photography – Author Sarah Angleton

On November 22, 1944 after schedule delays, numerous script rewrites, budget woes, and a leading lady still unhappy with her role, a new Christmas musical debuted on the big screen in St. Louis, the city at the film’s heart.

The song “Meet Me in St. Louis,” well known today because of the musical, is actually from 1904 and was written specifically for the World’s Fair. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Despite the mess of getting to that moment, Meet Me in St. Louis enjoyed immediate success, becoming Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s second highest grossing film up to that point, coming in only behind Gone With the Wind. After the premiere, Judy Garland even decided she liked it after all and commented to the producer, “Remind me not to tell you what kinds of pictures to make.”

The screenplay is based on a series of semi-autobiographical short stories by St. Louis native Sally Benson who wrote of an upper middle-class family that lived at 5135 Kensington Avenue during the construction of the 1904 World’s Fair on the grounds of Forest Park in St. Louis.

I confess, I saw the movie for the first time later in life than I should have, having grown up within easy reach of St. Louis. My childhood summers included trips to downtown to watch the Cardinals play at Busch Stadium where the musical’s title song is still played by the organist at every game and the crowd sings along as the words scroll across the jumbotron.

I’ve been many times to the wonderful outdoor Muny theater in Forest Park where the stage adaptation of Meet Me in St. Louis, originally produced in 1989, is performed every few years. I even got engaged in that park on the very grounds of the actual 1904 World’s Fair.

I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the new exhibit, open to the public on April 27th. It contains a scale model of the entire fairgrounds. And it’s spectacular.

Officially known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the Fair is a big deal in St. Louis history. It transformed the city, launching it for about seven months into the center of the world’s attention.

And it’s still a big deal, today. One-hundred and twenty years later the World’s Fair looms large in the community memory carried now by not a single living person who was there to see it, sparking excitement whenever it comes up in conversation, which is kind of weirdly a lot.

It’s especially on everyone’s minds right now because at the end of this month, just in time to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the opening of the Fair, the Missouri History Museum will reveal a newly re-imagined permanent World’s Fair exhibit.

Equally exciting for everyone who either lives in my house or happens to be my mother, is the release of my new historical mystery set on the grounds of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Paradise on the Pike is available for the first time today. The story takes place in the enchanting world of Hagenbeck’s Zoological Paradise and Trained Animal Circus on the Pike, which is the entertainment strip within the Fair. It’s not a light, sentimental sort of story like Sally Benson’s, but it does contain elephants and lions and a pair of cantankerous goats. It also allowed me, and will hopefully allow you, to spend some time strolling through the Fair, which was almost entirely constructed of temporary buildings meant to disappear.

Available today! Order from your favorite independent bookstore or slightly bigger bookstore or Amazon.

And maybe that’s why, one hundred and twenty years later, it still takes up space in our imaginations, because we’re a little like six-year-old Tootie at the end of Benson’s stories when the family marvels over the lights and fountains on the fairgrounds and her sister Agnes asks if it’ll ever be torn down.

Tootie emphatically replies, “They’ll never tear it down. It will be like this forever.”

Agnes, relieved, exclaims, “I can’t believe it. Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis.”

Forest Park retains very few physical reminders of the enormous event that once filled its every corner and held the attention of the world, but in the hearts of the St. Louisans who stroll through the grounds and wish they could have seen those lights shining, it will never be torn down. It’ll be like this forever.

You can find more information about Paradise on the Pike at this link.

On a recent family excursion to Multnomah Falls, a place I’ve been too few times, I noticed a sign along the trail that I hadn’t read before, probably because I assumed it had something to do with rock formations and/or water volume as most of the signs do.

But this one was different. It described an event from September of 1995 when a boulder weighing 400 tons (according to the sign that is approximately the same weight as a school bus filled with concrete, and go ahead and disprove that) fell from the rock face next to upper Multnomah Falls, plunging 225 feet into the pool at the bottom. Upon entering the water the school bus boulder produced a 70-foot splash that washed over the observation bridge, completely dousing a wedding party that had been posing for pictures. Now, I may not care much about geology, but I am a big fan of wedding photos.

