Backstory STL

Jason Korner is a criminal defense attorney with his own firm in St. Louis County.

Jerry Naunheim was a photographer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for 25 years and covered several historical events locally and abroad. 

This week's guest on Backstory STL is John Perkins. He used crack for decades and struggled to make it by. But through his lows, he found a light. Now, he wants to give back to St. Louis-area youth and be a role model he didn't have. 

Ralph Zuke is on a 2,200-mile bike ride from St. Louis to Calgary, Canada, to raise awareness for the eradication of polio.

Julie Smith is a communications professor at Webster University and author of “Master the Media: How Teaching Media Literacy Can Save Our Plugged-In World.”

Dave Walters started disseminating news he heard on the Police and Fire scanners, eventually gaining 47,000 followers on Facebook. But after years of posting strictly news, he got personal in sharing a stage 3 cancer diagnosis. Even through that time, he has still managed to post every single day on St. Louis Scanner News.

Bobby Bostic was incarcerated in Missouri for 27 years. After being convicted of an armed robbery he committed at 16, a judge sentenced him to 241 years in prison - effectively a life sentence. But a recent law allowed for people convicted of crimes as juveniles to go up for parole after 15 years. In 2022, he was released from prison and is now a community advocate.

Ed Wheatley is an author whose love for baseball has helped keep a major part of St. Louis history alive. You know about our beloved Cardinals, but what about the St. Louis Browns? Major League Baseball's forgotten team still has a following to this day.

This week's guest on Backstory STL is Lindy Drew, co-founder and lead storyteller for Humans of St. Louis.

Erica Williams is a nonprofit leader making her community healthier through food. She changed her career as a paralegal to start an organization called "A Red Circle."

My guest this week is a volunteer wish granter for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He's been granting wishes for about 10 years but his connection to the nonprofit started long before then.

This week’s guest on Backstory STL is Jeff Hastings, a 20-year Air Force veteran who runs the nonprofit “The Flagman’s Mission Continues.”

Patrick Benson is a case manager at the Criminal Justice Ministry in St. Louis. He advocates for those involved in the criminal justice system as well as people struggling with substance use. 

The inaugural episode of Backstory STL features Pastor Pamela Paul. She started her church, Faith, Hope, and Love, after losing family members to drug overdoses. Her boots-on-the-ground outreach work is about trying to combat overdoses and deaths from drugs like fentanyl. First Alert 4 featured Paul in a special edition newscast in 2024, "Combating a Crisis: a roundtable on fentanyl."