The Weather Bureau Confirms What Has Now Become Obvious in St. Louis

Posted on January 15, 2016 by bobwyss

Seventy-five years ago St. Louis mounted a great effort to rid itself of air pollution that had plagued the city, and many others throughout North America and Europe, for decades. This is another in a continuing series about that campaign.

By Bob Wyss

It was now official.

The amount of smoke and air pollution hovering on St. Louis had been cut in more than half in the winter of 1940-41.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch made that declaration in a story Jan. 14 after sending a reporter to the U.S. Weather Bureau to examine records for the last two years.

The air was clear most days, even downtown near the old historic courthouse.

The findings – 146 hours of thick and moderate smoke palls had occurred between Sept. 30, 1940 and Jan. 14 compared to 336 hours during the same period the year earlier.

The Weather Bureau broke up the degree of the problem labeling the pollution either thick or moderate. Thick smoke clouds had been reduced by 22 percent, moderate levels of pollution were down 48 percent.

“The findings constitute the first detailed statistical evidence of the striking success already achieved in the administration of the city’s plan,” declared the newspaper in a front-page story.

In an editorial titled “It’s Official” the editors also expressed their satisfaction in the statistics. “Most of us came to the same conclusion some time ago by reading our shirts, comparing the laundry and cleaning bills and tapering our visits to the nose-and-throat doctors,” it said. “But the Weather Man now makes it official. Those who don’t believe in the evidence of the eyes can pore over his figures.”

Actually, readers need only glance at Daniel Fitzpatrick’s editorial cartoons to gauge what was happening with the air in St. Louis this winter. “How did you manage to quit smoking?” asked one cartoon. Another was titled “Now that the smoke is clearing.”

Shaw’s Garden, now called the Missouri Botanical Garden, was finding striking new successes as the air quality improved.

Out at Shaw’s Garden where the plants had always suffered from the air pollution the signs were especially promising. The red and yellow dogwoods and the green sassafras twigs were particularly vibrant in color this year. In the greenhouses, for the first time ever, the orchid experts were able to produce four perfect snow-white blossoms on one plant of the hybrid Catteya.

Not every day was perfectly clear.

Smoke had crept over the city on Jan. 13 beneath low hanging clouds. But it was the first episode of the new year and only the seventh time thick smoke had arrived in this winter.

James L. Ford, the businessman who had chaired the citizen’s committee that resulted in St. Louis’ tough new anti-pollution ordinance, said the smoke “was not that bad today.”

The city enforcement requiring citizens to buy cleaner fuels or to upgrade their boilers was continuing without any let up, he said.

And it would not stop even if recollections of the previous winter were beginning to fade.

He added: “We forget how terrible it was at this time last year,”

A Christmas Gift For St. Louis in 1940 – Clear Skies And No War Worries Yet

Posted on December 23, 2015 by bobwyss

By Bob Wyss

Christmas 1939 in St. Louis had been shrouded by clouds of acrid black smoke.

Christmas 1941 in St. Louis would be clouded by war and the recent attack in Pearl Harbor.

Christmas 1940, 75 years ago, was a wonderful respite.

A clear day in St. Louis in the early 1940s

They called it the smokeless Christmas. The skies had remained mostly clear and residents were beginning to praise the city’s efforts to reduce air pollution by forcing them to buy cleaner-burning coal. Christmas cards and thank you letters were arriving at City Hall praising Mayor Bernard Dickmann for his efforts.

A.V. Imba, who ran a manufacturing plant, compared the city’s drive towards cleaner air with an earlier effort to provide clean water for St. Louis. Visitors were beginning to notice, he said.

“I experienced the delightful sensation of listening to two men say most complimentary things about the cleanliness of St. Louis,” he told Dickmann.

Ella Myers, who sold baskets of coal to the poor, said that at the beginning of the season customers were complaining about the higher prices she was charging for the cleaner coal. “But they changed their minds,” she wrote, “as they used the coal and got more heat and less dirt. We as housewives got something to be proud of. By Christmas last year I washed curtains three or four times. This year at Christmas it was not necessary to wash curtains put up in September.”

