It’s 1903 in St Louis, Missouri, just months before the World’s Fair will turn this booming city into a Midwestern mecca, and the Smith family’s crowded household is bustling. Eighteen-year-old Rose is finishing high school and hoping for a proposal from her beau. Her brother Lon is heading off to college. Their sister, Esther (played by Judy Garland), is secretly pining for the boy next door. And their younger sisters, Agnes and Tootie, are wreaking havoc in the neighborhood. The 1944 movie musical, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” chronicles four seasons in the lives of the Smith family as they try to come to terms with the fact that father, Alonzo, has accepted a banking position in New York City that will soon take them away from their beloved home and city.
Apart from Judy Garland’s now-famous musical number, “The Trolley Song,” “Meet Me in St Louis” might best be known for introducing the Christmas standard, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” to the world, making it a perennial holiday favorite
for many families, including my own. My favorite character as a child was Tootie, played by Margaret O’Brien (who won one of the first Juvenile Academy Awards for the role), the hilariously morbid and anarchic seven-year-old who has funerals for her dolls before burying them in the backyard and who is digging a tunnel into her neighbor’s yard so that she can reach up through the ground and grab her by the leg.
“Meet Me in St. Louis” is certainly one of the most beautiful films from Hollywood’s Golden Age of Technicolor musicals (which started in the 1930’s with films like Judy Garland’s breakthrough, the family classic, “The Wizard of Oz”), but it’s also a window into what life was like for many in turn-of-the-century St. Louis. For a more thorough guide to the happenings of the time, check out the book, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” by Robert Jackson, which is filled with plenty of historical context and photographs of the fair’s myriad attractions.
Here’s a list of just a few of the things that were introduced to the general public during the 1904 World’s Fair: an early version of a wireless phone; the “telautograph”—a precursor to the modern fax machine; the X-ray machine; the infant incubator; the personal automobile; the airplane; ice cream cones; hot dogs; Dr. Pepper; and cotton candy!
