By Jeff Fister

I can be incredibly annoying when I’m driving around town with passengers in the car.

By virtue of publishing books on St. Louis history for nearly 20 years, I’ve slowly accumulated tiny bits of St. Louis historical trivia. Occasionally, I can impress an out-of-town visitor, but mostly it’s my kids who bear the brunt of my utterances.

Also, now that I’ve been on the planet for 50 years, and in St. Louis for 41 of those, historical facts are now mixing with my own past into one big grab-bag of entirely useless bits of information — that is, useless until there’s a St. Louis category at a trivia night I’m attending.

Years ago my older kids started calling me “Mr. History.” I thought it was out of respect, but I noticed that they’d always giggle after they called me that. One of them finally told me they watched a cartoon where one of the villains was, you guessed it, Mr. History.  He would show up and start spouting random historical facts, and punishing the other characters by “boring them to bits.”

Thanks, kids.

But I don’t take the history thing too seriously. It’s not that I even LIKED history that much in high school and college. For myself, it was just another class requirement to complete, easier than math and less memorization than French. But in my career as a journalist, editor, PR guy and publisher, I’ve had to master quickly whatever subject area I was writing about. Believe it or not, I spent five years learning to be an “expert” on the U. S. space program when I worked at Boeing.

So becoming a publisher of local history books has helped me to master a lot of PR-worthy historical blurbs, although I’d never profess to be an expert. I’ll leave that to the wonderful authors I’ve had a chance to publish. But I have come to love the rich tapestry of history that permeates our river city.

I was on a recent interview with John Carney of KMOX, promoting my own book called “Counting Chickens.” John threw me a curveball when he asked me to name three surprising things about St.. Louis history. I was stumped to come up with anything quickly; luckily he went to a break and gave me a few minutes.  I forget now which three I came up with except for the nickname of the 04 Wydown streetcar line: the “dinky.”

To illustrate my St. Louis historical “bent,” let’s say you’re captive in my car for a ride to St. Louis University, where I’m picking up my niece Aileen to bring her back to our house for dinner (she’s a student there). Below is a list of landmarks I couldn’t help commenting on. Did you know…

• at Kingshighway and Waterman, the Central Reform Congregation is the city’s only active Jewish synagogue? The temple, built in 2001, is at the site of the old Plymouth Hotel, which eventually became run-down, vacant and crime-ridden before being torn down.

• at Kingshighway and Washington is the “holy corners” historical district. In one two-block area you can see three different types of architectural columns in front of various churches: Doric, Ionic and Corinthian.

• at Olive east of Euclid is the site of Bowood Farms Nursery. The building was formerly an auto repair shop. Farther east on Olive was the filming site for the 1993 movie, “King of the Hill.” It was director Steven Soderbergh’s first movie.

• Speaking of movies, nearby on Westminster Place, actress Susan Sarandon rented a house while filming the movie “White Palace” in 1990. Westminster Place is also the street where writer T.S. Eliot grew up.

• At Olive and Taylor is a monument to the old Gaslight Square. Even I was too young to see the entertainment district in its heyday, but Woody Allen, Tina Turner, the Smothers Brothers, Barbra Streisand and many others performed in those bars in the early 1960s.

• at Lindell near Vandeventer is the site of the old Playboy’s Club. It later became a coffee shop and now is vacant. No, I never visited but I heard stories…

• Farther east on Lindell, past Vandeventer, is the Moolah Theatre and Lounge. It once was a meeting place for the “shriners,” the guys who ride around on tiny motorcycles in parades and operate hospitals for disabled children. It’s also where I worked as a janitor while I was a student at St. Louis University. I’d come in early on weekend mornings to clean up from the “meetings” the night before. Let’s put it this way: those guys knew how to party.

• at Spring and Lindell is the renovated Coronado Ballroom. It was once a fashionable hotel, hosting notables such as President Harry Truman, Queen Marie of Romania, film stars Rudolph Valentino and Barbara Stanwick, Charles Lindbergh and jazz singer Mel Torme. More personal history: it also hosted me for a semester in 1980 when it was NOT renovated and I had a middle-Eastern roommate named Said Waked. Some names you never forget.

I’m nearly halfway through my sentimental journey to St. Louis University, and there’s so much more to tell… but I wouldn’t want to bore you to bits.