If the Reverend Calvin Stuart ever regrets his appointment as executive director of the Skinker-DeBaliviere Community Council, Inc., he’ll have no one to blame but himself.
When he and his wife wanted to move into a house from their apartment on Rosebury, they deliberately selected this neighborhood. “We didn’t particularly know anyone in the area,” he said, “It just looked like a place where lots of things were going on.”
This proved to be a highly accurate appraisal, so Cal Stuart pitched right into a great many projects and, like the rest of us, has seen new things pop up almost monthly to demand neighborhood attention.
The Rev. Stuart, who lived at [street name unclear in original scan] and Belt as a child and began his education at Clark School at Union and Cabanne, his present home completes a geographic figure eight with St. Louis as its center. His family moved to California, then to the Clayton area. He touched the east coast while he studied divinity at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass.
He moved back to St. Louis as assistant rector of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension on Goodfellow. He was named rector in 1964, a post he held until December 1970.
“We had to battle a few realtors to convince them we wanted to buy our house on McPherson,” he admitted. “I don’t think it’s so much collusion among real estate people as it is a kind of real estate mentality. They don’t think much of a neighborhood and they cannot understand how that neighborhood can attract intelligent buyers. That some people prefer to live in a neighborhood that is mixed racially, socially, economically, every which way, is just beyond their comprehension.”
Since the Stuarts moved into their house, the household has grown to include two young daughters and a son. For Cal, his schedule at the church was flexible enough to allow him to devote a lot of hours to the Rosedale-Skinker Neighborhood Association. He was elected president of that group last May, which placed him on the Board of the Skinker-DeBaliviere Community Council, Inc. This fall, board members elected him chairman of that organization.
During this period he acted both as chairman and executive director, assisted by a volunteer staff. At his desk, tucked in the back of the new Council offices on Kingsbury at Des Peres, he talked about possible priorities for Skinker-Debaliviere.
“These are my own priorities,” he made clear. “The first would be keeping together on our problems. We can’t afford to have rifts and hard feelings every time an issue comes up for neighborhood attention.”
Considering the number of issues that have faced us in the last six months, Jack-in-the-Box, the 235 program, the Housing Authority’s action on the Clara Apartments, the unsuccessful Delmar and DeBaliviere, the suits filed against slum landlords on Waterman east of DeBaliviere, plus political and organizational elections, Mr. Stuart’s emphasis on speaking freely but working together seems well placed.
“Housing of course is a constant problem,” he said. “To push for good property maintenance, to redevelop sub-standard housing, to demolish present structures that are eyesores and crime breeders, is tremendously urgent. We want to interest private developers in our neighborhood and obtain government funds to tackle housing problems.”
Two other high neighborhood priorities are being handled by a husband and wife team, he reported. “Chris (Mrs. Virgil) Wright is getting together a group aimed at helping Hamilton School parents in their efforts to upgrade that school. Her husband heads the local committee concerned with crime in this area. These groups deserve cooperation because they are working on problems which concern every resident.”
Another matter with which Mr. Stuart hopes Skinker-DeBaliviere will continue to work is the encouragement of business and commercial ventures in those areas zoned for this activity. The Council will soon begin to sponsor community meetings centered on one specific issue or priority in order to sound out community opinion on that one item.
“The Council can’t do everything,” he cheerfully admits, “but it can certainly be a clearing house for ideas and projects as well as a valuable resource to those working in the neighborhood. We would like to see less tension and more cooperation and we hope community meetings focusing on one problem at a time will help us achieve that.”
Like the rest of us, what the Skinker-DeBaliviere Community Council does is pretty well dependent on its budget. With Cal Stuart as its executive director, 1971 should be the kind of year he was looking for: a year when “lots of things are going on.”
Transcription note: Two passages in the available original scan are unclear or incomplete. They are marked in brackets above; no missing wording has been supplied.
Original newspaper source
Originally published in The Paper, February 1971.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
