YouTube Episodes

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H.F. Episode #1

This entire project was conceived in a whorehouse!

When I learned Babe Ruth considered St. Louis his favorite city to visit, I had to know why.

And when I learned why, I had to know more.

That's how this whole thing got started about 15 years ago. Back then, it was an old fashioned blog on Blogger. Remember old Blogger? Well, when I forgot my log-in credentials, all that content just died. I had lots of good stuff, too. Beyond Babe Ruth, there were stories on Pope's Cafeteria and Mickey Carroll, St. Louis' resident Wizard of Oz Munchkin, among others.

I still have all my notes and will be able to re-tell them bigger and better in video form. The videos themselves reside on my Highway Farty You Tube channel, with shortened versions on Instagram. A quick disclaimer on A.I. use: I will never use A.I. to write my content and I certainly can't use it to do what I do in the field, but I do use it in my research, in creating the thumbnails I design and for cutting down my full videos to Instagram shorts.

This website is simply a gathering place for the long videos and also a spot where I can add bonus content.

For example, in this first video at the 16:00 mark, and for nearly a minute thereafter, you see me pass a red brick tavern on the corner of Spring & Sullivan across from what would have been the left field gates at Sportsman's Park.

Today it is the Sit & Sip.

But, this was called Palermo's Tavern from 1933-1966. And, it is generally considered to be America's first true "Sports Bar."

What does that even mean? Well, in 1947, barkeeper Paul Palermo purchased one of the St. Louis area's first television sets, a 12 inch Farnsworth, to be exact.

Palermo then put the TV on a shelf above the bar and tuned it to sports broadcasts for his patrons. This was, of course, in the infancy of televised sports and back then it was pretty much just boxing with Friday Night Fights. But, in time, other sports would follow and Palermo was already ahead of the game.

Jimmy Palermo, the owner's son, who just happened to be a former St. Louis Browns bat boy, was tasked with the job of decorating the place. Jimmy lined the walls with sports memorabilia decades before it became the drinking establishment standard. Jimmy was obsessive in his pursuit of choice sports memorabilia and Palermo's Tavern acquired a museum vibe, complete with game-used equipment and uniforms from all 16 (at the time) major league teams.

When the Cardinals moved downtown to their new stadium in 1966, the crowds went with them and after a 33 year run, Palermo's closed.

H.F. Episode #2

All I really wanted to do in this episode was to set the table and give credit to author Kal Wagenheim for doing what no other author had done--uncovering the name of Babe Ruth's notorious St. Louis bordello. Had it not been for Wagenheim's long out-of-print 1974 biography of Babe Ruth, I'd still be chasing my tail.

In this book, the author introduces us to a New York Daily News sports columnist who was essentially Babe Ruth's shadow, covering him 24/7, year round. Hunt is a pioneer in sports tabloid journalism and is one of the men who helped create the larger-than-life image of Babe Ruth.

It was Hunt's account of traveling with Babe Ruth through St. Louis Union Station where we get the name and details of the whorehouse-the "House of the Good Shepherd."

But other than that, Hunt has no real ties to St. Louis. There is, however, a key player in Babe Ruth's braintrust who is from St. Louis. Couldn't get into his story due to time constraints, but his name was Christy Walsh and he was Ruth's agent.

In fact, he was the first true agent in sports history, representing far more than Babe Ruth. Walsh's clients included Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Dizzy Dean, Rogers Hornsby and Knute Rockne, to name but a few.

Walsh was a marketing genius, skilled in landing top endorsement deals for his clients.

Before becoming a Super Agent, Walsh started his own ghostwriting syndicate employing famous writers to pen books and articles attributed to sports stars.

He was born in St. Louis in 1891 and lived in the Soulard neighborhood. His early education was at St. Vincent de Paul church and school at 9th & Park in Soulard. It's still there today.

So, of course Babe Ruth loved St. Louis!

It was a St. Louis boy who made him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams--more than able to afford the local ladies of the night he was known to patronize here.

H.F. Episode #3

This is an example of how one story leads me unexpectedly down an entirely different path. Honestly, I had no idea about these things called "Magdalene Laundries," which makes me wonder what the Archdiocese of St. Louis knew and when they knew it?

The Magdalene Laundry scandal blew up on a big way in 1993 with the sale of the High Park Convent in the Drumcondra section of Dublin, Ireland. It was the largest such facility in Ireland and the sale was forced by huge stock market losses incurred by the Sisters who ran the place. In this case, it was the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge and not the Sisters of Good Shepherd who ran the St. Louis Magdalene Laundry referenced in my story.

