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.
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.
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.
Mary Welch Steinhoff, my Mother
Click on any photo to make it larger,then click on the sides to move through the gallery.
Dad’s construction company had a couple of simple tasks:
Build a new bridge over the Black River near Williamsville in Wayne County.
Remove the old bridge.
Both tasks taken individually were routine. The catch came with Task 2. The old bridge was between the new bridge and some big phone lines. It would be a Bad Thing to take out either of those things. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)
Things were kind of tight
The phone and electrical lines are hard to see, but they are about as far from the old bridge on one side as the new bridge was on the other. If the bridge toppled over, it would hit one or the other.
So, how do we do this?
Dad said the bridge had to drop straight down. If they used cutting torches to take it down, there was no assurance that it wouldn’t twist if one side let loose before the other. Dad decided they’d dynamite it. This was in the days before building implosions and blasting were used much for this kind of thing.
There’s a lot of rock in Missouri, so explosives weren’t an unknown to him. In fact, I remember taking a length of blasting cord to school for a show ‘n’ tell. It was neat how the orange-colored fuse would burn under water.
Dad didn’t like handling dynamite, which is basically sawdust soaked in nitroglycerine and compacted. He didn’t like it, not so much because it was dangerous, but because the nitro would “sweat” out of the sticks of dynamite and give him a headache.
Dad would let me hold a stick of dynamite, but he warned me to never touch a blasting cap: they were just too sensitive to handle casually. Since he let me do so many other things that some people would consider dangerous, I took his warning seriously.
Crimp the blasting caps with your teeth
The old style fuse like you saw in Road Runner cartoons used blasting caps that were metal cylinders that were open on one end and closed on the other. The fuse would go into the cap and then be crimped down. Oldtimers would use their teeth to make the crimp. You can see how that could go wrong, right?
Because both sides of the bridge had to go off at exactly the same time, and because a burning fuse might not hit both blasting caps at exactly the same time, Dad opted to use an electric blasting cap.
The first task was to remove the approach on one side of the bridge, and to take off as much steel and flooring as possible. Brother Mark has some of the steel in his backyard garden in St. Louis.
We’re ready for the show
When the bridge was reduced to a skeleton, explosives were set on two key trusses at one end and everybody stepped back with fingers crossed.
Flash! BOOOOOM!
Watch the video to see how things went. Dad was playing cinematographer with the family’s Bell & Howell 8mm movie camera, so the quality wasn’t all that hot to begin with. It’s subsequently been moved over to VHS tape and then digitized, so don’t expect IMAX 3D.
All went according to plan. The bridge dropped like a rock and remained standing upright between the new bridge and the wires. You can see that the next step was for a worker in a hoist at the end of a crane to start cutting the steel into manageable pieces.
That also went mostly well. Right up until one bad cut caused it to collapse unexpectedly. You can tell it was unexpectedly because everybody started running. A good portion of that area’s phone calls were cut off abruptly.
It’s fortunate that this was a silent movie because I imagine Dad’s narrative at that point would have made it non-PG-rated.
Do you remember giving out your telephone number as EDgewater 5-7543? Or, if you lived in Jackson, your telephone exchange was CIrcle.
