Category: Photos around Cape

This must have been the grand opening of Griff’s Burger Bar. I don’t have any idea who the two men are or the exact date it was taken. I’m going to guess sometime between 1966 and 1968.

Millikan Car Lot is in the background. There was a story in the August 12, 1968, Missourian that reported that four wheel covers, valued at $138, were stolen from a vehicle at Millikan Car Lot, 1803 Independence. Based on that,  Griff’s must have been the the eatery at Caruthers and Independence.

I didn’t see any mention of the opening, but the Google archive index may have missed it. A couple of want ads looking for night managers ran in 1966 and 1969.

Griff’s employee engagement announced

There was a Missourian engagement announcement published  May 10, 1968, that said that “Mr. and Mrs. Norman V. Niswonger have ann0unced the the engagement of their daughter, Miss Laura Mae Sample, to Leroy Friedhof, son of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Friedhof. Miss Sample is a senior at Central High School. Mr. Friedhof is a senior at College High School, and is employed by Griff’s Burger Bar. A late August wedding is planned.”

[UPDATE: make sure you read the comments below to find out more about the Friedhofs.]

Brad Elfrink in his workshop

Cape is a place that overlaps and interlocks. My friend and former co-worker, Jan Norris, asked me if I’d meet up with Brad Elfrink while I was in Cape. He does beautiful “whimsical hand crafted collectibles” that she wanted photographed for her button site.

Brad and his wife live on Sprigg St., just down from William, which is why I photographed that corner for a recent page.

He and I talked about local landmarks that have quietly disappeared. I told him I had been looking in vain for a unique house in the neighborhood that I photographed in the 60s. He broke the news that it had been torn down, but that he had some of the decorative bricks from it in his back yard. (More about Brad and that on that another day.)

I prowled St. Francis Hospital

I mentioned that I sort of “found a way” into the nearby boarded-up St. Francis Hospital just before it was torn down. I wanted photos of the interior (and to make off with the room number tag off  the room my mother was assigned after I was born).

“Do you recognize these rocks?”

“Do you recognize these rocks?” he asked me.

I took a wild stab and said, “Did they come out of the grotto in the gardens behind the hospital? I always thought that was neat.”

St. Francis Hospital Grotto

Yep, Brad saw it being torn down and scavenged a few rocks for future use.

Nun Circus

The photo above of the grotto was in a film sleeve slugged Nun Circus, with no date or other info. From a technical standpoint, the frames were overexposed and overdeveloped, which caused the whites to block up to the point they were almost unprintable.

I’m going to put up a photo gallery of the “Nun Circus” and some of Brad’s recovered Grotto rocks. I apologize for the quality of the black and whites. I rationalize that their historical value may outweigh their poor quality.

St. Francis Photo Gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left of right side of the image to move through the gallery.

Typical Cape serendipity

Friend in Florida with no connection to Cape puts me in contact with an artist who just happens to have salvaged pieces of two buildings I had photographed in the 1960s. Things related to Cape don’t have Six Degrees of Separation. You can make the connections in no more than two or three.

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.