Free Rubout by Elaine Viets Page B

ceilings, a huge oak counter, and carved church pews to sit in while you waited for your books to be brought from the stacks.
    Today I wanted History and Genealogy, another grand room with a ceiling modeled after an Italian palace. It had helpful librarians. I called and told them what I was looking for, and they assembled everything they had on Ladue. I took the pile of books and files and sat at a long oak table, next to a husband and wife who were researching their family tree.
    The librarians dug up good stuff. I couldn’t wait to tell Lyle what I found. He wanted facts on why I didn’t like Ladue, I’d give him facts. Hah. Old and new, Ladue was one strange place. It had no public pool, no tennis courts, or recreational facilities. If you wanted those, you had to join a country club. Ladue had the highest concentration of private clubs in the area, places that excelled at keeping more people out than they let in. They included the St. Louis Country Club, the Log Cabin Club, the Bogey GolfClub, the Deer Creek Club, Old Warson Country Club, and the Racquet Club Ladue.
    Ladue believes we’re just jealous, which we are. They also say Ladue isn’t as rich as everyone thinks. Huntleigh Village, a tiny St. Louis suburb of 392 people, has a median family income of more than $135,000 a year. Ladue families, on the average, scrape by with around $121,000. Ladue has 108 people living below the poverty level. Huntleigh has none. Not one person. So why don’t we pick on Huntleigh? Why aren’t we calling it elitist and snobbish?
    Because Ladue has this attitude, see. It has more to do with Ladue minds than Ladue money. Ladue likes to sue the socks off people—for reasons that would have the rest of us shrugging and turning away.
    Only Ladue would sue a respectable cohabiting couple, because the city had a rule that more than one family couldn’t live in the same house. Ladue won that lawsuit, too. Took it all the way to the Supreme Court. My hairdresser friend told me the suit had a curious outcome: a gay couple living in Ladue were worried they were next. So the older one adopted the younger. They now commit incest, with the blessing of the city.
    Then Ladue turned around and sued Margaret Gilleo, a woman who was worried about war. She put up a yard sign that said, SAY NO TO WAR IN THE PERSIAN GULF, CALL CONGRESS NOW . The sign was the size of a FOR SALE sign, but Ladue carried on like she was advertising X-rated videos. Gilleo thought she was guaranteed free speech. She challenged Ladue’s signordinance in federal court—and the ordinance was struck down as unconstitutional. Ladue then adopted a new sign ordinance, which wasn’t much different from the first. And Margaret taped a sign the size of a piece of typing paper in a window that Said, FOR PEACE IN THE GULF.
    For that modest wish, Ladue sued her all the way to the Supreme Court. Ladue lost that one. Some Ladueites complained to the press that the sign was tacky. Evidently, it was not tacky to have Americans die in the desert. But it was tacky to mention the problem in a Ladue yard.
    That was Ladue for you—so self-absorbed in petty city politics, it forgot there was a world out there, where people died. My Ladue friends keep telling me “We’re not all like that. Some of us are normal,” and I believe them. Because otherwise, Margaret Gilleo wouldn’t have fought the good fight for free speech. She would have put her sign away and shut up.
    Some people say this rash of lawsuits is a recent thing. But it’s not. Ladue has been getting itself in stupid public scrapes for years. My favorite example was back in the 1940s when Ladue had a ghost library. St. Louis County wanted to set up a county library district and tax everybody ten cents per hundred dollars of assessed valuation. But some municipalities in the county already had thriving libraries, so they were exempt. Ladue did not have a library—until it looked like it would have to pay that ten-cent tax.