The sight had Johnny Carson and his audience roaring with laughter. Stan Kann nervously fidgeted as he tried to demonstrate his collection of ancient vacuum cleaners. But the more he tried, the more things went wrong. The more he pumped the nineteenth-century machines, the more they left grime on the floor.
So began the national comedy career of Stan Kann, a native St. Louisan who wowed audiences with his bumbling antics and his way on an organ and lived his last ten years on Federer Place in South St. Louis.
Stan’s story is one of the stories in the very soon-to-be-released Second Edition of Hoosiers and Scrubby Dutch: St. Louis’s South Side. It contains most of the stories in the First Edition, plus a bunch of new ones you don’t want to miss.
You can get an autographed copy of the book eight days from now at a release/signing party at The Royale, 3132 South Kingshighway Boulevard. The fun begins at 2 pm on Sunday, October 19, with a discussion about what it means to be a South Sider featuring people in the book. It continues until 5. We’ll see you there.
Jim Merkel the Writer 