May 25, 2024 • 34 mins
In this episode of the Cassilly Chronicles, I sit down with my mother, Gail Soliwoda Cassilly, to delve into the intricacies and challenges of the artistic life. We explore her journey as an artist, the early days of City Museum, and the unique dynamic between her and my father, Bob Cassilly. We dive deep into the genesis of the Lafayette shop and its role in our family's creative journey. The Cassilly shop was a hub of artistic innovation and rehabilitation, where my parents transformed old facades and contributed to major art projects in Saint Louis, including those at the City Museum and the Saint Louis Zoo.
From the bustling creativity that fueled their projects to the detailed craftsmanship in the Cassilly shop, this conversation offers a raw and intimate glimpse into the heart of our family's artistic legacy. Join us as we unravel stories that are as complex and vibrant as the artworks themselves. Don't forget to support us on Patreon for exclusive content and early access to future episodes!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
Welcome to the Cassley Chronicles.
Kail Salawatta Cassley.
She's a talented artist, a teacher, and one of the founders of city museum.
Also my mom.
I'm Max Kessley.
Here she is sharing a story with me about the time before I existed.
When she was a nun on a mission to Malawi.
Africa, that's East Africa.
(00:26):
Starting an art program for a girls school.
I had been in Africa, I guess, for almost three years.
So, of course, I hadn't seen my family in three years.
And they decided, actually, it was my grandma poplaski whose idea, of all people, was to come to Africa.
And she was in her eighties then.
And so my mother and my sister and my grandmother were all supposed to come.
(00:52):
And it turned out that my grandmother, because of her polish descent, somehow could not get a visa, enter the country.
It was very convoluted.
I don't remember the exact reason why.
But anyway, it was extremely disappointing for her and my mother and my sister.
So it wound up that just the two of them came.
(01:14):
And so, as was my custom during all these years of being away, I would write letters to my mother and tell her various things we needed for the art department or the nuns.
Sometimes it might be pair of stockings or scissors or who knows?
So anyway, you know, my mother, I told her to bring any kind of interesting food items she could think of that she was able to bring.
(01:37):
So she brought shaken bake.
Grandma, can I help you make your special fried chicken?
If you can keep a secret, I use shake and bake now.
So we went to mass in the village that night.
And we had prepared the chicken with the shaken bake on it.
And set the chicken on a little counter in our little kitchen, went to mass.
(01:59):
And when we came back, I walked in first, and I saw the chicken looked really strange.
There were a lot of black things on it.
So it turned out the chicken was covered in ants.
Oh, no.
And they weren't big ants, but they were lay.
And so I kind of hid it so nobody would see it.
(02:20):
Well, particularly my mother.
She didn't see it.
So when she was in the other room, I proceeded to try and shake the ants off.
You do?
Sure.
I'll show you.
First we shake.
Then we bake the chicken pieces as best as I could.
Of course, lost some of the shake and bake.
But anyhow, so my sister walked in and saw what I was doing.
(02:41):
And I just said, you know, don't tell mom, whatever.
So anyway, we wound up cooking the chicken with the ant residue chicken a la ant.
And you know, we thought it was wonderful, and my mother never knew.
All the better.
Oh, no, she did find out about it.
Well, probably after I might have told her.
My sister might have told her after.
I remember her hearing the story years ago.
(03:03):
Yeah, so it was one of many little episodes.
Mother, why isn't my fried chicken is crispy and juicy?
I want your recipe.
Welcome back to our space, fellow citizens.
We will check back in with my mom a little bit later, but now let's set the stage.
While I love to shoot from the hip to riff and to share a laugh, there are times when reality steps in and the curtain behind the entertainment is pulled away.
(03:31):
This isn't just another edutainment podcast into an authentic experience.
My life has been a tapestry of artistic people, and let me tell you, they can be quite the characters.
Join me, my wife Maria.
Hello.
And our friend Chris from St.
Louis, Patina.
Hi, Max, how are you?
We've tried our best to keep this family friendly by bleeping out some colorful language if it occurs.
(03:53):
But just as a heads up, content warnings are a thing here.
And just to be clear, city Museum has its charm for kids.
This podcast explores the deeper and sometimes darker sides of life, death, and everything in between.
And as Mister Charles would say, explore with your own disorder.
Discretion.
Unlock ad free episodes of the Cassidy.
Chronicles and dive deeper with exclusive digital content@patreon.com.
(04:15):
capturedPlanet Mister Charles worked at the museum from day one, and he would do all the tours for the groups especially.
He was the sort of unofficial official tour guide.
Yeah, he would also, on a personal note, he would also sing my name whenever he would see me, which was always lovely.
(04:41):
So in the first episode, we talked about the giant snake, a burmese python that was 13ft long, and how it showed up in my courtyard when I was about twelve years old.
Well, after starting this and sending off the first episode, there was a guy who had video footage of my dad working throughout the years, and his name is Mark Silverman.
(05:02):
And when I approached him, he got back with me.
And we've been going through some footage of my dad.
And in it is where the snake would have gone inside the aquarium.
Inside the aquarium.
They're building the World aquarium.
And I did find a video of a snake in there that they're filming.
(05:23):
I'm thinking it's not the snake because we do have a photo of the snake and there's a different pattern on it.
It's a pretty big snake.
But I love how there were multiple snakes then, is what that means.
Oh, yeah.
There were also a teenage max in that filming as well.
Yes.
There's a lot of me slacking off in the background, certainly.
(05:46):
And it's definitely.
I haven't felt old till watching these.
Yeah.
Makes you realize how much time went by, because they're almost.
The videos are 20 years old.
Almost.
Wow.
