Cape Girardeau History and Photos
News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
When I didn’t know what else to do, I’d head down to the river to try for a different shot of the bridge. This is a time exposure taken from the Illinois side looking back toward Cape.
The car and truck lights show up as streaks.
Trust me, this will NOT be the last bridge picture you see.
Blaring klaxons at Alma Schrader SchoolJust as I stepped out of the car in front of Alma Schrader School Friday morning, an ear-splitting alarm cut the air. “Wow, that’s some greeting,” I thought. “They’ve got the sensor on the StrangeCharacter-o’meter set just a little bit too sensitive.”
When I got inside, I saw little kids hunkered down in the hallway and teachers taking headcounts. I glanced out the window where the skies were gray, but not particularly threatening. “Tornado drill?” I asked a staffer. “It IS a drill, right?”
I was assured that it was merely a drill, something they practice several times a year. I hope it’s more effective than the Duck ‘n Cover exercises we did to prepare for nuclear blasts.
It was a productive visit. Principal Ruth Ann Orr, administrative assistant Stephanie Voil Depro and counselor Julia Unnerstall were a great help in matching names to faces in the photos I shot of the school’s 50th Anniversary Celebration March 11.
My memory is a funny thing. It’s full of old stuff waiting for some kind of electrical spark to flicker between it and something I encounter in Today’s World. When I looked out the door at the gray skies, I flashed back to a stormy Friday afternoon on November 22, 1963.
The American History teacher was droning on. We were waiting for the end of the day and the start of the weekend. The PA crackled to life and we looked out at the threatening clouds wondering if we were going to hear a tornado alert.
Principal Fred Wilferth announced that President John F. Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas, Texas. Not long after that came the bulletin that the President was dead.
The Missourian reported that Central High School “held a period of respect and remembrance [that began] at 2:45, lasting several minutes.”
Shortly after that, a television set with rabbit ears was wheeled into the gym, where shocked students watched the story unfold. As soon as I saw the scene, I called The Missourian and told Editor John Blue that I’d have something for him. That promise would soon come back to haunt me.
He said the paper was going to publish an EXTRA edition, but I’d have to hurry. They wanted the paper on the street by 6 p.m.
I ran up to the school darkroom, grabbed the Crown Graphic 4×5 camera and two holders of film. One side was empty, so that left me three shots. I didn’t see the school’s electronic flash, so I grabbed three old-fashioned flash bulbs on the way out the door.
Without getting too technical, the camera had to be set differently for each type of light. An electronic flash fires a very short burst of light, so the shutter has to be fully open when it goes off (that’s the X setting). A flashbulb ignites, then it gets progressively brighter until it dims out. That means it has to fire slightly before the shutter does so it is at maximum brightness when the shutter is open all of the way (that’s the M setting).
In my excitement, I didn’t notice that the camera was set for electronic flash. When I pulled the dripping film out of the fixer, my heart sank. It was almost blank. There was hardly any image on it at all. The flashbulb hadn’t had time to get to full brightness before the shutter closed.
I knew I didn’t have time to reshoot the picture, even if the students were still around. I pulled out what meager little bag of magic darkroom tricks I had learned and managed to come up with a shot that made the paper.
It was the last time in my entire career that I ever told an editor that I had a picture before I saw it. You have to remember that my first Missourian news photo was published April 18 of that year. My credibility was on the line. You don’t tell someone to hold space in an EXTRA! unless you can deliver.
By the way, the “pupil” quoted as saying all he could hear was the sound of his fellow classmates breathing was me. The Missourian had this quaint style rule that you were a “pupil” until you were in college. Then you were promoted to “student.” I tried every way I could to get the style changed, but never succeeded.
Here’s a link to the EXTRA! edition. You’ll have to play around with the zoom settings on the page to be able to read it.
I’ll publish all three photos, warts and all. In some ways, the dust spots, fingerprints and bad exposure makes the images feel more “real.” Or, that’s the excuse I’ll use.
My family and I went to Central High School on the Sunday after the assassination to get sugar cubes with drops of polio vaccine on them. When we got into the car to go home, we heard the news that Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald while he was being transferred from the jail to an interrogation room.
The assassination, Oswald shooting and Kennedy funeral changed the way Americans would get the news. I know the The Palm Beach Evening Times put out an EXTRA! edition when the Challenger exploded. I’m pretty sure that was the last extra edition I ever worked on.
Radio and TV were much better equipped to handle breaking news. (I would argue that the 24-hour cable channels have mishandled breaking news in recent years with their obsession of staying live when there’s nothing going on.) The printed newspaper provided a keepsake and tangible proof that an event happened in a way that broadcasting couldn’t, but the Internet has essentially driven a stake through the heart of traditional media.
The screen shots, by the way, were taken off the Steinhoff family Zenith TV in our basement.
JFK’s assassination was the first in a wave of killings and attempted killings: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan…
None of us who lived through that era emerged untouched. If you don’t believe it, look how a tornado drill at an elementary school in my home town can give me a flashback to a Friday afternoon nearly half a century earlier.
Miss Alma Schrader had an excused absence for missing the 50th Anniversary of the school named after her: the veteran Cape Girardeau school principal died shortly before the school opened. She would have been 124 years old, had she been able to attend, Principal Ruth Ann Orr joked.
