News

School Losing Confederate Soldier’s Name

Written by DOYLE MURPHY

The Confederacy loses again.

After a years-long battle,

Kennard Classical Junior

Academy will become Classical Junior Academy, losing the reference to the Civil War lieutenant for the southern army, Veiled Prophet founder and St. Louis businessman Samuel Kennard.

The school will eventually be

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renamed to honor a different figure, apparently one without a racist past or involvement in a weird and creepy pageant that sends a bizarre message to students. Betty Wheeler, the pioneering Black education leader who founded Metro High School, was a popular choice on a previous petition in 2018, but that part hasn’t been settled yet. But Samuel Kennard is out — news first reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Kennard served in the Confederate Army as aide-de-camp to General Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, who served as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In St. Louis, Kennard took over his dad’s carpet company J. Kennard & Sons and built a fortune. He moved in St. Louis’ circles of wealth and privilege, which manifested in the Veiled Prophet, the exclusionary secret society that chose for its early imagery a figure that looN suspiciously like an armed klansman.

Kennard’s legacy has long been a problem for the Northampton magnet school. The Post-Dispatch

e sign still says Kennard, but the magnet school is getting a new name. | DOYLE MURPHY

wrote about the controversy in 2015, and the RFT reported on a petition drive in 2018.

Schools Superintendent Dr. Kelvin Adams suggested temporarily changing the named to Classical Junior Academy for the 2020-21 school year while a permanent name is being decided, according to the Equity and Inclusion Committee, a group comprising parents and teachers at magnet school. 7he issue finally made it to last week’s school board meeting for approval. n

Mark McCloskey to Speak at RNC, Of Course

Written by DANNY WICENTOWSKI

It was inevitable. The circle of bullshit that began when a rifle-toting Mark McCloskey yelled at a group of protesters in the Central West End to “Get the hell out of my neighborhood!” has arced through cable news, tabloids and the city prosecutor’s office, and it has finally come to lodge itself where it belongs: next week’s Republican National Convention. Indeed, the fact that Mark and Patricia McCloskey — the now-infamous “St. Louis gun couple” — initially tried to play themselves off as supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement is just one more punchless punchline in the joke that is 2020.

“The Black Lives Matters movement is here to stay, it is the right message, and it is about time,” one of the McCloskeys’ attorneys, Al Watkins, said in a statement released June 29, a day after the scene of the couple pointing guns at protesters went viral and made national news. Two months later, on Monday, Watkins confirmed to Wake Up to Politics creator

Mark McCloskey defended his home from peaceful protestors this June. | THEO WELLING

Gabe Fleisher that Mark McCloskey “will be in full oratory splendor at the RNC.”

Oh, how the worms turn.

In the weeks after the couple’s armed confrontation, the case became yet another noxious node of the culture war, as Republicans (including President Donald Trump) showed just as little trigger discipline as the McCloskeys in jumping to support the couple’s noble stand against, you know, unarmed people standing in the street.

It didn’t matter that the couple’s claim of a gate-smashing horde was refuted by video evidence; it didn’t matter that the couple had, as the St. Louis PostDispatch revealed, waged a decadeslong legal war on their neighbors, or that Mark McCloskey had pulled a gun in a previous circumstance where he was not in danger, but rather establishing by force what he believed were the bounds of his property (sidewalks be damned) in the ultra-wealthy and private enclave of Portland Place.

Let’s also not forget about the Rosh Hashanah beehives, which in 2013 had the misfortune to be placed by a synagogue near the McCloskey mansion and which Mark McCloskey destroyed in a rage of entitlement.

“The children were crying in school,” Rabbi Susan Talve recounted to PostDispatch reporter Jeremy Kohler. “It was part of our curriculum.”

Those bees deserved better. And St. Louis certainly deserves a better representative at the national political gathering.

Still, Mark McCloskey is the guy the Republicans want on stage: an entitled lawyer who, like his wife Patricia, is facing a felony charge for unlawful use of a weapon; a guy who has demonstrated himself as an easily flustered boomer with an overcompensating arsenal and an underdeveloped sense of empathy, a guy who sees other people as a threat to his cavernous edifice to unfathomable wealth.

Huh. You know, it suddenly makes a kind of sense. The McCloskeys are perfect representations of Trump’s Republicans, and we wish them the best.

Have a great convention, y’all. Don’t come back too soon. n

Opera Big Resigns After Arrest

Written by DANNY WICENTOWSKI

Last week, little more than a year after Opera Theatre of Saint Louis announced the hiring of Damon Bristo as its director of artistic administration, the rising star in St. Louis’ opera community quit his job and has all but disappeared from the company’s web presence after it was revealed he’d been arrested last month on suspicion of child sex trafficking.

The arrest appeared to catch the opera company by surprise.

“Upon learning of the arrest, the employee was immediately placed on unpaid administrative leave and later resigned,” said company General Director Andrew Jorgensen in a statement.

