Author: Ken Steinhoff

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Vintage Hats of Perry County

When I was in Cape last fall, I wrote a piece for my bike blog about my favorite ride: the 26-mile run from Cape to Altenburg.

I try to stop in at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum whenever it’s open. Their permanent collections are full of fascinating artifacts of the German communities. I see something new every time I visit. The staff is friendly and knowledgeable. It’s free, but your conscience should twitch a little if you don’t throw SOMETHING in the donation box on the way out the door.

I was planning on doing a series on cool stuff to see in Perry County, but the Easter bonnet theme caused me to jump the gun.

Hats off to 100 Years

The current exhibit features 100 historic hats and related photographs and other artifacts. It is the inaugural celebration of the Perry County Lutheran Historical Society’s centennial year as an historical society.

These aren’t hats from some far-off place. These are hats worn by local women who loaned them to the center just like they loaned their aprons to the exhibit I saw last fall. Knowing that the hats were worn by real women to Perry County church services or club meetings make them come to life for me.

Historical Society organized in 1910

The Perry County Lutheran Historical Society was organized in 1910 to preserve, interpret and promote the Log Cabin Seminary. The exhibit is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. Bus tours and groups are welcome.

I wasn’t in Missouri for the Christmas Tree display between Nov. 18 and Jan. 5.

My Mother mentioned to the tour guide that it hasn’t been too long ago that women didn’t feel dressed unless they were wearing a hat and gloves.

This looks like Brain Coral

Maybe I’ve been in Florida too long, but this one makes me think of Brain Coral

Who needs pepper spray?

You didn’t want to have to chase one of these intricately-designed hats down the street on a windy day, so you used hat pins to hold it on. I am reasonably sure you couldn’t board a plane wearing one of these today. Some of those pins looked to be as much as eight inches long. I can see now how they were good tools for defending one’s honor.

How do I get to Altenburg from Cape?


View Cape Girardeau to Altenburg Bike Route in a larger map

There are more direct ways, but the way I go by bicycle is a great route. It takes you through some beautiful farming country that’s just now greening out. If you click on the map, it’ll make it larger. You can pan and zoom to see more detail.

You’ll pass farm houses that have to be closer to 200 years old than 100. You’ll cringe when you come to some bridges that are marked as one-lane when you recall that we drove on them as two-lane bridges at 60 mph.

The Tour of Missouri rode a good portion of this route. When you come to some of the steeper hills, think of climbing them under your own power on a bicycle. When you come to some of the sharper curves, think of taking them with 120 of your closest friends on all sides of you in a game of chicken.

Check out the Heritage Center web site

The Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum has an easy to navigate, uncluttered web site with lots of information. If you make the trip, tell them you heard about them here.

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Cherry Hill Easter Egg Hunt

It was a Good Friday,  the religious holiday, and it was a Good Friday for Midwesterners looking for nice day after a long winter.

Trees and flowers were blooming and green was popping out all over. Lawn mowers were puttering away in neighborhood yards.

A perfect day for SEMO baseball

A healthy crowd, many in shorts and T-shirts, turned out to watch a double header between SEMO and Western Kentucky. (SEMO won the first game 17-9 and the second 7-4, if anyone cares). I love the sound of baseball games, but I still haven’t gotten used to the “CLINK” of aluminum bats. There’s something wrong about it.

Bell & Howell 8mm movies

Late in 1959, Dad brought home a Bell & Howell 8mm movie camera outfit. In the days before Super-8, 8mm cameras actually used 16mm film. You’d shoot the first half of the roll, open up the camera, flip the film over and shoot the rest of your movie on the other half of the film. The processor would develop it, split it down the middle and splice the two 25-foot lengths into one 50-footer.

This wasn’t an ideal setup. First off, it was easy to fog the film when you were doing the open-the-camera, rethread-the-film operation. Then, when you went to project it, only one side of the film had sprockets to pull it through the projector. That made it easy for the film to slip off. If you didn’t get to it in time, the heat from the projector bulb would burn a hole right through the film.

Brother Mark took on the task of converting the 8mm film to VHS tapes ab0ut 15 years ago. It wasn’t a high tech solution. I think he mostly took a picture of a moving picture. I didn’t complain. At least, I didn’t have to do it.

With VHS going the way of 8mm, I got a good deal on a VCR that outputs to a computer USB port. Considering that the original film quality wasn’t great to begin with, and that Mark’s copy didn’t improve things, the digital result is acceptable if you don’t mind fuzzy, blow-out images.

I say that to lower expectations.

Here’s an Easter Egg Hunt on Cherry Hill

Bro Mark appears in these pictures along with his Trinity Lutheran School kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Tickel, so  Mother and I are guessing that this video was taken around 1961. Mark is the cute kid who can’t seem to keep his shoes on. The Capaha Park Band Shell is in a few frames.

Spring makes you forget winter

Since we normally come home in October to celebrate my mother’s Birthday Season, we get to see the fall colors. I had forgotten how much I loved seeing the countryside come to life in the spring. It almost makes you forget those gray, gloomy days.

Almost.

 

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The Spring on Bloomfield Road

When we were driving past the castle called Elmwood, my mother wondered if a spring she remembered as a little girl was still there.

I had heard her talk about it years and years ago, so I thought I knew approximately where it was alongside Bloomfield Rd. I parked my van at Kensington Lane and walked north, back toward the curve in the road leading to Cape.

