Ted and I were excited when Kyra told us she’d finally saved enough money to come to our home for a visit–something we’ve all been looking forward to for quite a while. The event became even better when we heard that her BFF, Hannah, was coming too. The girls met each other when they were two years old and have been friends ever since. Ted and I have seen Hannah with Kyra so many times over the years that we think of her as another granddaughter.

Given the girls’ arrival time in St. Louis, and given the quality of airline food, we knew the girls would be hungry when they arrived, so our first stop was at Blueberry Hill for lunch.

When Ted and I were at Blueberry Hill with the Bryans, we didn’t have time to look at all the displays in the restaurant. Today, we did.

Joe Edwards, the owner of Blueberry Hill, has his picture taken with every celebrity who visits or performs at his restaurant. The photos include four U. S. Presidents. The walls of the 10,000-square-foot building are covered with those photos and with Edwards’ collections. We saw photos of three Presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. On this wall, you can see Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Snap, Crackle, and Pop. It would have been fun to be there when the cereal trio showed up!

Edwards began collecting things when he was seven years old. He started with comic books, records (he has over 30,000 records in his collection and alternates them in the jukebox), and baseball cards. At 10, he started collecting toys, sheet music, and oak furniture. (Oak furniture?! At 10?!) At 12, he says, it was vintage lunch boxes; at 16, Wurlitzer juke boxes. Now he has collections of Star Wars, the Simpsons, Howdy Doody, Elvis, PacMan, Pez dispensers, etc., etc. and the largest collection of Chuck Berry artifacts and historic memorabilia on display in the world. The center boxes in this display are some of Edwards’ vintage Pez containers. (There were many, many more in other displays.)

These are some of Edwards’ Howdy Doody memorabilia.

There are two live performance venues within the restaurant. One is the Elvis room. Although every wall in the restaurant is covered with displays or photos, there may be fewer individual celebrity photos than you think. Throughout the restaurant, we saw duplicate photos of a number of people, and the left wall below has the same arrangement of photos as the wall in the photo above, with Obama, the Clintons, and Snap, Crackle, and Pop in the same positions with the same adjacent photos. Oops!

The Duck Room, named for Chuck Berry’s famous “duck walk,” is the other live performance venue at Blueberry Hill. Chuck Berry was the first pop music star to perform at Blueberry Hill, and he made 209 consecutive monthly appearances. Chuck’s home was in this area, and he has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame which passes in front of Blueberry Hill. Check out the chimeras near the ceiling on the right in this photo.

Remember this old video game? At Blueberry Hill, it’s a wall decoration.

I couldn’t tell if this giraffe lamp was carved out of oak and therefore qualified as oak furniture for Edwards’ collection; if not, maybe it was part of a “giraffe lamps” collection.

Kyra and Hannah sat on planes (two flights) for over three hours, plus a two-hour layover, and then in our car and at lunch. When we finished eating and looking at the restaurant displays, we were all ready to take a walk around the Delmar Loop, where Blueberry Hill is located. As we walked, we saw some outdoor murals. If you look closely at this photo, you can see that the gray blocks on the sidewalk have St. Louis Walk of Fame stars on them.

I especially like the Maya Angelou quotes in this mural. The quotation with the yellow background on the left is from Angelou’s book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It says, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” The quotation on the right says, “If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you are.”

Kyra and Hannah needed to wake up very early to be at the airport for their flight(s) to St. Louis. Then they had hours of travel followed by a lengthy lunch and a restaurant tour so, after our walk, we went home where they could unpack and chill out before we had dinner together. You can tell by the outdoor photos that it was a gloomy day, but not for us. For us, being together made it as much fun as a sunny day!