- [Jim] It's moving day for a man who hasn't been with us since 1983, but Buckminster Fuller's ideas, his visions, and of course, his domes, those will be with us for a long time.

- He lived here through possibly his 10 most famous and productive years of his life.

- [Jim] He was a collector, a collector of buildings, saving what he could, before it was lost.

- Famous old St. Louis landmark, the Rivoli Theater.

- [Jim] We remember our visit with the late Larry Giles.

And for Missouri's bicentennial, we head south for the story of how this state got a boot heel, and the story of the man who just didn't want to be in Arkansas.

- [Donald] Anyway, he got what he wanted.

- [Jim] Is a really one guy who made this happen?

It's all next on Living St. Louis.

(upbeat music) I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we're in the Mississippi River town of Caruthersville, Missouri.

Across the river, that's Tennessee.

You head that way, you hit Arkansas, but if you had that way, you also hit Arkansas.

Yep, we're in the boot heel.

That's the where of the story, but for the Missouri bicentennial, we wanted to know why, I mean, why a boot heel?

There's no good geographic reason for this southern thrust into Arkansas, which apparently challenged not just surveyors, but mapmakers as well, and in fact, when Missouri petitioned for statehood, it wasn't there.

This is what Missouri was supposed to look like.

The northwest corner, the plat addition, that was originally Indian territory.

It was added to the state and open to settlers in 1837.

And the southern border, it was just a straight line along the 36,30 parallel.

That was the dividing line going back to colonial times, the border between Virginia and North Carolina.

It was just extended out, and became the Kentucky, Tennessee border, and would have been extended across the Mississippi to become the Missouri, Arkansas border.

So what happened?

Well, the town of Carothersville, population about 6,000, county seat of Pemiscott County is a good place to find out, and what you find out is it's not so much a question of why, but who.

Is that him, that's him up there?

- [Donald] That is John Harden Walker.

Now this- - [Jim] We met with Donald Jeffries of the Pemiscott County Historical Society, to learn about the man considered the father, sometimes called the czar of the Missouri boot heel.

Was it really one guy who made this happen?

- Actually with some assistance, but it was primarily him.

- [Jim] John Walker came from Tennessee to settle in this region in 1810, not an easy place to make a living.

It was swampy, prone to flooding, sparsely populated, and when the big New Madrid earthquakes hit in 1811, 1812, a lot of people who survived simply moved out, and never came back.

And Walker stayed?

- Yes.

- [Jim] He might've seen the post earthquake situation as an opportunity.

- Yes, he did.

- [Jim] Because if other people are leaving, that's more land for him.

- Yes, he had amassed land holdings with the farming that he was doing, you know, on what he could, and, but he also had amassed herds of livestock.

- [Jim] When the issue of Missouri statehood came, Walker was a leading citizen of what was then called Little Prairie, and with his business and political connections, he looked forward to being part of the new state, instead of a federal territory.

And the borders weren't set yet.

One proposal included pieces of today's Iowa and Kansas, and a big chunk to the south.

Congress opted for a smaller squared off version, and Walker found himself south of the border.

- He wanted the protection of a state.

Then that's when Walker went to Washington.

- [Jim] And this is when the facts get mixed up with the legend.

Jeffries found a 1937 newspaper article, allegedly recounting the moment Walker heard the bad news.

- It starts out, "hey can't do that to me," according to what he supposed to have said, "and he jumped on his mule," but more likely a man with his prominence probably jumped on a horse.

- So we're already questioning the historical record here.

- Uh-huh.

(chuckles) - [Jim] Okay.

- But anyway, he rode 700 miles to Washington, DC.

- [Jim] Very little is known about what Walker actually did, whom he talked to when he got there, there's no records.

But Jeffries and other historians reject colorful versions that portray Walker wandering the halls of Congress, making his argument with a muzzle loading shotgun.

More likely, things back then got done pretty much like they get done today.

- He did have connections, plus he was a prominent landowner.

He was a person of wealth, so there might've been a little backdoor dealings going on as well.

Anyway, he got what he wanted.

- [Jim] When Walker returned from the Capitol, bottom line, so to speak, the new state of Missouri had a boot heel.

The boot heel is more than just lines on a map.

It is distinct in its geography, its history, and economy, and Jeffries says while it is a part of the state, it is also in some ways, apart from the state.

- And yes, it should have been Arkansas land.

It's, the culture here is more akin to Arkansas.

You go up to Cape Girardeau, it's different culture, but you know, Walker did what he did, and here we are today.

- If you're looking for signs of this chapter of Missouri history, and I am, you don't have to go very far, because John Hardeman Walker is still here, right in the center of town.