Charles Nagel Jr. was an architect who suffered from asthma the last three winters when the coal smoke had been thick. “I noticed a change this year,” he wrote. “But I feared to write earlier lest it prove premature. Now, however, there can be no doubt of the success of your efforts. The city is a different place already.”

A barber, John Gartner, wrote: “If the majority of those who travel about our streets would only express their sentiments as vociferously as they did their denunciation.” He added: “All of us are indebted to you for the firm stand you took. Health demands pure air. People are not coughing as they did.”

A clear day and a smoggy day in Beijing in the 21st Century is very similar to the contrasts that St. Louis experienced more than 75 years ago.

Louis J. Nicolaus was an investment banker who had considered moving out of the city to a farm that he owned. No more. “I cannot tell you how wonderful it is living as I do at Delmar and Taylor to be relieved of smoke nuisances. I know this feeling is shared by many citizens.”

Mrs. Charles H. Wagner called the clear skies “a grand thing.” Campaigns to stop the city’s smoke had been discussed for years, she told the mayor, “but nothing was done until you got busy.”

“You deserve hearty congratulations from all, particularly those who have to work in the downtown district daily,” wrote Eugene F. Williams, president of his own firm. He called the winter “a great joy.”

Even a poem was dictated by one caller to the mayor’s office.

Hurrah for our Mayor

And pure air

May Christmas be clear

All the New Year

Without smoke

Coal At Christmas Brightens

Posted on December 18, 2015 by bobwyss

By Bob Wyss

Lumps of coal for Christmas?

Some in St. Louis in the winter of 1940-41 welcomed the gift of coal, which was discounted for some and free for others.

The concept of heating assistance to the poor generally was unknown 75 years ago, but it was being discovered in St. Louis. Prices for a basket of coal, about 60 pounds and the only affordable option for anyone of a low income, had doubled since the city had banned cheaper but dirtier coal.

Efforts were made to make sure Christmas in 1940 in St. Louis was warm and bright.

In late November a group representing a range of low-income residents met with Smoke Commissioner Raymond Tucker seeking to find a way to lower prices. Charles E. Stovall, editor of the St. Louis Call, which was a newspaper for African Americans, proposed that basket sellers could lower their prices if the city could cover their losses.

Baskets, which a year ago had sold for 20 cents, were now selling for 40 cents. Stovall suggested that 25 cents would be affordable.

A few days later Tucker announced a plan that would lower the price of a 60-pound basket to 25 cents. A consortium of 135 coal yards around the city agreed to sell up to four baskets during the winter to residents who could show that they were living on a low or fixed income.

The city earlier in the year had set aside $300,000 to buy coal for poor residents in an emergency. However, under the voluntary plan proposed by the coal yards, that money would not be needed.

Businessman James L. Ford then went a step beyond this, and inspired others to do the same.

Ford won the St. Louis Award, given annually for an outstanding civic achievement. Ford won for his efforts as chairman of the Smoke Elimination Committee which had investigation had to rid the city of the coal smoke that had smothered it for decades each winter.

The award carried a $1,000 which Ford contributed, along with another $500, to a heating fund for low-income residents. This then prompted more donations from the mine operators in Arkansas and Oklahoma, 600 miners in Arkansas, and the Frisco Railroad, which had been carrying the coal to St. Louis.

The coal miners sacrificed a half of a day’s wages, which amounted to $1,500.

The result was that 33,000 baskets of coal were to be distributed to needy families throughout St. Louis. By Christmas eve more than 5,000 families had been identified to receive the free coal. That’s when the first trainloads of coal arrived and coal dealers bustled to get the work done by the end of the day. A second shipment was delivered the day after Christmas.

“We should say this is something unusual, if not unique,” reported the St. Louis Post Dispatch, in the form of Christmas gifts.”

Most Neighbors Agree To Curb Smoke

Posted on December 11, 2015 by bobwyss

By Bob Wyss

The air does not recognize city limits.

Pollution, and in the case of St. Louis 75 years ago, coal smoke will drift wherever the wind takes it.

In the winter of 1940 some were beginning to suspect that the smoke was traveling from the suburbs to the city.

Clear skies over landmarks such as Union Station had become common in St. Louis in the winter of 1940-41.

