Centerre Bancorporation brought us this book to celebrate the opening of its new headquarters in St. Louis in 1982. Don’t remember Centerre Bancorporation? Boatmen’s Bank bought it out in 1988. Don’t remember Boatmen’s Bank? NationsBank bought it in 1996 and sent the Boatmen’s Bank Guy pitchman to MagnaBank, where he became Magna Man. Don’t remember MagnaBank? That’s not relevant here. Don’t remember NationsBank? It eventually became Bank of America.
Whew.
At any rate, I got this book from the library as a picture book I could browse while watching football games, but the text-to-photos ratio is not particularly conducive to that. The book is almost endcapped by glowing tributes to the revitalizations of St. Louis City and Kansas City, and it’s almost handicapped by those tributes. For the last 30 years or so, St. Louis has always been on the verge of returning to its glory back in the days where it had the only bridge over the Mississippi River. But it never gets there, and any boosterism text is suspect.
But the book also takes a bit of a tour through small towns in Missouri, and it has a lot of pictures of historic Missouri (of 1982!). So it’s got that going for it, and it wasn’t an unpleasant couple of hours of browsing.
Books mentioned in this review:
