Parks Archives

September 7, 2010April 11, 2021

Radioactive Teenage Girls

When I first ran across the photos of this giggle of girls in front of the Arena Building, I thought they might be refugees from some kind of band camp. One girl is strumming on a guitar, there’s at least one other guitar case there, and another girl has what appears to be a ukulele under her arm.

Ouija Boards and sleeping bags

Then I noticed a Careers board game, a Ouija Board, sleeping bags, canteens and other camping paraphernalia.

Is this a Girl Scout campout?

If it is, they certainly don’t travel light. They appear to be a thirsty bunch, too. I see canteens of various shapes, thermos bottles, an insulated jug and a pitcher. Those square boxes look like they might contain beauty aids. Or ham sandwiches.

Headed INTO the Arena Building

They weren’t meeting in front of the Arena Building to go somewhere, they were headed INTO the building. That’s interesting. If you have really sharp eyes, you can see a Civil Defense triangle on a box on the table at the top of the stairs. Maybe that’ll provide a clue to what’s going on.

What is that on her head?

There is some kind of signing up going on here. I covered lots of Boy and Girl Scout events, but I don’t every recall running into the ceremonial or protective headgear the girl at the table is wearing.

Elaborate forms to fill out

The forms these girls are holding look more formidable than the ones we face on April 15 every year. What ARE they up to?

Civil Defense and National Security

Then, I finally found the two frames that made it all clear. Notice the small box with the Civil Defense triangle on it the man is holding? It’s a Geiger Counter.

You have to remember that this was at the confluence of The Red Scare and the Dawn of Rock and Roll, you know, Devil’s Music.

The girls were suspected of being Radio Active

Some busybody neighbor must have heard these girls listening to rock n roll on the radio and passed the word to the local Civil Defense office. The message got garbled at each stage along the way until it finally read, “Scores of teenage girls in Cape Girardeau are radioactive.”

The next thing you know, buses were dispatched to snatch the girls and quarantine them in the Arena Building until they could be screened with Geiger Counters.

That’s my theory and I’m sticking to until someone can come up with a better one.

August 15, 2010

Hooligans Deface Train

I miss The Southeast Missourian. I never got to write headlines like that at any other paper I worked for. Some low-lifes, probably from out of town, maybe as far away as Jackson, defaced Rosie, the Capaha Park play train.

Class of 70: “Cape Hurts.”

If you look closely to the rear of the train, you can see a pair of legs. I suspect those belonged to the cop reporter bein’ as how this was probably the crime story of the day – if not the week – and warranted a photographer AND a reporter. As far as I know, the miscreants were never apprehended.

I’m SURE this photo didn’t run

The Missourian was big on decorum. There were advice to the lovelorn columns that didn’t run because they were “too racy.”

When I ran a story about the Capaha Park and Arena Park trains back in November, I noted that the trains look different today than they did in the 60s when these photos were taken.

Trains have been modified

Reader and model railroader Keith Robinson cleared up the confusion: both locomotives were known as tank locomotives, meaning there was a water tank saddling the boiler. In the black and white photos, the protuberances above the tank from the front of the locomotive rearward are in order; smoke stack, forward sand dome, steam dome, and the rear sand dome. The sand domes sat atop the tank while the steam dome is part of the boiler; the high point from whence steam is drawn. When the tanks were removed in the 80s because of the asbestos insulation that was underneath them, the sand domes were removed with the tanks. The bells never sat directly on the boiler in either case but were mounted atop the tank in front of the smoke stacks.

August 10, 2010September 6, 2016

Fort D in 1966

I’m pretty sure the photo with the tire ran in The Missourian, but a quick Google Archives search for 1966 didn’t pop up the story.

The stories that DID show up that year included one where some out-of-town tourists wondered why Fort D didn’t have any historical markers telling its story.

How long has that thing been missing?

“Darn!” said the City Fathers. “There used to be one up there. Wonder how long it’s been gone?”

The city had a caretaker living in the Fort for awhile, but when he moved out, all of the windows were broken out. (In a story that may or may not have been related, a caretaker was arrested for drunken driving and may have had other housing assigned to him.)

Weeds and trash

Weeds and trash were allowed to grow up around the landmark.

Fort D tourist-worthy in 2008

When Brother Mark and I rode up to Fort D on our bikes in October 2008, the grounds were well-kept and there were plenty of interesting historical markers to make the trip worthwhile.

The building is missing its roof, unfortunately.

I wrote about the history of the Fort on my bike blog. in 2008. Follow the link to read more about the fort and to see more contemporary photos.

I was disappointed to find that this isn’t the original fort. The American Legion bought the site to save it from development in 1936, and the WPA built the building in 1937.

Fort D Photo Gallery

Here are more photos from 1966. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the photo to move through the gallery.

May 18, 2010October 19, 2011

Capaha Park Pool Party

I got an email this morning from The City of Cape Girardeau promising that the new Cape Splash Family Aquatic Center will be opening on May 20. (Whoever came up with that name must have been paid by the word. I bet everybody ends up calling it The Water Park.)

I showed some photos of it under construction last month (and discussed Jackson’s Lickitysplit Water Slide).

Capaha Pool Dance

Let’s don’t dwell on the future, let’s wallow in the past. This appears to be a dance on the deck of the Capaha Park Pool. I don’t have a clue what the event was, when it was held or why.

It had a band

It was a big enough deal that a real band was playing and there were lots of spectators outside the fence. Despite all of the electrical cords stretched across the pool deck, apparently nobody got electrocuted. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that.

I DO remember covering a swimming event there one night with a borrowed electronic flash. The way old-time strobes worked was that batteries would charge up a capacitor so there was lots of juice just waiting around to arch across a tube, producing a blast of light that was thousandths of a second in duration.

I was walking across the pool deck when my wet finger touched the place where the charging cord would normally plug in. There SHOULD have been a cover over those contacts, but there wasn’t.

As soon as my finger completed the electrical circuit, all of the voltage stored in the capacitor tried to light me up like a xenon tube. Failing that, it dropped me to my knees like I’d been poleaxed.

It wasn’t life-threatening, but it WAS unpleasant.

Looking for non-fried memories

This wasn’t the only time I had something like that happen. I was walking across a wet football field one night when I was knocked flat. I assumed that I had stepped in front of a play accidentally, but there was nobody around me.

I got up, took a few more steps and it happened again. Turned out that I had a short in the 510-volt battery pack that powered the electronic flash. The massive charge was looking for a path to the wet ground, and I happened to provide it.

Maybe one of you who hasn’t had his or her short / long-term memory fried by high voltages will be able to tell us who these folks are and what they are doing.