Examines the often-serious, sometimes funny, and truly amazing story of Germans in the Gateway City from the arrival of the first German priest right after the city's founding to the present.
With his fourth book from Reedy Press, The Making of an Icon, Jim Merkel captured the spirit behind the conception and construction of one of America’s most distinctive and beloved national monuments. More than two million visitors stand in awe at the Gateway Arch each year, and the stories behind it were unearthed in breathless detail in the first edition. Back with even more lore and the addition of beautiful color images, Merkel brings new information on the Arch grounds and museum to this updated and revised second edition. Now expanded, his book includes more stories compiled from interviews with the visionaries, finaglers, protesters, and intrepid workers who built the arch while one misstep away from a fatal fall. Merkel’s book will help us appreciate the relentless pursuit, innovation, and toil that raised the Arch to the sky.
When Fidel Castro sends his top assassin into Colorado's high country to kill the vacationing American and Russian Presidents, Buck and Dolly Madison and Buck's Vietnam war buddies are caught in a cross-fire of presidential politics, water politics and forced to make a choice between Duty-Honor-Country and allowing Fidel's terrorists to assassinate a President who "loathes" the military. After their private plane is shot down by the terrorists on a Rocky Mountain glacier, Buck and Dolly must fight their way downhill through a terrorist gauntlet that tests their love, courage and survival skills. If they can outwit the terrorists, they can prevent the destruction of the Lake Granby High Dam and save the lives of thousands of innocent Americans.
In the South Side, there lived a tactless TV guy who had a way of getting tossed out of everything on camera, from the old VP Fair to Bill Clinton’s 1996 local re-election victory party. On the South Side, there dwelt a collector of ancient vacuum cleaners, none of which worked when he demonstrated them before millions of guffawing viewers watching on national television. And on the South Side, a beer baron tried to fight off Prohibition with a high-class, three-sided beer hall. It’s all in the second edition of Hoosiers and Scrubby Dutch: St. Louis’s South Side. The first edition captured the essence of the South St. Louis, with its tales of women scrubbing steps ever Saturday, the yummy brain sandwich, and a nationally known gospel performer who ran a furniture store in the Cherokee neighborhood. These stories, along with the new ones that fill the second edition, convey what gives a truly unique place its rough but charming personality. The result—Holy Hoosiers!—is an edition that’s even better than the first!
As we all know, St. Louis is the best baseball town in America, but the city's major league history is not confined to the Cardinals. For several decades, until the middle of the twentieth century, St. Louis fielded a second professional team. True, it was mostly a losing team, but it once featured a first baseman who hit .400, a legendary Negro League star, and a pitcher who would go on to throw a perfect game in the World Series. They were the St. Louis Browns--the forerunners of the current Baltimore Orioles and a part of St. Louis's rich baseball history.
The most entertaining and comprehensive guide to every baseball fan’s dream road trip—including every new ballpark since the 2004 edition—revised and completely updated!
The most entertaining and comprehensive guide to every baseball fan’s dream road trip—including every new ballpark since the 2004 edition—revised and completely updated!
No matter when or where we grow up, the stories, people, and places that populate our memories leave an indelible mark on the manuscript that becomes our life story. A day at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, meatless meals and hard times during the Great Depression, or knowing Mark McGwire's precise homerun count that summer of 1998 become galvanized in our own timelines, while other details fade into the background. In Growing Up St. Louis, hear the stories that stuck with more than 110 native St. Louisans over the last century told by the very people who lived through them. Ranging from joyous to humdrum, and even to grim, these childhood memories offer a glimpse of life in still frame, from the start of the twentieth century to the present day. A woman speaks lovingly of the elephant ears she bought in University City in the 1950s while a future local sportscaster falls in love with sports as he and his dad watch the 1968 World Series. With new and old photographs to accompany the essays, join veteran author Jim Merkel on a journey through ten decades of coming of age in St. Louis. Whether they spark nostalgia or empathy, they'll surely provoke commentary about how deeply our tender years impact us for the rest of our lives.
Hall of Famer and Chicago icon Frank Thomas shares his passion for grilling and cooking with baseball fans everywhere for the first time. Grilling is perhaps as essential and synonymous with American culture as baseball itself, and Frank Thomas is ready to share all of his home run recipes. Whether you're looking for barbecue basics or grilling greatness, these sizzling steaks, slow-cooked smoked ribs, and mouthwatering burgers are sure to please every palate, from healthy fare to hearty indulgences. Beautiful full-color photographs and easy to follow instructions set you up for culinary success alongside legendary former White Sox player Frank Thomas.
Marian Alexander Spencer was born in 1920 in the Ohio River town of Gallipolis, Ohio, one year after the “Red Summer” of 1919 that saw an upsurge in race riots and lynchings. Following the example of her grandfather, an ex-slave and community leader, Marian joined the NAACP at thirteen and grew up to achieve not only a number of civic leadership firsts in her adopted home city of Cincinnati, but a legacy of lasting civil rights victories. Of these, the best known is the desegregation of Cincinnati’s Coney Island amusement park. She also fought to desegregate Cincinnati schools and to stop the introduction of observers in black voting precincts in Ohio. Her campaign to raise awareness of industrial toxic-waste practices in minority neighborhoods was later adapted into national Superfund legislation. In 2012, Marian’s friend and colleague Dot Christenson sat down with her to record her memories. The resulting biography not only gives us the life story of remarkable leader but encapsulates many of the twentieth century’s greatest struggles and advances. Spencer’s story will prove inspirational and instructive to citizens and students alike.