2008 Woodie Awards
St. Louis may be boring, but that's not a bad thing
St. Louis' lack of entertainment actually helps make citizens safer, healthier and have better ties to their families.
By: Leah Merriman
Issue date: 8/30/07 Section: Opinion/Editorial
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For years, St. Louis has been trying to live up to the excitement and grandeur of such big brothers as Chicago, New Orleans and even Memphis, Tenn. We promote our sports teams as better, our music as superior, our Mardi-Gras celebration as second best and our beer as king. We glorify our past. Try as we may, St. Louis is really just the nerdy junior high school girl with a good personality, great grades and a fairly good body, but who dresses for comfort and practicality. The boys just won't notice her; they're too busy checking out the "bad girl" with cleavage and a miniskirt.
Let's face it, we're just not that kind of girl.
St. Louis is virtually ignored by the rest of the country. Watch the Weather Channel on any given day and see the meteorologist move across the weather map, covering the country from east to west. He will cover the East Coast metropolitans, Chicago, maybe Kansas City, Mo., Denver and on to the Southwest and West Coast cities. For having such extreme weather conditions-such as snow at the end of April and wearing shorts on Christmas, St. Louis sure gets snubbed.
During the area's July 2006 power outage, I consistently listened to National Public Radio. When reporting on national news, NPR mentioned St. Louis in brief, stating it was experiencing some power outages due to a storm that rolled through the area. The big news was in New York City, where 174,000 residents in Queens were without power caused by extreme heat conditions. In St. Louis, there were an estimated 500,000 to one million customers without power in the middle of a severe heat wave. The highest heat index during the power outages in St. Louis was recorded at 118 degrees.
My aunt in Florida called my family a few days after the storm. I thought it was to check up on us, but I was wrong. She hadn't even heard about the power outages or the storm, but she had heard about Queens. She was shocked when I told her St. Louis had recorded 80 mph gusts of winds downtown. Those are category-one hurricane force winds.
When it comes to danger, however, that's supposedly our city's middle name. In October 2006, St. Louis was ranked as the United States' most dangerous city, according to Morgan Quitno Press. Yet, it did not have a single incident of looting reported during the summer weeks without electricity. That's more than can be said for the 25-hour blackout in New York in 1977, or even the 2003 power outage in Ottawa, Canada.
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