By early December the number of days of thick smoke in St. Louis as measured by the U.S. Weather Bureau was down by more than 50 percent. There had only been 5 days where visibility was poor and two of those were aided significantly by fog as opposed to smoke. A year before the number had been 11.

But moderate smoke was up markedly, more than 150 percent, from 4 to 15. Much of it seemed to be drifting from neighboring cities, according to some reports. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported seeing smoke drifting from chimneys in East St. Louis across the river into St. Louis.

It’s a common dilemma that has plagued air pollution experts for centuries, and it has only become more complicated as the number of automobile tailpipes increased and smokestacks got bigger and higher.

St. Louis decided to ask its neighbors to join its crusade.

Mayor Bernard Dickmann sent letters to surrounding cities on both sides of the river to cooperate with the St. Louis campaign to reduce smoke. He sent photos of the changes in air quality in the city, copies of the ordinance requiring all residents and businesses to reduce air emissions, and offers of assistance in enforcement.

He told a reporter that what had already occurred in St. Louis could easily be replicated elsewhere.

One of the first to respond was the mayor of Belleville, Ill., where coal miners and operators had been especially upset by the city’s banning of cheap but dirty coal from Southern Illinois mines.

Mayor George Remusnider said the St. Louis anti-smoke campaign had been run by “citizens whose ideas are more or less fantastic.” The ordinance adopted back in April had been a “rush act.”

He said it was hurting low-income families that could not afford the more expensive fuel, it had thrown thousands of coal miners out of work, it had rendered worthless a perfectly sound fuel, and it was hurting trade between St. Louis and Southern Illinois.

But Remusnider’s remarks, which were buried in a story in the Post-Dispatch on Dec. 13, were the exception.

In a front page story the day before mayors from seven municipalities in St. Louis County that ringed St. Louis agreed to work with Dickmann and the city. Five had already adopted ordinances that they said could be enforced and adapted to meet the city’s standards. Two others said they were interested in enacting similar laws.

“We feel as St. Louis does about the desirability of abating smoke and will cooperate in any way we can,” said Mayor B.W. LaTourette of Richmond Heights, Mo.

Clayton, Mo. Mayor Alfred H. Kerth said: “Clayton is appreciative of what St. Louis is doing and St. Louis can depend on us to help eliminate smoke.”

In Brentwood, Mo. Mayor Jerome Howe said that smoke from residential chimneys did not seem to be a problem but that several industries were “creating a lot of smoke.” He said the city had considered adopting an anti-smoke ordinance two years before, had not acted, but would consider taking it up again.

Smoke from railroads seemed to be the major concern in Webster Grove, Mo. The town was also receptive to considering changes.

In addition, University City, Mo. Mayor Matt C. Fogarty said that he was president of an association of municipal leaders within the county, the League of Municipalities. He said he would be willing to bring the issue up before all local executives.

“St. Louis has been doing a good job,” he said, “and we are willing to help in any way we can.”

Boycott Disappears With Smoke

Posted on December 3, 2015 by bobwyss

By Bob Wyss

The disappearance of black clouds of smoke at noon was not the only hazard that had disappeared so far in St. Louis.

The threatened boycott of St. Louis goods by the citizens of Southern Illinois also had never arrived. Smoke Commissioner Raymond Tucker was convinced it never would.

“It was easier to talk than to act,” observed Oscar Allison who wrote a 1978 unpublished research paper on the smoke controversy. Further, he said, the boycott was fizzling “because of the enormity of the task of trying to stop trade with St. Louis over such a wide area.”

The boycott may have failed because Illinois coal miners did not suffer the way they had first anticipated.

Economists have often said that boycotts over political issues can be difficult to sustain. In Illinois the boycott never really ever got off the ground.

Tucker, in speeches and columns in newspapers, argued that there was no economic incentive to sustain the boycott.

Coal purchased by customers in St. Louis only constituted a very small percentage of the commerce of Southern Illinois. The primary businesses at the time were manufacturing and agriculture.

Protesters had argued that St. Louis was putting 35,000 coal miners out of work by its refusal to buy low-grade high sulfur coal.

But Tucker, in an article published in the St. Louis Commerce and later reprinted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, argued that such a number was nothing more than a fantasy.

