This Month in St. Louis History

Former Cardinal GM, noted Broadway debut

Former St. Louis Cardinal general manager Vaughan Pallmore "Bing" Devine was born in St. Louis on March 1916. Famous actress Pearl Bailey wasn't born here but made her Broadway debut when she starred in the play "St. Louis Woman."

One of the Jesuit priests who performed a famed St. Louis exorcism died in March 2005.

Also inventor Howard Hathaway Aiken, who invented a forerunner of the modern electronic digital computer, also died in a past March.

These are just some of the people and events that made their marks in St. Louis history.

To give kids a sense of the area's rich history, the Missouri History Museum each month cooperates with Young Saint Louis.com to highlight anniversaries of people and events.

If you'd like to know more, visit links in this article or visit www.mohistory.org.

Vaughan Pallmore "Bing" Devine

Bing Devine

"Bing" Devine was born March 1, 1916, in St. Louis. He attended his first St. Louis Cardinals game with his dad when he was 10 years old. His dad was a big Cardinal fan and also took him to Cardinal road games.

He graduated from University City High School and Washington University. He became an aide in the Cardinals publicity department, where he worked for Bob Broeg. Broeg later became the sports editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

When Branch Rickey was the Cardinals general manager, Devine was named business manager for the Cardinals' Class D farm team in Johnson City, Tenn. After time in the U.S. Navy in World War II, he came back to the Cardinals as a minor league general manager.

He became general manager of the Cardinals for the first time in 1957. He kept that job until 1964, when beer baron August Busch fired him. He was back with the Cardinals as general manager from 1967-1978.

He won multiple World Series championships with the Cardinals.

He also served as president of the St. Louis Cardinals football team.

He died at age 90 on Jan. 27, 2007.

For more about Mr. Devine, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Devine.

Actress Pearl Bailey

Pearl Bailey

Pearl Bailey was born in Virginia on March 29, 1918. But, she is tied to St. Louis in an unusual way.

She made her Broadway debut as an actress in the play, "St. Louis Woman." The play was about the black horseracing set. St. Louis' large African-American population seemed to fill the bill as a site for the play.

St. Louis also had many black entertainers who had moved to New York to achieve wider fame. It was also the birthplace of modern jazz.

Bailey went on to star in musicals, motion pictures and television.

For more, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Bailey.

Priest Walter H. Halloran

Walter Halloran

Walter H. Halloran was a seminarian at St. Louis University in 1949 when he was asked to participate in an exorcism effort. He assisted Father William S. Bowdern in attempting to rid a 14-year-old boy of possession by demons.

The episode was outlined in the 1971 book by William Peter Blatty that later was made into the movie, "The Exorcist." In the movie, the child was portrayed as a girl.

Father Halloran, who died March 1, 2005, was the last Jesuit involved in the original episode. He said the boy had a seizure while he held him and the boy broke his nose.

He believed in the ability of demons to possess humans. He played himself in a 1997 movie, "In the Grip of Evil."

For more, visit http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=306632.

Inventor Howard Hathaway

Howard Hathaway Aiken

Howard Hathaway Aiken was a pioneer in computing and the primary engineer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer.

He got interested in electronic computing as a way to cut the time needed to solve by hand complicated differential equations. He wanted a machine that could do all those long, tedious calculations more quickly.

At Harvard University, Aiken worked on the Mark I with Grace Hopper. The funding for what was first called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was from IBM. It received the Mark I name later.

In 1970, he received the prestigious Edison Medal for his pioneering career in the field of computers.

He died on March 14, 1973, in St. Louis.

For more, visit http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9004179/Howard-Hathaway-Aiken.

Dedication of Old Post Office

Old Post Office

On March 15, 1884, General William Tecumseh Sherman, a Civil War hero, dedicated what was then the United States Custom House and Post Office.After its renovation, the building is referred to simply as the Old Post Office.

When the Custom House was owned by the federal General Services Administration (GSA), it was ranked high in both historic and architectural value. It was deemed the 6th most historic and 7th most architecturally significant of GSA's 2,200 buildings.

The Custom House housed federal offices that administrated post-Civil War westward expansion. It housed the 8th Circuit federal court as well as a federal district court.

It also served as a storage site for up to $4 million in gold bullion.

Among the famous federal cases tried in the building were the breakup of Standard Oil in 1909 and the Teapot Dome case in 1926. Standard Oil was found to be an oil monopoly and was broken into several separate companies.

The Teapot Dome case was actually called United States vs. Marathon Oil. At trial, President Warren Harding was found to have gotten a $400,000 "loan" from Marathon before it received a federal lease to develop a naval underground petroleum reserve. The reserve was named Teapot Dome.

In the 1990s, the building was declared to be "surplus property" and put up for sale. Since then, it has been renovated and is now the home of the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District. Other organizations, including Webster University, occupy other space.

For more visit http://stlcin.missouri.org/history/structdetail.cfm?Master_ID=1332 and http://www.courts.mo.gov/page.asp?id=3502.