Family Archives

June 21, 2013April 10, 2021

We Had 3-D: View-Master

While I was packing to head back to Cape next week I kicked a dusty box in the back of the closet. In it was a stack of View-Master reels. I don’t know why the were called reels, but that’s the name that shows up on the official Fisher-Price View-Master website.

I didn’t dig though the box to see if the heavy, Bakelite viewer was in there. I’m disappointed. The viewers are selling for less than $20 on eBay. I guess it can stay hidden for a few more years.

Not only did I have the stereoscopic viewer, which simulated 3-D by having two slides that you looked through at the same time that had been photographed by lenses slightly apart, but I had a View-Master projector, too. It ran on wall power and got so hot you could probably fry an egg on it.

When you were traveling across the country, you had to pick up a bumper sticker and View-Master reel from just about every attraction you stopped at. In later years, View-Master started phasing out the scenics and started producing more cartoon characters and TV stories.

I spent many a happy hour sliding those reels into the viewer, then reaching for the advance lever – click – slunk – new magic pictures. Unless, of course, the holes didn’t engage and you’d have to keep pressing the lever until they did. If you got impatient, you could bend the lever or even break it off. Patience, young man, patience.

June 20, 2013February 13, 2021

Remember EDgewater? Or CIrcle?

Do you remember giving out your telephone number as EDgewater 5-7543? Or, if you lived in Jackson, your telephone exchange was CIrcle.

This rotary dial phone was one I picked up used somewhere. It shows a number after area codes were assigned and names phased out. The phone in the basement is one that I talked on when I was a teenager, though. (Mother had been paying a couple of bucks a month to Ma Bell for the phone for 30 or 40 years. I wanted to hang on to it for sentimental reasons, so I paid the phone company a flat fee to own it.)

If you are a phone junkie, there is a site that has pictures of telephone central offices all over the country. Some of the ones in SE Missouri are interesting because they sit on fault lines and have had to be retrofitted for earthquakes.

When I was offered the job of telecommunications manager just before I left for Missouri on vacation in 1991, it dawned on me as I was driving through little towns like Old Appleton that if I took the job, I’d be in charge of more phones than a lot of towns had. I ended up taking the job and doing it until I retired in 2008.

Exchanges for this area

Advance – RAmond
Benton – KIngsdale
Bloomfield = LOcust
Cape Girardeau – EDgewater
Chaffee – TUlip
Jacksopn – CIrcle
Sikeston – GRanite

June 15, 2013

Dad at 14

It’s hard to imagine your parents being young. Here’s a shot of L.V. Steinhoff when he was 14. The photos are from a scrapbook he put together when he was in high school on Pacific Street.

Dad’s full name was Louis Vera Steinhoff. The Vera came from an aunt’s name, if I remember correctly. He didn’t exactly advertise his middle name. The “Junior” nickname was because he was named after his father.

He dropped the “Junior” when he got older. (Much like I’ve tried to get shed of “Kenny.”) Only a handful of his oldest friends and family used that term. Most of the men who worked for him called him Louie or L.V.

Big feet

You can barely read the fading “Big Feet”caption on this photo. It says underneath the photo that it was taken at May Greene School. He must have been friends with some of this teachers because he has pictures of some of them in casual poses around the school grounds..

Maybe being a photographer gave him access that normal students wouldn’t have had. He and Master Photographer Paul Leuders were contemporaries and members of the Kodak Club in high school.

Not Enough Words

I usually start with a picture, then wrap some words around it. This time, though, I have an endless supply of pictures and not enough words to express how I feel about Mary Welch Steinhoff. So, on this Mother’s Day, here’s a small sample of Mother with her family.

Every picture I ran across led me to another, and there are scores that I remembered and couldn’t lay my hands on quickly. Mother sure has packed a lot of livin’ into her 91 years.