While Southern Illinois did employ close to 35,000 coal miners (the official number three years earlier had been 27,151), St. Louis was not the region’s only customer. If St. Louis totally withdrew from the Illinois coal market, Tucker estimated it would only cause 3,250 miners to lose their jobs.

That was not the case. Higher quality coal was still being purchased and even the lower grades were acceptable if customers had the right equipment to reduce emissions.

Therefore, said Tucker, 800 miners was a better estimate.

“Opposed to the welfare of those 800, or even the entire 3,250, must necessarily be placed the welfare of more than 800,000 residents of St. Louis,” wrote Tucker.

Plus, with war underway in Europe and the economy improving nationally and in St. Louis, employment opportunities were rising.

Tucker, in a separate speech in Rollo, Ill. in September 1940 suggested that the net impact likely by that rise in prosperity was at the very least zero. In other words, the 800 jobs lost by the ordinance were cancelled out by an increase in 800 jobs by the improved economy.

Whether Southern Illinois bought that argument did not matter. What did was that Southern Illinois was buying St. Louis products.

The boycott had failed. It would never return.

Smoke Inspectors Shoot, Capture Suspect Coal Bootleggers

Posted on November 20, 2015 by bobwyss

By Bob Wyss

St.Louis was fighting coal bootleggers to stop the clouds that had pestered the city for decades.

Sandy Ford did not run until after the city inspector flagged down his truck on a cold winter night. Henry Kessler suspected that Ford was hauling bootleg coal and that was confirmed when Ford jumped out of the truck and ran away.

Kessler pulled out his revolver and fired. But he only aimed at the asphalt and Ford did not stop running.

A second man in the truck, Robert McFadden, was charged with hauling illegal coal. Ford gave himself up an hour later at the police station and was also arrested.

Ford contended that the only reason he had fled was because he knew that he and McFadden would need a bail bondsman.

He brought one with him to the police station, and the two men were quickly released.

By the end of the week 20 coal peddlers had been arrested for selling bootleg South Illinois coal in St. Louis where it was illegal. This was January, 1941 and the reason the city had drastically increased its staff of smoke inspectors up to 18.

Bootlegging coal dealers faced misdemeanor charges, which meant that they could usually avoid jail, but they also could lose their licenses for such activity. Many were caught by inspectors stationed on the bridges from Illinois to St. Louis.

Today, the very term smoke inspector sounds quaint, more related to tobacco or fire prevention than air pollution. But beginning in the late 19^th Century and continuing into the 1950s cities throughout North America and Europe routinely relied upon smoke inspection staffs as one way to control pollution from the burning of coal.

The first efforts to control smoke in cities such as St. Louis began in municipal health departments. Some cities would create separate smoke inspection offices both to enforce existing laws and to run educational programs. The number of inspectors could vary widely. New York City at one point reportedly had 400 smoke inspectors while nearby Philadelphia only had two. They could also range from trained engineers to common laborers.

Smoke Inspectors gathered at their annual conference in 1904.

In St. Louis the Division of Smoke Regulation was created in the Department of Public Safety in 1937. Smoke Commissioner Raymond R. Tucker and his staff of 13 smoke inspectors were responsible for examining furnaces, inspecting coal supplies and educating the public.

Once the new ordinance was passed in April 1940 Tucker and his staff also relied upon private citizens to help that identify specific chimneys emitting bilious clouds of black smoke. Normally a homeowner or small business owner would not be cited for a violation of the law unless they were caught at least three times. Often they simply did not understand how to operate stokers and other mechanical equipment added on to boilers to reduce pollution.

But it was never an easy task and often inspectors would be torn between their responsibilities. What was more important, inspecting wholesale yards for signs of illegal coal, that is soft coal with a high sulfur content, or being out on the streets searching for suspect chimneys?

Sometimes it was not even clear to Tucker who he should be most worried about.

Shortly after the new ordinance was adopted in April someone claiming to be a city alderman proposed selling a list of people who had been violating the law but not prosecuted. He phoned and asked George Hale, secretary for the St. Louis Stoker Association, if his members would buy the list.

