'Death of the Blues

St. Louis had the Cardinals and Budweiser and the zoo. And it also had the blues. Once (1870) the third largest city in the U.S., it had slipped down to eighth. The city was one-quarter slum, another quarter near-slum, and no new office building had been put up in 25 years. The municipal budget was deep ($4,200,000) in the red. Downtown traffic was chaotic, industry was pulling out, property values and business activity were dropping; e.g., city retail sales, up almost everywhere else, were down 10% from 1948. Said a St. Louis cabbie of that dismal time, 1953: "This city was dying."

St. Louis also had a hidden asset: a man named Raymond Roche Tucker. Fourth-generation St. Louisan Ray Tucker, now 60, was raised on the staid, comfortably middle-class South Side, attended both public and parochial schools, scholarshiped his way through St. Louis University ('17). Set on a teaching career, he went on to Washington University for a B.S. in mechanical engineering, got it in 1920, was rewarded with a post on the engineering faculty.

Ten for Twenty. Engineer Tucker won his academic spurs--and his first crack at public service--by specializing in industrial problems, notably the elimination of St. Louis' then-notorious smog. In the late '303, while serving a stint as smoke commissioner, he drafted and helped fight through to victory the city's model smoke ordinance. (His solution: cut down on the amount of volatile material used in industrial fuel.) Named chairman of Washington University's department of mechanical engineering in 1942, he kept serving political stints, e.g., as head of a freeholder committee that drafted a modern city charter.

In February 1953 Independent Democrat Tucker was approached by a couple of friends with an unattractive proposition. They wanted him to give up his comfortable $20,000-a-year income and run for mayor--at $10,000 a year, plus the use of a chauffeur-driven Lincoln sedan. Said his wife Edythe: "Ray went through a change of life or something. He decided to run."

Plunging into the Democratic primary with the St. Louis press behind him, Tucker beat down the solid opposition of the regular Democrats, triumphed over the machine candidate by a slim (1,500 votes) majority. A month later, with a solid phalanx of G.O.P. and Democratic friends and businessmen behind him, Ray Tucker beat his Republican opponent and became St. Louis' 38th mayor in a stunning (142,839-82,000) landslide.

Renaissance Man. Since then, says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Ray Tucker has sparked a "notable civic renaissance." An ardent believer in bipartisanship on the local level. Tucker's method was to invite the city's business leaders to help out on important problems; e.g., he handed Republican Edwin M. Clark, president of Southwestern Bell Telephone Co., the job of studying and straightening out the traffic tangle. Using similar methods, Tucker pulled St. Louis out of the red and away from the blight by pushing through 1) a city earnings tax. 2) a $1,500.000 bond issue to clear and redevelop (with private and federal capital) a 14-acre slum area hard by city hall, and 3) a $110 million public-improvements bond issue, largest in St. Louis history. The programs, closely supervised by Mayor-Engineer Tucker, have shown some spectacular results--among them, the rehabilitation of 4,150 blighted dwellings in two large (total: 71 city blocks) near-slum areas. In the cooperative drive to improve housing the city put up $400,000, the residents $900,000.

One day last week St. Louis voters went to the polls to decide whether Mayor Tucker deserved a second term. As the votes came in, the mayor, his gold-rimmed eyeglasses perched on his nose, looked like the father of the bride before the ceremony--reserved, a little tense. He need not have worried. He won in a second landslide, piling up a record 71,000 majority and carrying all of the city's 28 wards.

When his opponent conceded. Ray Tucker briefly thanked his followers over TV for their "vote of confidence," went home to the house on Vermont Avenue where he has lived for some 50 years.

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