Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Frontenac trailer park
The park is halfway down a dead-end outer road, hidden by a grove of scrubby pines with needles as sparse as a teenager’s beard. It used to be, rush-hour commuters on Highway 40 could catch a startled glimpse of the place. Then the sound barriers went up, and gray concrete blocked the view.
But the Daniel Boone Mobile Home Park is still back there, a three-minute drive from Plaza Frontenac and surrounded by exclusive clubs and million-dollar houses.
You take the Spoede Road exit and turn onto South Forty Drive. A little way down, you’ll see a nondescript entrance, framed by shrubs that look nothing like the neighbors’ primped boxwoods. The gravel road winds past trailers set crooked, scattered almost at random in a sun-dappled hollow. Nestled into the woods, sheltered by a 30-foot hill in back, the place feels both dilapidated and enchanted—as though many years ago, someone cast a spell here, one that made it impossible to draw conclusions.
You see a Beware the Dog sign, then a gentle old white-whiskered beagle sitting in a doorway, thumping its tail.
One trailer’s dark. A spider has spun a web from an unused doorknob to the driftwood-beige siding. Across the road, somebody has planted a bright Snoopy flag. It reads, “Welcome to Our Home.”
A trailer in back has either guano or mildew caked on top of its air-conditioning unit; its yellowed blinds are rucked up, hanging aslant like a drunk Frenchman’s beret. Another trailer’s immaculate, with fragile Asian ceramics serenely set on an exterior ledge.
Who lives here? A nurse, a house painter, a parking-lot striper, somebody who works at Schnucks, a bar cook, somebody who works at a gas station, a young man who comes home reeking of Billy Goat potato chips’ fry oil… With such little yard work, housework, and stretching-out space, you imagine them all sitting outside on balmy evenings, shooting the breeze. But they just let it blow.
“We’re all too tired,” a resident explains. “But we help each other out when need be. We had a water main break when it was really cold, and people got together and replaced it.”
What she loves most isn’t some sort of campground camaraderie, but the quiet of the place. “I’m not used to that. We lived in Lemay, and it was awful. Out here, it’s been so nice. We don’t even have to lock our doors.”
She doesn’t offer her name. Residents here guard each other’s privacy, protecting that sense of refuge, guaranteeing the freedom to invent—or reinvent—yourself. Still, life spills out of the narrow rectangles. Someone’s stretched a crescent of red, white, and blue bunting between trees; someone else made an outdoor bench by laying countertop across tree ends. A canoe lies half-concealed in the woods.
“That’s my archery range back there,” says Jim, a middle-aged contractor who’s lived here almost two decades. Most of his clients live in a 4-mile radius, in the kind of houses that have circle drives and sparkling mullioned windows. But when he divorced, he realized a mobile home would give him the freedom to travel, hunt, fish, and camp. Once his son reached school age, though, Jim made him a solemn offer: “I can sell this and buy a house right next to your new school. We might not get to do as much stuff as we do now, but…”
His son voted for the trailer. It’s the smallest in the park, 50 feet by 12 feet. But Jim cheats: He keeps all of his fishing and camping gear in a second trailer. He’s been a Boy Scout leader for 18 years—he forgot to quit when his son grew up—and he goes camping most weekends. He recently went lobster-diving in the Florida Keys. “Work hard, play hard,” he says, his deep voice hearty and satisfied. He remembers two old guys, successful retirees who sold their fancy houses and moved into the mobile-home park after their wives died. “Those guys did it right,” he says. “They used to sit in the back, playin’ gin and drinkin’ gin.”
Jim also remembers Delores Luton, who moved here from Cape Girardeau. “Sparkling personality,” he says. “She’d talk your ear off for days. She just loved an audience.” Gradually, she doled out bits of her past: the years in Cape Girardeau, when she used to wash her car in a sexy black bathing suit, and how she owned a pet shop and a lot of property there, and how she found herself a wealthy second husband, Wilbur “Boots” Luton, and he drank every day, and she…
Pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in prison for conspiring to murder him—after upping the insurance policy to $2 million with herself as beneficiary.
Wilbur had later sued the insurance company for more than $3 million for letting her do so. The man she’d hired to kill him, Harry Clapp, had gone straight to the Missouri Highway Patrol. As reported, her plan was that she and Wilbur would go to brunch, she’d leave the door unlocked at home and a crowbar and gloves on the steps, she’d say her feet hurt and send Wilbur home to fetch a different pair of shoes, and wham! That would be that.
Luton received a concurrent sentence for tampering with a witness: Beck Jolly, who showed up at the prosecuting attorney’s office and said she’d offered him $5,000, a set of drums, and a ring to claim she’d been with him in Sikeston the day Harry said she tried to hire him. Prosecutor Morley Swingle later wrote a book in which he described his favorite Perry Mason–like moment: Luton’s defense attorney calling Jolly to the stand.
She spent eight years in prison, got out on parole in 1997, and must’ve gotten permission to move north to St. Louis. She moved into the trailer park in 2000. She died eleven years later, a feisty 80 years of age and still a landlady. She owned seven trailers. “Some of them she got deeded over to her by people who were dying,” Jim says. “After she died, her daughter came over with this envelope—three checks from my clients that should’ve been in my mailbox—and we started exchanging stories.”
These days, the most colorful resident is Jame’ Lee Barker. She, too, defies snap judgment. A busty former bricklayer with sinewy arms and frizzy, pale-blond hair, she works as a church custodian, fashion designer, and “handy girl.” She waves to a display carousel inside her crowded trailer, which she intends to paint white and hang with mirrors to create a sense of space. “I make earrings from scrap fabric,” she says. “I’m in a steampunk mood right now.” She forages among shelves of craft supplies. “Oh God. I don’t think I have any skulls left. I found these little bitty skulls and got a jar of maybe 1,000 to make earrings. I go to the doomsday-prepper store, get military surplus. And I can make anything from a teeny-weeny bikini to a wedding dress out of T-shirts. The wedding dress takes 36 to 40 XXL T’s.”
