- 2012 Ladue News - Interview Bob McCullock
McCulloch is one of those people who always seems to have just a hint of a smile on his face, no matter the circumstance. Maybe it’s there to cover up all the awful things he’s been through, both professionally and personally. Or maybe it’s there because deep down, he knows he’s had a wonderful life, despite it all.
I went to meet McCulloch in his office recently, the first time I’d been there in a long time. The walls of his corner office at the Justice Center are covered with pictures: family photos, as well as pictures of him with governors, senators and presidents. Since we’re both St. Louisans—and north-siders at that—we talked about high school. He told me he wanted to go to McBride but couldn’t get in, so he took a bi-state bus every day to Augustinian Academy all the way across town. He paid his way through school working different jobs, but loved his time as a guard at Busch Stadium during the Cardinals’ glory years in the ’60s. “I got to see every pitch of every game,” he says with a huge kid-like grin.
It was also in the ’60s that his life changed forever. McCulloch grew up on the border between St. Louis and Pine Lawn in the shadow of the old ammunitions plant just off Goodfellow Boulevard. His dad was a city cop, one of the first K-9 officers in the department. “July 2, 1964: My dad was 37 years old, I was 12.” It was the day his father was killed in the line of duty trying to arrest a kidnapper. “He was in his police car and heard a call for an officer in need of aid at the old Pruett-Igoe housing project. He wasn’t far from there, and when he arrived, he saw one officer was down and another officer was chasing a guy,” he explains. “They went around a building, my dad went around the other way and they got into a shootout—my father got shot.” Officer Paul McCulloch left behind a wife and four children. Bob McCulloch, the future prosecutor, was now a crime victim. “It had a huge impact on me in the long run. In the short term, at that age, it’s hard to comprehend the finality of death and so that took some time to sink in. My mother was a great woman, very strong and made sure we all toed the line.”
There would be more difficult days ahead. Five years later, during his senior year at Augustinian, doctors discovered he had a rare form of bone cancer, making it necessary for his leg to be amputated at the hip. A couple of years after that, his best friend—the chum who had always been there for him since kindergarten— died in an accidental drowning. For a lot of us, it all would have been too much to withstand; instead, McCulloch grew from it. “It sounds like a cliché, but it builds character,” he says. “You have these things and you suffer through them and deal with them. You don’t forget or act like they never happened, but you try to understand them. I think all of it gave me great empathy for victims.”
