The recent closure of a local longtime business struck a real chord with me, sort of like reopening an old wound.
The Leader recently reported that Bluff City Beer will go out of business July 20, having sold its distribution rights to two other liquor distributors.
Bluff City, which dates back to 1927 and the Prohibition era, operated warehouses in Herculaneum, Cape Girardeau and Poplar Bluff. The buildings are up for sale and the 17 employees in Herculaneum will be looking for work.
Those of you who have ever been laid off from a good-paying job, raise your hand.
I’ve been there. So I feel for those workers. Unemployment hurts, and the pain grows as time passes from days to weeks to months and for some, years.
Ironically, I never had anything to do with Bluff City or any of the retailers it did business with, because I’m a non-drinker and have been since my early 20s. So it was already well off my personal radar screen. But lost jobs are lost livelihoods and I sympathize.
It’s a reminder that all things are temporary, and if you live long enough, the touchstones of your past can disappear and leave you with nothing but memories. I’ve experienced this several times, aside from the job loss I went through in 2009.
In mid-May I received a notice from Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. that the annuity contract I owned was no longer carried by a MetLife subsidiary, General American Life. General American had been merged into another MetLife company and ceased to exist.
If I were just a customer, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. But I worked full-time in communications for General American for nearly 27 years, including the company’s heyday in the 1980s and 1990s. General American had big offices in downtown St. Louis (where I worked) and in south St. Louis County and quite a few of its employees, like me, lived in Jefferson County. Some of you reading this worked there or knew people who did.
So the news got to me a little. The saga of General American is much too long to cover here, but in short, this was a company with a truly noble beginning and a humiliating end.
It was formed to rescue another insurer, Missouri State Life, in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression. General American grew into one of the largest mutual insurance companies in the Midwest and at its peak had, as I recall, more than $20 billion in assets.
But this staid, almost boring enterprise got caught up in the high-finance boom of the late 1990s and through a series of risky moves that backfired, was in danger of defaulting on its core life insurance business. MetLife rode to the rescue, bought General American and basically unwound the company over the next 10 years. It was during that period that I left for a magazine editing job. Three weeks after I left, my old department was disbanded.
So a piece of me died, figuratively speaking, when my old employer went defunct.
Some of you can identify with another extinction experience that hit me in the mid-1980s. My high school, New Trier West in Northfield, Ill., closed because of declining enrollment. Talk about irony – the school was built in 1965 for $10 million, a lot of money in those days. Once all the Baby Boomers had passed through, there weren’t enough younger families to keep that fancy campus open. It’s been a white elephant ever since – as General American’s downtown St. Louis headquarters was until Laclede Gas (now Spire Energy) moved there in 2015 and revived the building.
St. Louis may lead the nation in organizational extinctions, public and private. In the high school category, there’s Beaumont High, Berkeley High, Cleveland High and most recently, John F. Kennedy High, a Catholic school. On the business side, the latest to go is Monsanto, swallowed up by the German firm Bayer. McDonnell-Douglas merged into Boeing, Ralston-Purina gave way to Nestle, Anheuser Busch became AB InBev and the big brokerage firm A.G. Edwards sold out to Wachovia (which itself got bought by Wells Fargo). And the pharmacy benefits firm, Express Scripts – homegrown in St. Louis like all the aforementioned bought-out firms – plans to merge into Cigna.
What’s left, Imo’s Pizza and Ted Drewes?
So I feel like saluting enterprises that last. Have you noticed all the local groups and entities marking major anniversaries this year? Besides this being Jefferson County’s Bicentennial (200 years), you’ve got 100 years for Goodwill Industries in St. Louis, the 100th PGA golf championship playing in St. Louis in August, and the 100th anniversary of the Muny Opera in St. Louis. It’s also Illinois’ bicentennial.
And mark your calendars for August 2019, the 25th anniversary of – Leader Publications.
Let’s toast all the bygone companies and the surviving milestones, and remember the wisdom displayed recently on the Comtrea office street sign in Festus: “The past is history, the future a mystery; today is a gift; that’s why they call it the present.”
