(calm bright music) - I'm Ruth Ezell.

By the time you see this, I will be retired from Nine PBS after 21 years of telling stories for and about the community.

But before I bid my colleagues farewell, Brooke Butler sat me down for a conversation about my time here and some of my favorite stories.

That conversation is next on a special "Living St.

Louis."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - I'm Brooke Butler, and it is my honor to sit down with Ruth Ezell and talk about your vast portfolio of incredible stories you've told over the past 22 seasons of "Living St.

Louis."

- It's a lot of stories.

- A lot of stories, and I mean every subject imaginable, history, economics, and everything in between.

But there's one subject area that you've gravitated toward and really found your niche in, which is the arts.

- I do love the arts, and even though I've done a lot of stories on painters, sculptors, photographers, digital artists, all of that, I do tend to gravitate toward musicians, especially singers.

♪ I came back to let you know ♪ Got a thing for you ♪ And I can't let it go (upbeat music) - [Ruth] Denise Thimes was raised in a family with a history of performing before audiences.

Her father, the late Lou "Fatha" Thimes, was a pioneering and influential disc jockey who spent most of his radio career at KATZ (AM) playing gospel music and the blues.

- I just grew up with music and listening to my dad on the radio, and of course, everybody knows Aretha Franklin was my favorite.

I wanted to be Aretha Franklin.

♪ She was looking for a friend (upbeat music) ♪ Help with this life filled with so much dream ♪ - They're actually partner songs.

Like, I just wanna feel all right is the plea.

Keep moving on.

It's kinda like the encouragement.

You know?

It's like I feel down, like I don't know what to do.

I don't know where to go.

I tried all these things, but at the end of the day, you gotta keep moving on.

♪ The lights are shining ♪ Any place where the - [Ruth] Did you know right away that you wanted to be like them, to be on stage like them?

- Well, I knew that even before then, 'cause my father was a performer, and that's how, you know, I got the bug or whatever, the DNA, I don't know what you call it.

- [Ruth] Was he a musician?

- He was a singer and a guitarist from his hometown, back when folk's hometown, Richmond, Virginia.

And that's, you know, how they moved up to New York.

He got signed up with an agency.

- [Ruth] After high school graduation, Trevor headed to the West coast with relatives.

She enrolled in Los Angeles City College as a drama major and worked as a secretary to put herself through school.

Trevor got her first professional singing engagements in LA and San Francisco, and she acted with a Black repertory ensemble.

Trevor also got a small movie role in the 1959 Western, "The Oregon Trail."

Then in the early 1960s, a musician who was a friend of Trevor's cousin suggested they relocate to St. Louis.

- He told us about a place they were starting or had started called Gaslight Square.

So that's where that comes in.

And they were very amenable to talented new faces.

- And I wouldn't wanna do a show like this without mentioning someone who is not just one of my favorite singers, but one of my favorite people, Soprano Christine Brewer.

♪ When thoughts echo back to some unruly room ♪ ♪ And echoes do not die away as echoes are supposed to do ♪ - [Ruth] Christine Brewer originated the role of Sister Aloysius with the Minnesota Opera in 2013.

The Union Avenue production marked the second staging of the work.

(Christine singing opera indistinctly) ♪ I think he should be treated like every other boy ♪ ♪ You yourself singled out the boy ♪ ♪ You held a private meeting with him at the rectory ♪ Brewer's character was convinced the relationship between a parish priest and an eighth grade student was improper until doubt set in.

- Since I last saw you, I've been singing a lot of nun's parts.

I was at the Lyric Opera in Chicago singing "The Sound of Music," and then in St. Louis singing the "Dialogues of the Carmelites," and then in Minnesota singing, "Doubt."

So I was three different kinds of nuns, three different orders.

So I had some friends saying, "Look, are you gonna try to tell us something?

Are you going to convert?"

Or something, you know...

But yeah, so I've been traveling, but staying in one place a little bit longer each time.