The house that I grew up in, the Caroline mission, as it's known, that's where if city museum started in a basement garage, it 100% started in the.
(06:24):
At the Caroline mission, which was an old mission in Lafayette Square.
When my parents bought the house, they actually bought three houses and split it with their friend Jay Watson Scott, and he rehabbed one of the houses and sold it.
(06:44):
And then my dad and my.
His people rehabbed the house next door and sold it.
And then they took the nice crown jewel of it, which was the Caroline mission, and decked it out.
And it had a whole bunch, like, when you walk into the front door, there's a whole bunch of mirrors, and you don't really know which way you should go.
(07:07):
And it.
The mirrors are actually from Westport Plaza, the giant.
There were some.
Some mirrors that were misprinted or something, so they had to.
They recalled them, and my dad bought them for cheap and put them in the house.
And that's trucks.
He made a table out of it.
(07:27):
So our dining room table growing up was a giant mirror, sort of a yellow mirror.
Yeah, it was.
Or golden.
Yeah, very golden.
Um, and they would break occasionally.
So he would go pull them out from this, the, uh, the basement storage.
(07:49):
And get new ones.
Yeah, he had, like, ten of them down there waiting.
Models set up there.
That's where we would.
He would be playing and he would be working on his stuff.
Um, and then it became like a play place for us.
So your.
Your parents definitely delineated, like, so how did they define their studio is where they worked on, you know, small models of what would eventually become very large items that would say, there's a shop.
(08:17):
Yeah.
You definitely do what, one 6th scale and then a third scale.
So, like, a little modelo or bozzetto would be worked on in the studio.
Or even on the front, like, table, where we'd be that eating table.
Bob, clear off the table.
We need to eat dinner.
And then you'd get that stuff done.
And then you take those bossetti over to the shop, where you then reinterpret it and expand it to the full size, which in some cases would be a dozen feet wide or tall.
(08:48):
Yeah.
Okay.
So I think that's important.
For people to realize that each place where your parents worked had a different component to the artistic process.
Oh, yeah.
And everything bled into everything.
So at the shop, which we would call that, because that's where it was a lot more work time for parents, too.
(09:10):
I think the stage was set a little bit, and we'd hang out and draw stuff on paper on the floor, and, yeah, go pick up trash outside and, you know, go buy some junk food, get some Mountain Dew and Doritos.
(09:30):
So, sort of the invention of the artistic pieces would occur back at your family's house, where the studios were.
So the actual kind of coming up with ideas would happen back there, and then the execution would happen at the shop.
Would that be kind of another way of putting it?
Oh, yeah, completely.
And the.
The original house that they bought that my parents lived in, my mom still lives there.
(09:57):
It was definitely a showroom for what they could do and be weird and wacky.
Would they have clients come over to your house?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So the house even kind of functioned as part of the business then.
Yeah.
So if you walk in through the front door of my mom's house, there's the courtyard, and then when you walk in the front door, there's a mirror, and it's kind of like a false.
(10:22):
Like, to the.
Oh, and then that's to the left, there's a mirror, and then to the right, there's some stairs that go down, and then behind those stairs, there's another mirror.
Right?
And then to the right a little bit, there's the stairs that take you up.
So no matter what you think, you're going to go left, but you have to go right.
(10:43):
I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
And so it's definitely a different house, and it has these huge skylights that were definitely skylights from a different building originally.
They've been replaced now for leaking.
Leaking reasons.
There's a big.
(11:03):
Whenever it would rain, it would always leak.
She would help with the business end.
Of things and the grunt work.
I caught up with her and recorded.
Our conversation a couple months ago.
Let's roll this tape.
You know, I started teaching part time, but basically.
(11:24):
Well, he in particular, realized we had to find a way to live off of this.
And, you know, that's often the artist's dilemma.
Okay, I'm an artist.
I have a degree.
But now, you know, how am I going to make a penny?
And we live in this historically rich neighborhood in Lafayette Square.
And so he had some developer buddies who were making new infill housing, but also had to have architectural detail involved.
(11:50):
And so we experimented and learned the craft of making some of these architectural ornamentation with a variety of materials.
And that started to grow, developed.
And that's when we actually developed Castleine Cassley as a sort of an architectural sculptural firm.
Initially, it was quick because individual house projects or a couple, you know, row houses, to suddenly, I think, Jerry King, who developed the Manhattan muse.
(12:20):
I can't remember how many units there were, but there were a lot of them.
And they all needed this ornamentation, you know, from cheek stones to cornices, windows, sills, all of that kind of stuff.
So we became a real production company at that point.
And that's when we had to hire people and get a bigger space because our basement, we started using these.
(12:43):
I think they're called polyurethane foams, which swell in the mold and become firm and are very weather resistant.
But we knew nothing about that except that the material existed.
So we started doing all of these.
We had experimented like crazy in the basement.
We'd have some of these things that shrunk to like nothing.
Other things that grew twice the size of what they were supposed to be, other things that whooshed up and melted, until finally we got the formula right to make these things.
(13:11):
And to this day, those cornice ornamentations are still made out of that product that we started developing here.
And it worked.
And every developers in particular saw the product, got interested, and bit by bit, it grew.
So the using of concrete was a natural progression.
(13:31):
It didn't start that way.
Did you start by doing, initially, actual terracotta?
No, because terracotta has to be fired, as you know.
But no, we.
Sometimes we would make a sample out of terracotta so we could make a mold off of that.
But we didn't do any reproduction in terracotta.
(13:54):
I remember we drive all over town to pick up those pieces, and I have to go to Duke's shop and.
No, I mean, we would do cast concrete, but it would have a terracotta like finish because we would add dyes to the products.
