Proclamations

Issuing proclamations is one of the nice things that the Mayor’s Office can do to acknowledge the milestones of the City’s residents and their friends. You’ll notice the procs in doctors’ waiting rooms, restaurant lobbies, church halls — and in thousands of living rooms and parlors throughout the City. Some avid collectors have documents from three or four consecutive administrations framed side-by-side.

In most cases, the threshold for approval isn’t very high. You have to send a letter to City Hall requesting a proclamation and, if the cause is idiosyncratic, you have to supply some basic details. It makes for a better proclamation if you let us know a little bit about Aunt Minnie’s 90 years of earthly toil before we designate a day in September as Aunt Minnie’s Day in the City of St. Louis. And, it really helps if you put your address on the request. We have assembled a small collection of procs “returned to sender” for lack of sufficient direction to the US Postal Service.

Once in a while, we get scammed. We have honored family pets as if they were beloved grandchildren, non-existent or one-person organizations as if they were the United Way or a Fortune 100 Company, and the occasional wrongdoer. But, in most cases, a group or individual who deserved a little notice, got it. That’s a good thing.

Requests for the "Key to the City" get a higher level of scrutiny. But, that’s another story . . .