Photos around Cape Archives

December 16, 2015

MV Donna Griffin

Road Warriorette Shari came down from St. Louis the other week with a list of places she wanted to go: Old Appleton (where we saw the old Silver Dollar Tavern just hours before it was torn down), the Mississippi Mud Tavern for Liver and Onions Night, the Lutheran Heritage Center’s Christmas tree exhibit, and Trail of Tears State Park.

From the Mississippi River overlook, we were lucky enough to catch the MV Donna Griffin coming upstream. We could hear her talking to another boat to arrange a passing, but I think it was well north of us, so we didn’t get to see that. We could hear a train whistle in the distance, but it must have been on the Illinois side, so we missed seeing two major transportation systems at the same time.

Rigging amazes me

It always amazes me how the pilots and captains can maneuver long strings of barges around sharp bends and between bridge piers. I know those straps have to be bigger than they look in this photo, but still, I can’t imagine how much strain is placed on them when the captain needs to move something that’s a thousand-plus feet in front of him.

Here’s a website with some interesting factoids. It says that a standard barge is 195 feet long and 35 feet wide, although some of the newer ones are 290 by 50 feet.

Let’s assume that the ones in the photo are standard length. The string appears to be two wide and six long. That would mean that you have to figure out where to make your turn from nearly 1,200 feet back. Think about THAT the next time you complain about a parallel parking space being a little tight.

You can click on the photo to make it larger, but I didn’t spot anyone on deck checking us out.

Bald Knob Cross

That little white dot on the top of the hill in the distance is the Bald Knob Cross.

Has had three names

The Donna Griffin was built by Nashville Bridge Shipbuilding in 1965. A website, reports that she was named the Julia Woods until May 2006, when she became the Michelle O’Neil. In May 2009, she was renamed the Donna Griffin. I didn’t find anything that explained who the boat was named for nor the significance of changing the names in May.

A shipbuilding site said Nashville Bridge Company was originally a bridge builder, founded in the 1890s. It was converted to shipbuilding in 1915 and, by the 1960s, it was said to be the world’s largest builder of inland barges. George Steinbrenner bought it in 1969 and added a second yard in Ashland City in 1977; he sold the company to Trinity Marine Group in 1995. Trinity closed the Nashville yard in 1996, when the City of Nashville decided that the downtown shipyard property would be more valuable to the community as a stadium.

She is 180.1 feet long, 50.5 feet wide, and the hull depth is 11.5 feet.

The towboat is owned by Ingram Barge of Nashville, the largest carrier on the inland waterway system.

December 9, 2015

Sunsets and Geotags

I was racing the dark Monday to shoot the remains of the Silver Dollar Tavern on Apple Creek when I popped over a hill on Highway 61 south of Old Appleton and saw this farm in the sunset. I did one of my patented U-turns to capture the golden glow. That’s the reason photographers call the hour after sunrise and before sunset the Golden Hours.

I had some tighter shots, and I debated cropping up from the bottom, but I like the way the manmade yellow highway divider lines echo the color of the backlit grasses.

Keeping track of where I am

One of the challenges in shooting lot of pictures is that you sometimes forget where you were or there aren’t clearly identifiable clues to help you orient yourself.

You can buy GPS attachments to plug into your camera, but they are bulky and expensive. Kid Matt came up with a cheaper solution. Since I already have an Android phone on my belt all the time and an iPad in the car, he suggested I get a program called Geotag Photos Pro that would capture the GPS track of where I’ve been. Matching up the track time with the filestamp time associated with a photo, can tell you where it was taken.

It sounds complicated, but I was happy to find out that it is harder to explain than to use. The map above shows where the photos were taken. The yellow marker that has the 16 means that 16 frames were exposed near there. The orange 4 represents four frames taken with a second camera body. They were both taken from the same location, but the camera times were off by a few seconds, which caused them to appear to have been taken at different locations. I’ll synchronize the devices better before I do this again.

It’s going to help out a lot now that I’m spending a lot of time roaming around in rural areas I’m not really familiar with.

December 7, 2015

Roundabout To Eat Buildings

When I drove past this building one day, it said Southeast Missourian. A few days later, the sign was gone and the Jackson bureau office was closed for good. When I competed with Missourian reporter Bob Todd in my old Jackson Pioneer days, and filled in for him when I started working for the Cape paper, the office was in a tiny building where the Cape County Archive Center is today.

We filed our stories on a 110-baud Teletype that looked like this. Everything you typed showed up on a companion machine in the Cape newsroom. It printed in all caps, there was no backspace, and you had to type in a slow rhythm to keep from going faster than the machine could handle.

One of my jobs at The Pioneer, a paper with more characters than character, was to plagiarize Bob Todd’s county commission meeting reports. I still think my rewrites were better than his originals, even if I didn’t copy his signature transition phrase, “In other business….”

How to outfox the competition

I could have sworn I had told this story before, but I couldn’t find it in the archives. Anyway, it might explain why I was able to make the transition from the newsroom to telecommunications late in my career.

On Election Day 1964, Jackson Pioneer Publisher John Hoffman told me I had better be wearing running shoes because “Bob Todd keeps the only pay phone nailed up, and you’ll be running back and forth from the courthouse with election returns all night.”

I gave that some thought, and toward the end of the business day, I went to that pay phone, took the receiver off the hook, and put a sign on it that read, “Phone Out of Order. Has Been Reported to Phone Company.” My theory was that since it was late in the day, nobody would bother to call Ma Bell, particularly since someone else had already done it.

When the returns started trickling in, Bob sauntered up to the phone with a bunch of results in his hand, glad to see it unoccupied, then his shoulders slumped when he read the sign. I let him contemplate it for a minute, then I stepped up, hit the phone’s hookswitch, dropped a dime and called The Pioneer. When I hung up, I told him what I had done, and we agreed to share the phone for the rest of the night.

Victim of the roundabout

A sign on the door read, “Due to MoDot needs to demolish this building for the planned roundabout, the Southeast Missourian’s Jackson office will be closing September 30, 2015. It has been our pleasure to serve you at this location for the past 22 years. After September 30, please continue to call the Southeast Missourian at 573-243-6635 of 573-335-5611 for assistance, or visit our office at 301 Broadway in Cape.”

A Missourian story (not written by Bob Todd) reported that the DOT has acquired the right-of-way from all but one property owner. This is a different location than the roundabout that would have wiped out Jackson’s Hanging Tree and a good part of the courthouse lawn.

December 3, 2015

R.I.P. Jackson Skating Rink

When I photographed the building that had been the Jackson Skating Rink in 2010, it had already morphed into another use. On a drive to Marble Hill a few weeks ago, I saw that the rink was no more. (Check out the link to learn some interesting things about the history of the rink going back to the early 1950s.)

I don’t think I ever skated there, but Brothers Mark and David did.

I was confused

In fact, I posted some pictures of kids skating back in the 60s and thought they might have been taken inside the Hanover Skating Rink. Several readers said I was wrong, and some others thought it was the MaryAnn Rink. After a lot of give-and take, Fred Lynch provided proof that it must have been the Jackson rink by the process of elimination.

Follow this link to weigh in (it also lists a bunch of other skating-related posts).

Floor no more

All of us who grew up hearing our wooden wheels click across wooden floors like this one find modern rinks strangely silent.

You have to wonder how many beginner bottoms bounced off those boards.