This, of course, leads me to question why the Sisters of any order were speculating in the stock market, but they gambled and lost on a company called Guinness Peat Aviation. Known primarily by its initials, GPA neither built nor flew airplanes. It bought them in bulk and leased them to airlines around the world. At its peak, it was the largest aircraft lessor in the world. But the 1991 Gulf War disrupted air travel to such an extent that GPA went belly-up, causing the Sisters to lose their entire investment.

A chain reaction started that would prove disastrous to the worldwide reputation of the Catholic Church: Desperate to cover their losses, the Sisters, in 1993, decided to sell 11.5 acres of their choice Dublin convent land.

Here's where the story gets super creepy--because, of course these nuns knew what was lurking beneath their land, and to cover their you-know-what's they applied for an exhumation permit to relocate bodies buried on the property.

Wait....what? Exhumation permit? That convent had been in operation since 1831 (back when it was called, stragely enough, the Mary Magdalen Asylum) and they didn't say nuttin 'bout no buried bodies!!!

The exhumation shockingly revealed a mass grave of 155 women carelessly buried on the property--and the nuns had no records or death certificates for half of the women. When local authorities pressed for more details, the Sisters could only guess who was there, often referring to the deceased only by their given "religious names."

Remember, the women who worked and lived in these so-called Magdalene Laundries mostly came with a troubled past that included prostitution, promiscuity and sadly, mental illness. They were not called residents, but rather inmates or penitents--to brand them for their sins. Moreover, they were defeminized and forced to cut their hair like men and wear drab uniforms during their forced labor. The names they were given were often fashioned after saints.

Beyond this stripping of their identities, their lives inside these facilities were characterized by enforced silence and constant surveillance.

And all of these horrors came out in the open when the convent land was cleared for development. At first, the Irish Government did the whole Sergeant Schultz bit: I know nothing!

But a lengthy investigation resulted and in 2013 a damning report shattered that narrative. What became known as the McAleese Report proved the state was not only aware of the Magdalene Laundries, but was a key partner in keeping them running: The State actually acted as a primary source of "inmates," funneling women from the justice system to the convents as a condition of their probation. And when any of the women managed to get away, the police would return the "escapees" to the Sisters who would, of course, mete out the harshest punishment.

The whole system of these Magdalene Laundries stunk to High Heaven and three years after the discovery of the mass grave in Drumcondra, the last forced-laundry-labor convent finally closed in the north inner city of Dublin on October 25, 1996.

As for St. Louis, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd convent in South City closed in 1969, long before the extent of these systemic abuses became widely known. The reason given for the closure and ultimate sale of the property on Gravois @ Bamberger centered on it being a fire trap. This was a common reason given in the 1960's to shutter aging religious institutions that had become too expensive to maintain.

At the time of the closure of the so-called House of the Good Shepherd (NOT to be confused with the Babe Ruth bordello of the same name) St. Louis was a key hub for the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in the United States. The St. Louis Province was the mother ship for missions that stretched into the Far West.

The order still exists today, albeit with a much smaller footprint, in Olivette. Its mission remains generally the same: To help troubled women and families. They just no longer incarcerate them. Worldwide, an estimated 30,000 women were forced into servitude at Magdalene Laundries.

Below is the link to the song The Magdalene Laundries by the great Joni Mitchell:

H.F. Episode #4

Good thing a lot of Lawyers live in Ladue--the ritzy little inner ring suburb sure finds itself in court a lot.

High profile cases, too!

The three I'm looking at for future episodes are:

City of Ladue v. Gilleo, a First Amendment case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court in 1994.

The 1954 murder of Dr. Cecil Sharp, the St. Louis County Health Commissioner gunned down at the kitchen door of his Ladue home. Not only was this a high profile murder in a rich enclave where murders are rare, the case itself went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court and set a legal precedent that still stands today regarding the mental state of a defendant.

City of Ladue v. Horn, a 1986 "Family Values" case where Ladue held fast to its longstanding opposition to an unmarried couple cohabitating in Ladue city limits. In that case, Ladue won the legal battle but lost the war.

Today, Ladue is no longer peering in the bedroom windows of its residents or checking for marriage licenses. But it still was doing so as recently as the late 1980's, and it aggressively defended its law.

But before Ladue was incorporated as a municipality in St. Louis County proper, it was anything BUT proper.

Safe from the prying eyes of local police departments, Ladue was known to be "wide open."