- And when you think about how long ago I first profiled her, she's still performing, and that's part of the beauty.

She knew how to save her instrument and she's still going, great guns, when other singers have retired.

- Yeah, and that's the thing about artists is their career portfolio expands and shifts so much over their career.

And that I imagine is why you've profiled artists more than once.

- In fact, Christine was one case.

- And I'm also thinking, you know, Royce Martin, - We'll probably be following him for years and years, years, years to come.

- Oh, I'm sure.

Yes.

- So we first met him at the Teen Talent Competition.

The last time I saw him, he invited us to the Scott Joplin House where he was recording his first album.

(upbeat music) Bet you've never heard a Scott Joplin tune interpreted quite like this.

(upbeat piano music plays) The entertainer is one of Joplin's best known compositions, but in the hands of pianist and composer, Royce Martin, it's a ragtime remix incorporating bebop swing and other forms of jazz that have influenced Martin over the years.

(upbeat piano music plays) On November 12th, 2022, Martin gave us a preview of what he recorded here the following day, an album of his favorite Scott Joplin works performed inside the Scott Joplin house.

- I'm really excited about the album.

This album is something that I've been sort of dreaming of subconsciously before I realized for a long time.

I think it's just the thing that this place needs, the Joplin House, I could be biased, but I'm just excited to do it for a multitude of reasons.

Personal reasons, obviously, with regard to my career.

But for the city, for the Joplin House, for my friends, for Black boys, I'm really happy about this for jazz music.

Let's go.

(upbeat music) - [Ruth] Martin first captured our attention and the public's attention as a finalist in the 2016 Teen Talent Competition at the fabulous Fox Theater.

Martin was a 16-year-old student at the Grand Center Arts Academy and played one of his own compositions.

But up to this point, Martin had never taken a piano lesson.

To call him a natural was an understatement.

(upbeat piano music plays) (audience cheers) And yes, he won.

It wasn't long before Martin started receiving formal instruction.

Two years later, he was in Boston studying at the Berkeley College of Music.

- My concentration was in film scoring, and I'm really fortunate to be able to say that too, because Berkeley has a really great program for film scoring, and it was really challenging, but it was just what I needed it to be.

Like, you know, it took me to the next level.

- [Ruth] The name of the album is "Memories on Morgan Street."

You can buy it on his website.

- [Brooke] Yeah, good for Royce.

- The late Bob Heil was not a singer, but he made a lot of singers sound good with his awesome microphones.

And I had no idea that around the world, there are pop and rock singers that will not use any other microphone, but his.

(upbeat music) For musicians on a par with the legendary band, the Eagles, the quality of sound reproduction is everything.

(upbeat music) ♪ Blue bird with his heart removed ♪ ♪ Lonely as a train In fact, Eagle Joe Walsh, that's him on the far right swears by the microphones produced by Heil Sound of Fairview Heights, Illinois.

Company founder, Bob Heil, who's been a close friend of Walsh for years, refers to the guitarist as his beta tester.

- Joe is very technical, and he was telling me that, you know, we wanna move the mid range out an octave, and let's make it go down to 50 cycles instead of stopping it on a hundred, a quarter, like all the other manufacturers.

And so I started listening and building for Joe, and we have now come up with a line of microphones that's just absolutely magnificent.

- Bob Heil's ability to understand what musicians need to sound their best, then give it to them, has made Heil one of the most innovative and respected people in the world of professional audio.

I also found out he played the organ.

I didn't know.

Again, more interesting things you find out about people, you start talking and the things you learn.

- And so much more connection from St. Louis that goes worldwide and influences so many people, places, industries.

- [Ruth] Yeah.

- That all originated in St. Louis.

- All of it in St. Louis.

- [Brooke] Yeah.

- And they call it flyover country, shame.

- That's right.

