This book reminds me a lot of Webster Groves by Clarissa Start, and well it should. Both are local histories compiled in the 1970s as part of the localities’ celebration of anniversaries. However, this book is a little less meaty than that one.
It has a couple of paragraphs around different topics such as sports teams, the car, airports, radio, television, and so on amid numerous black and white photographs. In addition, the book is chock full of sponsored pages, advertorials or paid content where a business had its copywriters or corporate historian chuck out a brief history of the business. You know, that was a thing in the middle part of the last century: The corporate historian, someone with an English degree or something that worked on keeping writing about the history of the company. This was proffered as a career option even when I was a kid for writers, but that’s all gone now, ainna?
At any rate, I was not a resident of the area at the time, so many of the brands and buildings they talk about within this book are gone now, although I did fly on Ozark Airlines and Trans World Airlines when I was a kid, before the bigger ate the littler and then got eaten by a bigger. But most of the local things mentioned in the book are gone, too, especially amongst the sponsored pages, so that probably explains why the Webster Groves book seemed more immediate to me when I read it–because it balanced historical places more than this volume, which focuses on abstract topic centers and businesses that have faded away.
At any rate, worth a buck, maybe, for the pictures. But don’t plan to browse it during football games and then wander away from the game.