So it was basically a colored concrete.
The facade of the castle and Cassley building, that was almost an ad for.
(14:18):
What you guys could do.
Am I wrong?
Especially when your father put the praying mantis on top of the building so that everybody driving Highway 44 saw this gigantic praying mantis, and it was like, what the.
And then saw the building with all the ornamentation on it and said, grandma.
Would take me by that every time, every weekend, because she would get me Friday, Grandma Judy.
(14:40):
Yeah.
And her and grandpa would pick me.
Up and I'd say, wave to the mantis.
And I'd wave to the mantis.
Yeah.
So, you know, that was what you call free advertising, except it wasn't free to make it, but was afraid to put it on a roof.
It's weird when your mom is married to God.
Before she was your mom back to Africa.
(15:01):
So you were an art teacher there?
I was.
I started the art program there.
It was the first program of its kind in that part of Malawi, anyway, and they needed that kind of program to graduate.
It sounds strange, or to be credited, I should say, as a secondary school.
(15:23):
Sounds strange.
But they did.
So that's why I went there in the first place, because I had just received my degree and knew enough to do a startup department.
The girls loved it.
Absolutely loved everything we did, you know, from batik to digging clay in the creeks and firing pots, making our own glazes, coring, stone carving, soapstone.
(15:51):
Everything was an adventure, tons of fun.
They loved it.
They loved it.
We'd have these little exhibits in the art room, and it was a good time.
I wrote a little textbook with mimeograph pages, if anybody remembers what the mimeograph is.
The precursor to the copier, right?
(16:12):
Yeah.
What was the other machine called?
The diddle machine.
No, I don't even remember, but.
So I wrote this little textbook, and, of course, plagiarized a bunch of little stuff for my art books.
But out there, I didn't think that was going to be an issue, and it wasn't.
I don't think it is, no.
So I actually can't remember what happened once I left the school, if they continued it or not.
(16:34):
Didn't you remember the name?
It was in Likuni secondary school for girls.
It was in a little village called Likuni.
L e k l I k u n I, li kuni.
And it was just about.
It was about 15 miles from Li Longue, which was more of a little major city.
(16:58):
And so we lived there in the compound, in the school compound, and the girls boarded there, so we just really won.
Tight knit community.
When I went in, French was one of the major languages, and I didn't know French either, so I learned a little bit of French while I was in the convent.
And, you know, then they took English, became a major secondary language of the group.
(17:23):
So they were bilingual, basically.
So I went to a country that was English speaking as well as Chichewa speaking.
Chichewa.
Chichewa.
And I taught in English, so.
Which was required.
But I did go to a language course for three months when I first got there, and to learn a bit of Chichewa, which helped.
(17:49):
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think it's also respectful when you're in a different.
Yeah.
Or the people would love it when you tried to say something, even if you were, you know, miles wrong, they still acknowledged you and appreciated the effort.
Yeah.
(18:12):
What was after?
So Lafayette shop and then what was the next property that they bought to work in?
Because there were a couple other, like, subsequent studios.
Right.
Yeah.
There's the gratiot building.
That was.
They bought that.
And if you need help to remember the name, it's giant biggest sculpture of a giraffe there.
So I'm.
Your dad could be a petty at times, which I sort of admired as far as, like, he.
(18:38):
For the giraffe building.
For the giraffe sculpture.
So it was gonna be the tallest, but then it wasn't quite tall enough.
So then he added on the.
No, no.
So I don't know if they set out for it to necessarily be the tallest sculpture, if that makes any, like.
But they were like, it's gonna be a tall sculpture.
And then they found out that it was.
Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying.
Like, it wasn't even the goal necessary.
(19:00):
But once he found out there was another one, and it was, like, so close, it's like, oh, well, as long as we're here, why don't we make it the tallest one?
So they added on, like a.
Like, the tongue, like an extra long giraffe tongue to make sure it was the largest sculpture in Texas.
So, yeah, we have this large sculpture in Texas.
(19:22):
And my dad wanted to keep making even more art that was huge and breaking world records.
And he had taken Texas by storm, you know, and so he was looking for a building with a way higher ceiling.
And the polar wave ice building came into his targeted sites.
(19:47):
Anyway, I asked my mom about this a couple months ago.
Okay, roll the tape.
So the polar wave ice building.
Mm hmm.
How long was that owned?
Oh, by us?
(20:08):
Not that long.
I can't recall exactly.
Maybe four years or something like that.
Maybe a little longer.
But I think the only thing in there at the time was a.
I think it was being rented for truck storage or something like that.
(20:30):
Freight storage.
And so it was a.
They had big oil pits from these trucks, you know, draining the old dirty oil.
I mean, literally, like 3ft deep kind of holes everywhere.
You had to be very careful where you.
Oh, I remember yeah, people weren't.
And so Bob, of course, adored space.
(20:51):
What he loved about this was the space, the height of the ceilings.
I don't know what that was, but it was extremely high.
And so that was always excited to him because he thought he could build something huge, you know, so.
But the other thing I think he realized right from the beginning, and I'm pretty sure this is true, is that this building was fairly close to the property of Missouri botanical Gardens.
(21:18):
And I don't know if he thought that they would someday expand or need it or just kind of.
It was a speculation or intuition or what it was.
But sure enough, that came true, and they did need it and come knocking, wanting to buy the building for their research center, which is still there, I think.
(21:43):
Yes, it is.
So, you know, that was an opportunity to, you know, I think.
I don't know.
I think we paid $60,000 for that building at the time, which was a crazy price for a building that big.
But it did have a lot of environmental issues.
Yeah, I remember it was a chemical spell, basically.
Yeah.
It was not something that most people would want.