(Brooke and Ruth laughing) (Brooke and Ruth laughing) And you know, you've told many stories about the arts, and that's what people, you know, associate Ruth Ezell with, you know, telling stories about the arts, but... And other producers here have kind of found their niches too, Jim Kercher and his history stories.

But you've told a a few interesting history stories in your time as well.

- You know, a lot of our good stories, we get through news releases, and I received this news release from the State Historical Society of Missouri.

They have several locations.

There's one here, but I heard from the one, the main one in Columbia.

- [Brooke] Right.

- They had put together this digital archive of letters and photographs of veterans from World War II, and they had put out a call to people, bring us your stuff.

We want to make sure it is permanently housed in a place where people can do research and learn about a lot of the individual stories of people who served then.

We know a lot about what the men did, but we don't know a lot about what women did.

So it thrilled me to no end to be able to do a story on Lieutenant Jean Schwarting and how she came to serve in the military in a brand new unit.

She wrote these beautiful letters home that I had her daughter read to me.

- [Phyllis] March 9th, 1944.

Dear family, all of us apprentice seamen are billeted in Northampton Hotel.

The midshipmen are living in the dormitories on Smith campus.

- [Ruth] It was the first of many letters written by Jean Schwarting to loved ones in St. Louis and Mexico, Missouri during World War II.

Schwarting was among tens of thousands of American women who enlisted in a newly created division of the Navy, known as WAVES, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.

The influx of female personnel freed up men for duty at sea.

- [Phyllis] She turned 21 and graduated from college and enlisted in the Navy all in like January of 1944.

- [Ruth] Jean Schwarting's daughter, Phyllis Carlyle, explains why her mother signed up.

- She was in a family with three daughters, and so there weren't any sons to, you know, join the war efforts.

And she came from a fairly patriotic, stoic German family, and her father served in World War I, but it was that patriotism, I think, that was evident at the time.

- [Ruth] Schwarting wrote home daily for two reasons.

- [Phyllis] She was not allowed to keep a diary, so she wrote the letters to maintain a connection to her family and also create her diary.

Some of the letters even mention, "Put these pictures I send you in a drawer and save them for me when I get home."

- The thing about researching an interesting topic or a compelling person is that the more you learn, the deeper you wanna dig.

That was certainly the case with Jean Schwarting.

She and her twin sister, June, spent the first nine years of their lives living here in South St. Louis on the 4900 Block of Botanical.

They, in their immediate family, lived above a grocery store owned by the girls' aunt and uncle who helped to raise them.

That's because Jean and June's mother died shortly after they were born.

Their father, Harry Schwarting, was an engineer.

He eventually remarried and fathered a third daughter, Mickey.

The girls spent summers in Mexico, Missouri, where their aunt and uncle had moved and owned a farm.

Jean and her twin went on to graduate from Southwest High School, then enrolled at Washington University where they were when the US entered the Second World War.

- And she was in college and she decided that she was going to enlist, and the recruiter talked her into waiting till she graduated from college, so that she could become an officer.

- Schwarting graduated with a degree in business and accounting and joined other WAVE recruits at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where they trained at officer candidate school.

One of my first stories from the first season was this man.

He was like 80 years old and he was a hat maker, made him from scratch something that used to be done all over the United States when we manufactured everything before a lot of manufacturing went overseas.

And downtown St. Louis, a lot of people, younger people don't know that there was a big garment district down there.

- [Person] He has forgotten more than I'll ever know about the headwear industry, and he works harder than anybody else out there.

- [Ruth] 80-year-old Ray Pultman makes hats and caps.

He's been at it since the 1950s.

Pultman and fellow workers at Leader Manufacturing are part of an endangered species here in St. Louis and across the United States.

- There were 13 Union cap manufacturers in the City of St. Louis at one time.

And now this is the last one.

This is the only one left.

- And aside from the shorter form stories, which is, you know, majority of what we do, we also have a lot of special projects that we take a little bit more time to either profile individuals or history.

