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For the curious, I did a video in which I answered five questions about Growing Up St. Louis: Looking Back Through the Decades. I wasn’t able to answer the question: Why haven’t you bought a book yet? You can fix that by clicking here and buying one.      

“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 thisContinue reading “Spared a life of sadness”

  By far the oldest of the more than 100 people I interviewed for Growing Up St. Louis was Dorothy Hunter. I met her in the spring of 2017 in her room in the Meramec Bluffs Care Center, an assisted living facility in Ballwin. Born in 1907, the retired school teacher was 109, but hadContinue reading “Memories of a Long, Lost St. Louis”

Mischelle Leahy of Reedy Press interviewed me about Growing Up St. Louis: Looking Back Through the Decades. You can buy a copy by clicking here.  

Growing Up St. Louis author Jim Merkel ponders what kids today will tell their grandkids about coronavrus.

Copies of Growing Up St. Louis: Looking Back Through the Decades came into the Reedy Press warehouse on March 26, 2020,. That’s 1,159 days (three years, two months and four days after I turned in a proposal to Reedy Press Publisher Josh Stevens. It wast worth waiting for. It’s not going to take you thatContinue reading “The books are in, and they look great”

The waiting soon will be over. On Friday, I’m told, we’ll get real copies of Growing Up St. Louis: Looking Back Through the Decades. We’ll have a chance to look at what I got from interviews of  more than 100 people about their experiences growing up here. When you add the transcribing, writing, rewriting, changesContinue reading “The book is almost here”

I wonder what kids today will remember about COVID-19 half a century from now. From what I discovered in writing Growing Up St. Louis: Looking Back Through the Decades, their memories should be vivid and fairly accurate. I interviewed a couple of experts about remembering things, and they talked about something called “flashbulb memory.” PeopleContinue reading “How will they look back at the virus?”

For months, I and many others were looking forward to the big April 11 Launch Event for my new book, Growing Up St. Louis: Looking Back Through the Decades. We hoped to pack the 250 seats of the auditorium at the Central Library downtown. But then came the COVID-19 health emergency, and the library canceledContinue reading “The virus can’t keep us down”

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