(chill jazzy music) - [Jim] The streetcars are running again.

A new season, maybe a new chapter.

Has the Loop Trolley finally turned the corner?

These scientists didn't just come to teach.

They're putting these students to work on a study comparing country bees to city bees.

- So we're gonna be looking at how bees are behaving next to highways, which is not studied at all anywhere.

- [Jim] One of the world's worst archival disasters happened more than 50 years ago in St. Louis, and the efforts to restore military records continue to this day and beyond.

- Six million records.

That's gonna take a really long time.

(light playful music) - He was accused of the murder of his father in St. Louis in 1925 and walked free.

But not for long.

It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(upbeat playful music) (upbeat playful music continues) (upbeat playful music continues) (upbeat playful music continues) I'm Jim Kirchherr, and the Loop Trolley is back on track for another season.

You know the story: big idea, big project, big price tag, big disappointment.

But after some big changes and major cutbacks, there's a renewed effort to get more people literally and figuratively on board.

This was the kickoff to the new trolley season.

It was a day before operations began on May 1st.

And arriving at the Missouri History Museum stop were the major players and supporters: Bi-State, the Missouri Historical Society, Forest Park Forever, University City, Loop businesses.

- Hello, everybody!

- [Jim] This kind of PR event indicates something of renewed confidence for the trolley.

- The Loop Trolley is a special amenity that the Delmar Loop gets to benefit from.

We get to welcome thousands of visitors to our district every year who ride the trolley, and we can take advantage of that.

- [Jim] After Bi-State took over operations, it agreed to run the trolley only through the end of this year.

But after tackling safety and budget issues, it has now extended that commitment through 2028.

But there must have been some skepticism even on your board that you wanted to continue to do this.

- Yeah, there was skepticism.

And, for instance, they said, "All right, let's just try it for a couple of years "and see how we do."

We proved ourselves.

We were consistent.

We were able to ride a regular schedule.

No accidents.

Went really well.

- [Jim] It's not your job to get people on board, right?

- That's true.

My job is just to get it running, right?

And get it consistent.

And now let's build those partnerships to get more people on the asset.

- [Jim] There's still a ways to go, but there were indications at the end of last year that the pieces were falling into place.

And Anne-Marie Berger looked at what it took to turn Loop entrepreneur Joe Edwards' dream into a functioning reality.

(audience applauds) - Riders, Delmar is the next station.

- [Anne-Marie] The Loop Trolley is a 2.2-mile streetcar line with 10 stops.

And at the end of October, 2024, it concluded its six-month operating season.

A few weeks later marked six years since the Loop Trolley opened for passenger service, six turbulent years.

Before it even hit the tracks, the trolley had already derailed a few times.

There were long construction delays, and it went over budget, $7 million over budget, with a price tag of $51 million to complete.

Budget issues were compounded by low ridership.

And after it started running, its expected ridership of almost 400,000 missed the mark by 95%.

And its operations were suspended by the end of 2019.

The Federal Transit Authority funded about $31 million for this project, and suspension of its operation did not sit well with them.

If trolleys were not running by June of 2022, the city would have to pay back a significant amount of the funding, and future funding for transportation projects were at risk.

- And we were asked to take over from the Loop Trolley Company to kind of rightsize this asset and get it running.

- [Anne-Marie] Taulby Roach is the CEO of Bi-State Development.

In an effort to avoid a federal default on funding, Bi-State took over trolley operations in 2022.

What was your plan?

- So the key to any public asset is reliability.

Fulfill the obligations to the taxpayers.

And that's really what our goal was with this asset.

Let's get it out, let's get it running.

Let's be sure that it's living within its means.

What we needed to do was restore the public confidence in these vehicles.

Look, I have professional maintenance teams at Bi-State.

We know how to run equipment reliably.

They call it re-tiring or re-trucking.

- [Anne-Marie] Okay.

- Even though they're steel wheels, you will put new profiles on.

So we can do all that with our existing equipment.

And when the trolley was having its problems earlier coming off the track, see, that's what we do.

We know how to do it.

- Okay.

- So wheel profile.

- And that was what was missing originally was that?

- [Taulby] Yes.

You can't just run one of these in your backyard.

- My next station stop is Pageant.

Doors will open to my right.

- [Anne-Marie] Balancing a budget supported by taxpayers for a transit system no one wanted to ride is a little trickier.

The purpose of the trolley had to be reimagined.

