Cape Girardeau History and Photos

February 6, 2014December 9, 2021

A Band of Bands

Somebody will have to tell me what brought all these bands together. I saw high school logos from Cape Central, Jackson, Advance, Valle, Kelly, Sikeston, “D” and one uniform sporting “Official All American Lover.” I’m not even sure where the photos were taken. I thought it was Houck Stadium, but it might have been at Jackson High School.

This was one of my rolls of coffee can film and it was in really bad shape. I think it might have been processed in the darkroom at The Jackson Pioneer, one of the most primitive facilities I ever had the displeasure of working in, and that includes darkrooms I set up in motel rooms while covering hurricanes.

A lot of the frames weren’t fixed nor washed properly, so they have amoeba-like shapes on them that were too big to even think about spotting out. So, look around the dust spots, scratches and amoebas, please.

Bands from all over

This shot has “D” girls in the foreground, but Central High School majorette Della Heise is behind them.

UPDATE

Thanks to Lois Seabaugh, Terry Hopkins, Linda Suedekum, Phil Lewis and others who were more awake in the 1960s than your photographer, the event has been identified as the annual Jackson Band Festival.

Band photo gallery

You are welcome to try to put names and schools to faces. Click on any photo to maker it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery. Again, please overlook the flaws.

February 4, 2014

Crash on Independence

This minor three-car wreck near the corner of Independence and Henderson is interesting not because of the crash, but for what’s going on around it. This shot, for example, shows E.C. Robinson Lumber Company in the background. A quick peek at Google Earth shows that the main building is still there, but some of the ones behind it are gone. (Click on the photo to make it large enough to see the details.)

There’s a Greyhound bus parked at the bus depot, and a sign for Budget Laundry & Cleaners is behind it. There’s a boy’s bike with fenders and a rear rack propped up on its kickstand on the sidewalk. On the rack is a baseball mitt. The railroad tracks hadn’t been removed yet.

I apologize for the quality of the film: this frame has some fog flare on the left, and some of the other shots have more spots and flaws that I felt like fixing.

Wrecks as a spectator sport

Cape Girardeans love their wrecks. The sound of a crash will bring folks out to enjoy the excitement. I have to admit that it was a family ritual to swing by James’ Wrecker on the way home from church to see who had come to grief over the weekend. Mother, of course, could never resist the siren call (literally) of police cars, fire trucks and ambulances. When I come home I have to tell her that I don’t have to chase those flashing lights in my retirement. I think that disappoints her.

Even I was shocked, though, when I worked a car being pulled out of a river in the wee hours of the morning in Ohio. Water was still pouring out of it and the driver, a young woman who had served me a spaghetti dinner at a local diner that evening was still behind the wheel. I have no idea where a crowd could have come from at that hour of the morning, but the capper was when someone lifted a toddler up so he could see inside the car. THAT busted even Cape standards.

Probably happened in 1964

The tag on this car says 1965, and some other photos on the roll were of a football game with a plane towing a banner urging attendees to vote for AuH2O in 1964. That leads me to believe that the fenderbender was in the fall of 1964.

I see my station wagon

I see my 1959 Buick LaSabe station wagon off on the right. (I mention that only because there is an active group of collectors who search for any photo or mention of that vehicle they can find.) The body language of the spectators is fascinating.

Curator Jessica and I are considering doing a workshop at the Athens County Historical Society Museum to encourage local photographers to both scour their old photos for ones that have historical significance and to encourage them to document their surroundings on an ongoing basis. As in this case, a wreck that wasn’t even worth putting in the paper contains elements that show what life was like in Cape in the mid-1960s.

February 3, 2014

Missourian Equipment Move

It looks like a heavy piece of equipment is being taken out of The Southeast Missourian building. It’s hard for me to tell what it is, but I think it might be a plate maker that etched the zinc plates used to make halftone photos. The man on the left in the patterned shirt is one of the many Hohlers who were responsible for producing the paper. I just can’t remember which one he is.

A balcony for parades

That balcony opened off the newsroom, so it was a perfect place to watch the parades go by.

Missourian Building a landmark

The Missourian building may not be as iconic from a distance as the Common Pleas Courthouse or Academic Hall’s dome, but it’s a Cape landmark, nonetheless. If you are interested in the history of the building, here’s a link to the National Register of Historic Places registration form.

Spooky place at night

I loved sitting up in the newsroom all by myself at night. It was a great place to do my homework. There were three police monitors hanging from a shelf on a column that would occasionally crackle to life from time to time with some minor call that I could usually ignore. In fact, over the years, I got to where I could pretty much tune out the sound of the cops and robbers in the background until I heard a change in voice stress and cadence, then I’d perk up.

The spooky part was the Western Union Clock on the wall. Every hour, it would make a sound as it synchronized itself with the mother ship, wherever it was. Even though I knew what it was and should have been expecting, I’d always jump.

Of all the places I worked, I don’t think any felt more like a newsroom “home” to me.

Shooting from the balcony

Looks like I got the high ground on this occasion. I snapped off a photo of One-Shot Frony standing on the sidewalk while I was on the balcony.

February 2, 2014

There WILL Be a July

I’m sitting here in Florida where the temperature is 77.4 degrees (the heat index drops it to 71 degrees), listening through the wonders of the Internet to police calls 1,100 miles away in Southeast Missouri. It sounds like an afternoon and evening of slip, slip, sliding away. The poor guys running the plows and salt trucks are getting Super Bowl updates on their two-way radios, but I don’t think they are overly happy being out there. The radio traffic overall has dropped off. that’s a good sign that those with sense aren’t venturing onto the roads.

Anyway, here’s a photo that might give you hope that another warm July 21 day will come again just like it did in 1967. Of course, that diver’s granddaughter won’t be able to duplicate that dive because Capaha Park Pool is nothing but a memory now. (Click on the photo to make it larger.)

I must have gotten a special waiver on the rule that “if you climb up the ladder to the high dive, there’s only one way down – off the board.” Maybe it’s because I knew one of the lifeguards.