(22:05):
And, of course, we didn't have a lot of money.
Not at all.
But my mother stepped in, and I think she lent us $20,000.
So that helped get us there.
So we went from there to, you know, selling it at a gigantic profit to be able to shop for something much bigger.
(22:26):
And Bob had always been interested in owning a property in downtown St.
Louis.
And again, the bigger the better.
And that's when, you know, the international shoe company came into focus, and, you know, the rest of that is history.
Yeah.
What I'm trying to figure out is where did the genesis for the fish tank and all that stuff come from?
(22:54):
I don't know what came first, but I know that one of the first ideas your dad had when we started to have some money to develop the bottom floor of the back building.
Now, each floor there's ten stories, but each floor is 60,000.
So he had this idea to build an aquarium.
(23:14):
At that point, St.
Louis didn't have much of an aquarium, except I think Leonard's aquarium did exist.
But.
So because we would be on ground floor weight wise, it could accommodate a.
A lot of water and weight.
So that was the initial idea.
(23:35):
And as we started to decide or discover that we knew nothing about keeping fish alive, that idea kind of started to morph into something else.
But we did keep a fish tank, one fish tank at the time.
Now, there's more.
Leonard was never scheduled to have like, he.
It was just like a seed.
(23:58):
No, I don't believe Leonard was going to participate in any of that early adventure.
Leonard came into the scene later to take over an area and really have his own project.
Way before the museum, they were redoing the front building.
Correct.
And we pulled up the carpet, and there was that really nice granite from the original building.
(24:25):
And it being an aha moment for the whole project, it definitely started as a blueprint for, like, uncovering this terrible renovation job that had been done probably 20 years before in the seventies.
And it was just peeling back that and exposing the actual building that was still there almost.
And then adding the castle touch, if you will.
(24:48):
Yeah.
We started trying to salvage and refinish parts some of the floors of that building, because there's a ton of water down.
Oh, yeah.
And flooding and a lot of warped and rotten, moldy everything.
It was everywhere.
It was terrible.
They had to redo every floor.
(25:08):
So, you know, we started fixing up smaller areas at a time, and the idea was to find tenants, and that that tenant income would then enable Bob to start thinking about bigger projects and have extra money in his pocket to develop something else in the bigger part of the building, which was the back part of the building, the warehouse, which was really what it was interested in right from the beginning.
(25:33):
So that's really what it is.
We'll leave you there with that interview with my mom.
You can hear more on our patreon.
I have some behind the scenes stuff.
And I interviewed her at her house, which was the original Caroline mission and where Casseline Cassidy originally started.
And it's a really interesting house.
(25:56):
Yeah.
Christian mission.
And.
Yeah.
Because it very much is different than all the other houses on the street.
Yeah.
It's set back.
Right?
Set back a whole bunch.
There's not really any backyard at all.
Right?
Correct.
The house sits.
There's no backyard.
House sits on the alley line.
Yeah.
And you could load in all your gear for making stuff just right in.
(26:16):
I bet that was really appealing to your parents.
Yes.
And so, yeah, my mom and my dad started it out of the basement there because my dad was flipping houses before that.
Really?
I didn't.
So you renovated houses?
He did.
I think in all the photos of him and his first wife.
They're up on the corner house on Hickory.
(26:37):
Oh, wow.
Hickory and 18.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we would go to the shop, which.
The facade of the shop is amalgamation of a couple different things, different projects of his.
And there's one that is the Manhattan townhouses, I believe a couple.
(27:03):
Yeah.
It was at least designed at the same time, maybe not used in it, because I believe they're a little bit different.
And that was very much, that front was made up of.
I call it a pastiche, which is a combination and conglomeration of a bunch of different works of art combined together into something new.
(27:24):
And in the art history world, sometimes the word pastiche can be a little bit of a dirty word, particularly in the museum world, because back in the 19th century, unscrupulous art dealers, what they would do is they take pieces from different works of art, and maybe a lot of it was damaged.
So they just take the undamaged pieces of work from a work of art, and they'd combine them together to create a new work of art, which obviously isn't very honest, but in this instance, pastiche is actually very much a compliment because your parents combine together these various different disparate elements and made something that's really a very beautiful, cogent whole, in my opinion.
(28:03):
Some of my first memories are of the shop.
Really?
Yeah.
Like what?
Dusty.
A lot of it's the smell.
What kind of smells?
What does it smell like?
All this concrete smells pretty earthy.
Right?
Right.
One of my most fondest memories is.
Of my grandfather whistling while working in the wood shop.
I would eat lunch up there, surrounded by the scent of wood and the hum of creativity.
(28:26):
Over the years, we've seen so many places transform into cherished memories.
I truly appreciate the attention everyone has paid to the Cassley shop.
Thank you, Jackie, Dana, for everything that you've done so far.
It's overwhelming in the best way.
Our next episode should be an episode about Bill Chrisman.
He is one of the original artists who helped start city museum with my parents.
(28:50):
He started beatnik Bob's and he also started Joe's cafe.
Who was Joe?
Was Joe a person?
Find out next episode how can you help?
Join our patreon for $5 or $10 and get ad free content, exclusive videos.
Full interviews, and more.
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(29:11):
If you can't become a patron, please.
Leave a review and share our podcast on your social media channels.
An insightful sneak peek of our conversation with Bill Chrisman, taken a couple years ago.
Actually, at this point, lucky dog lucky.
Let's see.
All right, so are you ready?
(29:34):
Do you have your questions ready?
No.
Yes.
Do I have to write my own goddamn question?
No.
Can I use the word motherf er on the tape without computing?
Doesn't matter to me.
