Amazing Webster Groves

America’s Heartbeat can be found in a St. Louis suburb that’s been a Time Magazine cover story, the subject of a CBS-TV documentary, and a magnet for pollsters at presidential election time. In Amazing Webster Groves, you’ll discover Old Orchard, where prime real estate was sold out of President Ulysses S. Grant’s log cabin. You’ll find Webster Park, where a governor, a senator, and many of St. Louis business geniuses once lived. Read the true tale of the Webster TV housewife who named her hubby “Fang,” the man whose election to governor was held up when Democrats cried fraud, a zoologist who advocated for “charismatic megafauna,” an atomic age activist who collected 300,000 baby teeth for Strontium 90 detection, a female author who won a Pulitzer at 24. Learn about the town’s remarkable college and a famous seminary where theologians who advised presidents taught beneath its Oxford Tower. Local author Don Corrigan, profiles the town he has been proud to cover for four decades as editor of the Webster-Kirkwood Times. A writer and journalism professor at Webster University, he was a teaching colleague of Missouri’s Poet Laureate and “the post-Auschwitz Catholic” professor who took on Holocaust deniers. As a reporter/editor, he interviewed TV and theatre stars like Phyllis Diller, Charlotte Peters and Martha Mason, the "Goodbye Girl."

Don Corrigan is an award-winning author who was inducted into the St. Louis Media Hall of Fame in 2020 for his work as a journalism professor and community newspaper editor. At Webster University, he received a Messing Research Award in 1990, the Kemper Outstanding Teacher Award in 1994 and the Presidential Faculty Scholar Award in 1998. Corrigan has reported for his newspaper group from Russia, Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Vietnam. He won a Gannett Foundation Award and the Lewis C. Green Environmental Service Award for his environmental writing. He is the author of eight books, including Environmental Missouri in 2014 by Reedy Press.