Cape Girardeau History and Photos

November 24, 2013February 27, 2021

Mississippi River Baptism

Three Church of God in Christ congregations would gather in New Madrid on the first Sunday in September to hold a church service, then walk through downtown New Madrid to the Mississippi River where they would hold a baptism.

I don’t know what drew me there in 1967 – so far as I know, The Missourian didn’t run any photos of it. Before the month was out, I transferred to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and started the next phase of my career. In fact, I look back at this set of photos as being kind of a “final exam” before I left Cape. It was the culmination of everything I had learned stumbling around in photojournalism with no real guidance.

Except for making a few prints for my portfolio, most of these pictures have been sitting in a filing cabinet for close to half a century. Last summer, I made a concerted effort to find the people in the pictures, much like I’ve been doing with the Smelterville project.

I walked up and down the New Madrid streets near the church, talked to people on their porches and attended Sunday church services to show the photos around. I went on wild goose chases to Sikeston and a tiny community near Bird’s Point.

Bishop Benjamin is still alive

I finally caught a break when I received an email from Beverly Armour Gilyard: “This is my dad, Elder B. A. Armour (preacher on the left), many, many years ago when the saints were still baptizing once a year in the Mississippi River. wow!!!!!

Not long after, Martha J. Armour-Dunmore, wrote, “I’m also the daughter of Bishop Armour and I was home to visit and saw the picture. Showed my father and he says he conducted the baptisms with JC Pullen (preacher on the right). Not sure who the child in the photo is, but he says he conducted them every year for 7 years. This is a wonderful photo of my father. We had a very long conversation about this.”

Meeting arranged

After trading emails, we set up a meeting on Wednesday with Bishop Armour, his wife. Osie and Granddaughter Sondoia Armour West in Hayti. Elder Robert L. Bell, Jr., was also there. We went through all the photos trying to put as many names to faces as possible. The challenge is that different combinations of people remember different things.

When I got back to Cape to download the nearly two hours of video I shot, I was disappointed (that’s a mild term) to discover that I had exactly one minute and 35 seconds of content. I had gotten sloppy since I had been shooting so much video on my Perry county project that I thought I knew what I was doing. I had a wireless mike clipped to Bishop Armour and my video camera audio meter was bouncing around like crazy, so I assumed that I was capturing it. What I had neglected to do was to press the RECORD button on the camera. I had a few still photos and lots of audio captured by my digital voice recorder, but I wanted to see the rich expressions of Bishop Armour while he was telling his stories.

“That was Beverly Armour in high school”

Feeling extremely sheepish, I contacted Elder Bell and Sondoia to see if they thought Bishop Armour would be up for another meeting if I hadn’t tired him out too much (he’ll turn 90 next spring). All was GO, until I got a message saying that he had taken a fall and we would have to postpone until Saturday.

Mother had said it had been years since she had been to Hayti, so I popped her in the car, assuring her that the follow-up interview shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes since I knew what ground I wanted to cover. Fortunately, Bishop Armour had bounced back from his fall quite nicely. Mother was greeted like she was a long-lost friend. The house was full of warmth.

Daughter Beverly was down visiting from Atlanta. “I’m IN one of those pictures,” she exclaimed. “When I first saw this, I thought, ‘Oh, my God. That was Beverly Armour in high school. That’s Beverly.'” [Beverly is the girl all the way on the right side of the picture.]

As it turned out, 20 minutes turned into nearly two hours. Bishop Armour hadn’t told me of his World War II Navy years where he served in the Navy aboard an LST. You’ll see that next Memorial Day.

Looking to ID more photos

The Armours are well-versed in social media. All the time we were talking, they were texting and bouncing photos back and forth to folks who might help ID or confirm the names in the pictures.

To that end, I’m going to post a gallery of the whole take so they have a common place to see the photos. I figure most of my readers are going to busy with Thanksgiving activities and won’t be around anyway. If you see someone you recognize or have participated in a Mississippi River baptism, I’d love to hear from you. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the sides to move through the gallery. The little girl above is one person, in particular, I’d like to track down.

