Ken Steinhoff, Author at Cape Girardeau History and Photos

December 23, 2020

The House in a Hole Is History

Back in 2014, Niece Laurie asked if I knew the story behind the “house in a hole” on Campster Drive just north of the Drury Inn. I had always wondered about it, too. so went to my best source, Mother.

She knew the woman who lived there, Mrs. Earl Siemers, from church, but she didn’t think she’d talk with me.

I gave it a shot, but Mother was right, as I should have known. Mrs. Siemers would talk with me only if I promised it would be off the record. In the real world, I’d have honored the request, but then I would have done an end-run to find a source who WOULD tell me the whole story. You folks don’t pay me enough to go to all that trouble, so I left things vague.

I posted a photo of the house and an aerial map, and, true to form, my readers told me “the rest of the story.”

Click on the photos to make them larger, then use your back-arrow to go back to the story.

Laurie the Stalker

Niece Laurie must be some kind of House in the Hole stalker because she tipped me in November that it looked like the house was going to be demolished.

It was almost sundown when I got around to checking it out, so the light wasn’t great. It did look like the white siding had been stripped off the building, so I figured its days were numbered.

What’s funny is that the photos I liked best were not of the house. I loved the trees, outbuilding and leaves in the late, Golden Hour light.

Dandelion and leaves

I was impressed with the last dandelion of the season struggling to peek out from beneath the leaves.

The Things Left Behind

I’ve always been a sucker for the things that are left behind when homes are abandoned. I raised the question, “What would you take?” to go with a blog post about an abandoned house in St. Mary.

I wondered how many flies that swatter had dispatched in its life.

Here was the naked house

I didn’t spend much time shooting the house because the light was lousy, and the building wasn’t all that interesting in its naked state. (I bet that’s the first time I’ve written that.)

Soon nothing will be left but memories

When I was running errands on Tuesday, I happened to look over the hill and saw that the yellow Cat had ripped out the trees I liked so much, knocked down the outbuilding, and crunched the house down to the basement.

If a few days, all that will be left will be memories, and those will fade, too.

November 19, 2020November 20, 2020

Power to the People

Charging stations at Schnucks 11-17-2020

Charging stations for four electric cars have been added to the Schnucks parking lot in Cape.

Here’s the press release from Ameren. I am pleased to announce that I managed to compose this post using only one pun. Still, I hope you get a charge out of it. (Oops.)

November 12, 2020

Picturing the Past Business Cards

A big box with 1,000 new business cards came this morning. My telephone number changed, so I had to do an update.

This photo, which replaces the one of the Cape Girardeau traffic bridge, reflects that I’m broadening out from concentrating on Cape Girardeau.

To be honest, I still have a lot of unpublished photos from the SE MO area, but all the ones I really like have already been posted. I’m looking forward to scanning more of my Ohio pictures.

This photo was taken when Grandma Gatewood was honored by having a bridge over the Buckeye Trail in the Hocking Hills State Park dedicated to her in 1969.

I didn’t know she was a big deal

Grandma Gatewood, 81, hikes the Buckeye Trail In Hocking Hills State Park 01-1969

When I showed up at the state park, it was foggy, sleeting and raining. The trail was a mixture of mud and treacherous ice. Lots of my photos were fuzzy because the lens was constantly fogging over or being rain dappled.

The cute gal second from the right is Lila Perry a few months before she became Lila Steinhoff.

I didn’t realize my subject was a big deal until about 20 years ago when I read a book on the Appalachian Trail where she was mentioned prominently in the forward.

The Washington Post filled in details about Grandma Gatewood:

Grandma Gatewood, as she became known, was the first woman to hike the entire 2,050 miles of the Appalachian Trail by herself in 1955. She was 67 years old at the time, a mother of 11 and grandmother of 23. She’d survived more than 30 years of marriage to a brutal husband who beat her repeatedly.

Gatewood hiked the trail carrying a homemade knapsack and wearing ordinary sneakers — she wore out six pairs of them in 146 days from May to September. She brought a blanket and a plastic shower curtain to protect her from the elements, but she didn’t bother with a sleeping bag, a tent, a compass or even a map.

The back of the card shows my bike blog

The back of the card has a drawing Don Greenwood was gracious enough to let me repurpose. I’ve neglected that blog for years, but there’s still enough good info in it that it’s worth mentioning.

You can throw this one away

This is the one that has the old phone number on it, so you can throw it away (unless you just like the photo). By the way, if anybody has a use for about 700 outdated cards, let me know.

More Smelterville books available

The last batch of Smelterville books disappeared quickly, so I ordered another 50 from the fine folks at PDQ Printing in Cape. If you’d like like a copy (they’d make great Christmas presents), they are available at these three local places.

Cape Girardeau County History Center, 102 S. High Street, Jackson, Mo., 63755; Phone 573-979-5170. $20 in person; $30 to cover shipping and handling if mailed.

Annie Laurie’s Antique Store, 536 Broadway Street, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63701; Phone 573-339-1301, $20 in person.

Pastimes Antiques, 45 Main Street, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63701; Phone 573-332-8882. $20 in person.

November 11, 2020

I Like My New Flag

On Oct. 3, 2020, I posted a pitiful photo of my American Flag that was torn almost in two by a gust of wind or just general tiredness.

At the time, I remarked somberly (and maybe a little too dramatically) that I was afraid that flag was a symbol of this nation that was almost ripped apart, and hanging on by a thread.

I’m happy to say that my new flag is flying proudly from a unique flagpole I engineered, partially by accident.

That’s Bill and Rhonda Bolton’s house in the background on a fine Fall day. We always called it the Tinker House because Bob and Mary Tinker lived there for years. The Boltons have lived in it long enough that it’s probably time to rename the place.

How I made the flagpole

My previous flag was attached to a pole in front of the house. When the rose bushes got high, the flag would snag on the thorns. I figured I could solve that problem if I moved it out in the yard.

After scratching my head a bit, I went to the hardware store and discovered that a 10-foot length of 1-inch galvanized pipe would easily slip inside a 30-inch piece of 1-1/4-inch pipe sunk 24 inches into concrete.

I wanted to make it possible to back a trailer into the yard to get firewood, so this lets me take out the long pole and only leave the sleeve sticking out above the ground about six inches.

I drilled holes through both pipes with the intention of putting a bolt through them, but it was after dark when I finished, so I turned the flag and pole in the direction where I thought it would be best and went to bed.

Serendipity sets in

The next morning, I was surprised to see the flag in exactly opposite of the direction it was the previous night.

While I was standing there, a gust of wind rotated the whole pole. I was mesmerized. Figuring there was no way that pole was going to jump out of the sleeve, I decided to forgo the bolts and let it act as a weather vane.

Here’s what it looked like on a gusty day this week. The halo-looking thing at the top is a solar-powered LED array to light the flag at night. The flag sticks up so high that the porch dusk-to-dawn lights only hit the lower half of it.

To be honest, I’m not overly happy with the performance of the halo light, but it’s up there.

One other cool thing is that the pipes make a spooky moaning or groaning sound when they rotate more that about 25 degrees. I couldn’t figure out where the weird sound was coming from until one afternoon when I was outside loading the car and made the connection.

The 10-foot pole is rigid. The “bouncing” is caused by the play from the sleeve being larger than the pole. It’s not going anywhere.

Veterans Day is an appropriate time to show off my new flag.