Hale conferred with his members who agreed that they would prefer dealing with Tucker directly if such a list existed. Tucker confirmed that there was such a list but it was confidential.

Tucker then called a meeting of his staff and told them it would be “too bad” if someone in his office passed the list to anyone. The story quickly spread to the city’s three newspapers.

Hale may have known the name of the “alderman” but by the time the newspaper reporters got to him he had forgotten it.

Banning coal was causing all kinds of unexpected headaches.

Cold Arrives But What’s Missing?

Posted on November 13, 2015 by bobwyss

By Bob Wyss

And then, finally, came the cold.

But not the smoke

All of St. Louis, even those meeting a train at Union Station, waited as the cold began to arrive for the city’s spate of coal smoke.

The first cold snap arrived Oct. 10. The sky over St. Louis was clear, while smoke covered much of East St. Louis across the river, which had no ban on dirty coal. Slowly the smoke drifted on a westerly breeze into downtown St. Louis.

The East St. Louis smoke returned again to downtown the morning of Nov. 8.

But the real test arrived Nov. 11 and continued for five days when a 63 miles per hour gale struck St. Louis. It brought with it the coldest temperature the city had seen this early in the season since record keeping began in 1873. The average was 26.4 degrees, which was 4.3 degrees below the mean expected in mid-January.

This time there was no westerly breeze and no smoke from East St. Louis.

Everyone noticed the clear skies.

A resident wrote the mayor’s office to report that the new, more expensive but clear coal did make life easier. He no longer had to clean the range before his wife baked, he did not have to worry about blackening his neighbors clothes drying on a line when the wind blew, and the coal was so much higher quality that he could bank it so it could last all night.

He called it “a wonderful fuel that helps us in every way.”

Smoke Commissioner Raymond Tucker said calls to his office had virtually ceased, except for a few complaints about the price.

The winter blooming witch hazel at Shaw’s Garden was bright yellow. In past years blossoms had turned a dirty, rusting brown.

While it was a good beginning, neither Tucker or James L. Ford, who had chaired the Smoke Elimination Committee, were ready to declare that the heavy blankets of smoke would not return.

For decades people in St. Louis and other cities throughout the U.S. and Europe had contended that the noxious clouds of smoke from coal were the price that had to be paid. No one, they argued would either pay more to heat their homes or runs their businesses. No one would put pollution controls on their boilers or machinery or pay a higher price for coal.

But St. Louis was proving that it could be done.

Tucker estimated that as many as 5,000 dwellings around the city had installed stokers that produced fewer emissions, or had converted to oil burners.

Plus, many buying the more expensive coal was discovering that Turner was right – its BTU content was far greater. The same amount of clean coal would burn more than two times longer than the dirtier coal St. Louis had used for years.

This type of smoke from trains passing through St. Louis had been more common each winter. Photo Tucker Archive, Washington University

There were a few problems.

The city was allowing any leftover coal from the year before to be burned. But by the November cold snap Tucker said those supplies were pretty much gone.

Some residents did not understand how to use the stokers or other mechanical equipment. A smoky chimney often drew the attention of one of Tucker’s 13 smoke inspectors, and would lead to a lesson in how to use a stoker.

Inspectors were also out searching for what were being described as coal bootleggers, dealers selling coal that would burn so dirty that it was illegal. Tucker indicated he had no plans to reduce enforcement and that he hoped to hire more inspectors.

Not surprisingly, the poor seemed to be paying more than anyone else, at least proportionately.

A basket of coal that last winter had cost 20 cents was now double the price. Tucker’s inspection staff could not do much about the price, but they were rigidly inspecting the baskets to make sure a city requirement of 80 pounds per basket.

The Workers Alliance, which advocated for the poor, began calling for the city to lift the restrictions on coal, at least for residents on relief and the WPA rolls.

Tucker agreed that he believed the poor were paying too much. But he gave no indication that he was going to back down in insisting that everyone needed to contribute to cleaner skies.

By Nov. 16 the cold snap began to lift. By mid afternoon it was 50 degrees and sunny. No one wanted to complain about that.

Illinois Vows Revenge But Will It Work?