It was on that same day — more than two weeks after Bristo’s arrest — that the opera singer and industry watchdog Zach Finkelstein posted Bristo’s mugshot as it appeared on STLMugshots.com, a site that pays for access to official repositories of arrest data and then publishes that information, including mugshots, online and in print.

St. Louis County police confirmed

that Bristo had been arrested July 22 and released, KSDK reported. A search of online court records shows no formal charges filed in connection to the arrest.

RFT reached out to the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney last week, but our questions were not answered by publication.

Without charges from the county prosecutor, the charge listed with Bristo’s arrest — for second-degree child sex trafficking — represents allegations from the arresting officer.

According to the Missouri statute, the charge of second-degree trafficking can apply to someone who benefits from or causes by “any means, including but not limited to through the use of force ... a person under the age of eighteen to participate in a commercial sex act, a sexual performance, or the production of explicit sexual material.”

If someone is convicted, the charge carries a ten-year minimum sentence.

Bristo’s hiring as artistic director in August 2019 made him the successor to Paul Kilmer, who had served in the role for more than 35 years. Previously, Bristo had been a vice president at Columbia Artists, where he’d represented opera singers including mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, bass-baritone James Morris and soprano Amanda Majeski, according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story about his hiring.

This summer, like much of St. Louis’ performing arts scene, the company

Opera eatre of Saint Louis parted ways with an administrator aer his arrest. | GOOGLE MAPS

has suffered a complete cancelation of its scheduled season, including performances of Carmen, Die Fledermaus and the world premiere of Awakenings (based on the memoir by Oliver Sacks).

Instead, the company produced a series of virtual events that featured performers and staff, including its Tent Talks; Bristo himself was featured in coverage of the company’s virtual season in the Post-Dispatch.

As of last week, the Tent Talk videos appear to have been removed from the company’s Facebook page.

Reached by email on August 13, a spokeswoman for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis did not answer questions about when the company learned of Bristo’s arrest. She referred inquiries back to the company’s earlier statement attributed to Jorgensen, which concluded, “We have a strict code of ethics and strong values that we expect our employees to uphold inside and outside of the workplace.”

In comments to St. Louis Public Radio, soprano Angel Azzarra said the news of Bristo’s arrest and resignation came “out of left field.”

“I mean we’re all devastated,” she said. “It’s a horrible blow.” n

A Jeep is pulled upright aer a crash on Monday aernoon at Tucker Boulevard and Clark Avenue in downtown. No serious injuries were reported. | DOYLE MURPHY

Restrictions Planned for Downtown Streets

Written by DOYLE MURPHY

St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson says the city will make changes to downtown streets in response to a string of crashes and late-night drag racing.

During her regular briefing on Monday, Krewson said the situation has gotten out of hand.

“I’m sure some of those changes will be inconvenient for some folks who are used to driving a particular route,” the mayor said. “I’m sorry about that, but this Say Hello to St. Louis City Soccer Club Written by JAIME LEES has a name — and it’s St. Louis City Soccer Club.

Bringing Major League Soccer to St. Louis has been a long, long process. There were huge hurdles to get over, including who was going to pay for all of this and where in the heck these games would happen.

But St. Louis worked out the details, and we’re in the process of building the team a brand new stadium on prime real estate right next to Union Station.

With all of our established local sports teams taking hard hits during the pandemic, all eyes were on the announcement last week. There are big hopes is that St. Louis City SC will bring not just excitement, but an economic and public something we have to get under control.”

Earlier that morning, a teenage girl was killed in a violent crash at the corner of 10th Street and Washington Avenue. Police say Sierra Ward, seventeen, of De Soto was riding in the back of a 1998 Chevrolet Silverado with others when it was hit by a speeding 2014 Dodge Charger, throwing her to her death, police say. Four others, including another seventeen-year-old girl were injured and taken to the hospital.

St. Louis Public Safety Director Jimmie Edwards told KMOV the changes would include blocking some sections of downtown roads with barricades and narrowing lanes.

Throughout the pandemic, traffic stops have been way down. In late March, all the members of the police department’s traffic unit were temporarily quarantined after a sergeant tested posi

St. Louis’ new soccer team finally

tive for COVID-19. boom to downtown. Those hopes exist alongside longstanding concerns about the equity of publicly financed stadiums and whether a new sports team deserves millions in tax credits.

Still, it’s indisputable that the game of soccer is so important to many people in St. Louis. In addition to being loved by our large Catholic population who grew up playing it in school, the Beautiful Game is also close to the hearts of our beloved immigrant populations, who often carried their love for the sport from their home country all the way to St. Louis.

Soccer is unique among sports because, essentially, all somebody needs to play is one ball and a little bit of space. That makes the game a hit in varied territories across the world and in all economic conditions. From lush lawns to dusty deserts to wet alleyways to warm rooftops, anywhere in the world can become a soccer field if you have a ball.

St. Louis’ stadium is still little more than giant, intricately built pit at this stage of construction. But when it’s finished it’s expected to have room for 22,500 fans. It’s scheduled to open in 2023. n