If you spend much time in St. Louis, and get out and socialize a bit, sooner or later you’ll get hit with what St. Louisans call The Question: “Where’d you go to high school?”

The answer is meant to do several things: differentiate “real” St. Louisians from people who may have gone to high school, but not in St. Louis — and who didn’t even live in St. Louis in their lost youth; and further distinguish whether or not you’re Catholic, whether you come from money, and so on.

We’ve found this insider preoccupation odd in St. Louis, a city that’s had its share of problems, and chips on its big shoulders — but perhaps that’s the reason for this ranking and insularity. Today, some St. Louisians cling to the conservative idea that we lead one-act lives.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when St. Louis was new; it was founded as a trading center by the French in 1764, transferred to the French First Republic in 1800 and sold by Napoleon to the U.S. in 1803 — at which point there was scarcely a second-generation St. Louisian to be found. It was a vital, dynamic way-station on the Mississippi; for Europeans and white Americans, it was the gateway to the West.

There was rank and caste, of course, even in St. Louis in 1800, and they probably were the more jealousy guarded because the city was so raw — but what made St. Louis go was the flux of newcomers, and arrivals of people of multiple nationalities (including indigenous people from up the Missouri River). Many of the city’s problems emerged later in the 20th century, and then in part because so much of the city’s population, mostly Black, and the descendants of slaves, felt justifiably stuck on the city’s crumbling north side, a situation that’s mostly unchanged today.

Mobility, including economic mobility, is part of what makes the U.S. great — when it is.

We used to know that in the West. We knew it when Park City was incorporated, in 1884: Almost all its residents were from somewhere else and it was jumping. It was true again, to a lesser degree, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when new arrivals, many from California, had dreams of what could be done with a decaying mining town and realized some of them.

Park City is still a place that many people have chosen rather than been born into. When you meet Parkites, the reason almost no one asks where you went to high school is because no one thinks they’d recognize your school, or that you’d recognize theirs — a small and instant kind of democracy, even if there are also Parkites who still use “summer” as a verb, as no doubt their parents did.

One of the great optimists in literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald, once observed that there were no second acts in American lives. What is less remembered is that as soon as Fitzgerald said it, he took it back, and then he disproved it, by living a three-act life.

If history is any guide, Park City will have a third and unforeseeable act. Maybe even a fourth. Somewhere around 2060, there will be old-timers who will try to remind people of the importance skiing once had, and they will be politely indulged in the same way some Parkites half-listen about Park City mining today.

Here and there a preserved ski lift stanchion will remain with a tarnished plaque reminding people that there was once, in Park City, something mysteriously called Vail Resorts. There will be some old-timers around, noted for their stick-to-itiveness, but there will also be many people not yet born who will come into the world elsewhere and make this place their home, helping, with the optimism of the arriviste, to heal and renew it.