One that comes to my mind is Jenifer Lewis, Kinloch native, and about her career.

Tell us about that.

- First, I have to say that to call her a force of nature is an understatement.

- [Brooke] (laughs) That's right.

- It's hard just keeping up with her, and her mind like runs a mile a minute.

She has so much to say.

What impressed me the most about her is her love of Kinloch.

In spite of all the television shows and movies that she's done, being the self-described mother of Black Hollywood, I don't think any of that means as much to her as her hometown.

And she let me in with her.

I met her in Kinloch and she showed me around.

It was a very moving experience.

Kinloch is the oldest community in Missouri, incorporated by African Americans.

It wasn't long before Lewis spotted someone from her youth, former classmate, John Nunn.

- We graduated going through first grade, through high school, graduating in '74, Kinloch High School.

Glad she's doing well, blessing.

God have been truly good to both of us.

- I'm so happy to see John.

I just started crying.

I told him, get outta here before I mess up my makeup.

- [Ruth] Afterward, we headed to Lewis' old neighborhood in search of the site where her home once stood.

It required some help from a sibling.

- Hey everybody, this is my brother, Larry Lewis.

He taught in the St. Louis School district for 30 years.

He's retired, and his students are in his life.

They give him birthday parties, they love him, and that means you did a great job.

We used to fight all the time too.

(laughs) I'm proud of you.

- Thank you.

- He knows it.

But this is where our house once stood.

- Oh my God, Larry, I don't recognize it.

- Well, that's what's left of it.

- (sniffles) This is where my house was.

This is where I lived.

It's all gone.

- [Ruth] But among the nearby debris, Louis found a remnant of someone else's childhood.

Their trash to her treasure.

- A lot of great people came up from this rubble.

This was my high school.

It was all brick and it was beautiful back in the day, I'm gonna take this home and put it on my mantle.

But great people came outta Kinloch, Maxine Waters, Dick Gregory.

We knew there was something bigger, and we went and got it.

- There's the artist and the more, you know, feel-good type stories, but then there's also a lot of consequential topics that you've covered.

You stepped up during the mortgage crisis and really, you know, helped our viewers understand what was going on and what they could do.

- The research on that was mind boggling, just to figure out, "How did we get here?

How did we get to this point where our whole financial system was in peril at that time?"

People had defaulted on mortgages that they didn't know they probably shouldn't have taken out in the first place.

All these subprime mortgages they were coming, people were defaulting, and they didn't know what to do.

And we produced two one-hour specials just outlining everything, but most important, pointing people to where they could go to trusted resources that could work with them, so they could work with their banks to hold onto their homes.

It was one of the most important things that I've done.

- Another one of those consequential topics that comes to mind is African Americans' experience as a police officer, "Of Black and Blue."

Tell us about that.

- "Of Black and Blue," that was such an emotional experience for me to hear these men and women working with the city police, county police, talking about their personal experiences, why they decided to go on to law enforcement.

(siren wails) - My name is James Morgan.

I am a lieutenant in the patrol.

So I work in the Central County Precinct.

I am currently the second vice president of Ethical Society of Police, which is an organization in St. Louis City.

Here, we actually adopted that into St. Louis County, and I was blessed and honored to be the president of that organization.

(upbeat music) I grew up in the inner city of St. Louis, I actually grew up on Union, the 1700 Block of Union.

You know, our neighborhood had a lot of gangs in it.

(upbeat music) It was survival for me, you know, walking from the bus stop on Wobada where there was Wobada Crips and walking down that five, 10-minute walk to my house between the Vice Lords and Buds that lived in that neighborhood, trying to go to school and keep my head on that focus.

For me as a kid, the police would chase us.

Actually, we would get chased by the police all the time.

(siren wails) Being so closely to Forest Park and those places that thoroughfare to the different places where people kinda cruised and played loud music, and that type of stuff.

You know, we became the target.