Posted on October 7, 2015 by bobwyss

By Bob Wyss

The Hotel Belleville fed baked beans and ham to more than 200 coal miners and operators in Southern Illinois and the audience served up a bellyful of outrage about St. Louis.

Officials watch the loading of coal into shuttle cars by conveyor belt at a mine in the 1940s near Johnson City, Illinois. U.S. Dept of Interior

Coal operators on that Friday in early May 1940 vowed to boycott St. Louis goods in retaliation for the city’s refusal to buy the coal they produced. At this gathering, however, many said they preferred the term “trade reciprocity” to boycott. It meant pretty much the same thing – Southern Illinois residents would buy St. Louis products when St. Louis bought Illinois coal.

For months St. Louis officials had been urging its neighbors to the east to cooperate rather than fight the city’s new strict ordinance banning the burning of high sulfur coal. Virtually all of that coal came from Illinois.

The reciprocity resolution was one of several passed that night in what reporters described was an often raucous gathering.

“Frequent applause greeted speakers who talked of trade reciprocity,” reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Some of the numerous speakers said they would have threatened boycott but didn’t want to use the term.”

Instead they likened the St. Louis action to the nation’s ill-fated prohibition of alcohol and speakers talked about how to reclaim the market.

Clarence V. Beck, a self-described St. Louis coal man, said there was no evidence that the coal smoke each winter in the city was the cause of rising respiratory illnesses.

Richard F. Wood, executive director of the Solid Fuel Institute of St. Louis, which represented coal interests, said the city seemed desperate, it had changed its ordinances on coal three times in the last five years.

Another ordinance that was proposed at the meeting called on the city to abolish the new ordinance. Both that proposal and the reciprocity measure were approved.

The bean dinner was financed by Bituminous Casualty Safety Council, which represented coal companies.

By August the coal companies working with union representatives said that they had organized six towns, which vowed to boycott St. Louis goods.

“This time it is not an idle rumor or threat,” said Clarence G. Stiehl, president of the St. Clair-Madison Coal Operators’ Association.

The six towns were outside of Belleville, Ill. and they had a combined population of about 10,000.

Stiehl said the residents were 100 percent in favor of the boycott, because most were miners who had been organized by the Progressive Miners Union.

The boycott would intensify when the mines reopened in the early Fall, said Stiehl. He said those backing the ban would be especially motivated if the 80 members of the coal operators association were unable to find buyers for their product.

The only other solution for Illinois was to build processing plants to convert the soft, high sulfur coal into smokeless fuels. While the state of Illinois indicated it was willing to make that investment, it could take years for the plants to be completed.

But not everyone in Illinois was backing the boycott.

The Old Ben Coal Corp. in West Frankfort, Ill. announced during the summer that it had enough low sulfur coal to double its production and delivery to St. Louis. In addition, the company was rushing to complete a plant that would convert higher sulfur coal into smokeless briquette that would also comply with the new St. Louis regulations.

In addition, the Illinois Municipal League rejected a boycott referendum and instead authorized it leadership to meet with St. Louis officials.

“We won’t get anywhere unless we all go together,” said Mayor Lester Hileman of Christopher, Ill. “If we don’t take care of our interests down here, we won’t have any.”

Hileman was described by a reporter as “an abrupt, gnarled man who discharges his mayoral duties in time taken from his refrigeration business.” Hileman likened St. Louis to a “fellow who pats you on the back and gives you a nice smile as long as you carry our money to him.”

While some Illinois newspapers supported the boycott the majority urged restraint.

The Illinois State Register in Springfield counseled coal operators “to give careful consideration of the danger of losing one of their best cash customers – St. Louis.”

Added E.R. Jones, the editor of the Marion Evening Post: “We have never seen any good accomplished trying to force something upon a community it does not want.”

In mid-August the Post-Dispatch was asking both officials and business people if the boycott was developing. Few were seeing any signs of it.

A Marissa, Ill. businessman said he had heard people talk about the boycott but he was not seeing any difference in sales.

“The boycott must be somewhere else,” said another unnamed merchant in New Athens, Ill. “I haven’t seen anything of it here.”

St. Louis Mayor Bernard Dickmann said any boycott would not deter his city.

