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ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- The Republican National Convention should be St. Paul's big moment. Too bad most everyone seems to think it's being held in Minneapolis.

"It's like nails on a chalkboard when I hear that," said Mary Lethert Wingerd, a St. Paul native and historian of the city.

Happens all the time.

This is, after all, the city that comes after the hyphen in the urban conglomeration known as Minneapolis-St. Paul. It's the city of Charles M. Schulz, whose endearing loser Charlie Brown could never catch a break.

For a few days in September, at least, call it St. Paul-Minneapolis, the underdog taking a turn as top dog. Charlie finally gets to kick the football that Lucy always pulled away.

The long rivalry between the Twin Cities isn't as potent as it was in the decades before freeways and automobiles shrank the 10 miles that separate the two downtowns. What hasn't changed is the conviction among many longtime St. Paulites that their hometown is just a little bit better than the bigger, flashier neighbor a few miles up the Mississippi.

"I love to visit Minneapolis, but there's something about St. Paul that's charming and simple," said Nick Linsmayer, a manufacturing executive whose St. Paul roots reach back to 1849.

Minneapolis takes bragging rights in the easiest measurement of civic strength, population: It has about 100,000 more residents than St. Paul. It's the state's economic and cultural center, while St. Paul is the seat of state government.

Minneapolis offers more modern architecture and fancier restaurants, the Guthrie Theater and the Walker Art Center, three pro sports teams, five major lakes within its boundaries and the University of Minnesota's main campus. The city launched rockers Prince and the Replacements.

St. Paul has a downtown shaded by historic buildings and neighborhoods lined with block upon block of pristine Victorian homes. It's got science and history museums, pro hockey, two lakes and a smaller University of Minnesota campus.

Literary heavyweight F. Scott Fitzgerald hailed from St. Paul. Schulz grew up in St. Paul and sold his first panel cartoon to the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1947, three years before the debut of Peanuts.

"St. Small, don't they call it?" offered Carol Connolly, St. Paul's poet laureate and a lifelong resident whose ancestors moved here in 1885. "It is. You can hardly go anywhere in St. Paul that you don't see someone you know. Which is the great thing about it, I think."

St. Paul was founded before Minneapolis and was larger for the first few decades of the two cities' existence. French-Canadian traders set up camp south of Fort Snelling on the Mississippi in 1840, dubbing the settlement Pig's Eye (the nickname of an original settler and bootlegger). In its earliest days, the area was hub of the whiskey trade that catered to soldiers at the remote military outpost.

Local Catholic leaders soon saw to it that the city was renamed St. Paul, cementing a relationship between the Catholic Church and the city's ruling class that exists to this day. By the time Minnesota became a state in 1858, St. Paul was its biggest city and a regional trading center.

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