St. Louis Smoke

The burly head of Bernard Francis ("Barney") Dickmann, the enterprising bachelor realtor who is St. Louis' mayor until at least April 6 (municipal election day), last week literally was in a smoky fog, and had been there for many winter weeks. The murk over St. Louis has been so thick that the new Governor of Missouri, Lloyd Crow Stark, an enterprising nurseryman, could not see the city streets when he flew over during an inspection of the Ohio-Mississippi flood. He wished that Mayor Dickmann would sign a pending city ordinance to abate the smoke which makes St. Louis grimier than notorious Pittsburgh.

Across the Mississippi the Governor of Illinois, Henry Horner, a lawyer, was of a different mind. To Mayor Dickmann he dispatched an urgent telegram: "Before you take final action on the ordinance before you, may I ask you fully consider the unnecessarily drastic effect which its enforcement will have on the coal industry in 15 southern Illinois counties, adjacent to St. Louis, employing 29,000 wage earners, and sending 4,000,000 tons of coal annually to your city, which is the natural market place for these counties."

In St. Louis, doctors insisted that Mayor Dickmann sign the ordinance in the interest of public health, though it would require practically all users of soft coal in St. Louis to install new kinds of furnaces. Coal dealers would be obliged to "wash" small-sized coal and hand-pick chunks to prevent sulphuric acid and other products of burning sulphur from getting into the atmosphere. Locomotives would be permitted to belch smoke in St. Louis only for six minutes in any hour while getting up steam in a roundhouse, only one minute while on open tracks.

On noxious gases in the air St. Louis doctors blame the high incidence of nose and throat ailments in that city. On the smoky fog which shuts off health-promoting sunrays they blame other ills which St. Louis inhabitants suffer.

Y. M. C. A. workers also campaigned for smoke abatement, because among other reasons, their laundry bills were higher than the laundry bills of Y. M. C. A. workers in Philadelphia and Boston. Property owners refused to paint their buildings or paper walls because smoke begrimed those coatings too quickly. Merchants had to keep their store windows lighted, motorists to use their headlights until noon on winter days. The estimates of what these man-made handicaps to living in St. Louis cost ran into fantastic millions.

Fantastic too were the estimates of completely altering St. Louis' methods of burning fuel. Realtor Dickmann, who wants to be re-elected mayor during Passover, put his ear to the Lenten ground, telegraphed "my kindest regards" to Illinois' Governor Henry Horner and last week signed the ordinance which next winter may make St. Louis cleaner than Pittsburgh.

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From Washington to St. Louis went a hopeful news dispatch last week. At the Bureau of Mines, Metallurgist H. W. St. Clair had put a shrill electrical whistle in a chimney-like tube filled with smoke. When he turned on the whistle, the sound waves (7,000 cycles per second) oriented the fine particles of soot, made them coalesce into heavy flakes which settled to the bottom of the tube. This dust-settling whistle was designed for the chimneys of smelters where gold and silver go up in smoke. It could just as well be put to work in any coal-burning chimney, reasoned Metallurgist St. Clair.

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To flyers, abatement of St. Louis smoke will mean loss of an important landmark. They can see the distinctive dome of haze 100 miles away. According to President Henry H. Harris of General Alloys Corp., who has the unique hobby of photograph ing haze over industrial communities to which he flies his own monoplane, St. Louis' pile of smoky fog resembles a dirty Parker House roll.

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