November 24, 2013

Pine Cone Magic

It’s been a warm October and November, but we’ve had about a dozen days so far that called for a fire in the fireplace. Tonight, possibly the last night I’ll be in Cape until the spring, is one of those nights. Weatherbug reports it is 25, headed to an overnight low of 18. I didn’t bother to look at the windchill numbers. When your nose hairs freeze, windchill is a non-factor.

I noticed that Brother Mark had a box of pine cones dipped in wax in a box near the fireplace, so I tried one of them as a fire starter. It burned like a champ. (Click on the photos to make them larger. They might make you feel warmer if you live up north. Plus, they’re kinda pretty.)

I’m cheap and lazy

I knew the wax would enhance the burn quality of the cones, but I didn’t want to go to the trouble and expense of buying, melting and spilling the wax, so I thought I’d see how well plain ones would work.

Mother and I cruised around until we saw some pine cones sitting on the ground under a tree in a park in Jackson.

They followed us home.

It was amazing at how easily they caught fire. (Something that you might want to think about if you have pine trees that have dropped a bunch of cones around your house.)

Just the touch of a match

All it took was the touch of a match to get the cones to burst into flame.

A thing of beauty

I was watching one just as the flames were dying down and the cone was a mass of glowing red. I dashed across the room for my camera, but it was one of those things that was perfect just for an instant.

That’s when I threw some of these cones into the fireplace trying to duplicate what I had seen seconds before. Didn’t work: the magic had all leaked out. Some of these are nice, but not close to what that first one looked like.

How to start a fire

I found the fastest way to start a fire with these was to wrap half a dozen in a couple of sheets of loosely twisted newspaper. (See, newspapers ARE still good for something.)
Put a few sticks or other light kindling on top of the newspaper.
Light and run away (That last part is for fireworks; you don’t have to run away.)
If you feel lucky, you could go ahead an put a log on top of the kindling when you light it, but I usually like to see that it’s going to take off first.

Oh, my aching back

I got smart before we went on our next pine cone mission: I stopped at a local hardware store and picked up something similar to this aluminum reacher and grabber gizmo. (Buy it from this link and I’ll make a couple of pennies. Or, go to just about any hardware store and get it for about the same price.) It’s not a high precision piece of equipment and it’s not going to last forever if you pick up heavy stuff (or give it to your grandkid to play with), but Wife Lila and Mother have found it useful.

It does an excellent job of snagging pine cones.

Photo geekery

I was going to give you all kinds of information about exposures, but they were all over the place. The only constant was that I underexposed them by two stops from what the camera said was normal.

The camera looked at all the dark areas in the photo (most of which I cropped out) and said, “I want to make those areas lighter.”

I wanted the shadows to go dark, which also brought out the rich colors in the flames, so I told the camera to give it much less light than it thought it should in the theoretical world. Is there a scientific way to calculate the right exposure for something like this? Probably, but I just guessed, looked at the image, liked it, and kept shooting.

It’s a shame about the magic leaking out, though. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that first cone was the prettiest.

November 23, 2013

Centenary Nativity Scene

Mother and I were heading to Annie Laurie’s Antiques tonight when we passed by Centenary Methodist Church. I don’t know that I had ever noticed the beautiful stained glass Nativity scene on the west side of the church.

It’s appropriate for the season, so enjoy. (The best part was I didn’t even have to get out of the car in the cold wind to shoot it.)

November 22, 2013

Thankful? Support Ken Steinhoff and Cape Central

Howdy, all. Special guest post today by me, Matthew Steinhoff.

If you like Ken Steinhoff, the CapeCentralHigh web site and want to support them both, please click the above magical button and go about your regular, online holiday shopping business.

How Does This Amazon Thing Work?