(upbeat music) I was blessed enough to go through the DSEC program.

My mom was able to get us in that program, myself, and my two older sisters in the DSEC program pretty early.

I got out there in fifth grade, and then just that transition, you know, seeing, driving, getting on the bus at six o'clock in the morning and getting home at sometimes eight o'clock at night.

That discipline, and I saw that in police officers.

Actually, even throughout, you know, my experiences as a young youth, I still thought that there was discipline there, and instead of being a part of the issue, I thought it'd be better to be a part of the solution.

So I joined, I went to college and got a couple of degrees, I'd say three of them, got my master's, and here I am.

- What really surprised me was how candid they were.

I mean, 'cause this was going out to everybody, and they were talking to me about stuff that normally they would just talk to each other about.

- But I'm not surprised because you have that instinct and presence when you talk to someone to get the real story out, and you know, so there's the consequential, impactful topics, but then there's also the quirky stuff, the fun stories.

What are some of those fun stories that come to mind?

- Well, I was so impressed when I first came to St. Louis.

I didn't realize that St. Louis had the second biggest Mardi Gras celebration in the country.

- [Brooke] Oh yeah, oh yeah.

(laughs) - So of course, I became enamored of that and the parades and the floats.

And just like in New Orleans, St. Louisans have crews, they put together floats.

Well, I quickly found out that the premier crew that put together the most elaborate, the most colorful, the most creative floats were the crew called Mystic Knights of the Purple Haze.

The very first Mystic Knights float was called a Festival of Faces.

Two weeks before the 1989 parade, construction began in a crew member's garage.

- We just built a frame on a trailer and a frame on the back of a pickup truck.

And then the night before the parade, he threw a big party and we put this thing together.

We stayed up all night and put that float together.

(upbeat music) - [Ruth] A lot more thought and work went into the floats that followed.

The first one to capture first place was made in 1992 and had, as its theme, the death of communism in the Soviet Union.

- [Matt] We had a funeral pyre with themes, with a sickle and hammer theme.

We all wore funeral attire.

We actually had a casket on wheels that we were pushing behind a hearst.

- [Ruth] A few years later, after the city of St. Louis lost its bid for an NFL expansion franchise, the Mystic Knights of the Purple Haze lampooned The Purple Stallions.

- [Matt] Our float was based on a purple stallion flat on its belly on top of Busch Stadium.

We were all dressed in football uniforms and we had the original soundtrack of the "Go-Go Purple Stallion" song that was being played on the radio and by the TV stations.

We got a hold of that soundtrack.

We played it for the judges in front of the judges stand, and it was absolutely perfect.

- [Ruth] But to Matt Reardon, the most memorable float to date is from 1993 and was inspired by the children's book, "Alice in Wonderland."

- Because of the great costumes, the creativity, the way that we were able to cover the entire book from start to finish, and then add a little touch to make it funny for everybody along the parade route.

- [Ruth] That little touch was a giant head of Bill Clinton.

It was on the body of the water pipe smoking caterpillar in the "Alice in Wonderland" tale, hence, the irreverent title of the float, Inhale to the Chief.

- Thank you, Ruth, not only just for sitting here and talking to me today, but for your 22 seasons of amazing, incredible stories.

They will continue to have an impact on our local content and the St. Louis community, and good luck in the future.

- Oh, thanks so much.

And just wanna let you know, because I can watch everything online, I'm going to keep in touch with everything you do.

You have been such a great addition to the staff.

I can't wait to see what you do in the future.

- Oh, me too.

I can't wait either.

(both laughing) - [Brooke] Thank you.

- My thanks to Brooke Butler for that conversation.

And remember, you can watch all of my stories for "Living St. Louis" and Nine PBS on YouTube.

We leave you with the sounds of the drumming group, Joia, performing at the 2025 Earth Day Festival in Forest Park.

I'm Ruth Ezell.

Thanks for watching, and take care.

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