Cape Girardeau History and Photos
News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
I know these race photos were taken at Arena Park, but I don’t know anything else about them. I’m going to guess they date back to 1967, only because I don’t think I had any telephoto lenses long enough to shoot anything like this before that.
Since I don’t have any information, I’ll toss them all into a photo gallery. I’ll let you fill in the blanks. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.
The Southeast Missouri District Fair in Cape Girardeau was my first newspaper undercover investigation assignment. Jackson Pioneer Editor Gary Fredericks decided he and I would go to the fair to see if we could uncover and document gambling violations on the fair’s midway. I have no way of knowing whether or not he had any evidence of the gambling or if he just wanted to go to the fair.
[Editor’s note: I THINK Gary was editor. We had so many come and go it was hard to tell who was wearing the Editor hat on any give day. I also can’t remember if his last name had an “S” on the end. We’ll just call him Gary from here on out to be safe.]
Gary had a number of theories
Gary was capable of multi-tasking. He was working on that last theory at the same time.
That’s Editor Gary pitching the Krazy ball trying to win a piece of plush (stuffed toy). I presume the enthusiastic gentleman perched on the stool is Mike. I’m not sure how Gary rated this stand.
Soon we meandered over to this game. You might detect some kinda bad vibes coming off the gentleman at the left. I was beginning to get the feeling that he might not like me.
Before long, this nice man came over to talk with me. He was joined by two other burly fellows who wanted to make sure I got back to my car safely at the end of the evening, which, coincidentally, was Right Now. Gary shot this with a camera I slipped him when I thought things might be going south.
I was 5’10 and weighed maybe 105 pounds in those days, so they wouldn’t have had to be too big to meet my definition of “burly.” At any rate, I thought that maybe since they were kind enough to offer me an escort off the grounds that it would have been ungracious to refuse.
I don’t remember what kind of story Gary ended up writing. It may have had something to do with UFOs.
When I wasn’t getting kicked out, the SEMO Fair ranked right up there with Christmas, the 4th of July and your birthday for big events. It was such a big deal that the schools let out for Fair Day.
When you ran out of money, you’d scrounge the grounds looking for soda bottles to turn in for the two-cent deposit to food stands like this one.
Many local service service clubs and schools set up tents and stands to make money. This one has a sign, Delta Senior Stand. Note the electrical wires snaking along the ground.
Power for the grounds was provided by huge generators on the back of 18-wheelers. Huge cables the size of your wrist would feed into junction boxes on the ground, which would, in turn, fed into smaller cables. I always wondered why nobody got electrocuted when it rained. I’ll never forget the sound those generators made. They were noisy all the time, but they would scream when a big ride started up and they had to catch up with the sudden load.
Most midways were laid out in a U shape was designed to draw crowds throughout the entire carnival and maximize spending. Crowds tended to enter the right leg, so the stands on that side were more valuable and were either owned by the promoter or went for big rents.
Game concessions were usually the first joints along the outside of the right leg of the U. Rides would be located down the center column, with the carousel traditionally being the first ride beyond the front gate. After the games, the crowd would find the shows and the penny arcade.
The right hand bend was where the girlie show lived. I never made it into The Follies. I’ll have to let someone else fill me in on what you saw there.
The left leg would contain more shows and games all the way back to the front gate. They had slimmer pickings because a lot of money drained off before it got to them.
Other rides might be more spectacular, but the “wheel” traditionally signaled the end of the night. Because it was generally the tallest ride and could be seen throughout the whole midway, the carnival would use it to signal that the midway was closed for the night. When it went dark, it was time to go back to the trailers to get ready for the next day.
The greasy, tattooed guy with his cigarettes rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve who took your ticket when you got on a ride could be your friend – or not – depending on how he sized you up. He could give you a great ride or, by cleverly working the clutch, he could shake the change out of your pockets and make you puke on your girlfriend.
While we were scouting bottles for the deposits, we tried to look for loose change under the big rides. The carnies would run us off, though, because they considered that “their” money.
SEMO fairs are either hot and dusty or rainy and muddy. Frequently, they are both. Sometimes they even mix in cold and windy with the rainy.
All of the action didn’t take place on the midway. Cape was an agricultural area, so there were plenty of 4H and livestock exhibits. The Arena building was stuffed with baking contests, quilts and sewing competitions with their blue, red and white ribbons.
In addition to the exhibits, there were scores of booths set up that were the Real World equivalents of the Home Shopping Network. Barkers were hawking every imaginable thing. No kid – and few adults – went home without a shopping bag of handouts and samples.
It was a great place to go when you had run out of money and soda bottles.