(horn blows) The original concept included these cars serving as actual modes of transportation, improving traffic and parking.

Today, they are free to ride, operating just four days a week, Thursday through Sunday, only six months a year, and tourism-focused.

- Here we are in the midst of a district that has all kinds of really interesting events, including the jazz event that's on Thursday evenings at the History Museum and other events that happen along the Loop District all during these operating times.

And what we want to do is be complementary to that and also maybe build ridership.

If we build ridership, it means that the asset becomes more viable and the realization of a taxing district becomes real.

- [Anne-Marie] And rightsizing operations requires downsizing operations.

Until recently, there were five cars in the fleet.

- So we negotiated a complex renegotiation with the original manufacturer of these vehicles.

We returned three to them.

They're now gone.

And we've kept these two.

- [Anne-Marie] And you didn't need them?

- Right.

Essentially under this new operating rubric, concentrating on the tourist capability of this, of these units, mostly on weekends, mostly when the good weather situations, we only needed two vehicles to make that work.

And we renegotiated the operating plan with both the Loop District and the Federal Transit Administration.

And everything is square.

- [Anne-Marie] According to Roach, the Loop Trolley ended its 2024 season with a 40% increase in ridership.

That's over 12,000 rides.

He says they have accomplished the goal of living within the means and expectations of the taxpayers and are currently operating in the black.

Now they can explore how the trolley can benefit the district it rolls through.

- Now what we need to do is move toward a more productive relationship.

So are there little avenues where we can get more out of these assets, where they can be more fruitful for the businesses along this district?

We'll look at all those assets and see what we can do so that we start having this be really a crown in the jewel of the Loop District.

(bell rings) - From a public relations standpoint, I think bees have been getting something of an image makeover; from pesky stingers to essential pollinators.

And there's a new study of local bee populations and bee behavior.

And the researchers are, let's say, getting some bee students involved.

This strip of land along Interstate 44 in South St. Louis is on this day both a classroom and a laboratory.

The students are from Mullanphy and St. Margaret of Scotland schools.

Their teachers?

They're real scientists from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

And the lesson today is insects, particularly bees.

- As they're flying, they actually do all of their legs across their bodies.

Just like that.

- [Jim] They're answering questions and sharing what they know, but they are also sharing what they don't know about a particular kind of bee: the solitary bee.

- Actually don't know very much about those bees because they're kind of hard to study.

And one thing that makes them hard to study is finding those nests.

- Professor Aimee Dunlap and PhD candidate George Todd are about to put these kids to work, sending them to search for little holes in the ground that are entries to the bee nests.

So this is more than just a classroom activity.

Yes, the kids, they're gonna learn a lot, but so will the scientists.

- So we're gonna be looking at how bees are behaving next to highways, which is not studied at all anywhere.

- [Jim] This strip of land along the interstate will be the focus of a multi-year study of country bees and city bees.

We've been to Professor Dunlap's UMSL lab before.

She's an expert in bee behavior and bee cognition.

So explain to me what you mean by cognition.

- Yeah, so for a long time people thought that animals were just instinctual beings.

They would respond to a stimulus, and they would have this innate response that they would do.

So they were basically like little robots going around in the world.

Now what we are finding out is that insects have sophisticated cognition that people never guessed about.

Bees have cultural transmission.

This is something we thought about for decades as only primates or dolphins or whales.

You know, there are no limits, I think, to what a small insect brain is capable in terms of problem solving.

- [Jim] So perhaps a different environment would necessitate different behaviors.

And that's what they want to find out.

- And they might not be using the space in a normal way because there's a lot of noise from the highway, there's a lot of vibrations from the highway, and there are also a lot of like fine particulate matter.

There's pollution from a highway.

And so what we're doing here is we're gonna be looking at how the bees are using the space and how the bees are behaving on the flowers.

And how does that differ from similar plantings that are not next to the highway?

What kind of food are they getting?

- [Jim] One of the partners in all of this is the Green House Venture organization, which offers local schools programs focusing on bioscience and urban agriculture.

And it has plans to build its own educational center across from the embankment greenway it developed, which is the focus of the bee study.

And as this study progresses, the students will continue to be a part of it, based on the bee nests they help identify.

- So we're going to put cameras, GoPro cameras on them, and we'll be able to get very detailed images which they can take in their classroom, and they can help identify some of the pollen that's on the bees from those high-resolution camera images.

- [Jim] So they're not just here as a class activity, they're contributing to this study?

