Hello, and welcome to The Kirkwood Gadfly! My name is Parker Pence and I am the website’s (blog’s?) proud owner. Let’s get the important questions out of the way first: A proud Kirkwood native (RIP St. Joe’s hospital), I attended Robison elementary through second grade, St. Peter’s from 3rd-8th, SLUH for high school, and St. Louis U. for undergrad where I graduated in 2019. I currently live in New York City where I graduated from NYU with a Masters of Science in Public Policy and now work for the state’s affordable housing agency, HCR, as a data and policy analyst.
Besides housing and walkability, I enjoy reading fiction (Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin), listening to history podcasts (s/o Mike Duncan), watching Billiken basketball (don’t sleep!), and making people go look at art with me.
Acknowledgements & Relations
I am supported by my mom, Gaye Pence, and my dad (and sometimes photographer), Paul Pence, himself a lifelong resident of Kirkwood and graduate of KHS, class of ’82. Perhaps even more importantly, Kirkwood Gadfly would not be possible without my #1 twitter hype-man, Kirkwood Gadfly facebook page co-administrator, chief NIMBY button-pusher, the blog’s social chair, and my younger brother, Patrick Pence. He is currently working on finding a cure to cancer.
I would also like to thank my girlfriend, Jocelyn Weisman, hailing from Oak Park, Illinois, (by all indications, a model suburb), for providing the indispensable service of distraction from the goings-on of Kirkwood. She’s also an excellent proofreader as she has scored highly on several standardized tests.
