St. Louis Wedding, 2015
October 17, 2015
ALAN writes:
A week ago, a group of Koreans were in St. Louis for a wedding. The day after, while they were visiting the Gateway Arch, thugs broke into their rental van in broad daylight in downtown St. Louis and stole their passports and five traditional Korean dresses. This photograph shows the elegantly-attired wedding party on the day before the theft.
This incident caught my attention, but not because of crime by black thugs, which is as predictable in St. Louis as night following day.
It caught my attention because of the place where the wedding was held: The Jewel Box in Forest Park, the site of floral exhibitions since its opening in 1936 and a popular location for weddings.
What could be found in the Jewel Box? “There is fragrance, beauty, soft music, the loveliness of nature, the presence of God in this cathedral of waterfalls and flowers.” [ City of St. Louis, Forest Park And Its History, 1943, p. 58 ]
I know that description is accurate because that is why my mother enjoyed visiting the Jewel Box as often as she did from the 1930s through the 1980s.
One day in June 1956, she and a friend of hers just happened to be walking near the rose garden outside the Jewel Box at the same time that a wedding party was there. She paused and took several color slides. One of them shows the bride with nine other young women in pink or white dresses, posing amid the flowers for family photographs, with the Jewel Box in the background.
The dignity, demeanor, self-restraint, and meticulous devotion to attractive apparel and appearance that are evident in the Korean wedding party picture from last week reminded me of the same qualities reflected in that group of ten young white women in the wedding party photographed at the same location but entirely by chance by my mother on that day in 1956.
I am confident that that 1956 wedding party did not have their dresses and personal property stolen by young black thugs operating with impunity in broad daylight. The two weddings took place in the same city but in radically different cultures. The difference is that thugs did not own the streets of St. Louis in 1956 as they do today because white men in 1956 had not yet surrendered their legitimate patriarchal and political authority.