- Yes.

- And they've shown that bumblebees.

- [Jim] And for many of the kids, this was really an introductory class.

But it was taught by scientists who brought their knowledge and their enthusiasm.

- Well, she was just teaching us about the pollinators and the hummingbirds and other insects that she was showing us.

It was a really great experience.

- [Jim] Plus, you're not sitting in a class.

You're sitting outside on a nice day.

I think that's good.

- Yeah, that's really good.

- Seeds.

- [Jim] But back to the study.

Why do we care about city bees?

Well, in part because of the growing urban agriculture movement.

Supplying fresh vegetables and fruit, urban farms dependent on urban pollinators that have to adapt to and thrive in an urban environment.

- We're losing insect populations, and we need habitat wherever we can get it.

So habitat next to highways is something that a number of people have zeroed in on as something that we can plant up native plants.

It doesn't have to be mowed as much.

It can be a win-win for everyone.

- [Jim] And if you include the possible impact on and the possible contributions of these students?

- [Aimee] Radar device.

- [Jim] Win-win-win.

- [Aimee] That's what we're gonna do.

How would you find a nest?

What's the best way, you think?

- 52 years ago, there was a big fire in St. Louis, and it wasn't just a local story.

Because this particular fire was a national disaster.

Millions of military personnel records were destroyed or damaged.

As Leah Gullet shows us, painstaking restoration efforts have been going on ever since and will continue for a long time to come.

- [Leah] Archiving and preservation is the guardian of our nation's history, and the United States Archives and Records Administration holds the documents and stories of U.S. citizens dating back to the late 19th century, and the United States military records.

There are 40 national archive campuses across the nation, and here in North County St. Louis, the National Personnel Record Center is the second largest National Archives building in the country.

- The main archives in D.C., well, all of the archives, have all the federal agency records.

But our main focus here in the preservation office is to take care of the burned records from the fire in 1973.

- Tell me more.

What is the exact date that that fire happened?

What time of the year was that, do you know?

- July 12th, I believe, 1973.

And, yeah, it caught fire around midnight or so.

(plaintive piano music) - A disastrous fire broke out on the sixth floor of what used to be the National Personnel Record Center, the building right behind me.

It burned uncontrollably for almost 24 hours, destroying over 22 million military records.

It's known as one of the greatest losses of modern world history.

It started a salvaging project that would last for decades.

- Well, last year was the 50th anniversary of the fire, and we keep our records now, the burned records, in a temperature- and humidity-controlled area to preserve them.

- [Leah] The labor and care that is put into restoring these documents is a career that many people aren't aware of.

Here there are different labs and processes that they use to take care of these historical records.

Can you tell me what this process here is that you're using?

- This is the humidification chamber that we have this in, which put paper into this chamber here.

And what it does is it'll relax that paper.

This paper here is really dry.

So as the moisture goes in, it relaxes that paper, and kind of get some of the folds out.

(light pensive music) - Right now, we're going into our decontamination lab.

This is where we do most of our work on the burned and moldy records.

(light pensive music) This is the type of record that we see probably the most.

Sometimes there's a little metal depressor that goes along the top that just really rusts into the paper, and it's very difficult to get out.

And either using your hands, which is kind of what I like to do, or you can use what's called a microspatula, you can slide up underneath there and lift those up, and it kind of helps you get that nice bit in.

I'm gonna get some of these pieces out so they don't crumble.

And then I'm gonna find the back of this, and then I'm gonna slowly lift these off.

Doing my best to keep this ruffled char attached to the page.

(light pensive music) - [Leah] There are other preservation and archiving projects that they work on outside of the burned records.

To prioritize the damaged military documents would be counterproductive to their overall work, so they decided to work on them on a case-by-case basis.

- It would take hundreds of years, I think, to get them digitized.

And for the burned records, there are 16 of us here to work on those.

So that's gonna take a really long time.

Six million records.

Even having started, you know, in 1999 or 2000 with dealing with them, it's just more than we could ever do.

- Preservation is actually done by everyone.

So we do conservation, right?

We do the treatments.

But the littlest thing, how you put it into a box, how you'd set it on your desk, all of those lead to the long-term preservation of a document.

- [Leah] And the last stop?

The reformatting lab.

Here, they have one of their most revolutionary conservation methods for the burned documents in microfilm scanning.

- So we're gonna show you a little bit about our content recovery process, which uses infrared light.

