I'm quite used to reading the writing of SLM staff writer Jeannette Cooperman -- she probably wrote 20,000 words for the new August issue alone. But it's a new kind of fun to read her stuff when it's directed at a national audience -- and when it's still about St. Louis. Here's the opening of her 6-page article "The Gateway City," written for and published in the official 270-page program for the 2009 All-Star Game (just now got my hands on a copy):
If you've been in St. louis for at least two hours, a stranger has smiled, you've glimpsed at 19th-century red brick, and you've felt a certain ease -- not island indolence, not even southern slowness, but a relaxed determination to enjoy life that dates back to the city's 18th-century French Creole founders. There's no pretense here. St. Louis is famously friendly, a once-rowdy river city that turned prim in the Gilded Age, then slowly relaxed again.
She'll frown at me for even posting this, but I like knowing many tens of thousands of people got their introduction to St. Louis from one of St. Louis Magazine's most prominent voices. -- Stephen Schenkenberg
