Office profile: Saint Louis;

              u Meet me in Saint Louis" "Every night we passed towns, some of
them away back up on black hillsides,
nothing but just a shiny bed of lights;
not a house you could see. The fifth
night we passed Saint Louis, and it was
like the whole world lit up.
In St. Petersburg they used to say
there was twenty or thirty thousand
people in Saint Louis, but I never
believed it till I see that wonderful
spread of lights at two o'clock that
still night. There warn't a sound
there; everybody was asleep..."
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
by Mark Twain.
In the 130 years since Huck Finn and
Jim passed the city in the silence of
night as they floated down the
Mississippi on their raft, Saint Louis
has certainly changed. Throughout the
19th century it was the great industrial
and commercial center of the
Mississippi Valley, a magnet for
capital, for business and for talented
people of many skills. It is still the
focal point of human activity in the
valley, a center of commerce, production
and creative thought. With close to
2,400,000 people in the metropolitan
area, Greater Saint Louis ranks tenth
in the country in population. A century ago
Saint Louis was America's third largest
city, surpassed only by New York and
Philadelphia. Although other newer cities
have passed it in size during the past
several decades, Saint Louis yields to
none in its long and proud heritage of
excellence, its service to the nation in
the opening of the West, and its promise
of continued greatness.
A few people who remember still speak
with nostalgia of the great Louisiana
Purchase Exposition of 1904 as the
finest world's fair of the many held
in this country. The memory lingers on in
the old song:
"Meet me in Saint Louis, Louis,
Meet me at the fair... "
The soaring Gateway Arch, designed by
the noted architect Eero Saarinen and
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