Hoosiers and Scrubby Dutch

In the South Side, there lived a tactless TV guy who had a way of getting tossed out of everything on camera, from the old VP Fair to Bill Clinton’s 1996 local re-election victory party. On the South Side, there dwelt a collector of ancient vacuum cleaners, none of which worked when he demonstrated them before millions of guffawing viewers watching on national television. And on the South Side, a beer baron tried to fight off Prohibition with a high-class, three-sided beer hall. It’s all in the second edition of Hoosiers and Scrubby Dutch: St. Louis’s South Side. The first edition captured the essence of the South St. Louis, with its tales of women scrubbing steps ever Saturday, the yummy brain sandwich, and a nationally known gospel performer who ran a furniture store in the Cherokee neighborhood. These stories, along with the new ones that fill the second edition, convey what gives a truly unique place its rough but charming personality. The result—Holy Hoosiers!—is an edition that’s even better than the first!


About the Author

Jim Merkel reported for covered the South Side Journal from 2001 to 2009 before writing Hoosiers and Scrubby Dutch: St. Louis’s South Side. Since then, he’s written Beer, Brats, and Baseball: St. Louis Germans and The Making of an Icon: The Dreamers, the Schemers, and the Hard Hats Who Built the Gateway Arch. A true-blue South Side hoosier, he’s lived for twenty-two years with his wife, Lorraine, in the South Side’s Bevo Mill neighborhood.