Monthly Archives: August 2014

Most of us won’t be laboring on Labor Day,  So it’ll be a good time to sit back and listen to Charlie Brennan interview me on KMOX AM 1120 from 9:35 a.m. to 10 a.m. Out-of-towners can listen in to the program at http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/station/kmox/. Charlie’s the dean of local talk show hosts and the host onContinue reading “Charlie Brennan is Having Me Back”

Readers of page 108 of The Making of an Icon: The Dreamers, The Schemers, and the Hard Hats learn that it wasn’t easy to work on the Gateway Arch, and not just because of the heights. In June 1965, nearly six months before the topping-out ceremony for the Gateway Arch, the electrical systems subcontractor forContinue reading “Work Not For Everybody”

Monday will be a good time to mosey out to St. Charles. The German Chapter of the St. Charles Sister Cities has invited me to come out and talk about one of my favorite subjects, St. Louis Germans. I’ll do some readings about St. Louis Germans from all three of my books, Beer, Brats, andContinue reading “Out to St. Charles for Some Gemütlichkeit”

Just six months after my book on the Gateway Arch came out, I’ll have a new book. Make that a new old book. The book will be the 2nd Edition of my first book, Hoosiers and Scrubby Dutch: St. Louis’s South Side. This story of the people, places, events, and oddities that have made theContinue reading “Return of an Oldie But Goodie”

From the beginning, businesses have adopted the Gateway Arch as a symbol of St. Louis. The Missouri Secretary of State’s online database of corporations lists more than six hundred corporations, present and past, whose name starts with the word Arch. Compared to the number of corporations starting with the word Gateway, that’s a handful.  AsContinue reading “The Gateway Arch Means Business”

Gag! Yesterday was the birthday of Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. How could I forget! Happy 104th birthday, Eero.

One of the biggest thrills an author can have is for someone you wrote about to say you did a great job. That happened this week when Eric Saarinen sent me the most kind e-mail you could imagine about my book The Making of an Icon: The Dreamers, The Schemers, and the Hard Hats WhoContinue reading “Kind Words From Eric Saarinen”

A strange peace was in effect when I drove through the area of the protests/riots in Ferguson this afternoon. Some cops were out, so were protesters walking along West Florissant Avenue.. TV trucks and crowds gathered in front of the Florissant Market & Liquor, which was robbed just before Michael Brown was shot. Boards coveredContinue reading “A Visit to Ground Zero”

Today I had coffee with my wife and brother in the Central West End, not far from the World Chess Hall of Fame. It got me thinking about what would have happened if Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen had been a chess enthusiast. Maybe instead of a 630-foot-high croquet wicket, we might have had aContinue reading “The Gateway Chess Set”

I was part of a KWMU program this morning on the anti-German sentiment during World War I. Here’s the link: http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/century-old-war-leaves-lasting-impact-st-louis-german-identity