Just a short walk off the main street in downtown Caruthersville you will find his grave, and a plaque placed here by the D.A.R.

John Hardeman Walker, 1794 - 1860, enterprising citizen of Little Prairie.

Through his efforts, the boot heel became a part of Missouri.

So that's the story of the boot heel, the story of a time, and a place, and a man who 200 years ago literally helped reshape the state of Missouri.

For this next story, another road trip, this one to Southern Illinois.

Kara Vaninger takes us to the unusual home of a most unusual man.

- [Kara] Unless you were, or are a regular at SIU Carbondale, this small, unassuming structure might look like a campus storage shed, but it was actually the home of one of the greatest innovators of the 20th century.

- I've had the opportunity to give papers around the world, in India to Egypt, and the first thing people say, when they see I'm from Southern Illinois University, "Oh, Buckminster Fuller."

- [Kara] Affectionately known by all as Bucky, Fuller designed and lived in this geodesic dome home with his wife, Anne during his time as a professor at the university.

Recent efforts by the R. Buckminster Fuller Dome Nonprofit have resulted in it being added to the National Registry of Historic Places, and a grant from the National Park Service has helped to restore the deceptively modest little dome to all of its sparse, functional glory.

- We have an easement with the National Park Service that we're responsible that let it be a museum for 10 years.

We're going to do that no matter what.

- [Kara] But it was the invaluable donation by the family estate that has turned it into a time capsule, and shines a light on what was arguably the most impactful decade of his career.

- It means that the dome home is just more than a piece of architecture.

It now has content to it.

- Part of the restoration was not only restoring the structure, but refurnishing it with a lot of the original pieces, including this library, which was on the second floor loft, and that's where we came into play.

What could fit on the shelves in the home will go there, and then the overflow will be kept here in our rare book stacks.

- We're really excited to be able to work with the dome home, preserving those thought processes that can be observed through his library, through the notes that he wrote in the books, and through the notes that people wrote when they gave him the book.

What shines a light on your soul better than the books you collect?

- It's hard to put a label on who Buckminster Fuller was.

He was an inventor, a designer, a cartographer, a visionary, a poet, and all of that for him personally sprung out of this kind of crisis that he had in Chicago.

- [Kara] After the loss of his job, and the death of his firstborn daughter, Fuller determined the best way to take care of his remaining family was for them to cash in his life insurance policy.

- He was going to swim out into lake Michigan in the winter, and he got in up to his waist, and had this kind of disembodied voice talk to him, and say, you know, "If you're going to throw your life away, you should give it away in service."

What he decided was that he would live his life as an experiment of what can one human individual do to affect the world for the better.

- [Kara] Fuller felt that many of the world's problems, like poverty, inequality, and climate change could be resolved by discovering more efficient ways to apply energy, and use existing resources.

He relentlessly pursued this mission over the next six decades through his writings, lectures, and inventions, but it was the challenges he faced as a child that formed his unique world view into a very specific shape.

- He had a different sensory experience.

He was virtually blind and deaf.

He had very, very thick glasses his whole life, and had to wear hearing aids.

So his early years, his formative years, he navigated the world through touch.

As a child in school, when the other kids were asked to build, they built based on what they saw in the world around them that came on the squares and cubes and boxes.

He did it in more of the tactile way, and found that a triangle, and then a tetrahedron was actually a more stable shape, and you could feel that.

- [Kara] From a baseball stadium in Japan, to Epcot Center, Disney World, to the Climatron in our own Botanical garden, it's clear that Fuller's most well-known invention began to take shape in those little hands.

- The geodesic dome is efficient in that it uses the least amount of material to enclose a volume of space, and it achieves that by imitating the way nature builds, from the subatomic out to the galactic level.

- [Kara] Throughout his life, Fuller observed this building pattern repeated time and time again in the natural world.

- He was really validated when the carbon 60 molecule, which is a really fundamental part of life on a universal scale, turned out to be a little geodesic sphere, so it was named after him.

It was named the Fullerene.

- [Kara] Now, there are thousands of Fuller designed or inspired geodesic domes worldwide, but before the patent for these dynamic structures emerged in the 1950s, the 2D version would serve as a new world view, literally.

- Bucky's famous Dymaxion map began as the sphere of the planet, broken into a series of triangles that become a 12-sided icosahedron, and then unwraps from the poles, along the 90th longitudinal meridian, which has a north, south orientation, instead of an east, west orientation.

It really bothered him that the most used two dimensional map was a Mercator projection it's called, which unwraps the three-dimensional sphere of the planet into a 2D plane, and stretches the poles.