“We intend to go along just as we are until the problem of smoke has been resolved,” he said. “We’re not trying to ruin their business, we’re trying to help it. As I said years ago, we want their commodity but we don’t want their dirt.”

The Editor Who Got Mad

Posted on March 20, 2015 by bobwyss

The story so far: On November 28, 1939, 75 years ago, a thick, black smoke covered St. Louis, turning day into night, snarling traffic and angering and shocking residents. A Smoke Elimination Committee was created and it met through January and into February sorting out its limited options for finagling cleaning the city’s air. Its report in late February proposed that all residents and businesses buy more expensive fuel that caused less pollution. The question now was whether the city government, and then the city’s residents, would comply.

By Bob Wyss

Ralph Coghlan liked to get people mad.

As he explained once: “When I find men in public office outraging public decency it makes me goddam mad.”

Which made Coghlan seemingly perfect to be the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page 75 years ago at a time when the newspaper was fighting to help the city rid its terrible air pollution.

The editorials had been unrelenting since the campaign had begun last October. A few made the front page, but most were on the editorial page, which in those days looked remarkably different than most newspaper pages of today. The type was normal size but the headlines were no larger, and the page would often have five, six, even eight small editorials.

They were unassuming, the exact opposite of Coghlan.

Time magazine once described him as a ruddy, owlish, excitable Irishman, “who breathes fire and snorts.”

Originally from Chicago, Coghlan had worked in the editorial pages for the last 20 years, first at the Louisville Courier-Journal and then at the Post-Dispatch. According to Time magazine he was fired in Louisville “for betraying the Courier-Journal’s bone-dry policy (He let a wet letter slip into the letter’s column.”

Coghlan took over as editoral page editor in St. Louis is January, 1939, just before the smoke campaign began. Some of his battles during the next decade were famous.

Once Coghlan’s ire got raised over three old cannons perched on the lawn of the Missouri Capitol in Jefferson City. He thought they were a disgrace and should be scrapped but the Governor at the time disagreed.

One day Coghlan was working in his yard, planting locust trees, with the assistance of a tree surgeon, Sidney Stearns. The conversation turned to the cannons and it ended with Stearns agreeing to drive to Jefferson City with a friend and remove the cannons. Delighted, Coghlan said he would pay Stearn’s expenses.

But police caught Stearns in the act, as well as a loaded revolver and a full can of gasoline in his truck. Soon Coghlan’s role was learned and he was arrested. The Post-Dispatch tried to tell the story playfully but its competitors quoted then Governor Forrest C. Donnell: “This is outrageous..filled with a spirit of anarchy and disrespect for law…The law is going to be enforced, the Post-Dispatch notwithstanding.”

Eventually Coghlan was acquitted.

That controversy was nothing, however, compared to Coghlan’s troubles at the same time the smoke campaign was waging. The Post-Dispatch had reported that a state legislator had assisted in a bribe of a union leader. Both were arrested and tried before state Judge Thomas Rowe, who ordered that the legislator be released from any charges. The following day a judge in a separate civil action concluded that the union leader had been bribed and ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine.

This was too much for Coghlan. The next day his editorial page ran this headline “THESE MEN ARE GUILTY.” The language in the editorial was no less vitriolic.

Joseph Pulitzer II

Rowe ordered Coghlan to appear in his court, found him in contempt, fined the newspaper $2,000, Coghlan $200 and ordered him to spend 20 days in jail. Cartoonist Daniel Fitzpatrick was also jailed.

Journalists around the nation erupted in anger. Post-Dispatch Publisher Joseph Pulitzer II signed an editorial declaring “The Post-Dispatch Will Not be Gagged.” Life magazine called it one of the most outrageous attacks on the press since John Peter Zenger. The New York Herald Tribune labeled it “an arrogant and outrageous abuse of the contempt process.”

The state Supreme Court eventually over-turned the contempt citation. By then Judge Rowe was gone, having been found dead in a hotel room at the Democratic National Convention.

Coghlan not only got readers mad, he would often anger fellow staffers and even his boss, Pulitzer.

In 1949 Coghlan wound up in what was described in a news story at the time as “a drunken brawl.” Pulitzer stripped Coghlan of his title, but kept him on the payroll, ordering him to work out of Europe.

