Cape Girardeau History and Photos

October 24, 2013October 24, 2013

Trick or Treat

Friend Carol and I spent Wednesday turning pages of Ohio University Posts as old and brittle as we are trying to piece to together the stories that go along with the pictures I took of the birth of the student rights movement at the university in Athens in 1969 and 1970.

Radio station WOUB is going to record our pearls of wisdom Thursday afternoon. I’ll hold my photos up to the microphone while Carol recites facts. I hope former Postie and now broadcast honcho Tom Hodson warns listeners that they are going to have to stare hard at their speakers to get the full benefit of the show.

WOUB did a nice promo on our presentation scheduled for Thursday night.

It was cold and rainy

After dinner, I confessed to her that I hadn’t shot anything to run on the blog. It was cold and rainy most of the day and colder and more rainy tonight. We drove around hoping I’d get inspired, but I quickly realized that I probably couldn’t get away with stopping my car in the middle of the street to shoot a picture like I could when I worked for the paper.

We stumbled around the hilly city streets trying to find a house she and an indeterminate number of her friends rented. Indeterminate because more people used it as a mailing address than actually lived there. Don’t ask. I didn’t.

We found it, but she wouldn’t knock on the front door.

Find me some Halloween decorations

Still zilch for art, I told her to start looking for Halloween decorations since I remembered Shawnee, a nearby coal mining town, used to have some strange ones.

This was the best she could come up with. There wasn’t enough light to shoot by, so I swung the car around until my headlights lit up the porch.

Sorry, folks, it was either this or skip a day.

P.S. to the Homeowner: If your Zappos shoes are missing, we didn’t take them. Carol said they didn’t fit.

October 23, 2013August 14, 2015

O.U. Is Not Your Mother

A friend and I are going to do a presentation to the Ohio University History Association Thursday evening on the birth of the student rights movement in the 1960s.

Ohio University was a little more progressive than SEMO (where wasn’t?), but my friend Carol Towarnicky had to take a bus from Toledo to Athens during summer break to appear before a hearing board that could have expelled her for breaking curfew too many times. Fortunately, the editor of The OU Post, where she was a reporter, backed up her story that she was covering news events.

Quick video overview

Here is a quick overview of some of the material we will cover.

October 21, 2013

Moon and Temperatures Rising

I left Cape late, but I had good intentions of making Athens, Ohio, in a straight run. What I hadn’t counted on was a one-hour traffic jam between Nowhere, Illinois, and Not Quite to the State Line, Indiana.

Except for putting me behind schedule, it wasn’t that bad: I just munched on junk food and cranked up the audio book on World War II history I was listening to.

When I looked in the rearview mirror, though, it was apparent the young couple behind me was having a lot more fun than I was. They smooched through the whole moving parking lot. I kept waiting for their windows to fog up.

(I cropped out their license tag for the same reason I’d stand on a table in some cowboy bar and say, “I’m fixin’ to take some pictures for the paper. If you aren’t supposed to be here or you aren’t supposed to be here with the person you’re with, stay over in that corner of the room.”)

That’s SOME moon

A couple hours later, I pulled into a rest area for a 22-minute nap. When I got on the entrance ramp to get back on the Interstate, I thought I was looking at a big Gulf Oil sign. There was this huge orange ball hanging in the sky like a gas station logo.

I was already committed to getting on the road, so I resisted temptation to shoot the moon (so to speak), but I finally had to pull off on the shoulder to bang off half a dozen frames through the windshield. It was one of those times I wished I was a passenger: that silly moon kept teasing me with great photo ops for the next 45 minutes.

Scads of deer

Friend Jessica’s husband and a buddy went deer hunting last night and each bagged one for the freezer. I told her it would have been easier for them to drive along the road and pick up the dozen or so I saw on the shoulder after getting into Ohio. I hope the occupants of whatever vehicle hit them came out better than the deer.

Jessica lives on 40 acres so far out in the wilds of Athens County that the Lady in Sky who talks to me through my GPS kept asking, “Are you SURE?” Just as we pulled onto her driveway, a deer came running across the road in front of us.

October 20, 2013February 23, 2015

Kage School Then and Now

I photographed Kage School just before it closed in 1966, after 112 years of service. Here is what it looked like then. Follow this link to read the amazing history of this progressive school.

47 years later

One of my readers mentioned that they had been inside the school and had been disappointed at its condition. I made a quick stop and found that it was rough, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected. This shot was taken from just about the same spot at the 1966 photo. It’s funny how much bigger the room felt with kids in it.

Is it haunted?

There are two questions I get asked a lot: “Is it haunted?” “Is there a tunnel leading down to the river as part of the Underground Railroad?”

I can pretty much always answer the latter as “No.” The jury is out on the first question. I don’t know about “haunts,” but I can feel some kind of spirits or vibes in some buildings. It’s probably my overactive imagination, but something triggers a reaction that I hope is reflected in some of my photos.

More often than not, I wonder about the people who passed through the buildings. Who, for example, was the last child to write addition tables on this board before the door was closed for the last time?

Every once in awhile, not often, a building will hit me stronger than I like.

Why this and not that?

Why would someone leave behind a roll of toilet paper or some tiny bowls?

Flash cards, books and bingo cards

The kids who used these items have grandkids and maybe great-grandkids today. I wonder if they are some of the ones who carved their names in the bricks in the back of the school?

Earlier Kage School stories

Kage School photo gallery

Here are photos of the interior of the school. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the sides to move through the gallery.