Just Don't Eat the Apple: The Story of Jack, Bugs and the Great Groundhog Days_ (1997). **BOOKS FOR ADULTS AND YOUNG ADULTS** **S** ince the advent of the Internet, the vast majority of people no longer have to bother with buying _St. Louis Sunday_ or _St. Louis News-Post_ (it's been a weekday since 2003) because they can find out almost everything that's ever happened in St. Louis and much that has never happened anywhere else. (The _St. Louis Post-Dispatch_ —owned by the same company as the _Post-Dispatch_ —has a website and will print letters to the editor, although they can only publish a couple of hundred on any given day.) All of the books in this category were written by two former St. Louisans (he died in 1997, she died in 2009) who wrote mostly for newspapers in other cities before deciding to do something different. _A St. Louis Encyclopedia_ (1976) is a comprehensive book that was published as a supplement to the _St. Louis Post-Dispatch_ and as a reader's guide for the _St. Louis Globe-Democrat._ It's too bad that so much of the original material was lost when the St. Louis Public Library archives burned down in a fire in April 1975. The best historical information about St. Louis is not hard to find. It's only a few clicks away on the Internet or in the public library, where you can flip through pages of old copies of the _Post-Dispatch_ , the _Globe-Democrat_ , and any of the other newspapers that St. Louis once had. If you have any doubts about your research skills, go ahead and Google "the St. Louis stockyards fire," which killed seven thousand people in 1904. It happened less than a hundred miles from St. Louis. You can follow the details of the story on the Web and in several different books. The best books on St. Louis history written in the last twenty years include: * _Terror on the Chesapeake: The War of 1812 on the Bay_ (1996) by William Mills (the editor of the _St. Louis Dispatch_ ). * _The Shame of St. Louis: A Story of Disgraceful Deceit and Wretched Betrayal of the Nation's Most Distinguished Citizen_ (2000) by David K. Barnes. * _The St. Louis Walk_ (2004) by Terry Williams. * _The St. Louis Guidebook_ (2004) by Terry Williams. If you want to find out about St. Louis sports, you've got to keep switching between books. Most of the best ones are out of print or hard to find. But here are a few worth looking for: * _St. Louis Cardinals_ (1975) by Lawrence S. Ritter, originally published by Macmillan. This was the most entertaining book ever written about St. Louis sports—and it was also the most accurate. In those days before big league teams even had computers, every player on the St. Louis Cardinals had his own page, and Ritter was able to turn out a few pages a day with one-paragraph profiles that were just a little short of brilliant. _Bleeding Blue and Gray: The Tragic Story of the Old Hickory Tree_ (1994) by Bob Broeg. A book that's a lot more fiction than fact, but it's a damn good read. _A Day in the Life of Charlie Sifford_ (1975) by Roger Kahn. Sifford became the first black player in Major League Baseball when he broke the color barrier in 1947, and Kahn's lively account of Sifford's rookie season and of the events leading up to it is packed with local color. _The Dickson Baseball Dictionary_ (2003) by Michael Gershman. This book is filled with baseball statistics, but you'll learn a lot more about the game from its title. It's hard to pick just one book about St. Louis. The only question is which St. Louis book to choose. Here are a few possibilities: _Vote Early and Vote Often_ (1922) by Arthur Scott. This is the tale of Mayor Samuel Jones Clay and his attempts to keep St. Louis's political machine solvent when it had almost run out of office holders. _St. Louis_ (1906) by Charles W. Ramsaur. _The Great Heart of the Continent: A Natural History of the Mississippi Valley_ (1899) by E. Douglas Branch. Other great books that use the St. Louis as a character in the story are: * _Cooter: A Tall Tale of Talent, Greed and Glory on the Corner of Grand and Gravois_ (1998) by Michael D'Antonio. This is a great book—filled with a lot of local history that happened since D'Antonio was born. * _The Road from Jericho: A Bluegrass Memoir_ (1992) by Lydia Marano, who grew up in West County. Another great book: * _A St. Louis Story_ (1967) by James Welch. It's about St. Louis, the city. And if it's not about the city, it's about the people who inhabit it. There are dozens of books that can help you research St. Louis history. I've listed a lot of them here; if you really want to make a dent in your local history, I recommend that you start with this list. And there's one more thing I'd like to say about St. Louis. It's a terrific city. It just isn't the place where you want to raise your children. I'm not saying that you can't raise your children there. You're an adult and it's your call. But it's up to you to decide where they live. # NOTEBOOK: A CITY WITH TWO VERSIONS **T** he United States city of St. Louis has two names, both of them legitimate, both of them official, both of them confusing. To the St. Louisan, they're both the same name: the same place. To the outside world, they are different cities. The city is the larger of the two, encompassing the metropolitan area of St. Louis County. It's one of the largest urban areas in the country, with about 2.7 million people (about twice as many people live in St. Louis County, which was once its own county but has now been split into two counties: north and south). The city's official name is St. Louis, although most people who aren't from here still think of St. Louis as St. Louis, Missouri. (St. Louis, Missouri, is a good deal smaller, about twice the size of the old East St. Louis city limits, which is now part of Illinois.) The city's official name is the capital of Missouri, but even people who live here have trouble remembering that. They think of it as St. Louis because St. Louis was founded in 1764. They like the word "Saint" but not the name. This confusion explains why most people refer to the city as "St. Louis" but also refer to it as "St. Louis, Missouri." St. Louis is sometimes called "the gateway to the West," although the fact that it's in the Mississippi River Valley makes it more like a gateway to the East Coast, and the fact that it's in a state called Missouri makes it more like a gateway to the Great Plains, which, as it happens, are in the west. When you look at a map of the United States, you see that Missouri is the longest state in the western half of the country. That probably explains why St. Louis is the gateway to the West. But St. Louis has another identity, too, one that really didn't begin until about twenty years ago. It's not the Gateway to the West but the Gateway to the South. St. Louis is about equidistant from Nashville, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, which is why so many people are traveling through St. Louis to get to Jackson, Mississippi, or Nashville, Knoxville, or Memphis. When people say "the Gateway to the South," they mean "a place where people can go west and also get some culture." The Gateway to the South is located on the Mississippi River in the old southwestern part of the city (called the West End, which is really called the South End of the old city). It's home to the Saint Louis Art Museum, to the St. Louis Zoo, and to one of the oldest cathedrals in the United States, which has a large statue of Saint Louis in its front. And it's a city that has a great restaurant scene and many great theaters. There are more people living in the Gateway to the South than ever before. St. Louis was settled on a major river (the Missouri), on a major port on a major river (the Mississippi), and on the edge of a major port on a major river (the St. Louis River). It has a vibrant art scene and a wonderful architecture, especially at night when the lighting enhances the architecture and the architecture enhances the beauty of St. Louis at night. And the Gateway to the South has more museums than any other city in the country. The Gateway to the West is still going strong, but