This view, by the way, is the reason Bloomfield Rd. SHOULDN’T be widened. There should be some roads left that let us appreciate what the area was like before it became paved over. If the road isn’t fast enough for you, then don’t move out there. Ditto Route W. OK, rant off.

Just south of the big tree that’s shown in the photo above and on the west side of the road, I saw a small rivulet of water running toward what used to be the Elmwood estate.

Water boils mark the spring

I didn’t see a pipe running under the road that would account for the stream. When I looked at the pool through a polarizing filter on my camera, I could see beneath the reflections on the water’s surface.

Those black circles mark where water is boiling up out of the bottom of the pool.

I had found my Mother’s spring

“My Grandmother – my Mother’s Mother – Mary Adkins, would always buy some kind of pan at the dime store every time we came to Cape from Advance. On the way back, we’d stop at that spring and dip out a drink in the new pan. She died in 1938, when she was 75 years old, so that was quite a few years ago,” my mother, Mary Welch Steinhoff, recalled.

“I don’t remember what kind of car we had – it was before Model T days. Mother (Elsie Welch) would usually come along; Grandmother would drive. Dad (Roy Welch) never liked to drive.”

Did you stop for a drink on the way TO Cape?

“No, we didn’t have a pan on the way TO Cape.”

“Didn’t you ever think about bringing one along?” I asked?

“No, I guess she wanted a new pan and this was always an excuse to get one.”

View of spring looking south

That white fence marks what used to be the Elmwood property. I don’t know if this is in the 900 acres that were sold for the Dalhousie Golf Club or if it’s part of the 70 acres retained by the estate.

Map showing spring and Elmwood


View Bloomfield Spring & Elmwood in a larger map

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Cape’s Not a Town; It’s the Twilight Zone

My friend, Jan Norris, the former food editor of The Palm Beach Post and a fellow blogger, asked me to look up a local artist, Brad Elfrink, who produces beautiful hand-crafted buttons and jewelry. Jan’s a button collector, who writes for other collectors.

Brad’s a a relatively young guy originally from Marble Hill who has developed a love for Cape Girardeau’s buildings and people. I was describing a couple of landmarks I had been searching for over the weekend. “Want to see some pieces of them?” he asked, showing me some remnants he had saved from the bulldozer.

I’ll be writing about Brad and his finds later.

When I got back into the car, I called Jan and said, “Most places have six degrees of separation. Cape reduces it to two.”

It was still early, so I decided to shoot some other buildings I remembered in and around the 1600 block of Independence.

Old Fire Station Number Two

We used to go there on grade school field trips. It looks like it might have had two bays in the old days.

Pak-a-Snak, an early convenience store

Just east of the fire station, on the same side of the street, was the Pak-a-Snak. A Missourian story Aug. 17, 1955, called it the first drive-in, cash and carry market of its kind in Cape. We’d call it a convenience store today.

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Farrow were the first owners. They sold it to Mr. and Mrs. Porter Stubbs in 1955. The store hours – shocking – were 8 a.m. until 8:30 p.m. every day including – double shocking – Sundays and holidays.

A trip to the Twilight Zone

I wanted a photo of the old Donut Drive-in, but I wasn’t exactly sure which shop it was in. I heard music coming from a small bar a couple of doors down, so I figured somebody there might be able to help me out.

I don’t spend a whole lot of time in bars. I HAVE had occasion to step into one from time to time when I’m riding my bicycle. It doesn’t matter if it’s a redneck bar, a biker bar or just a coffee shop full of regulars, as soon as you step through the door wearing bike shorts and a glow-in-the-dark jersey, conversation stops and all eyes focus on you.

How to survive wearing Lycra

At that point, I’ve found your odds of survival go up if you glance around the room, pause a couple of beats and then say in a loud voice, “Y’all sure do dress funny around here.” Before long, people are asking how far you’ve come, how far are you going, what have you seen along the way, and are offering to buy you drinks or a meal.

There was a man holding a beer in the doorway. “Come on in. There’s plenty of room,” he said with a smile.

“You’ve got enough gray hair that you can probably help me,” I said, handing him a business card.

“Are you Kenny Steinhoff?”

I’ve been running from that nickname since 1967, but I had to admit that – in Cape – I was “Kenny Steinhoff.”

“I’m Jerry Schweain,” he said, extending his hand and smiling wider.

Turns out he was a truck-driving friend and former neighbor of my brother-in-law, John Perry. He posed with a friendly woman from behind the bar, then said, “I’ve got something to show you that you probably never thought you’d see again.”

He reached for his wallet, fumbled around for a bit, then pulled out a worn and faded Palm Beach Post-Times business card with my home phone number scrawled on it. “You told me to give you a call if I ever got down to your neck of the woods. I never got closer than around Tampa, so I never called you.”

I gave him that card in 1977 or 1978.

Only in Cape Girardeau would someone hold onto your business card for 30-plus years and then run into you in a neighborhood bar 1,100 miles from where you live.

Donut Drive-in

With Jerry’s help, I was able to locate the Donut Drive-in. The building still had the serving windows. It was a big deal to pull up to the window on Sunday morning on the way home from church to pick up some fresh donuts or Long Johns,  jelly-filled donut pastries  so sweet they’d find a cavity faster than a dentist.

Earl Kirchoff opened the doughnut stand in 1952. The ad in the 1964 Girardot had the slogan “Tote a Poke Home.”

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