Wrestling at the library (2009)

St. Louis' mayoral race, now in its final week, hasn't been a captivating affair.

Incumbent Francis Slay is the odds-on favorite to win a third term after serving eight years of what many have considered capable leadership.

He's pursued his reelection campaign with workmanlike seriousness and has enjoyed a fundraising advantage of about 200 to 1 over his best-known challenger, former Democratic state Sen. Maida Coleman, who is running as an independent.

Still, a candidate forum on Monday evening proved to be irresistible. The pedigree of its sponsors - along with the possibility of spectacle - set the stage.

The venue was St. Louis' stirringly beautiful Central Library, the Italian Renaissance masterpiece on Olive Street, an entire city block of Maine granite. It was in the library's elegant Events Pavilion, an oak-trimmed former periodicals room whose high ceiling is decorated according to Michelangelo's design of the Laurentian Library in Florence.

This isn't the first time the Central Library has played an active, if glancing, role in issues of the day. A 1963 news story by Post-Dispatch reporter William F. Woo (who later became editor of this page and the paper), for example, reveals how at the height of the Cold War, the Central Library had been "officially designated ... a place of refuge if one is in the neighborhood in time of atomic attack, and 718 barrels of water and 470 cases of survival crackers are kept there for just such an emergency."

The forum was organized by the venerable League of Women Voters, and it appeared that it would need to apply every ounce of its natural authority to maintain decorum.

In the news on the day of the forum were reports that a van had been torched in front of the home of Green Party candidate Elston McCowan. Mr. McCowan, something of a combustible figure himself, suggested that Mr. Slay might be complicit.

"I wouldn't put it past him," McCowan told a reporter.

This, in other words, has been a campaign with few holds barred.

The forum audience was made up of community activists and party faithful. They, too, were prepared to rumble - with catcalls, mocking laughter and strategically timed coughing at the ready. One keen City Hall watcher said of the crowd of 200, everybody had come at the behest of one of the campaigns.

"There's not an undecided voter in the house," he said.

But there was little misbehavior. Most of the talk was about tending to the needy, narrowing the racial divides and providing education and opportunities for all people. Sometimes, members of the racially and economically diverse audience would groan or find it impossible to hold their applause. The mayor fielded a hail of verbal rocks - but he remained composed, even good humored, throughout.

Perhaps one of St. Louis' most underrated cultural contributions is "Wrestling at the Chase" - the professional wrestling events staged at the Chase Hotel from the late 1950s until the early 1980s. The matches, during their early years, were held in the imposing Khorassan Room, a place better known for high-society affairs.

"Wrestling at the Chase" attracted people from all walks of life and, by doing so, revealed a community uncharacteristically at ease with itself - reveling in low amusement in a hifalutin' setting.

Monday's candidate forum offered some of that same camp and happy contrast. But, in the end, in so elegant a place, one was struck by how the community really was wrestling with lofty matters.

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("Wrestling at the Library" first appeared as an unsigned editorial by Eddie Roth in the April 1, 2009 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)