Humans can only see a very small amount of light, but, using infrared technology, we are able to actually see through the totally charred areas of record and recover that information.

- The really interesting thing about the infrared camera and this documentation and this paper is that, when the fire happened, the paper and the ink burn at two different temperatures.

And with it burning at two different temperatures, the ink is still there.

And so what the infrared camera does, it refracts the light and it draws out the ink.

So it separates, and you can actually read the documentation that's underneath there.

And what is cool is that, right around here, this little part could be someone saying that they were honorably discharged or not.

And this could be the only information that could help that one individual to get benefits or their family benefits or their grandchildren, to find out what granddad did or grandma did in service.

- It provides them with so many benefits, and I think that's really our focus here.

People are always interested in the past and their ancestors and what came before us.

So I think there'll always be a place for preservation and conservation.

(plaintive string music) (light playful music) (typewriter clacks) - [Jim] 100 years ago this week in 1925, police were pretty sure they had their man in the killing of Dr. William Dillon, whose body was found shot in the head on Washington University's Francis Field.

Their man was the doctor's son, 19-year-old Edward "Toddy" Dillon.

He'd been living in Lawrence, Kansas after being expelled from the university for falsifying his education records, and all the evidence in his father's murder pointed to him.

He'd recently bought a .38 caliber revolver.

The day of the killing he wasn't seen in Lawrence, but some said they spotted him in St. Louis.

And he was the beneficiary of his father's life insurance policies.

This was not Dillon's first run-in with police.

While still a high school student in University City, car theft, but his mother convinced the owner not to press charges.

He was then suspected of being an accomplice in a series of armed robberies with a fellow student who was killed by a police officer.

But Dillon could not be positively identified by witnesses as the one who ran off.

A year later, he was arrested for his father's murder.

But under intense interrogation, Toddy Dillon gave police nothing.

He refused to say where he was or what he was doing the night of the murder.

And, with only circumstantial evidence, although plenty of it, when the grand jury heard the case?

No indictment.

A frustrated prosecutor said Toddy Dillon was, "The smartest fellow I'd ever questioned."

In custody, smart but sarcastic, smug, even contemptuous, but in public people talked about him as well-dressed, well-spoken, nice looking, even charming.

It was a dangerous combination, and it would soon become clear that there was something wrong with this guy.

After his father's murder, he was free.

But not for long.

Less than a year later, he and a partner were arrested in New York for a holdup at a Greenwich Village nightclub and a series of robberies, which reports said he glibly admitted to.

He served a prison term in Sing Sing, and after getting out on parole, he was arrested for a series of hotel robberies in Chicago where he was dubbed the Society Bandit or the Top Hat Robber.

And this time he ended up in the state prison in Joliet.

While there, he was teaching in the prison school.

The headmaster?

Another intelligent but deeply flawed inmate, Richard Loeb of the famous Loeb-Leopold Bobby Franks murder.

When Dillon came up for parole, which was denied several times, it wasn't just his mother who showed up to plead his case, but also Ethel Barrett, a St. Louis woman he'd met in Chicago who said she planned to marry him when he got out.

But when he did get out, Toddy had to go back to prison in New York to finish his term for breaking parole.

He was finally released in 1940, and Ethel was still waiting, and they did get married.

10 years later, the 1950 Census has them living in New York with a daughter.

He's listed as having worked 60 hours in a week at an engineering firm.

She was working as a part-time secretary.

But it wasn't happily ever after.

In 1959, Toddy Dillon was once again in police custody, this time in connection with the attempted kidnapping of a four-year-old boy and the abduction of his governess.

He wasn't convicted, though.

Psychiatrists said he was physically and mentally ill; paranoia, delusions of grandeur.

He was committed to a mental institution in 1960, and that's where the trail goes cold.

It's not clear if he ever got out.

One source did say he died in 1993, but a search finds no reports of his death here or in other cities where he once made headlines.

He died in obscurity with a long criminal record.

And while he was never tried for murder, Toddy Dillon never really cleared his name as a suspect in the officially unsolved murder of his father.

100 years ago this week in St. Louis history.

(soft pensive music) And that's "Living St.

Louis."

Keep those cards and letters coming, more likely, emails and messages at ninepbs.org/lsl.

Thanks for joining us.

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

(upbeat piano music) (upbeat piano music continues) (upbeat piano music continues) (upbeat piano music continues) - [Announcer] "Living St. Louis" is funded in part by the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.