Here’s a gallery of photos taken at the Southeast Missouri District Fair in the middle and / or late 60s. I don’t know that they were all taken in the same year. The earliest photos would have been of the 1964 fair. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right wide of the photo to move through the gallery.
Rush Limbaugh USED to be Cape Girardeau’s most prominent export. One of his classmates from the Central High School Class of 1969 is dominating the news right now: Terry Jones, the Gainesville, FL, preacher who is threatening to hold an “International Burn a Koran Day” on September 11.
In 2010, Jones published Islam is of the Devil, which denounces Islam as a violent faith.
His church also maintains a Gainesville boarding school, called the Dove World Outreach Academy. The Gainesville Sun newspaper reported that students of the academy are prohibited from outside and family contact including attendance at family weddings and funerals, and work without compensation selling, packing, and shipping furniture for TS and Company, a business owned by his current and second wife, Sylvia.
(His first wife was Lisa Barker, of Marble hill. She died of a heart attack in 1996.)
In March 2010, Dove World posted a sign saying “No Homo Mayor,” referring to Gainesville’s first openly gay mayor; after Americans United requested that the Internal Revenue Service investigate the sign as an undue participation of a non-political tax-exempt organization in the political process, the church then changed the sign to simply read “No Homo.”
On April 18, 2010, members of Dove World participated in a joint protest against homosexuality with the Westboro Baptist Church, a group known for disrupting the funerals of U.S. soldiers. On April 21, Dove World member Fran Ingram published a blog post proclaiming the church’s endorsements of the Westboro Baptist Church’s protests against homosexuality and homosexuals.
Jones has done a masterful job of uniting all ends of the political spectrum. Here is a short list of people who have denounced his book-burning plan:
Actually, a list of supporters would be shorter. (I don’t know that Rush has weighed in.)
The photo above is from the 1969 Central High School Girardot yearbook.
An April 25, 1968, Southeast Missourian sports report said that “Terry Jones took the Central win with six strikeouts to his credit. Marvin Hammack’s single in the third was the only Green Dragon base hit, but Jones ran into control problems as he walked one man, hit another, and threw four wild pitches – one resulting in the Ste. Genevieve run in the second.” He batted twice, but went hitless.
[Editor’s note: looks like he had control problems even in high school.]
The Missourian carried this story about Jones receiving an honorary doctorate of divinity degree from California Theology School in 1993. A Philadelphia TV website describes the the California Theology School as being “an obscure school that boasts that it’s so independent it’s never been accredited.”
Van Riehl noted, “I think this guy may have been on my Babe Ruth team, The Mets. Interestingly enough so was Rush Limbaugh. ”
Gregg Hopkins said, “I knew him the early 70s. He graduated from Central (I think) in 69. He was a funny, friendly guy back then, when he was dating my friend, Lisa. My how the years change some people. Every picture I’ve seen of him, he’s wearing an intense scowl. A couple of our Marble Hill friends figured out his connection about the same time I did. Sickening. His former in-laws, Lisa’s parents, are fine folks. I feel embarrassed for them.”
Here’s Rush (better known as “Rusty” back then) Limbaugh’s senior picture in the 1969 Girardot. He was on page 132. Terry Jones’ photo was on page 130. I don’t THINK they are on the same page today.
Had I not been able to come up with the yearbook pictures, this is the photo I was planning to run with this piece. Terry Jones is a train wreck waiting to happen. Let’s hope his actions don’t provide the spark to ignite worldwide violence.
Frederick Douglas paraphrased Hosea 8:7: “When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.”
[Note: thanks to Bill East for pointing me to the 1969 Girardot and to sis-in-law Marty Perry Riley for dragging out her 1968 yearbook and copying a picture from it.]
When I first saw this photo, I thought it made have been the razing of the St. Charles Hotel on Main Street. I’m going to let you tell me what building is in the foreground, because I’m not sure. Here are some clues, though.
This photo, shot from a little more to the east shows a tantalizing amount of info. There’s a Pepsi sign advertising what looks like Criss or Cris Cross Cafe on the side of the building.
A 1966 British movie about a photographer who photographed what might have been a murder scene came to mind here. The photographer took the negative into the darkroom and made increasingly larger blowups of it trying to figure out if he really saw what he thought he saw. Of course, the bigger the enlargement, the more the image degrades, and the less sure he was.
Playing the British photographer, I blew up just a portion of the frame above, enhanced the contrast and applied some sharpening filters to bring out maximum detail. That provided a few more hints.
This October 2009 photo looks like a Subway shop may have replaced Finney’s. A Google Earth aerial of the intersection shows a vacant lot at the northwest corner of Sprigg and Broadway today. That might mean that these workers razed the whole building, or it might have been taken down later.
Any idea what was in the building being torn down?