Worst case, we'll bleep you but we'll try and find, like, a good, you know what bleep noise.
When I was down in Florida, I was reading this guy's memoirs, and he said, technically speaking, wouldn't your father be a mother?
(30:02):
Bleep.
Yes.
Yes.
Everybody's father.
Everyone's father.
So it should say, happy bleep bleep.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Are you sure about that?
Why not?
What the hell?
This has been a captured planet production.
(30:28):
Goodbye, now.
Welcome to the Cassley Chronicles.
Kail Salawatta Cassley.
She's a talented artist, a teacher, and one of the founders of city museum.
Also my mom.
I'm Max Kessley.
Here she is sharing a story with me about the time before I existed.
When she was a nun on a mission to Malawi.
Africa, that's East Africa.
(00:26):
Starting an art program for a girls school.
I had been in Africa, I guess, for almost three years.
So, of course, I hadn't seen my family in three years.
And they decided, actually, it was my grandma poplaski whose idea, of all people, was to come to Africa.
And she was in her eighties then.
And so my mother and my sister and my grandmother were all supposed to come.
(00:52):
And it turned out that my grandmother, because of her polish descent, somehow could not get a visa, enter the country.
It was very convoluted.
I don't remember the exact reason why.
But anyway, it was extremely disappointing for her and my mother and my sister.
So it wound up that just the two of them came.
(01:14):
And so, as was my custom during all these years of being away, I would write letters to my mother and tell her various things we needed for the art department or the nuns.
Sometimes it might be pair of stockings or scissors or who knows?
So anyway, you know, my mother, I told her to bring any kind of interesting food items she could think of that she was able to bring.
(01:37):
So she brought shaken bake.
Grandma, can I help you make your special fried chicken?
If you can keep a secret, I use shake and bake now.
So we went to mass in the village that night.
And we had prepared the chicken with the shaken bake on it.
And set the chicken on a little counter in our little kitchen, went to mass.
(01:59):
And when we came back, I walked in first, and I saw the chicken looked really strange.
There were a lot of black things on it.
So it turned out the chicken was covered in ants.
Oh, no.
And they weren't big ants, but they were lay.
And so I kind of hid it so nobody would see it.
(02:20):
Well, particularly my mother.
She didn't see it.
So when she was in the other room, I proceeded to try and shake the ants off.
You do?
Sure.
I'll show you.
First we shake.
Then we bake the chicken pieces as best as I could.
Of course, lost some of the shake and bake.
But anyhow, so my sister walked in and saw what I was doing.
(02:41):
And I just said, you know, don't tell mom, whatever.
So anyway, we wound up cooking the chicken with the ant residue chicken a la ant.
And you know, we thought it was wonderful, and my mother never knew.
All the better.
Oh, no, she did find out about it.
Well, probably after I might have told her.
My sister might have told her after.
I remember her hearing the story years ago.
(03:03):
Yeah, so it was one of many little episodes.
Mother, why isn't my fried chicken is crispy and juicy?
I want your recipe.
Welcome back to our space, fellow citizens.
We will check back in with my mom a little bit later, but now let's set the stage.
While I love to shoot from the hip to riff and to share a laugh, there are times when reality steps in and the curtain behind the entertainment is pulled away.
(03:31):
This isn't just another edutainment podcast into an authentic experience.
My life has been a tapestry of artistic people, and let me tell you, they can be quite the characters.
Join me, my wife Maria.
Hello.
And our friend Chris from St.
Louis, Patina.
Hi, Max, how are you?
We've tried our best to keep this family friendly by bleeping out some colorful language if it occurs.
(03:53):
But just as a heads up, content warnings are a thing here.
And just to be clear, city Museum has its charm for kids.
This podcast explores the deeper and sometimes darker sides of life, death, and everything in between.
And as Mister Charles would say, explore with your own disorder.
Discretion.
Unlock ad free episodes of the Cassidy.
Chronicles and dive deeper with exclusive digital content@patreon.com.
(04:15):
capturedPlanet Mister Charles worked at the museum from day one, and he would do all the tours for the groups especially.
He was the sort of unofficial official tour guide.
Yeah, he would also, on a personal note, he would also sing my name whenever he would see me, which was always lovely.
(04:41):
So in the first episode, we talked about the giant snake, a burmese python that was 13ft long, and how it showed up in my courtyard when I was about twelve years old.
Well, after starting this and sending off the first episode, there was a guy who had video footage of my dad working throughout the years, and his name is Mark Silverman.
(05:02):
And when I approached him, he got back with me.
And we've been going through some footage of my dad.
And in it is where the snake would have gone inside the aquarium.
Inside the aquarium.
They're building the World aquarium.
And I did find a video of a snake in there that they're filming.
(05:23):
I'm thinking it's not the snake because we do have a photo of the snake and there's a different pattern on it.
It's a pretty big snake.
But I love how there were multiple snakes then, is what that means.
Oh, yeah.
There were also a teenage max in that filming as well.
Yes.
There's a lot of me slacking off in the background, certainly.
(05:46):
And it's definitely.
I haven't felt old till watching these.
Yeah.
Makes you realize how much time went by, because they're almost.
The videos are 20 years old.
Almost.
Wow.
The house that I grew up in, the Caroline mission, as it's known, that's where if city museum started in a basement garage, it 100% started in the.
(06:24):
At the Caroline mission, which was an old mission in Lafayette Square.
When my parents bought the house, they actually bought three houses and split it with their friend Jay Watson Scott, and he rehabbed one of the houses and sold it.
(06:44):
And then my dad and my.
His people rehabbed the house next door and sold it.
And then they took the nice crown jewel of it, which was the Caroline mission, and decked it out.