You can read about Miss Schrader and see photos of the kindergarten class of 1967 at this link.
All five of Alma Schraders’ adminstrators attended the ceremony, including Vince Raddle, Roy Glass, Frank Ellis, David Giles and Ms. Orr.
Roy Glass, left, was the school’s longest serving principal, with 21 years at the post. His grandson, Neil Glass, third from left, director of administrative services, said he used to ask his grandfather for the keys to the school so he could play in the gym when he was a kid.
“I hope you don’t get in trouble for that,” he joked. “I didn’t turn on the lights,” he added.
Those were simpler days and more trusting days. Central High School principal Fred Wilferth gave me the keys to the high school one evening in 1963 so I could process a spot news photo in the school darkroom. That photo launched my career in photojournalism.
I had to park my car about two blocks away. The hills in that neighborhood are a lot steeper than when I was 12 years old flinging papers in front yards.
The school’s gym was filled to standing room only. It seemed like every third person was recording the event in some form or fashion.
After the formal ceremonies, many of the attendees stayed around for refreshments and to look at old school scrapbooks and yearbooks.
There were several multi-generational Alma Schrader families. Dr. Ryan Davis flips a scrapbook page while Raleigh and Grayson Davis and Sarah McKinley watch.
Jim Gerhard was the only member of the original Class of 1959 to attend. He came across the state from Joplin for the celebration.
Here is a collection of photos from Alma Schrader’s 50th Anniversary celebration. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the picture to move through the gallery.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I never played any team sports and, despite the fact that I’ve covered just about every big sporting event to come along, I’ve never had any interest in any them. Super Bowls, championship golf tournaments and college bowl games were just another day at the office. I’m a cyclist, but that’s pretty much a solitary sport, at least the way I do it.
PE was probably my least favorite class at Central High School. The rope climb, which was intimidating when I was a freshman, became one of my favorite challenges later on after I had spent a summer loading and unloading trucks for my dad’s construction company. I could zip up the rope using only my upper body after that workout.
Still, every time when I got up to the top of the rope and just before I slapped the rafter holding the collar that secured the rope, I wondered how often that thing got checked.
I had similar concerns when I was doing a story on the sheriff’s helicopter (that’s me dangling in the rescue sling during a practice). On the first day, I asked the standard question, “What happens if the engine quits? Do we gently auto-rotate down or do we drop like a rock.?”
“Let’s find out,” Andy, the pilot said, gaining some altitude over a rural area. He cut the engine and we gradually descended toward what looked like a smooth, green pasture. Just before we touched down he fired up the engine and did an abrupt pull-up.
It wasn’t a green pasture, it was a green, algae-covered pond. We agreed that we wouldn’t mention the experiment in my story. Andy’s dead now, so I guess the statute of limitations has expired.
After establishing that a helicopter WILL set you down relatively gently if you aren’t aiming at a farm pond, the pilot said the worst thing that could happen would be a failure of the Jesus Nut.
Seeing the expression on my face, he explained that the Jesus Nut is the thing on the very tip top of the shaft that holds the rotor on. “If it fails, ‘JESUS!!!!’ is about all you’ll have time to say before things go REALLY bad.”
Now, I know what they should have called the thing that held the rope to the rafter.
The girls had blue and / or green suits that ranged from “hideous” to almost not too bad, depending on what year you went to school. The boys were luckier. They had basic shorts with a shirt that was orange on one side and black on the other so you could tell teams apart.
These guys look like they are formed into lines so they can duck under the divider, run across the gym, perform some act of pain and run back. I don’t see any smiles.
Coach Robert Goodwin and I had an uneasy relationship. Well, it was uneasy from my perspective. I tried to stay as far below his radar as possible. Since I possessed no jock characteristics, he generally overlooked me.
I DID make a mistake one day. He had us running endless laps of the track. “It’s good for you. Every lap burns out the nicotine equal to a cigarette.”
I don’t know what kind of scientific study he was quoting, but I made the mistake of piping up, “I’ve got a problem, then, Coach. I don’t smoke. I’m building up a huge nicotine deficit that’s going to come back and haunt me some day.”
He was not amused. I’m not sure, but I think I’m still supposed to be running around that track.
If the weather was bad or the coach’s mood was bad, it was push-up, chin-up, jumping jack, sit-up time.
When I got to SEMO, phys ed was a requirement. By the time I got all the academic classes scheduled, the only PE class open was something with a fancy name that was really nothing but calisthenics. The instructor told us on the first day that we would do a series of tests to establish our baseline and that our final grade would depend on how much better we were at the end of the semester.
My mamma didn’t raise a fool. When I took the baseline test, the coach was appalled at what lousy shape I was in. At the end of the semester, though, he was convinced that he was a great instructor because of my tremendous improvement.
The next semester, the only thing open was Beginning Wrestling. This did not sound good. The first day, two or three of us showed up; the coach said to come back for the next class to see if anyone else signed up. On the second day, he said the the group was too small, so he was going to fold us into the Advanced Wrestling class. I didn’t like the way that sounded.
I showed up for the first day of Advance Wrestling, took one look around the room and decided that I liked all of the body parts I was born with and dropped the class. That’s when I decided to transfer to Ohio University, where PE was not required.