The center of it all was the old Busch's Grove restaurant we visit in this episode.

No longer a restaurant today....it's a day spa....but it has not been all that long ago when it was still in operation.

OK, maybe it was longer ago than I thought: 2011. But I did get a chance, before it closed, to take a photo of that great old neon sign they had hanging out front.

It was a snowy night, which made the image look pretty dramatic.

In fact, I was so pleased with the way this picture turned out, I'm going to make it the first entry on my sign photo blog--"This Town Needs an Inema."

After the pic of the Avalon Inema, of course!

You can check out the signs I come across on my "sign detours" by clicking the sign gallery link at the top.

As for Busch's Grove, it is very cool the structure still stands--sort of. That's because the entire restaurant was given a mocern face lift about 25 years ago and the rehab cannibalized pretty much everything associated with the old restaurant. But the City of Ladue was adamant the historic look of the facade be preserved, and I'm glad they did.

There's a lot of history to be found inside the walls of Busch's Grove and I'll be back at least one more time to tell the story of one of the most famous "firings" in St. Louis history.

For now though....whenever you pass the intersection of Clayton and Price, look over at the old place and know you are on one end of a secret "bordello shuttle" between Busch's Grove and a nearby whorehouse, right in the heart of Ladue.

It still looks remarkably the same today (minus the prostitutes), so check it out in the video. Just please be respectful of the residents in the neighborhood if you go see it in person.

That said, it's located at #6 Town & Country Drive.

The entrance to the subdivision is off Price Rd., just North of Ladue Rd. And it's not like this is a state secret; the house has been written up in the Ladue society magazines a few times. And the last time the home was listed, the Realtor even called attention to this unique sexy selling point.

And from an awesome book I found, titled Ladue Found, I learned who the Madam was--and I can't wait to take you to meet her!

Soon!

H.F. Episode #5

Now that we finally know where Babe's favorite bordello was located in St. Louis, let's play a game of "what if?"

What if Babe Ruth got his wish to manage the St. Louis Browns in the 1937 season, how might the history of St. Louis baseball have changed?

Remember, with the exception of 1944, the Browns were the Bad News Bears of baseball. Might Babe Ruth have played a Walter Matthau role and altered the course of St. Louis sports history?

Part of the reason the Browns were so bad was their financial picture--they just couldn't afford top players. That translated to poor attendance, which led to more budget cuts. They didn't call it that then, but the Browns were in a Doom Loop.

Had it not been for World War Two, the Browns would have bugged out of St. Louis long before their eventual departutre in 1953.

Imagine having the most famous athlete of all time come to a city he dearly loved and put the capstone on a Hall of Fame career by getting the one thing he missed in baseball--an opportunity to manage?

And as we learned in this episode, he wouldn't have needed to shop for a house here--he already had one!

Strangely enough, the Cardinals are going through a bit of the same thing right now: It's a team in a tailspin. Fans are losing interest quickly and ait's are looking to a possible high profile manager to revive interest--Yadier Molina.

Ownership doesn't see it that way and it's a gamble the fans will continue to support the team. Browns fans certainly did not.

H.F. Episode #6

I just want to further unpack what Father Oscar Huber did that afternioon in the Parkland Hospital operating room where President Kennedy lay dead.

As I mentioned in the video, from the moment he arrived ,Huber was faced with a serious priestly problem--he knew the President was already dead; after all, they had to pull the sheet back for Huber to even see Kennedy's forehead. But he also knew Catholic doctrine states Sacraments are for the Living.

Once we are dead, we are in God's hands and there's nothing more left to be done here.

In that moment in Dallas, however, Mrs. Kennedy desperately needed comfort and knowing her husband received the Last Rites of the church was very important to her.

Think of Last Rites as a Final Confession for a Catholic; having received them, they can now die in a State of Grace and go right to Heaven.

Without that Final Confession, it's a gray area about what happens to a Catholic Soul.

What Huber did was walk a spiritual tightrope that day: He did what is known as a "Conditional Sacrament." And the way to accomplish this was to include two Latin words--si vivis. "If you are living." This allowed him to stay true to the doctrine and at the same time provide Mrs. Kennedy the comfort of seeing the entire ritual performed.

When Mrs. Kennedy asked if it "took," Huber could honestly state he was confident the President's soul was still in his body because Catholics believe the soul does not depart immediately.

That grace period gray area allowed Huber to pull off the best win-win scenario on an otherwidse lose-lose day.

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