And it had a whole bunch, like, when you walk into the front door, there's a whole bunch of mirrors, and you don't really know which way you should go.
(07:07):
And it.
The mirrors are actually from Westport Plaza, the giant.
There were some.
Some mirrors that were misprinted or something, so they had to.
They recalled them, and my dad bought them for cheap and put them in the house.
And that's trucks.
He made a table out of it.
(07:27):
So our dining room table growing up was a giant mirror, sort of a yellow mirror.
Yeah, it was.
Or golden.
Yeah, very golden.
Um, and they would break occasionally.
So he would go pull them out from this, the, uh, the basement storage.
(07:49):
And get new ones.
Yeah, he had, like, ten of them down there waiting.
Models set up there.
That's where we would.
He would be playing and he would be working on his stuff.
Um, and then it became like a play place for us.
So your.
Your parents definitely delineated, like, so how did they define their studio is where they worked on, you know, small models of what would eventually become very large items that would say, there's a shop.
(08:17):
Yeah.
You definitely do what, one 6th scale and then a third scale.
So, like, a little modelo or bozzetto would be worked on in the studio.
Or even on the front, like, table, where we'd be that eating table.
Bob, clear off the table.
We need to eat dinner.
And then you'd get that stuff done.
And then you take those bossetti over to the shop, where you then reinterpret it and expand it to the full size, which in some cases would be a dozen feet wide or tall.
(08:48):
Yeah.
Okay.
So I think that's important.
For people to realize that each place where your parents worked had a different component to the artistic process.
Oh, yeah.
And everything bled into everything.
So at the shop, which we would call that, because that's where it was a lot more work time for parents, too.
(09:10):
I think the stage was set a little bit, and we'd hang out and draw stuff on paper on the floor, and, yeah, go pick up trash outside and, you know, go buy some junk food, get some Mountain Dew and Doritos.
(09:30):
So, sort of the invention of the artistic pieces would occur back at your family's house, where the studios were.
So the actual kind of coming up with ideas would happen back there, and then the execution would happen at the shop.
Would that be kind of another way of putting it?
Oh, yeah, completely.
And the.
The original house that they bought that my parents lived in, my mom still lives there.
(09:57):
It was definitely a showroom for what they could do and be weird and wacky.
Would they have clients come over to your house?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So the house even kind of functioned as part of the business then.
Yeah.
So if you walk in through the front door of my mom's house, there's the courtyard, and then when you walk in the front door, there's a mirror, and it's kind of like a false.
(10:22):
Like, to the.
Oh, and then that's to the left, there's a mirror, and then to the right, there's some stairs that go down, and then behind those stairs, there's another mirror.
Right?
And then to the right a little bit, there's the stairs that take you up.
So no matter what you think, you're going to go left, but you have to go right.
(10:43):
I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
And so it's definitely a different house, and it has these huge skylights that were definitely skylights from a different building originally.
They've been replaced now for leaking.
Leaking reasons.
There's a big.
(11:03):
Whenever it would rain, it would always leak.
She would help with the business end.
Of things and the grunt work.
I caught up with her and recorded.
Our conversation a couple months ago.
Let's roll this tape.
You know, I started teaching part time, but basically.
(11:24):
Well, he in particular, realized we had to find a way to live off of this.
And, you know, that's often the artist's dilemma.
Okay, I'm an artist.
I have a degree.
But now, you know, how am I going to make a penny?
And we live in this historically rich neighborhood in Lafayette Square.
And so he had some developer buddies who were making new infill housing, but also had to have architectural detail involved.
(11:50):
And so we experimented and learned the craft of making some of these architectural ornamentation with a variety of materials.
And that started to grow, developed.
And that's when we actually developed Castleine Cassley as a sort of an architectural sculptural firm.
Initially, it was quick because individual house projects or a couple, you know, row houses, to suddenly, I think, Jerry King, who developed the Manhattan muse.
(12:20):
I can't remember how many units there were, but there were a lot of them.
And they all needed this ornamentation, you know, from cheek stones to cornices, windows, sills, all of that kind of stuff.
So we became a real production company at that point.
And that's when we had to hire people and get a bigger space because our basement, we started using these.
(12:43):
I think they're called polyurethane foams, which swell in the mold and become firm and are very weather resistant.
But we knew nothing about that except that the material existed.
So we started doing all of these.
We had experimented like crazy in the basement.
We'd have some of these things that shrunk to like nothing.
Other things that grew twice the size of what they were supposed to be, other things that whooshed up and melted, until finally we got the formula right to make these things.
(13:11):
And to this day, those cornice ornamentations are still made out of that product that we started developing here.
And it worked.
And every developers in particular saw the product, got interested, and bit by bit, it grew.
So the using of concrete was a natural progression.
(13:31):
It didn't start that way.
Did you start by doing, initially, actual terracotta?
No, because terracotta has to be fired, as you know.
But no, we.
Sometimes we would make a sample out of terracotta so we could make a mold off of that.
But we didn't do any reproduction in terracotta.
(13:54):
I remember we drive all over town to pick up those pieces, and I have to go to Duke's shop and.
No, I mean, we would do cast concrete, but it would have a terracotta like finish because we would add dyes to the products.
So it was basically a colored concrete.
The facade of the castle and Cassley building, that was almost an ad for.
(14:18):
What you guys could do.
Am I wrong?
Especially when your father put the praying mantis on top of the building so that everybody driving Highway 44 saw this gigantic praying mantis, and it was like, what the.
And then saw the building with all the ornamentation on it and said, grandma.
Would take me by that every time, every weekend, because she would get me Friday, Grandma Judy.
(14:40):
Yeah.
And her and grandpa would pick me.
