Bill McClellan gives props to Maplewood barista/journalist

Maplewood barista/musician, Bill Newmann, is known for fine service at Stone Spiral Coffee and as a bass-player for local groups, The Provels and The Griddle Kids. He’s also apparently on St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan’s radar as a citizen-journalist.

Newmann and another journalist tried to go hear Vice President Joe Biden speak in Granite City last month but were stopped at the line because they were alternative media. They contribute to the Journal of Decomposition, a blog that “examines the myths and realities of a society run amuck.”

But as McClellan reports, also stopped, was a woman with a sewer problem who had wanted to tell Biden about it, so Newmann interviewed her.

“When asked what she would tell Biden if she had the chance, Alene points out a sinkhole in her front yard. It is above a collapsing sewer which snakes under much of her property and links to a drainage ditch in her backyard. ‘Listen, under here is all water. I can hear the water singing,’ she says,” Newmann writes in his piece called, The Wrong Side of the Tracks.

“It was really a nice story,” McClellan said in his column. “All these important people, including the vice president, the secretary of transportation and the governor of Illinois congratulating themselves about the stimulus, and just out of their sight, an elderly woman with a sewer problem.”

So Bill McClellan has his eyes on Bill Newmann — maybe next we’ll see McClellan in Stone Spiral watching The Griddle Kids play.