Ralph Coghlan had gotten one too many people mad.

Coal’s Footprint Stains Daily Life

Posted on December 8, 2014 by bobwyss

The story so far: On November 28, 1939, 75 years ago, a thick, black smoke covered St. Louis, turning day into night, snarling traffic and angering and shocking residents. Coal dealers and producers had fought changes in the past but on December 5 a gathering of 52 citizens declared that change was coming..

By Bob Wyss

It is difficult to imagine in the 21^st Century what it was like for residents of the first half of the 20^th Century to live with coal. The pollution was bad and the soot and dust were terrible. It stained women’s gloves, soaked into their hair, and discolored the curtains and wallpaper in their homes.

Louis G. Brenner grew up next to Tower Hill Park in south central St. Louis and he used to cut through the Botanical Garden on this way to school. “I can remember walking to school and being able to stamp your foot on the sidewalk and leave a footprint where the impact of your foot blew the soot aside,” he said. “I can remember the days when it should have been bright, sunny and the air was just horribly hazy with just smoke. Aw, it was bad.”

Living with coal meant more than the smoke and dust. It was the awful clatter of the coal being dumped in the alley outside the house, the scramble to get it down the coal chute into the cellar before it got dark, the chore of banking the coal downstairs every night before the family went to bed and then the task of removing the clinkers from the ash. “It was just always a dirty, dirty mess,” said Mildred Niermann.

Women, even those wealthy enough to employ cleaning help, reported that they or their staff spent much of their time cleaning. Soot had a way of getting into every home, even if they did not burn soft coal, and even if their windows were all shut and newspaper was wedged into the cracks and seams. One woman said that she was “eternally cleaning. We clean out own wall paper and wash and paint our own woodwork and hardly get one room done than we begin another.” She lived in a huge house in what was traditionally one of the smokiest neighborhoods in the city. Another said that every Monday was “Black Monday. Cook, housemaid and outside help turn out. I drive my own car while the chauffeur turns houseman. They scrub, polish, vacuum clean.” She added, “Of course, when one buys house furnishings in St. Louis, one cannot buy for beauty. First one must ask, will it wash, will it clean, is it a color that won’t show the dirt?”

There was also the task of dealing with the coal itself. Most homes and apartments bought coal by the ton and had it delivered by truck. Usually it was dumped in the back alleys that were common in St. Louis, and the coal would make a loud, clattering racket. One could pay the coal men to transfer it to the chute leading into the basement, or one could save some money and shovel it oneself.

Alice Rapp Bennett was only about seven years old when her family asked her to start helping when she would get home from school. She remembers it was an awful, messy task. The coal shovels would take forever to transfer the fuel from the alley to the coal chute, where it would make a thunderous racket when it toppled into the bin. Coal dust would rise from the pen and even up the chute. It would take hours to settle and unless the bin was fully enclosed the dust would settle throughout the cellar and sometimes seep into the house. When Alice’s father got home he would help, but the family often had to race against the darkness to get it cleared out of the alley. If darkness came first, a lantern had to be placed by the pile to warn motorists.

The coal furnaces also were very demanding. Until mechanical stokers were added, which allowed the coal to be fed automatically into the furnace, someone would have to go down every few hours and shovel the coal in manually. Mechanical stokers were around in 1939, but not very many people had them. The task of shoveling was especially onerous at night. Every evening before the family would retire someone would have to go downstairs and bank the furnace for the night. That supply usually lasted until around four in the morning, when someone would have to return again. Sometimes the task was left to an adult but in larger families the children quickly learned the responsibility of the early morning coal duty. Children also learned rapidly that letting the fire die would not be tolerated in a house that could quickly turn stone cold. Sometimes it took hours to get the heat back.

Finally, there was the task of removing the ashes and clinkers, the black metallic residue that had not burned. Again, as the shovel dug into the dry ash and metal the dust would rise from the furnace. When it was dumped into a metal wash pan it clattered and the dust rose a second time.

No one liked coal. Kids might complain, parents were more tolerant, but no one yet had come up with a cheaper, better alternative for staying warm in the winter.

A Coal Black Sky

Tag Archives: St. Louis

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