And Where You Are Is Where You Are Not - T.S. Elliot

St. Louis was first for many things that promoted a richness of experience in my early years, helping to form my worldview. These are:

• St. Louis Municipal Opera - the oldest outdoor municipal opera (1917) and still the largest in the country, seating 11,000 people.

  
  

• St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, 1860 - The New York Philharmonic was first

• The first publicly financed kindergarten in the U.S., 1873

• The First Jewish congregation west of the Mississippi

• First cocktail party held in 1917 by socialite Clara Bell Walsh who held a party devoted exclusively to serving mixed drinks

• First steel truss bridge, the Eads Bridge crossing the Mississippi River, 1874

• The first Olympics in the U.S. held in the summer of 1904

• The first school for the blind to use braille, 1860 - Missouri School for the Blind

• The first police department in the U.S. to use fingerprints

• First successful parachute jump from an airplane made by Albert Berry on March 1, 1912 from a Benoist pusher biplane.

• The first slave state in the nation to abolish slavery prior to the Thirteenth Amendment and remain loyal to the Union

• The first dedicated gas station in 1905

• St. Louis was home to Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. As a result of his endowment to Columbia University in New York, the Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917.

• T.S. Elliot, Nobel Prize laureate post and native son of St. Louis. His grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister, spear-headed the founding of Washington University.

The St. Louis 1904 World's Fair was not the first, but it is where more iconic American foods were either invented or popularized than any other single event in history. The list includes the popularization of iced tea, the invention of 7Up, the hamburger and hot dog served on rolls and eaten as sandwiches, peanut butter, cotton candy, the club sandwich, and the ice cream cone.

My grandmother Gretchen was eleven when she attended the World's Fair with her younger sister Bertha. She talked about how she and Birdie waited and watched through the front room window of their flat for her girlfriend's father to pick them up and transport them all to the fair. Before she even saw the horse and buggy, she heard the horse's hooves against the cobblestones and knew they were near. She recounted her excitement because grand and special events for her and her sister were far and few in between. The Depander family was not wealthy. They did not own a horse and buggy, they did not travel, and they did not spend money on needless things. They lived nicely but simply, and there were few extras. However, my grandmother told me that on that day she was given enough money for her and her sister to attend the fair and to enjoy a few of the rides, such as the Ferris wheel, as well as indulge themselves with ice cream cones, which she said she considered a luxury.

As such, the World's Fair was one of the highlights of my grandmother's life. In her 84 years, she rarely left St. Louis until the last fifteen years of her life which were spent in Florida so that she could live near her daughter, my Aunt Thelma. While visiting her in her later years in her tiny Florida trailer, I shared my dreams of travel after finishing college. She smiled, shook her head, and said, "Girl, you want it all, don't you?" My ambitions and dreams must have seemed grandiose to someone like my grandmother who grew up in an era when only the wealthy traveled and owned independent transportation, girls' educations weren't considered important, few women attended universities, most communication as done by telegraph or letters, and entertainment was scarce with acceptable recreation restricted to going to church, picnics, walks, or the occasional buggy ride if you were lucky enough to know someone who owned one. Yes, Grandma, I wanted it all. I managed to get some of it and some of it eluded me. Some of it has been incredible, wonderful, and surprising. Some of it, not so much. In the end, perhaps that is what "having it all" means. To my grandmother, my life would have been extraordinary and maybe even a little frightening. The difference between our lives is like a chasm between planets. I wonder at this as I struggle to keep the chasm between myself and my grandchildren's lives as narrow as possible. But I feel it widening as the years pass and see now that it is the inevitability of passing time. Old people carry their lives on their backs like turtles carry their shells; it's who they are and those shells are their stories. Without those stories, they would feel naked and vulnerable like the turtle without its shell. Everyone lives their story; it's the thing we must carry.