She has a cat with three names: Jasper Jazzman Barker I. She also has three grown children, but she never sees them.
“I used to be transgender,” she says. “And now that I have had surgery, the ex turned them against me. I love them still—I just don’t like them. I’ve had less arguments with the bricklayers than I did with my kids and my ex. The bricklayers said, ‘You’re not gonna wear a dress to work, are you, Jame’ Lee?’ And I said, ‘Only if I can find 6-inch stiletto heels!’”
Asked whether she’s from St. Louis, Barker says, “God, no. Amarillo, Texas. And I grew up in Southeast Asia. My dad was like a James Bond: We never had to go through customs.” She says the prince of Siam was her date for junior prom at the International School Bangkok—and his sister was her date for senior prom.
In the 1970s, Barker enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. “Everybody was wanting to be sent back home,” she says. “This chance to go anywhere in the world, and you want to go back home?” She wound up guarding a base in Amsterdam. One day, “this limo was getting ready to drive right through, so I got out in front and jacked up my M-16 and took dead aim at the driver,” she says. “He gets out and mumbo-jumbos in Dutch. I said, ‘We’re an American base. You have to speak English.’ He said, ‘Do you know who we are?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you are somebody trying to get on my base.’”
The driver gestured her toward the side of the car. Queen Juliana was in the back seat.
“Everybody was ready to tear into me afterward,” Barker says. “But the queen said no, I’d done my job—and invited me to tea.”
After the Air Force, Barker worked as a bricklayer, then in California, “in adult entertainment. I did movies. It’s not everything it’s cracked up to be. You’ve got a lot of takes and retakes.”
When she came back to St. Louis, a friend said, “Keep my trailer clean, and you can live there rent-free.” Then his father died. “Jame’ Lee, you want the trailer?” he asked.
“Well, yeah, I need a place to stay,” she said slowly. “How much?”
“Pay it forward.”
The first tenants at the Daniel Boone Mobile Home Park were workers at a World War II munitions plant. That means the site predates Frontenac’s 1947 incorporation—and the zoning that requires 1-acre residences. The city’s tried, over the years, to banish Daniel Boone. First, it claimed a trailer that burned in 2000 could not be replaced because the new trailer wouldn’t be grandfathered and would violate Frontenac’s code. A St. Louis County Circuit Court judge overturned the city’s ruling. Or, as Jim puts it, “Frontenac got spanked.”
The city also tried making new rules about decks and building heights. But every time their neighbors turned up their noses, the park’s residents thumbed theirs—and prevailed. “I think the place has survived by luck,” says Andy Leonard, who was Frontenac’s city attorney between 1992 and 1998. “First Highway 40 came through, then an expanded Spoede interchange, so that it was an odd parcel that wasn’t a desirable McMansion lot, and since there was no possible commercial use, nobody bothered them for long chunks of time.”
In 2006, then-owners Bobby and Dan Slavin told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that they planned to transform the park into something a little trendier, more modern and upscale. But that never happened, either.
And so the seasons pass. In spring, there are hummingbird feeders and Barker’s strawberry plants and Jim’s profusion of impatiens, begonias, Gerbera daisies, geraniums, and live forevers. In summer, garden furniture is everywhere, chairs tilted in a prayer against rain. In winter, people string holiday lights—which is easy with no peaks or gables. “Thirty feet up in that big pine tree, I’ve got an 8-foot star that lights up,” Jim says. “I put that up years ago, before the wall. After that, probably six other stars popped up alongside Highway 40.”
The worst weather so far has been the ice storm of 2013, which laid heavy snow and sharp icicles on the pine trees’ boughs. “They were gorgeous,” Jim says. “Now, they look like beat-up soldiers.”
Barker says she’s only had to cross the gulley and take shelter under the highway overpass once, in high winds. But she keeps a bug-out bag: “change of clothes, hygiene, three to five days of food, and a girl’s gotta have her cellphone.” Jasper has his own bug-out bag, filled with kitty kibble.
Jim’s a little more relaxed. “I’ve not gone home sometimes, if something’s really whippin’ up,” he says. “But I’ve never left.
“All of the trailers are strapped down,” he adds, then starts to chuckle. “All that’s really good for is, if a tornado were to go through, you’d know where the ends of the trailers were, because the middles would be ripped out. But I figure tornadoes are unappealing, so therefore they are not allowed in Frontenac.”
He hates the noise barriers, says they barely work. “And I used to be able to sit in my hot tub and tell somebody, ‘I won’t be there for another hour, from the look of the traffic,’” he says. “Now all I see is a freakin’ wall.”
Jim is the park’s unofficial mayor. Dan Slavin now owns the park with his wife, and Jim’s determined to help him spruce it up. “Either people clean everything up, or they’re out,” he says. “We got Jame’ Lee running shotgun on this.”
She puts it more demurely: “We are trying to bring the place back to a more park-like setting.”
She plants an herb garden and improvises a hothouse for the winter with PVC pipe, clear garbage bags, and a hurricane lamp. She makes bath salts and soaps under the label Pixie Hollow, because she feels like she lives in a fairy tale. She ordered a sign: “Entering Pixie Hollow,” and on the back, “Leaving Pixie Hollow.”
Jim just smiles when he sees “those tiny houses that are the rage on Facebook.” He’s had one for years.
“And it’s close to shopping,” he says with a twinkle. “The mall’s right there.”