When you click the button, Dad gets a 6% referral fee from Amazon based on your purchases made in the few hours after the click. Spend $100, Dad gets $6. Amazon doesn’t mark up your bill. The products aren’t more expensive using the link. I really like Amazon because it typically has the lowest prices; if your bill is more than $35, shipping is free and, in most states, there is no sales tax.

(Of note, if you have a local business you want to support, please do so. My cousin owns a really great antique shop in downtown Cape and I’d much rather you do your shopping at Annie Laurie’s than Amazon. But, if you’re anything like most of America, you’re probably going to do $400 worth of online shopping anyway. When you do that shopping, I’d love for you to click the above link and shop Amazon.)

Why You Should Click

Mostly, this blog is a giant money pit. Which, more or less, is fine because Dad is retired and would drive Mom absolutely nuts if he didn’t have some venture to keep him busy. Plus, this blog entertains far more people than if he took up golf and chased a little ball into the gator-infested ponds of Palm Beach County.

That said, creating the content is very time consuming and pretty darn costly. Dad has spent at least a third of the year outside the state of Florida and has driven several thousand miles. There are the raw materials (cameras, disk space, computers), services (online backups, mobile data plans, travel expenses and web hosting (bandwidth, power, storage). And then there’s the pie. Pie doesn’t grow on trees.

How You Can Support the Site

1. Purchase a 2014 Cape calendar. Get more than a year’s worth of Cape Girardeau photos! Simple and easy.

2. Buy from Amazon. Dad gets about six-percent of your total. We have no way to knowing it was you who bought the 11-pound jar of Nutella.

3. Click the yellow ‘Donate‘ button in the upper left-hand corner of the web site. This is my least favorite option because it doesn’t get you anything but a warm feeling deep in your soul. At least with the first two items you get a little something for yourself.

What You Should Buy From Amazon

1. Gift Cards Trust me: this is what your kids and grand kids want. Probably your spouse, too. Gift cards are tacky, require little thought and lack creativity. Still, they are easy to buy, easy to mail and are always welcome. You didn’t really want to spend the next few weeks knitting that sweater anyway, right?

2. Digital SLR-Style Cameras Everyone has an iPhone they take a bazillion pictures a day. But those photos aren’t real photos. If you or someone you love is ready to take a step up from a smart phone, a dSLR is the way to go. Dad shoots with a Nikon D7000 but the camera I’m lusting after is a throw-back to simpler days. The Nikon Df has all the new whiz-bang digital guts but the look and feel of Nikon cameras from the late-1970s and early 1980s. Everyone who absolutely loved the Nikon FA, FE or FM is going nuts trying to get the Nikon Df.

3. Apple iPad If you don’t already have an iPad, get one. So sweet! Once you have one, you’ll never be without one again. Worried about not being able to figure it out? No problem! Gran is 92 and uses hers every day. Got questions, call Gran. Need an endorsement? Call Gran. Still don’t have a smart phone? You don’t need one. Get an iPad instead. That way you still have a small cell phone you can take everywhere but still have all the smart phone features in the easily-readable format of an iPad.

Black Friday ~ Cyber Monday ~ Overspend Wednesday

Don’t worry. This is just the annual fund drive. We’ll sprinkle in a few Amazon links (Haunted Cape Girardeau: Where the River Turns a Thousand Chilling Tales) on our way up to Christmas then I’ll take my hand out of your pocket for another year.

Thank You, Readers!

Finally, a word of thanks from me to all you… Thank you for reading. Thank you for contributing. Thank you for sharing your stories and memories. And thank you for giving Dad an outlet to tell old stories and a reason to make up new ones. As long as you’re a willing audience, I don’t have to see Dad in golf pants.

Cheers,
Matt

[Editor’s note]

You can tell when your kids are getting worried that your outgo is getting bigger than your income. Sons Matt and Adam are so sure there won’t be anything left that they’ve stopped jockeying for top spot in the will.

Here’s a bunch of suggestions I made last year. If you click on the links there, you may find that newer versions of the product have come out. At least the links aren’t broken.