For a guy from small-town Iowa, covering business in St. Louis was a dream job.
The city’s rich factory base and its roster of world-class corporate headquarters promised a rich vein of stories about titans of industry whose decisions affected thousands, if not millions, of lives.
Little did I know, as a young reporter in 1981, that I would spend the next four decades chronicling the erosion of that industrial base and the toppling of one venerable corporate empire after another.
My first front-page story was about the sale of Mallinckrodt, a century-old chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturer, to Avon Products. McDonnell Douglas, Trans World Airlines, May Department Stores, Anheuser-Busch, Monsanto and many other prominent St. Louis names would make the same transition from headquarters to branch-office status.
People are also reading…
Meanwhile, the manufacturing jobs that powered St. Louis’ economy for much of the 20th century were disappearing. One colleague in the ’80s wrote about so many factory and foundry closings that we called him the Grim Reaper.
In case you haven’t guessed from the tone of this piece, I’m winding down my career as a full-time journalist. I’ll retire from the Post-Dispatch at the end of this month, although I still plan to contribute columns regularly. Jim Gallagher and I also plan to continue our Bottom Line video discussion series.
Don’t mistake my reflective tone, however, for nostalgia about a glorious corporate past. As I’ve often reminded readers, the economy evolves through a process of creative destruction, which has been accelerated by the internet and globalization.
St. Louis had a tremendous burst of creative energy from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th. Some of the great businesses from that era had grown sclerotic by the turn of the 21st century.
Anheuser-Busch, for example, was slow to realize that the beer market was global, not national, and found itself in the crosshairs of a Belgian-Brazilian group called InBev. When local officials sent up plaintive cries of protest, I told them to get a grip. It was a cold-blooded business deal, reflecting market forces that weren’t unique to St. Louis.
A more encouraging trend has occupied much of my attention in the last decade or so. As St. Louis became less of a big-company town, it became more hospitable to entrepreneurs, those risk-takers who forgo the security of a steady paycheck for the excitement of creating something new.
We used to be criticized as a place where entrepreneurs found neither funding nor respect. A failed startup in Silicon Valley would be regarded as a step toward success, but in the old St. Louis it was an indelible black mark.
Fortunately, that has changed. Success stories like Benson Hill, Confluence Discovery Technologies, Nerdy and TopOpps have made it respectable, even glamorous, to work for a startup. Venture capital is flowing into St. Louis like never before.
To be sure, St. Louis has problems. Longstanding ones include political fragmentation, racial division and a ruling class in Jefferson City that pays too little attention to the needs of a metro area that accounts for 45% of Missouri’s economy.
As I’ve pointed out, we also face a severe demographic challenge: Based on projections, the number of area residents between the prime working ages of 25 and 54 will actually decline over the next few years.
Still, after 40 years of covering the local economy’s ups and downs, I end my career as an optimist. As the entrepreneurial energy continues to build, the folks who are creating the businesses of the future may also show us how to create a better St. Louis.
Next week, Nicklaus reflects on his own role over the decades.