Merry Town, Missouri 1945-1948 — Nickell John Romjue

Merry Town, Missouri, 1945 - 1948, A Novel is a portrait of a Midwestern town in the transformed world of post-World War II America. It is about Andy Roan, a Missouri congressman of rare human insight into people and events, and Johnston Roan, his young grandson, through whose close companionship Merry's history and Southern roots and its economic, political, religious and social life are portrayed, together with themes related to the World War II veterans who came home to begin life in the new world of post-1945. Meriwether Lewis and President Harry Truman appear in this humorously serious family novel marked by unusual, unexpected mystery events--the strange visitation of a mysterious frontier figure, a fabulous engagement between intruding buffalo and a militarized herd of mules, two returning veterans and a violent animal stud-champion clash, a congressional race involving a looted German art trove, a crop-circle mystery and a credulous editor, the disastrous outcome of a Civil War cantata, the Missouri Bethel Colony and a young musician genius, the mystery of a soldier-veteran's prescience and his foretelling of the accidental death of a famous American general, and the morning of life of a German girl-artist war bride. This novel was written to present a time picture of a Missouri small town in the brief span of years from 1945 to 1948. That time between two eras marked the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the long Cold War that the United States and its allies would wage to contain the worldwide revolutionary drive for power of the Soviet Union--a conflict that would dominate the international world as well as the lives of Missourians and all Americans through most of the remainder of the 20th century. Merry Town, Missouri is a young boy's story, told in that historical frame, in rumination, about his love for his grandfather. It is based on an original series of nine related short stories centered on mystery, dramatic, and humorous events that occur in the town. The incidents shown are fictional, but the characters are modelled closely on the family of the author, here named the Roans, all of whom took seriously life in the world of the postwar 1940s and all of whom had a sense of humor. Any resemblance of the other characters in this novel, human or animal, to actual persons or creatures living or dead, lacks all credibility.