Glad you enjoyed it! And, no, i never did verify the firefighter story.

pncnmnp · on March 17, 2023

So, I looked into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's archive (1874 to present) in the hope of solving this mystery, but could not find anything. However, I did find a rather fascinating article titled "A Morning in the Cave" that was published on 28 July 1996. If anyone is affiliated with an academic institution, they can read it on ProQuest.

There is a free OCR version available here:

Page 7: https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/142619929/?terms=%22cher...

Unfortunately, I could not find the page 8 clipping on newspapers.com.

Edit: I found the page 8 clipping - https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25694845/the-world-beneath-1...

It looks like this was part of a larger Sunday piece titled "The World Beneath". You can find all six clippings on r22tycoon's newspapers.com account at https://www.newspapers.com/clippings/?user=4850847%3Ar22tyco...

tricky · on March 17, 2023

what? this is amazing, I haven't seen that article. I was just able to pull the article's text up for free via the St. Louis County Library. Thank you! if I figure out how to find individual pages, i will let you know.