That gave more importance to northern hemisphere places, which were predominantly white people, and equatorial people, like, black and brown people, where they're from is diminished.

That was what children were sitting in classrooms all day long looking at this inaccurate picture of world.

Bucky's Dymaxion map is a not only more accurate picture of the world as far as the sizes of the landmasses, it really reinforces this idea of global unity, because you can easily see how people would walk out of Africa through the Middle East, across, you know, Siberia, when this was all frozen, walk in through North America, and populate the entire planet.

Anthropologists really love this map.

It actually appeared in Life Magazine in 1943.

In 1954, he has his patent for the geodesic dome, and it's really kind of that process in reverse, taking those triangles and turning them back into the sphere.

- [Kara] While Fuller was teaching at Carbondale, the Edwardsville Campus announced its plans to build a place of worship for students.

As fate would have it, the 90th longitudinal meridian ran through the land being developed, providing an unmissable design opportunity for Fuller to turn his 2D map into a 3D miniature Earth.

- [Benjamin] When you stand on the 90th meridian, and you look up, you are looking at the place you are standing on the actual planet.

- [Kara] Fuller designed what is now the Center for Spirituality and Sustainability in partnership with architect, Shoji Sadao.

This one little building is designed mimicking that pattern Bucky identified repeating in nature would bring many of his philosophies and hopes for humankind together.

- So you have this vantage point of seeing your place in the world, and by the virtue that the dome is translucent, you look through it, out into the heavens, and you see the world's place in the universe.

- [Kara] Thanks to his residency in the area, Southern Illinois and St. Louis remain some of the most important regions for built structures by Buckminster Fuller.

The 120 foot high Wood River Union Tank Car Dome was, at the time it was built, one of the largest structures in the world with no internal support.

Used for maintenance and repairs on railroad cars, it had a 2.5 acre interior, and though Wood River's size was impressive, it was nothing compared to his futuristic vision for the residents of east St. Louis.

Famous dancer and choreographer, Katherine Dunham was also a professor at SIU during the 1960s, and was passionate about restoring her adopted hometown to its former glory.

- She bumped into Bucky and said, "Could you imagine something here in St. Louis that would be a 20th century solution?"

And that was the mile-wide Old Man River City Project.

- [Kara] Working with Washington University's architecture department, Fuller developed the plans and vision, and designed the first phase of the project, a geodesic dome that served as the town hall, where he eventually presented his plans to the community.

The scale model revealed a mile wide collection of housing apartments, businesses, and athletic fields, all covered by a 1000 foot high geodesic dome.

- In his mind, he was liberating people from having to have a mortgage, and live together in this cooperative, synergistic, unified living system.

What it ended up looking like was a containment solution.

- [Kara] Rejected by the community it was designed to enhance, and finding no funding to foot the $700 million price tag, the Old Man River Project, and its ideals died a slow, quiet death.

All that remains is the dome that once served as town hall, and is now the Mary Brown Center.

- He didn't have the same lived experience as people in east St. Louis who he was providing this solution for, and given the history of other community housing projects in St. Louis specifically really played on all of those legitimate fears.

- [Kara] On the other end of the size spectrum is Fuller's own geodesic dome home in Carbondale.

- He was good at delegating things, and he had the design students come over, and actually erect the dome in one day.

- He lived here through possibly his 10 most famous and productive years of his life.

He was an icon.

His lectures are still famous, but things that he influenced moved beyond him.

- A lot of people end up just calling him a futurist.

The present would have been his future, and it doesn't look like the world that he wanted to see, so contemporary writers sometimes will label him as a failed visionary, or as a failed futurist, but for him, things like a geodesic, they were the built expression of a worldview.

- He recognized that the world has limited resources, so he tried to utilize those resources in a way that can satisfy every human's need on the planet.

We would call it going green today.

He was thinking about those issues back in the thirties, and forties with his designs and energy efficiency.

- I think now we're seeing a resurgence of Buckminster Fuller in terms of making do with less, so we don't impact the world so much.

- [Kara] Thanks to restoration efforts, and the donation of Fuller's library, his dome home is now an immersive experience for those studying the incredible scope and impact of his work.

- I've been here 40 years teaching, and this was the first time in 40 years that we're starting to really recognize who Buckminster Fuller was, you know, instead of the old adage that a prophet does not know their own country, he's now known in Carbondale.

(upbeat music) - [Jim] Back in 2004, the U.S.

Postal Service issued a Buckminster Fuller postage stamp.

One of the unveiling ceremonies was at the Botanical Gardens in front of the Climatron.

