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The Dogs Bark, The Caravan Moves On

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FOR THE RAMS' GEORGIA, THE SIXTH TIME WAS THE CHARM: Maybe P-D flagship columnist Bill McClellan was consciously poking fun, or maybe it was an unconscious coincidence or a subconscious subplot -- with Bill, it's hard to tell these days. But when he did a 628-word tome on Dec. 8 about how funkytown St. Louis might be feeling about the vagabond Rams, the headline was "When the Team's a Trophy Wife, How Secure Can You Feel?" The column compared the football Cardinals with the "first wife" cliché and said the NFL Cardinals left when they couldn't get a new "house," a new stadium. The analogy went that St. Louis got a "trophy wife" in the Rams by building a new house, a dome, and wooing a team by spending money. Bill wrote that St. Louis fans might be a bit afraid that everybody is laughing at them because this wife "didn't marry you for love." No shit.

Well, speaking of trophy wives, Bill: The Rams's owner, St. Louis native Georgia Frontiere, fit that profile for Carroll Rosenbloom, who at the time of their marriage owned the Baltimore Colts. Though published ages in Georgia's case often aren't exact, it was printed that in 1957, when they met, Rosenbloom was 52 and she was 30. They were married in 1966, three weeks after Rosenbloom divorced his first wife of 25 years. It was her sixth marriage. Rosenbloom swapped the Colts for the Rams; in 1979, he drowned in the Florida surf, leaving Georgia 70 percent of the Rams. She married a seventh time, to the man who wrote the music for The Flying Nun, but divorced him in 1988. She moved the Rams to her hometown of St. Louis in 1995. Perhaps having Georgia owning the team is fitting. The Rams are not here for love but for money, and their success might just be the prime example of how this show-me-the-money world extends beyond sports. Combine Kurt Warner's yearly salary of $254,000, the Rams' paying a measly $20,000 per game to rent the completely publicly financed $260 million Trans World Dome and the Rams' guarantee of $22 million annually for the sale of luxury boxes and ticket receipts, and what do you get? A mighty happy trophy wife and maybe a city that knows that you get what you pay for.

TIME TO CHILL A 40 FOR OLD TIMES: In the end, even though it at first seemed onerous, maybe the most significant cultural legacy of the '90s in the city of St. Louis was the ban on the sale of cold 40-ounce bottles of beer and malt liquor, forcing a switch to the 24-ounce can at virtually the same price. The prohibition was, to vary a business-world maxim, a win-win-lose scenario. It was win for the environmentalists and neighborhood SLACO types, who bemoaned the broken glass and litter: The aluminum can was seldom discarded, and when it was, urban prospectors snatched it up for its recycling rebate. It was a win, too, for the brewers, who charged at least a buck for a dose of beer that had 16 fewer ounces. Those citizens desperate for a quick, cheap, accessible buzz ended up losing. But then we usually do.

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