This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon:St. Louis’ 250th birthday partying officially begins next year. But if you’re on Facebook or Twitter much, you may have noticed that celebrations have already started.
On its Facebook page every day this year, STL250 has posted morsels of history, called “This Day in St. Louis History,” and “St. Louis Birthday of the Day,” focusing on well-known and not-so-well known people who have touched St. Louis over time.
There are also Twitter updates, with more bits of the past scattered about daily.
STL 250, a nonprofit organized by volunteers, is working to serve as the master of ceremonies, says Erin Budde, the group's executive director as of May 1, helping people celebrate from grassroots to grand scale.
To this point, STL250 has been a volunteer effort, and Budde says the group will work to help people in the entire 16-county region celebrate St. Louis throughout the year.
And as part of that celebrating, the Missouri History Museum is donating its time and efforts for the Facebook postings. Some of the daily postings resulted from two interns spending most of the summer pouring through records of the past, says Andrew Wanko, assistant to the managing director of operations at the museum. Wanko also finds old headlines and researches them to fill out the “This Day in St. Louis History” postings.
There are moments from 1977, when a frenzied crowd broke through the doors at the Arena while jockeying for Led Zepplin tickets, the day in 1962, when the population of St. Louis County became greater than that of the city, and the 1920 day when Elsa Lemp killed herself at her country home.
Wanko’s favorite so far (and with 6,000 viewings, it is evidently liked by a lot of other people) came on Feb. 28, with a posting titled: “The Eads Bridge footing hits its mark, but workers are mysteriously dying.”
Fifteen workers died, with 77 severely injured while swimming rapidly up to the surface during the bridge’s construction. These cases were the fist time decompression sickness, called “Caissons disease,” and known as “the bends,” was first studied and understood.
The lives of people with St. Louis ties are also celebrated daily, including Bob Bergen, the voice of Porky Pig, sportscaster Bob Costas, and St. Louis Browns hitter “Gorgeous George” Sisler.
And there’s enough of the past to share on Facebook through New Year’s Day 2015, Wanko says.
The History Museum is also working on an artifact exhibit called “250 in 250,” commemorating 50 people, places, moments, images and objects from St. Louis’ past. As part of that project, Artifact Madness gives people the chance to choose, March Madness style, from a bracket of artifacts. The winner will make the exhibit.
What the big party of next year will hold is still a surprise, for now, though Budde says the group has plans for a birthday weekend celebration around Valentine's Day, plus activities in the spring and fall.
The purpose of it all will be to celebrate where the city has been, the momentum that's here now, she says, and to get everyone in the region involved in creating a great future.
It’s easy, thinking back to the World’s Fair and the 1880s, when St. Louis was a bustling and important city, to want to focus on what the city once was.
But to Wanko, the bits of history, such as the birthday of the day for March 26. In the late 1800s, Logan Uriah Reavis, who organized a meeting to lobby Congress into relocating from Washington, D.C., to St. Louis, reinforce something else.
“We still are a fantastic city," he says, "that has a lot of great things going for it."