A Fuller colleague was there, and he said, "Interest in Fuller, and his ideas at the time were less popular than they had been, but he was pretty sure that they would make yet another comeback."

- We found that it's about a 20 year cycle, and then 20 years or so from now, or maybe less time than that, the students will get interested in it again.

We just don't have Mr. Fuller around to be the catalyst.

That's what we miss.

(crowd clapping) (piano music) - Finally, on the topic of buildings and visionaries, the story of Larry Giles.

He passed away this past June, at the age of 73, remembered, especially within the historic preservation community, because you see, Larry Giles was a collector, a collector of buildings.

Here's Patrick Murphy's story from 2004.

(building exploding) (machine whirring) - [Patrick] We talk a lot about preserving treasures from our past, but sometimes we don't recognize them.

Visitors to Louis often comment on our architecture, how many historic buildings, even entire neighborhoods are still intact, but their numbers is dwindling, as St. Louis's past makes way for its future.

Maybe some of them should be razed.

That's an argument for another day, but some St. Louisians are concerned that we're rapidly losing a treasure that cannot be replaced, one that makes our city stand out among other American cities.

- [Larry] Let's see at last count, I think there were 14.

- One man is devoting his life to saving as much architectural detail as he can before the headache ball hits.

Larry Giles has spent over 25 years getting to condemned buildings before their wreckers, removing, storing, and cataloging the artwork of generations of stone and metalworkers, whose crafts once made St. Louis one of the most beautiful, and architecturally significant cities in America.

- St. Louis has lost quite a bit of its a fabric over the last 50, 55 years.

The central business district has probably shrank to about one third of its former size, and a lot of the buildings that were demolished in the 1950s and sixties, there was almost no effort to recover any of the artwork in these buildings.

- This block of ruins on Olive is all this left of the Gaslight Square entertainment district, and in fact, by the time this program airs, this will all be torn down.

And yet the architectural legacy of Gaslight Square will continue to live because of Larry Giles, who managed to save the most interesting parts of these buildings.

(machine whirring) and other buildings from neighborhoods all over St. Louis.

Tens of thousands of items, most of them very heavy, and very big, crated, stacked to the ceiling, protected, if not seen.

You ever wonder, "What the heck did I get myself into?"

- It does seem a bit overwhelming from time to time, but storage spaces seems to be always the big problem, you know, where do you go with it?

We work on 50 or 60 buildings a year, probably.

- So you're constantly expanding, constantly looking for more space?

- There's always a need for more space.

- There are certain people in life, and Larry Giles is one of them, that is just so passionate about what he does as a mission, that there are few like him, and what drives him is an absolute passion to save what he thinks is one of the most important parts of what really makes St. Louis, and makes us what we are.

- [Larry] This is a lobby mailbox that it's- - [Steve] Look at that eagle.

- It's a wonderful composition, isn't it?

- [Patrick] Steve Trampe, who renovated the 23 story Continental Life Building in Midtown, met Larry Giles at the perfect time, as he tried to bring the once elegant back to its original state.

- Larry Giles has lovingly collected over the years, most of the major bronze pieces that were originally stolen from the Continental.

I mean, he bought some from scrapyards.

He bought some from antique shops.

He bought some from dealers, and it was really a quest of his to track down so much of the Continental, the custom Continental bronze that had been stolen, and ripped from the walls 20, 25 years earlier.

And the building today exists in its original, magnificent splendor because of Larry Giles.

- [Larry] Well, I'm told that it's the largest, and most comprehensive collection of architectural materials in the United States.

Two warehouses that I'm currently using, and a storage yard that contains some 150,000 objects.

- Rivoli, that looks familiar, I've seen it before.

- It should seem familiar.

It's a famous old St. Louis landmark, the Rivoli Theater, more recently the Town Theater.

It was a dirty movie house in recent history.

As a child, my grandfather used to take me downtown at night, and when they were tearing down the old buildings, and would watch headache ball the building.

We always thought that it would be interesting to try and save some of it.

- [Patrick] It's not easy to stay one step ahead of a wrecking ball.

What ultimately happens to this extraordinary collection might turn out to be the work of others, someday in the future, but whoever that might be, we'll remember Larry Giles, and marvel that any man might think he could collect and store the treasures of a city lost.

- I envisioned it remaining in St. Louis, and being a part of a public trust, it would be useful to anyone interested in materials, the history of architecture, building technology, and conservation design.

St. Louis is really one of a handful of American cities that's essential for a understanding of American architecture in general.

- And that's Living St. Louis.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Jim Kirchherr, and we'll see you next time.

- [Announcer] Living St. Louis is made possible by the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation, Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan Charitable Trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.

(upbeat music)