“My mother? She was a good lady, a hard-working lady, and my father was a nice, good man, too, at least the way I remember him,’’ Madelyn Gaash recounts in Jim Merkel’s recently-released book, Growing Up St. Louis: Looking Back Through the Decades.
“I do not have bad feelings for him. Then he met this lady, and you know how ladies can be. He was with her and she was not going to accept just living with somebody. She wanted marriage, and that’s what she insisted on. So he asked my mother for a divorce, but she did not want it. And so he left her, which was awful—I don’t even like to tell the story.”
Then things got worse.
“I woke up one morning, and my mother was gone, too. They took her to the hospital, but it was too late. I was just eight years old when she died.”
After that incident in the middle of the 1920s, Madelyn Gaasch could have spent the rest of her childhood in an orphanage. Instead, an Italian couple named Elsie and Charles Pedrotti and took her into their happy home near the Bevo Mill. And that’s made all the difference for Gaasch, who was born in 1917.
Gaasch’s story turned out happy, but there also are sad ones, violent ones and stories of love in Growing Up St. Louis. Those who told their stories were black, white, rich and poor, representing St. Louis. Together, it makes for fascinating reading.
People can buy the book by clicking here.
Jim Merkel the Writer 