Category: Photos around Cape

Grandson Malcolm, who is going to turn 6 any second now, headed off on his bicycle for his first day of kindergarten this morning. He’s lucky enough to have a good school only a few blocks from his house in Lake Park, FL.

Brother David pumps up his tires

Here’s Brother David in his baseball uniform pumping up his tires. Note the speedometer. I had one of those on my bike, too. I pegged it going down the steep hill gravel road leading from Old McKendree Chapel. It’s the kind of thing you do just once in your life if you survive it.

Technical note: the black and white photos were taken with a half-frame camera that would get two photos in a standard 35-mm frame. You got twice as many photos per roll of film, but the quality was only half as good.

Brother Mark with his Sears Spyder

Mark had a Sears Spyder with a rare leopard skin banana seat. When he outgrew it, it ended up in a shed in Dutchtown where it went underwater in at least two floods. Read about my quest to fix it up for him as a present.

After I wrote that piece, I was surprised at how many bicycle collectors there are out there and wrote a second story. After discovering how much it was going to cost to restore the old bike, I loaded it back in the car to take it back to him. After all, you can only love your brother so much.

A fellow who read the stories knew a restorer in Henderson, KY, who had a near mint version of Mark’s old bike. Mark asked if I’d divert a few hundred miles out of my way to pick it up on my last trip to Cape. Sure. Gas was a lot cheaper than fixing his old bike.

I’ll be writing about that adventure on my bike blog.

I’m still looking for photos of MY bike. So far, I’ve found about a two-second video snippet of me pulling out of the driveway on it, and a still frame where it’s way in the background.

When I went back to Cape in the spring, I was curious to see if the old Fruitland School was still standing near the intersection of 177 and Route W. Dad built that road when I was two years old, and I remembered having a wienie roast there with the Steinhoff, Kirkwood and Joiner families.

The photo above shows Dad – L.V. Steinhoff – me and Carolyn Kirkwood. This was a rare outing for us. Dad wasn’t much big on picnics. “I eat sandwiches sitting on the ground six days a week. I don’t want to do it on the weekend, too.”

Old Fruitland School is gone

I imagine the old brick schoolhouse used to stand right about where the North Elementary School playground is today.

“Play like these are brownies”

Funny how stuff sticks in your head. I remember the ground was a little muddy where a bulldozer had gone by, leaving perfectly rectangular pieces of compressed soil behind in the tracks. “Let’s play like these are brownies,” Carolyn Kirkwood said. Even at two, I wasn’t falling for that trick.

Attending the event were L.V.,  Mary Steinhoff and Ken Steinhoff; Troas (Bones), Lillian and Billy Joiner; Jim and Maurine Kirkwood and Jimmy and Carolyn.

North Elementary School

This is a pretty, new, spiffy school. I still like the old brick one, though.

I’m always amused – OK, ticked off, if you have to know – at the people complaining about cyclists on Route W. That was considered a farm-to-market road in the days when Carolyn was trying to feed me mud brownies. Since I was there 60 years ago, I figure I’ve earned the right to ride it on my bike  without people honking at me.

On a sadder note, I’ve seen a lot of posting about this being the week that Elvis died in 1977. Like I wrote earlier, this is also the week that Dad died in the same year. There’s no doubt in my mind which one I miss more.

When I wrote about Bunny Bread the other day, folks immediately started remembering that Bunny Bread was a sponsor for Crusader Rabbit on KFVS-TV.

Crusader Rabbit was the first animated series produced specifically for television. The first episode, Crusader vs. the State of Texas, aired on KNBH in Los Angeles August 1, 1950.

Crusader vs. State of Texas

Kid Matt, who has a Bunny Bread T-shirt, but had never seen Crusader Rabbit, found a bunch of the cartoons on YouTube.

Episode 1 sounds vaguely topical these days. Crusader Rabbit is headed to the great Southwest because he heard a radio news report that “the Texans are chasing all of the jackrabbits out of Texas.” He was headed down to help his cousins, all of whom were named Jack. Along the way, he enlists the aid of his trust sidekick, Ragland T. Tiger (Rags).

Each episode broken into chapters

Each episode was broken into as many as 30 chapter, insuring that you’d have to be glued in front of the set every day to keep from missing the story line.

Budget wouldn’t buy lunch at Disney

Don Markstein wrote, “Television’s first cartoon series, Crusader Rabbit, embodied everything bad that came to be associated with TV animation. It was quickly and imperfectly produced on a budget that wouldn’t have bought lunch at Disney, it repeated the same episodes over and over, and its animation was limited almost to the point of stasis. It had only one saving grace — its young viewers thought it was funny.”

Crusader Rabbit had simple formula

“Crusader’s basic formula was simple — humorous adventure stories told (by narrator Roy Whaley) in short episodes, with cliffhangers, about a little smart hero (Crusader Rabbit, voiced by Lucille Bliss, who many years later was the voice of Smurfette), a big dumb hero (Rags the Tiger, voiced by Vern Loudon), and an inept recurring villain (Dudley Nightshade, voiced by Russ Coughlin). Ward would later become famous for another animated TV series with that very same formula — Rocky & Bullwinkle.

“Production ended in 1951, after 195 episodes had been made, and the creators went on to other things — in Ward’s case, bigger and better ones. The series was revived in 1957 (this time in color), and ran another 260 episodes; but without its creators (who had sold their interest in the characters), it never recaptured its earlier charm. The color episodes appeared in syndicated reruns as recently as the early 1980s.”