Up and I'd say, wave to the mantis.
And I'd wave to the mantis.
Yeah.
So, you know, that was what you call free advertising, except it wasn't free to make it, but was afraid to put it on a roof.
It's weird when your mom is married to God.
Before she was your mom back to Africa.
(15:01):
So you were an art teacher there?
I was.
I started the art program there.
It was the first program of its kind in that part of Malawi, anyway, and they needed that kind of program to graduate.
It sounds strange, or to be credited, I should say, as a secondary school.
(15:23):
Sounds strange.
But they did.
So that's why I went there in the first place, because I had just received my degree and knew enough to do a startup department.
The girls loved it.
Absolutely loved everything we did, you know, from batik to digging clay in the creeks and firing pots, making our own glazes, coring, stone carving, soapstone.
(15:51):
Everything was an adventure, tons of fun.
They loved it.
They loved it.
We'd have these little exhibits in the art room, and it was a good time.
I wrote a little textbook with mimeograph pages, if anybody remembers what the mimeograph is.
The precursor to the copier, right?
(16:12):
Yeah.
What was the other machine called?
The diddle machine.
No, I don't even remember, but.
So I wrote this little textbook, and, of course, plagiarized a bunch of little stuff for my art books.
But out there, I didn't think that was going to be an issue, and it wasn't.
I don't think it is, no.
So I actually can't remember what happened once I left the school, if they continued it or not.
(16:34):
Didn't you remember the name?
It was in Likuni secondary school for girls.
It was in a little village called Likuni.
L e k l I k u n I, li kuni.
And it was just about.
It was about 15 miles from Li Longue, which was more of a little major city.
(16:58):
And so we lived there in the compound, in the school compound, and the girls boarded there, so we just really won.
Tight knit community.
When I went in, French was one of the major languages, and I didn't know French either, so I learned a little bit of French while I was in the convent.
And, you know, then they took English, became a major secondary language of the group.
(17:23):
So they were bilingual, basically.
So I went to a country that was English speaking as well as Chichewa speaking.
Chichewa.
Chichewa.
And I taught in English, so.
Which was required.
But I did go to a language course for three months when I first got there, and to learn a bit of Chichewa, which helped.
(17:49):
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think it's also respectful when you're in a different.
Yeah.
Or the people would love it when you tried to say something, even if you were, you know, miles wrong, they still acknowledged you and appreciated the effort.
Yeah.
(18:12):
What was after?
So Lafayette shop and then what was the next property that they bought to work in?
Because there were a couple other, like, subsequent studios.
Right.
Yeah.
There's the gratiot building.
That was.
They bought that.
And if you need help to remember the name, it's giant biggest sculpture of a giraffe there.
So I'm.
Your dad could be a petty at times, which I sort of admired as far as, like, he.
(18:38):
For the giraffe building.
For the giraffe sculpture.
So it was gonna be the tallest, but then it wasn't quite tall enough.
So then he added on the.
No, no.
So I don't know if they set out for it to necessarily be the tallest sculpture, if that makes any, like.
But they were like, it's gonna be a tall sculpture.
And then they found out that it was.
Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying.
Like, it wasn't even the goal necessary.
(19:00):
But once he found out there was another one, and it was, like, so close, it's like, oh, well, as long as we're here, why don't we make it the tallest one?
So they added on, like a.
Like, the tongue, like an extra long giraffe tongue to make sure it was the largest sculpture in Texas.
So, yeah, we have this large sculpture in Texas.
(19:22):
And my dad wanted to keep making even more art that was huge and breaking world records.
And he had taken Texas by storm, you know, and so he was looking for a building with a way higher ceiling.
And the polar wave ice building came into his targeted sites.
(19:47):
Anyway, I asked my mom about this a couple months ago.
Okay, roll the tape.
So the polar wave ice building.
Mm hmm.
How long was that owned?
Oh, by us?
(20:08):
Not that long.
I can't recall exactly.
Maybe four years or something like that.
Maybe a little longer.
But I think the only thing in there at the time was a.
I think it was being rented for truck storage or something like that.
(20:30):
Freight storage.
And so it was a.
They had big oil pits from these trucks, you know, draining the old dirty oil.
I mean, literally, like 3ft deep kind of holes everywhere.
You had to be very careful where you.
Oh, I remember yeah, people weren't.
And so Bob, of course, adored space.
(20:51):
What he loved about this was the space, the height of the ceilings.
I don't know what that was, but it was extremely high.
And so that was always excited to him because he thought he could build something huge, you know, so.
But the other thing I think he realized right from the beginning, and I'm pretty sure this is true, is that this building was fairly close to the property of Missouri botanical Gardens.
(21:18):
And I don't know if he thought that they would someday expand or need it or just kind of.
It was a speculation or intuition or what it was.
But sure enough, that came true, and they did need it and come knocking, wanting to buy the building for their research center, which is still there, I think.
(21:43):
Yes, it is.
So, you know, that was an opportunity to, you know, I think.
I don't know.
I think we paid $60,000 for that building at the time, which was a crazy price for a building that big.
But it did have a lot of environmental issues.
Yeah, I remember it was a chemical spell, basically.
Yeah.
It was not something that most people would want.
(22:05):
And, of course, we didn't have a lot of money.
Not at all.
But my mother stepped in, and I think she lent us $20,000.
So that helped get us there.
So we went from there to, you know, selling it at a gigantic profit to be able to shop for something much bigger.
(22:26):
And Bob had always been interested in owning a property in downtown St.
Louis.
And again, the bigger the better.
And that's when, you know, the international shoe company came into focus, and, you know, the rest of that is history.
Yeah.
