THE REEL THING

Back during my childhood daze in the mid-1960s, I had a gadget that felt like it came straight from the future: a portable Panasonic reel-to-reel tape recorder. To my young mind, it was the ultimate in cool. It wasn't close to state of the art, but it could capture and playback sound, a feat that I found utterly captivating.

Kids from my suburban St. Louis County neighborhood would drop by, and we'd transform my bedroom into a broadcast booth and do our best to simulate the legendary Cardinal play-by-play announcers at the time, Harry Caray and Jack Buck. With the help of a walkie-talkie's fuzzy static for a cheering crowd-noise generator, we recorded imaginary games from our imaginary broadcast booth.

I’m not sure what ever happened to that little recorder. It probably wound up getting tossed along with my baseball card collection when I left home to attend college. But the memories? Those remain. They’ve lasted far longer than any reel of magnetic tape ever could.

Still Boneheaded After All These Years...

This story must be put in some geographic and historic perspective.

St. Louis Most Dangerous City

Due to a boneheaded decision from the city's politicians during the 19th Century, St. Louis' city boundaries haven't changed since 1876. At the time, the boundary ran through mostly rural farmland adjacent to St. Louis County. The idea, shortsighted as it was, was to free the wealthier, urbane city folks from the tax burden of supporting the needs of their poorer, farming neighbors in the county.

As the years passed, St. Louis' urban area expanded into this county frontier, but the city's outer boundary did not. By the 1960s, most of the area's wealth and tax base resided in the county, which was a complete reversal of the situation when the boundary freeze was first enacted. Now, the 'city' of St. Louis...still separated from the county...contains mostly impoverished and blighted neighborhoods. And the 134-year-old boundary that's still in place now runs through some of the most urbanized terrain one could possibly see in the U.S.

Had St. Louis been allowed to expand and develop as most major American cities did (e.g., Indianapolis), suburbs like Clayton, Kirkwood, Webster Groves and Florissant would be city neighborhoods. And, the statistics from this study, I believe, would paint St. Louis in a much more favorable light.

I wonder how Chicago or New York would have fared in this study if they retained their 1876 city limits.