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Eddie Roth Reader

The

Short Fiction
(& occasional poetry, essays, fragments, reprises, and other minor inventions)
Featured Writing
Mailman Tommy (2025)​

 

When peers and postal customers saw Tommy Shaw coming, they knew they were witnessing something special. He was legendary for the efficiency and precise street sequence with which he sorted and dropped mail into letter boxes. He carried two heavy satchels, strapped across his shoulders, bandolier style. He marched for hours, down streets, up hills, across front yards, up and down concrete stairs, and on and off porches, to the quick time cadence of an honor guard. He handled the mail like a drum major’s mace.

 

They called him Mailman Tommy.

 

What they didn’t know was that twenty months before retirement eligibility, Tommy’s job was threatened. He stood a risk of being fired and the reasons were confoundingly foolish.

 

CONT.

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About Eddie Roth

Eddie Roth came to fiction writing later in life. He received an M.A. in English from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2023, where he won The Mimi Zanger Memorial Award in Fiction and William Carlin Slattery Memorial Award in Poetry or Drama.

 

He organized The Eddie Roth Reader in the summer of 2024 to share his writing with friends and interested acquaintances. He mainly sees the Reader as a platform for short fiction. But he will present other forms, including a few of his old newspaper clips as examples of daily writing (and an old speech) for auld lang syne, as well as occasional poetry, essays, and fragments that comment on conditions and set some things down for the record.

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Eddie has mainly made his living practicing law, first in New York, where he graduated from New York University (1979) and Fordham Law School (1982), and then in St. Louis, his boyhood home.

 

​​Eddie clerked for Chief Judge Lawrence H. Cooke of the New York Court of Appeals (1982-1984), served on the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners (1998-2001) and spent nearly ten years (2002-2011)working as a newspaper editorial writer at the Dayton Daily News and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  He spent another six years (2011-2017) in St. Louis municipal government in the administration of Francis G. Slay, the city's longest serving mayor, including as Director of Operations, Director of Public Safety and Director of Human Services. Most recently, Eddie has been a police legal advisor in the city's law department under Mayor Tishaura O. Jones.

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Eddie and Jeanne Philips-Roth, a legal aid lawyer and his wife of more than 35 years, live in a brick and stucco bungalow house in south St. Louis. They are especially proud of their three daughters, Emily, Julia and Alice.

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