This memory, from page 43 of my book, Growing Up St. Louis: Looking Back Through the Decades, is especially to me. Sidney Duerr, the kid in the front, is my uncle. He was born in 1927 and died not long ago at the age of 91. He’s pulling his younger brother, my Uncle Donald Duerr.
Here’s a bit of what my Uncle Sid told me:
When times got hard, nobody would buy anything in hardware stores, so my dad lost his hardware store in Old Orchard in Webster Groves. He moved all of his stuff into the basement. My
job was to go get the lawn mowers and bring it to him to sharpen. After he lost the store, my dad got a job at a hat company. During the Depression, my mother took care of three old ladies. The
neighbors behind us, they were really poor, and we kind of helped them, too. That’s how we got through, everybody helping out. There wasn’t any politics.
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Jim Merkel the Writer 