Photograph courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society
In 1933, as Charles Lee Barr led a tour through the warehouse that he managed as commissioner of school supplies, he boasted, “You can find anything here, from a mousetrap to an electric dynamo,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported. The five-story brick building was located, logically enough, on School Street, “just behind the Odeon,” and employed this pencil-sharpener repairman (whose skills are now as lost an art as cursive). During that school year, the supply division delivered 62 million pieces of chalk, 1,500 gallons of ink, 720,000 pencils, and 1.25 million re-bound books. It also discovered a solution to a generations-old classroom problem: “This is library paste,” Barr said, pulling a half-gallon off a shelf and explaining that they distributed 6,000 cans per year. “Smell it. Not so pleasant, is it? Know why? The children were not using it according to directions. They were eating it. We had to put a little fish glue in it to discourage them.”
