver screen, villains prey on the powerful and wealthy. The hero of the flick is also a badass, but an endearing one. Linked by contrasting morals, the hero and his arch-enemy bounce around the globe playing hide and seek until the hero wins. Then we all go home satisfied, knowing that the masters of cinema have done it again. They’ve created a netherworld we need not fear, because it’s only fantasy.
Or is it? James Scavatta keeps his work for PDI Investigations close to his chest; he’d never propagate laypersons’ fantasies. But, let’s face it, he’s a heck of lot more in the mix than most people would care to be. At 47, he’s spent more than half of his life—25-plus years—protecting stalker victims, politicians and all manner of celebrities— think Jack Buck and Sammy Sosa, U.S. Sen. John Kerry and rocker Sammy Hagar.
Scavatta's work has sent him to five continents. And if he weren’t so mindful of confidentiality, he could finish anecdotes that begin: “One day we were evacuating 165 American citizens during a violent regime change in Indonesia ... ”
But don’t ask the guardian if he’s killed anyone. “I’ve never answered that question,” he says.
Maybe it’s better that way.
"Dr. Ginger" | Dr. Xinsheng Jiang
A patient stands at the counter of Oriental Ginseng & Gift Co., waiting to see Dr. Xinsheng Jiang, affectionately known to her clients as “Dr. Ginger.” Gary, 53, who has been a frequent client for five years, says that his respiratory problems are much better after Dr. Ginger’s herbs and acupuncture: “She took care of me, man. That’s all I can say.”
Dr. Ginger, 59, is a doctor of Oriental medicine (O.M.D.). She uses herbs, acupuncture and other techniques to treat depression, insomnia, tendinitis, deafness, smoking and drug addiction, impotence, infertility—the list goes on.
At the back of the gift shop/medical practice Dr. Ginger and her husband, Guangzheng Yu, share is a desk where she keeps a stack of snapshots that patients have sent her. Some are from patients who once could not conceive but are now sending pictures of their growing children. Others are portraits of patients who say that she changed their lives. She’s aided a dental patient in extreme pain and a cancer patient at wits’ end with Western medicine.
Dr. Ginger believes that Western technology offers faster diagnoses but that thousands of years of Eastern understanding offers more natural remedies for those ailments. Her first suggestion to patients is the use of prescribed herbal medicines, 200 to 300 herbs of which she keeps on hand. Medical matters of the lungs, Dr. Ginger says, can be aided with the use of cocklebur fruit. Problems with the heart and spleen may benefit from remedies containing frankincense. And the velvet of a young deer’s antler helps resolve kidney and liver issues, she says.
Dr. Ginger believes that the source of illness throughout the body results in blockage of your qi (pronounced “chee”), or energy. These blockages, she says, cause blood circulation to stagnate. Using the herbs and the precise application of acupuncture needles, Dr. Ginger seeks to get your blood, and energy, flowing.
The Amused Engineer | Lee Stellhorn
“First of all, we don’t use test dummies,” Lee Stellhorn says. Stellhorn, 40, is a mechanical engineer in a kid’s wonderland—Six Flags. “It’s my job to understand the physics, the dynamics of the rides, to help with maintenance,” he says. He’s one of the relatively few people in the world who gets paid to ride roller coasters—and he loves every minute of it.
At Six Flags amusement parks across the country, someone tests every ride, every day, before visitors eagerly push through the turnstiles and join the lines, anticipating the thrills that will rip screams from their churning bellies. Ah, the fun. Stellhorn and his fellow engineers, who are still kids at heart, relish the opportunity day after day, year after year.
“I love the coasters the most,” Stellhorn says. “The others ... eh. They’re OK. I’ve noticed as I get older, the rotating maybe affects the equilibrium.”
He once rode Excalibur three times straight. Never again, he says. “Rotating rides I can ride once and say, ‘OK, I don’t need to ride it a second time right away,’ but roller coasters—I’ve gotten in the front seat, middle seat, back seat, and ridden them excessive times.”
And what would the ultimate ride be for an expert who knows them all inside and out? He’s thought of a couple. Bobsledding, for instance: “Something centered around that, where you get almost an individual ride with high speed.” Hang gliding: “A one- or two-person type of vehicle. You’d have this experience of flying, so to speak.”
Stellhorn travels to Six Flags parks around the country and gives presentations at schools, during which he asks, “Hey, who wants to go to work with me?”
The students, as if already on a roller coaster, reach for the sky.
Madame Butterfly | Laura Chisholm
Laura Chisholm works with a whole lot of animals, about 1,500 of which are butterflies. The rest include spiders, scorpions, cockroaches and walking sticks.
“Insects are animals?” her visitors ask.
Chisholm, a 31-year-old entomologist at the Sophia M. Sachs Butterfly House, flashes them back to eighth-grade biology: “If it’s not a plant or bacteria, it’s an animal.”
“Butterflies are insects?” is another question she hears. Because butterflies are so pretty, people don’t think of them as anything but ... butterflies.
Early on, Chisholm got tired of killing her research subjects to learn about them. She still has a bug collection from when she was 8 years old. Butterflies—how they fly and their entire life cycle—were her first fascination. Now she gets to love her couple thousand pets and help them live, if only briefly.
