Author: Ken Steinhoff

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Radioactive Teenage Girls

When I first ran across the photos of this giggle of girls in front of the Arena Building, I thought they might be refugees from some kind of band camp. One girl is strumming on a guitar, there’s at least one other guitar case there, and another girl has what appears to be a ukulele under her arm.

Ouija Boards and sleeping bags

Then I noticed a Careers board game, a Ouija Board, sleeping bags, canteens and other camping paraphernalia.

Is this a Girl Scout campout?

If it is, they certainly don’t travel light. They appear to be a thirsty bunch, too. I see canteens of various shapes, thermos bottles, an insulated jug and a pitcher. Those square boxes look like they might contain beauty aids. Or ham sandwiches.

Headed INTO the Arena Building

They weren’t meeting in front of the Arena Building to go somewhere, they were headed INTO the building. That’s interesting. If you have really sharp eyes, you can see a Civil Defense triangle on a box on the table at the top of the stairs. Maybe that’ll provide a clue to what’s going on.

What is that on her head?

There is some kind of signing up going on here. I covered lots of Boy and Girl Scout events, but I don’t every recall running into the ceremonial or protective headgear the girl at the table is wearing.

Elaborate forms to fill out

The forms these girls are holding look more formidable than the ones we face on April 15 every year. What ARE they up to?

Civil Defense and National Security

Then, I finally found the two frames that made it all clear. Notice the small box with the Civil Defense triangle on it the man is holding? It’s a Geiger Counter.

You have to remember that this was at the confluence of The Red Scare and the Dawn of Rock and Roll, you know, Devil’s Music.

The girls were suspected of being Radio Active

Some busybody neighbor must have heard these girls listening to rock n roll on the radio and passed the word to the local Civil Defense office. The message got garbled at each stage along the way until it finally read, “Scores of teenage girls in Cape Girardeau are radioactive.”

The next thing you know, buses were dispatched to snatch the girls and quarantine them in the Arena Building until they could be screened with Geiger Counters.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to until someone can come up with a better one.

 

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Riverside West vs ISC

Newspapers in the 60s and 70s didn’t expend a lot of ink covering women playing sports, so I didn’t shoot a lot of it.

All I know about this game is that some of the women have shirts with Riverside West and ISC on them. I wonder if ISC stood for International Shoe Company?

Limitations of electronic flash

Technically speaking, these pictures suck canal water. It was dark enough that I used a strobe to punch up the lighting. The problem is that strobes are great for stopping action – they have a very short duration – but the cameras of those days required you to use a slow shutter speed, generally around 1/60 of a second. That meant that you picked up ghosting and movement from the ambient light.

On top of that, the negatives were scratched up from being rolled up in a coffee can for 35 or 40 years.

Photo Gallery of Riverside West vs. ISC

Y’all have been getting really good of late at identifying people and places. Maybe you can fill in the details of this game. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the photos to move through the gallery.

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Kool-Aid 3¢ (Buy 2, Get One)

There was a Missourian story about Samantha and William Gardner in the Sept. 5, 2010, paper. The youngsters sold vegetables they grew in a garden and proceeds from a lemonade stand to donate $113.07 to FISH, a Cape Girardeau food pantry.

Kool-Aid stands a Cape tradition

Samantha and William were carrying on the old Cape tradition of setting up a card table in front of your house where you would sell lemonade, Kool-Aid or home-grown produce.

That’s my old 1959 Buick LaSabre station wagon up there. Looks like I must have cruised by the kids, figured that I’d better grab a piece of wild art while I could, and put the land yacht in whoa-back.

Ways for kids to make money

These kids showed a real knack for business. Their sign, with a smiling Kool-Aid pitcher, touted Ice Cold Kool-Aid (they even got the trademark spelled right, with a hyphen) for 3 cents. “If you buy two, you get one free.”

Another sure-fire way to make money in those days was to scrounge the side of the road for soda bottles at two cents apiece. I’d have a lot fewer flats if they’re bring back bottle deposits (especially on beer bottles).

The house in the background looks familiar, but I can’t place what street it’s on, nor can I identify the entrepreneurs.

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Colonial Restaurant Crash

Some photos are more interesting because of the background than the subject. I noticed the Colonial Restaurant in these photos of a crash at Kingshighway and Broadway. I always think of the establishment as being the Colonial TAVERN, but the name must have changed sometime toward the end of the 1950s, based on newspaper stories.

Sports car plows into building

I couldn’t find any newspaper stories about the wreck, nor do I know when the pictures were taken. The car doesn’t look like it sustained much damage. It doesn’t have the typical dimples in the windshield caused by an unbelted driver.

Cape police and a state trooper

I count at least six police officers and a State Trooper working the wreck. It must have been a slow, if cold, night

One of the first lessons I learned as a news photographer that everything goes smoothly until you get one more cop on the scene than they need to work the incident. He looks around and decides that his job is to hassle the photographer. These guys must not have hit that point, because I don’t remember any conflicts.

Colonial Restaurant being remodeled

It looks like the building was being remodeled. There’s fresh lumber and framing visible, and the car knocked down one of the temporary supports.

In 1936, Albert Haman and Harley Estes spoke in favor of incorporating an area west of the city limits, as the first step in bringing the area into the Cape Girardeau city limits. Haman owned a restaurant at the intersection of Cape Rock Dr. and Highway 61. Estes represented the Simpson Oil Co., which owns the Colonial Tavern. There are five gasoline stations in the area, but no schools or churches.

Missourian advocates expanding city

A Missourian editorial in 1946 advocated extending the city limits to take in the entire stretch of Hwy 61 to enable the city to zone the property and “thus prevent it from becoming covered with undesirable structures….Pigpens and beer joints … have long infested the Alvarado-Colonial Tavern intersection…. Unless this is done Hwy 61 from the southern city limits to the northern limits may be expected to become a hodgepodge of shacks and dumps…”

Coroner Don Kremer

Coroner Don Kremer is the fellow next to the car. In addition to being the coroner, he was also a commercial photographer who made a sideline of shooting wrecks for insurance companies, so his presence doesn’t necessarily mean this was a fatality.

Kremer made the news himself in 1970, when he gunned down a young woman, then committed suicide by driving into a bridge abutment at high speed. (If you follow the link, you’ll have to zoom out and turn your head sideways to read the story. Google has the microfilm rotated to the left.) Investigators say that tire tracks indicated that he aimed his car so that the driver’s side would take the brunt of the impact.

Kremer’s wife said that he had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and had been given  two months to live.

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