St. Louis, Missouri — Dutchtown
On the evening of September 27, 2022, the families of St. Mary’s High School learned from the Archdiocese of St. Louis that their school would close at the end of the year. Francis Slay, the former mayor and a St. Mary’s graduate who sat on the school board, told a TV reporter, “I did not see this coming.”
Four years on, the school is still at 4701 South Grand. It is independent now, it owns the ground it sits on, and every Monday night one card is drawn online in an alumni raffle whose jackpot has been circling $100,000 since spring. The money from that raffle goes to the school. So does nearly every dollar of that story.
A School Built Next to an Orphanage
On St. Louis’ South Side, some institutions become more than buildings. They become part of the neighborhood itself. South Side Catholic High School opened in September 1931 to give the sons of the area’s families, many of them German immigrants, a Catholic high school of their own. Its first classrooms were small wooden buildings on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Orphanage at 4701 South Grand, and for the first two years the teachers were Christian Brothers. In September 1933 the Society of Mary, the Marianists, took over, and ten Brothers of Mary taught 275 boys. The school moved into the remodeled orphanage building in 1935, and the first graduating class, 62 young men, walked in 1936.
The Depression-era school grew faster than anyone planned. By 1946 there were 1,100 students, and in 1947 the name changed to St. Mary’s High School. A new brick-and-concrete building opened in 1964 with 19 classrooms, three science labs, a library and a cafeteria. When the 1938 gymnasium burned in September 1992, the school rebuilt within a year as the Archbishop John L. May Athletic Complex. The colors have always been green and white, the teams have always been the Dragons, and more than 11,000 young men have graduated from the school over the decades.
For generations of Dragons, that South Grand campus was the backdrop for a formative stretch of their lives: classrooms, ballfields, teachers, friendships and the countless small moments that make a school feel like home. St. Mary’s was never only about academics. The Marianist tradition put faith, brotherhood and service alongside the books, and the alumni association still describes being a St. Mary’s alumnus as “sharing in the history of our school” and feeling “ownership of our brotherhood.” Class reunions and alumni nights keep that going, decade after decade.
Two of those alumni are on baseball cards. Joe Garagiola and Yogi Berra grew up across the street from each other on Elizabeth Avenue on The Hill, and according to St. Louis Magazine both went to South Side Catholic. Garagiola caught for the Cardinals and then spent half a century on television. Berra ended up in the Hall of Fame. The school on South Grand was where it started.
Fall 2022: The Closure That Did Not Happen
The archdiocese’s announcement came as part of its All Things New reorganization. Enrollment was under 300 boys on a campus built for more than a thousand. Rather than accept it, the school’s leaders spent that fall with alumni and local business owners working out whether St. Mary’s could run on its own.
On December 15, 2022, President Mike England stood in the school and announced that it could. St. Mary’s would become an independent Catholic school under the sponsorship of the Marianist Province, starting July 1, 2023. Five private donors had already pledged $3.3 million toward a $10 million, five-year plan. Among the gifts reported since: $550,000 from the Kevin Beckmann Charitable Trust and $1.5 million from an alumnus who asked not to be named.
“God wants St. Mary’s to make it,” England said that day. Slay put it in the neighborhood’s terms: “Our students need St. Mary’s. This neighborhood needs St. Mary’s.”
The school took the name St. Mary’s South Side Catholic High School, a nod to the one it opened under in 1931. It leased the campus from the archdiocese for three years. Then, on July 14, 2025, it bought the property outright for $1.5 million. The purchase secured the school’s physical home and, more importantly, its ability to keep serving the neighborhood’s students for the next generation. About 240 boys are enrolled this year, and new partnerships with local trade unions give students pre-apprenticeship credit before they graduate.
The Monday Night Raffle
The St. Mary High School Alumni Association has run an online Queen of Hearts raffle since late 2018, years before anyone talked about closing, with a 50/50 alongside it. Tickets are $5, with a sixth free for every five bought. Every Monday at 7:30 p.m. the drawing runs online: one ticket is picked and its card turned over. The Queen of Hearts pays half the jackpot, a joker pays ten percent, and the rest rolls forward.
The numbers since 2018 tell the story. More than 137,000 tickets sold to nearly 10,000 different buyers. More than $563,000 in ticket sales. More than $170,000 paid out in prizes, including a $125,432 jackpot when the Queen came up in May 2021 and a $25,231 win in June 2023. The current game began June 19, 2023, twelve days before St. Mary’s became independent, and its jackpot stands at $97,065 after this week’s drawing. Last week alone 817 tickets sold.
The people buying them are the point. More than 500 buyers from the earlier games came back for this one, and some of the same names have turned up in Monday drawings for years. Half of every jackpot stays with the alumni association, which puts it toward scholarships, teachers, curriculum and classroom wish lists.
There is something fitting about that. A school that spent more than 90 years building a community now has that community making sure the school is still there for the next generation. Ninety-five years ago a few hundred boys sat in wooden sheds beside an orphanage because a neighborhood decided it wanted a Catholic high school. In 2022 the same neighborhood, now spread across the region, decided it still did.
The buildings change. The neighborhood changes. The students graduate and move on. For thousands of former Dragons, though, St. Mary’s is not simply a school they attended. It is a place they belonged. And after more than nine decades on the South Side, the Dragons are still here. The Monday drawing is just the weekly reminder.