In case you haven’t been to the falls, though, let me just provide a little background. Located on Interstate 84, just outside of Portland, Multnomah Falls drops a total of 620 feet, making it the highest waterfall in the Columbia River Gorge and the second highest year-round waterfall in the United States. Between the upper and lower portion of the falls spans Benson Bridge, constructed in 1914.

And if geology is your thing, Multnomah Falls is allegedly a fascinating place to visit because rumor has it you can see something like six different lava flows, evidence of flooding that occurred thousands of years ago, and probably even some really interesting differences in rates of erosion that have led to the tiered formation of the falls and the occasional plunging school-bus-sized rock. Personally, I just care that it’s pretty.

In fact, all those impressive geological goings-on coupled with the well-placed bridge in the middle make the easily accessible Multnomah Falls an ideal spot for all your magical wedding photo needs. Then there’s the tragic and super romantic mythological accompaniment that I didn’t even mention yet.

According to one Native American legend, the chief of the Multnomah people had a beautiful and beloved daughter. He arranged for her to marry a strong young chief from the neighboring Clatsop people and planned many days of feasting and celebration during which tragedy struck. A terrible sickness descended on the wedding festivities. The only solution, as determined by an honored medicine man, was for an innocent maiden to sacrifice herself. The idea was that her sacrificial love would impress the Great Spirit and the sick would recover. When her betrothed fell ill, the young maiden took it upon herself to save her people. She climbed up to the high cliff and leapt to her death. As a token of her loving sacrifice, a spring welled up on the cliff top, the water descending as a lasting bridal gown testimony to the young maiden.

I don’t know about you, but had I gotten married in Oregon, I think we would have made the effort to get that picture. But even though the myth lends a certain wild sentimentality to the photo op, I have to wonder if it ultimately makes a lot of sense to get fancied up in tuxedoes and ball gowns and go for a hike. Assuming here that your daily wear is somewhat less formal, don’t the memories painted by such pictures just ring a little false?

Yet as anyone who has ever tried to make small talk with relative strangers for hours at a wedding reception while waiting for the bridal party to arrive knows, couples do this kind of thing all the time. In fact, my husband was a groomsman at the beginning of this summer and while I’ve not yet seen the photographic evidence, it sounds like things may have gotten a little out of hand. Let’s just say there are some modern art sculptures on an undisclosed Midwestern college campus that are probably feeling a little violated. What that has to do with the celebration of marriage, well, you’d have to ask the couple. No one else seems willing to talk about it.

So the sign at the falls got me thinking about wedding photos and it happens that a few days ago some good friends of mine celebrated their wedding anniversary. It’s one of those that I always remember not only because I was a bridesmaid (and I actually liked the dress, and yes, I have even worn it since), but also because they had the foresight to get married on International Talk like a Pirate Day.

They’re a great couple and I am honored to be featured in their wedding photos, in which I never once posed with any modern art sculptures. But as I was looking back through the pictures, I realized that along with the lined up bridal party, the first kiss as husband and wife, and the gathered family, were some of the other kinds of photos as well: the ones in which excessively well-dressed people are deliberately posed in unnaturally casual ways.

Pirate Groomsmen — Clearly these men are pirates. You can tell by the way they are standing.

Ultimately, though, I think these are the ones I like best because it says a lot about a photographer (and how well they know the couple whose wedding they are trying to capture) and even more about the couple themselves, because if the photo didn’t somehow resonate with who they are, then it never would have made the wedding album. For my friends, their memories will forever include a nod to the internationally celebrated holiday with which they share their special day. And because of their willingness to embrace it, their friends will never forget to leave a heartfelt message on their Facebook pages: “Arr. Ye be havin a jolly anniversary ye old scurvy dogs.”

I am happy to report, too, that the Multnomah Falls wedding deluge resulted in no major injuries. In an interview after the wedding, the bride said of the event, “We got the tragedy out of the way and now we’re home free.” That’s a great attitude that I assume has led to many years of happily ever after. I just hope someone managed to snap a picture of the splash.