Bill McClellan

A collection of St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan's "love columns and reader favorites". Most of these columns are about love stories of one sort or another, many of them quite touching. My favorite is the one about the developmentally disabled couple who found each other late in life, married quickly and were happy and content for several months until David died of an asthma attack. But, as McClellan notes at the end, "a love story is never judged by its length." Also present are two columns about the Florissant walking couple whose place Nancy and I have taken, and a milk-snorter about a wintry day when Bill went out in his robe to get the paper, found himself unable to go back up the icy incline to his house, and found himself trying to convince his family, watching and laughing from the picture window, that he was in genuine distress and not putting on an act for their amusement.… (plus d'informations)

A fine selection of early columns by Bill McClellan, the long-time human interest columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. There are stories of various unfortunates' encounters with the police and the courts, stories about people who seem to have drawn the short straw when luck or brains were handed out, touching stories of people who persevere through misfortune for their loved ones, and humorous self-deprecating stories highlighting McClellan's own personal foibles.

Pg. 189 has an account of Jim Stoien, the former PhD candidate who, after being hit by a car in 1975 was in a coma for 8 weeks, and woke up with diminished physical and mental capacities. Since 1981 he has delivered newspapers through the hospital complex where I work. When he comes to our lab, I help him push his cart back up the ramp outside the lab, and he gives me one of the penny candies he buys in bulk for when he stops at Children's Hospital. I had no idea he used to live in Florissant and graduated from McCluer High School.

The other column that particularly caught my interest is on pg. 88, about McClellan getting his just deserts after laughing when the family dog slipped and turned turtle on the ice while doing her business. McClellan ventured outside in just a bathrobe to get the newspaper, and found he couldn't make his way up the ice back to his house. The family was inside, asleep. Tia, the dog, was watching and looked vaguely disappointed when McClellan was finally rescued from an embarrassing death from exposure.… (plus d'informations)

Bill McClellan has been the St. Louis Post Dispatch's regular columnist for a long time now, and he's generally interesting, always affable and self-effacing, with no illusions about how fortunate he is that the winding path he has taken has led him here.

Bill McClellan is kind of a poor man's Bob Greene. I showed Nancy the column on pg 208, "Couple That Was Florissant Fixture Thrives In Florida". It was about an older couple who met at the Casa Loma Ballroom in 1954, and eventually settled in Florissant, where they began a walking routine together (she'd had a stroke and could not balance to walk alone). They did this for years, becoming a fixture in the neighborhood -- then they vanished. A local teacher who wondered about them asked Bill McClellan to check on them. He did; they've retired to Florida. Nancy and I do a local 3 1/2 mile walk in Florissant every day. People always stop us on the street and say, "I see you walk every day." We wondered if people would ask about us if we suddenly stopped or moved.… (plus d'informations)