Tornados in St Louis: OZ or bust?

When we arrived in St. Louis for our talk at the Olin Library at Washington University, it was still sunny. The old part of the Washington University campus looks like an old European castle, built as part of the 1904 World Exposition.

While Peter gave his talk, and as the reception progressed, the rain began. The wind grew stronger and then we heard there was a tornado “watch”... but coming from "the land of earthquakes" we didn’t really know what that meant. Would our gypsy wagon end up in OZ?

The talk was very well attended. The audience included our Miniature Book Society friend Julian Edison, as well as Washington University's book arts teacher Jana Harper with her books arts class.

One student gave us this very relevant broadside.

We spent the night with Antiquarian bookseller Anthony Garnett and his family, who live adjacent to Forest Park in a 100-year old many-roomed mansion.

Here is Donna sitting in front of the fireplace.

We visited the beautiful: ARCH, built in the mid-1960s as a monument to the gateway to the west. It still feels very far from the “west” to us from California….

As we ate frozen custard ice cream at “Ted Drewes”, the local hot spot, lightning flashed in the west. Little did we know it was a tornado was tearing the roof off part of the St. Louis’ Lambert Airport.

While in St. Louis we visited our friends at ARCH Paper. They make 100% post consumer rag paper and paper pulp. They work with “Remains” a recycling and repurposing business that collects cast-off clothing for resale. They sort through tons of clothing and shoes every day. Shoes go to developing countries, cloth is recycled into things like archery target stuffing, auto insulation and more. The 100 percent cotton is shredded for making paper and that was what we were interested in. Peter bought as many bags of “Arch Shred” as he could fit in the empty spaces in the truck. The neat thing about the shred is that they sort the rag by color before it is shred, so Peter will not have to add dye to the pulp to get some vivid blacks, reds, greens, etc. Hand papermakers take note: this is a “100% post-CONSUMER” product, not merely scraps left behind from the making of clothing, so is the most ecological cotton rag pulp.

We parked at "Remains" for Easter. The storm blew by and we celebrated Easter with papermaker friend Joan Hall with pancakes and eggs. Check out her fantastic BIG work.

And finally: every community has its cool store for locally grown food!