Cape Girardeau History and Photos

May 11, 2013

Cheri Pind

A couple of Cheri Pind portraits were on the roll with Tom Holt and his grilling extravaganza. I mostly knew Cheri as a cheerleader, which put her in a whole other social league. Since I didn’t exactly know them, I sort of categorized them.

Anne Buchanan had a classic beauty. Joni Tickel was the All American Girl Next Door who could look good even in those hideous gym uniforms.

Cherie had a twinkle in her eye that always said, “Go ahead and dare me.”

Sassy then, sassy now

Her bio in the Class of 1965 20th Reunion captured her sassy spirit. “Cherie does not work and never will, if she can help it.”

“My hair was beautiful”

“Let me state that I thought my hair was beautiful in high school, but since, I have heard talk about it,” the bio continued.

Here is a photo from the Class of ’65 Senior Banquet. The Missourian’s caption read, “Miss Cheri Pind just realizes that she is the one being described in the class prophesy being read by Chuck Dockins and Steve Seabaugh at the Senior Banquet Tuesday night in the Central High School cafeteria. Jim Stone, background, seems relatively unimpressed.”

Cheerleading skirt not too short

“I have terrific memories of high school and classmates, and I did not think my cheerleading skirt was too short!” she said.

As a male, I would have to agree with Cheri.

Cheri was the second from the left in this photo of the cheerleaders collecting for the March of Dimes in 1963. Norma Waggoner is, alas, keeping us from being able to judge the length of Cheri’s skirt.

Dancin’ in the parking lot

Cheri was one of the dancers to set the floor of the Teen Age Club on Spanish bouncing so much a city inspector shut the place down. Dancin’ feet gotta dance, so the action was moved to the bank parking lot at the corner of Main and Broadway.

Miss Pind is the girl facing the camera in the middle. She shows up in other photos of the parking lot dance.

May 9, 2013May 10, 2013

Tom Holt Grilling Hints

Frony shot most of The Missourian’s food features because Mary Blue, who wrote most of them, was organized and worked well in advance. Most of my photos were spot news, self-generated features and assignments that popped up at the last minute when Frony wasn’t available.

Frony must have been out of pocket when it came time to shoot classmate Tom Holt from the Central High School Class of 1965. Tom and I had classes together and even went on a double date at least once, but we ran in different circles: he was a jock and I was a debater who had a plastic pocket protector.

Baste that chicken

I guess basting is what he’s doing. See, my cooking skills are severely limited. Wife Lila said the other night, “You know you’d starve if I got hit by a bus.”

Not exactly denying it, I said, “I think I could survive. I mean, I have my cookbook to fall back on.”

“Your cookbook?” she asked, giving me a quizzical – OK, unbelieving – look.

“Sure,” and I reached under the kitchen telephone and brought out a stack of carry-out menus.

Every great cook has an assistant

I don’t know who Tom’s assistant was. Somebody will have to fill in the blank.

These pictures suffer from overdevelopment in the darkroom. When you’re dealing with a contrasty situation like this, you should expose for the shadows and cut back on the developing time to reduce the contrast. I got the shadow part right, but I left the film in the developer a minute or two too long and caused the highlights, like the assistant’s shirt, to block up.

I couldn’t find the date when the pictures ran in The Missourian, so I can’t pass on Tom’s cooking tips.

May 9, 2013

Slushy Main Street

This shot down Main Street looks like one of those ugly winter days when the pretty snow has turned into that annoying slush that passing cars splash on you and that you drown your shoe in when you step off the curb. It’s cold enough that there are icicles on the store awnings. Christmas decorations are up, but I don’t know for sure when it was taken. I’m going to guess 1964 to 1966. It had to have been taken before April 1967, because that’s when the St. Charles Hotel was torn down.

Business signs

I see signs for Ross Young & Sons clothing, Oklahoma Tire & Supply, Osco Drug, Wards, Al’s Shop, Personal Loans, Zickfield’s Jeweler, Irvin’s, Penney’s and the St. Charles. Zickfield’s is the only one of the businesses that has survived. Here’s a story with lots of Main Street links. You can make the photo larger by clicking on it.

May 7, 2013July 14, 2021

Blowin’ Black River Bridge

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.

Dad came home cranky one night from another blasting project that didn’t go exactly as planned.