What I'm trying to figure out is where did the genesis for the fish tank and all that stuff come from?
(22:54):
I don't know what came first, but I know that one of the first ideas your dad had when we started to have some money to develop the bottom floor of the back building.
Now, each floor there's ten stories, but each floor is 60,000.
So he had this idea to build an aquarium.
(23:14):
At that point, St.
Louis didn't have much of an aquarium, except I think Leonard's aquarium did exist.
But.
So because we would be on ground floor weight wise, it could accommodate a.
A lot of water and weight.
So that was the initial idea.
(23:35):
And as we started to decide or discover that we knew nothing about keeping fish alive, that idea kind of started to morph into something else.
But we did keep a fish tank, one fish tank at the time.
Now, there's more.
Leonard was never scheduled to have like, he.
It was just like a seed.
(23:58):
No, I don't believe Leonard was going to participate in any of that early adventure.
Leonard came into the scene later to take over an area and really have his own project.
Way before the museum, they were redoing the front building.
Correct.
And we pulled up the carpet, and there was that really nice granite from the original building.
(24:25):
And it being an aha moment for the whole project, it definitely started as a blueprint for, like, uncovering this terrible renovation job that had been done probably 20 years before in the seventies.
And it was just peeling back that and exposing the actual building that was still there almost.
And then adding the castle touch, if you will.
(24:48):
Yeah.
We started trying to salvage and refinish parts some of the floors of that building, because there's a ton of water down.
Oh, yeah.
And flooding and a lot of warped and rotten, moldy everything.
It was everywhere.
It was terrible.
They had to redo every floor.
(25:08):
So, you know, we started fixing up smaller areas at a time, and the idea was to find tenants, and that that tenant income would then enable Bob to start thinking about bigger projects and have extra money in his pocket to develop something else in the bigger part of the building, which was the back part of the building, the warehouse, which was really what it was interested in right from the beginning.
(25:33):
So that's really what it is.
We'll leave you there with that interview with my mom.
You can hear more on our patreon.
I have some behind the scenes stuff.
And I interviewed her at her house, which was the original Caroline mission and where Casseline Cassidy originally started.
And it's a really interesting house.
(25:56):
Yeah.
Christian mission.
And.
Yeah.
Because it very much is different than all the other houses on the street.
Yeah.
It's set back.
Right?
Set back a whole bunch.
There's not really any backyard at all.
Right?
Correct.
The house sits.
There's no backyard.
House sits on the alley line.
Yeah.
And you could load in all your gear for making stuff just right in.
(26:16):
I bet that was really appealing to your parents.
Yes.
And so, yeah, my mom and my dad started it out of the basement there because my dad was flipping houses before that.
Really?
I didn't.
So you renovated houses?
He did.
I think in all the photos of him and his first wife.
They're up on the corner house on Hickory.
(26:37):
Oh, wow.
Hickory and 18.
Yeah.
Okay.
So we would go to the shop, which.
The facade of the shop is amalgamation of a couple different things, different projects of his.
And there's one that is the Manhattan townhouses, I believe a couple.
(27:03):
Yeah.
It was at least designed at the same time, maybe not used in it, because I believe they're a little bit different.
And that was very much, that front was made up of.
I call it a pastiche, which is a combination and conglomeration of a bunch of different works of art combined together into something new.
(27:24):
And in the art history world, sometimes the word pastiche can be a little bit of a dirty word, particularly in the museum world, because back in the 19th century, unscrupulous art dealers, what they would do is they take pieces from different works of art, and maybe a lot of it was damaged.
So they just take the undamaged pieces of work from a work of art, and they'd combine them together to create a new work of art, which obviously isn't very honest, but in this instance, pastiche is actually very much a compliment because your parents combine together these various different disparate elements and made something that's really a very beautiful, cogent whole, in my opinion.
(28:03):
Some of my first memories are of the shop.
Really?
Yeah.
Like what?
Dusty.
A lot of it's the smell.
What kind of smells?
What does it smell like?
All this concrete smells pretty earthy.
Right?
Right.
One of my most fondest memories is.
Of my grandfather whistling while working in the wood shop.
I would eat lunch up there, surrounded by the scent of wood and the hum of creativity.
(28:26):
Over the years, we've seen so many places transform into cherished memories.
I truly appreciate the attention everyone has paid to the Cassley shop.
Thank you, Jackie, Dana, for everything that you've done so far.
It's overwhelming in the best way.
Our next episode should be an episode about Bill Chrisman.
He is one of the original artists who helped start city museum with my parents.
(28:50):
He started beatnik Bob's and he also started Joe's cafe.
Who was Joe?
Was Joe a person?
Find out next episode how can you help?
Join our patreon for $5 or $10 and get ad free content, exclusive videos.
Full interviews, and more.
Also, if you would, please share the love.
(29:11):
If you can't become a patron, please.
Leave a review and share our podcast on your social media channels.
An insightful sneak peek of our conversation with Bill Chrisman, taken a couple years ago.
Actually, at this point, lucky dog lucky.
Let's see.
All right, so are you ready?
(29:34):
Do you have your questions ready?
No.
Yes.
Do I have to write my own goddamn question?
No.
Can I use the word motherf er on the tape without computing?
Doesn't matter to me.
Worst case, we'll bleep you but we'll try and find, like, a good, you know what bleep noise.
When I was down in Florida, I was reading this guy's memoirs, and he said, technically speaking, wouldn't your father be a mother?
(30:02):
Bleep.
Yes.
Yes.
Everybody's father.
Everyone's father.
So it should say, happy bleep bleep.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Are you sure about that?
Why not?
What the hell?
This has been a captured planet production.
(30:28):
Goodbye, now.
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