Butterflies only survive for a few weeks, so 200 to 400 new butterflies arrive at the Butterfly House each week—packed in boxes, in chrysalis form, the way visitors see them hanging in that large window at the end of the conservatory’s path. Before they achieve flight and we see them in that balmy environment that is always 85 degrees and 75 percent humidity, Chisholm and her partners inspect them, verifying that they are free of parasites.
Of course, the other animals require love and attention, too. The latest puzzle: why scorpions glow under ultraviolet light. The theories vary, but the constant learning at the Butterfly House is something Chisholm loves: “The day I stop learning is the day I quit my job.”
The Chief of Chocolate | Terry Wakefield
Often compared to Willy Wonka, Terry Wakefield is the first-ever chief chocolatier at Bissinger’s, which started making handcrafted chocolates more than 400 years ago. It’s not that Wakefield somersaults or even wears a top hat. But his job requires conjuring, experimenting with and tasting new chocolate recipes.
Before Wakefield, 58, joined Bissinger’s in September 2004, he was chief chocolate officer for a boutique chocolate company. He has also managed a 6.5-acre facility, overseeing chocolate product and process teams. He has 16 years of professional chocolate experience and a food-science degree—chemistry, microbiology, nutrition and engineering, applied to food. Now his chocolate-making requires the synergy of science with taste, art and creativity.
Putting this experience to work, Wakefield has made something new, something of which he’s particularly proud, from an old item: French truffles. His plan was to, by adjusting formulations, make an all-natural truffle with a more delicate look. Now he’s come up with nine additional flavors, including champagne and double chocolate.
Wakefield has introduced about 30 new chocolate products at Bissinger’s. Before his arrival, the company would have created just two or three in the same amount of time, he says. His chocolate revolution is combining healthy foods, such as seeds and nuts, with antioxidant-rich dark chocolate that’s healthy in its own right. “Good” dark chocolate is made without the added sugar and milk we find in most chocolates, he says, noting, “Very few fruits and vegetables contain more antioxdants.”
Ultimately, though, a chocolatier’s job is about giving others pleasure. “People enjoy talking about chocolate; they enjoy eating it,” Wakefield says. “There’s a peace that comes over their faces.”
Master of Beers | Stephen Hale
Many people take work home with them, but not many can carry it in the form of a six-pack. And those who do aren’t carrying the rewards of their personal craft.
Stephen Hale turned what was once a homebound passion into a career. He started home brewing when he was 19—and now, at age 45, he is the chief brewer at the Schlafly Tap Room. Along the way, he has worked as an eighth-grade English teacher, a Latin teacher, a chimney sweep and a sea-urchin diver. What do those jobs have in common with the brewing career he officially began 14 years ago? Passion.
“I haven’t chased the almighty greenback,” the former classics major says. “I’ve chosen a colorful path.” Now, at Schlafly, he makes his living with his highly refined hobby.
Sorry to bust the biggest misconception about the job, but Hale doesn’t sit around taste-testing product all day. Brewing demands supreme organization, split-second timing, methodical experimentation, precise temperatures. “And cleaning cannot be overemphasized,” Hale adds, explaining that the best brewer with the greatest recipes but poor cleaning habits will produce bad beer but a mediocre recipe used by a great cleaner and diligent brewer can produce good results.
Along with years of trial and error at home, Hale took a course at the Siebel Institute of Technology, and he compares notes with brewers across the country. “There is much to be gleaned from other people’s experiences,” he says, adding that his is an attention-grabbing craft: “I tend to gain more friends than I would otherwise.”
Doc of All Trades | Randy Junge
As visitors at the zoo, we’ve all been snubbed by animals that won’t cooperate for family-album snapshots. So how do doctors administer antibiotics to large, untamed animals? They’ve got to know the tricks of the trade.
The Saint Louis Zoo is no Dr. Dolittle operation. The monkeys aren’t wearing diapers, and head vet Randy Junge and his four-member veterinary staff let nature run its course whenever possible. But he does dip into a bag of tricks as varied as the 3,500 animals whose health he oversees.
“Sea lions are easy because they’ll eat a fish whole,” says Junge. “We put the antibiotics in the fish.” For other animals, different flavors get the job done. Primates, in particular, savor fruit and peanut-butter flavors and, like elephants, will strike a deal for a taste of marshmallow. But not all animals are flavor-oriented. When it comes to crocodiles, there isn’t much that will persuade the big lizards to cooperate. Physical restraint and administration of antibiotics by tranquilizer dart is the safest method of ensuring compliance.
Not long ago, Junge, 48, performed a C-section on a tamarin monkey, pregnant with triplets, that weighed little more than a pound. His smallest patient so far, though, was a hummingbird weighing 15 grams. Conducting checkups on 7,000-pound elephants, he says, is relatively easy by comparison to exams of other animals: “If an elephant doesn’t want to open its mouth, it won’t, but trainers can ask elephants for behaviors.” When prompted, the mammoth mammals will usually present an ear or trunk as requested.
Junge’s job isn’t exactly monotonous, but once a year, the head vet takes a break from St. Louis zoo life and makes house calls—in Madagascar. There, he spends a month working in the field with local biologists, examining the lemur population.
“Lemurs are easy enough to approach,” he says, “like a rabbit in your yard, until you get too close.”
