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Fourche a du Clos Valley Roadside Park

People who whiz up I-55 to get from Cape to St. Louis in about two hours never give a thought to U.S. Highway 61 that runs from the lands of ice and snow to New Orleans. Roads used to be known by names, not just numbers. Route 66, running east and west across the country was known as The Mother Road. North-South Highway 61 was El Camino Real – The King’s Road.

Going through Cape, it’s still called Kingshighway, and I grew up on Kingsway Drive, which parallels it.

Old U.S. 61 was a hilly, curvy, narrow road. Heavily-laden underpowered trucks growling up the steep hills would back up cars dozens deep. Eventually, someone would get impatient and try to pass, resulting in a grinding head-on collision that left dead scattered all over the roadside.

CB radios were decades in the future, so truckers and savvy drivers learned to communicate with their lights and hand signals to warn of speed traps and hazards ahead. Flashing headlights or an arm extended palm-down and waved in a patting motion meant “SLOW DOWN!”

Welcome rest area

About halfway between Cape and St. Louis, north of Bloomsdale and its Dew Drop Inn, was the Fourche a du Clos Valley Roadside Park. It had a spectacular view across the valley, picnic tables and a stone grill that’s still there. It has every feel of a WPA project, but I couldn’t find any markers around to confirm that. It was a great place to pull off to let your car and your kids cool off. I don’t think we ever passed there without stopping.

There were no rest facilities at the rest area, so what you might take as little white carnations all over the place when you looked over the stone wall and down the hill were actually tufts of toilet paper. Not all of the things in the Good Old Days were all that great.

I’m happy to report that there were no carnations visible on this visit.

583 feet above sea level

In case you were confused about which way you were going, there is still a concrete arrow that point NORTH. Next to it is a stone that proclaims that you’re standing 583 feet above sea level.

U.S. 61 has been improved

U.S. 61 has been improved. Cuts and fills have made the grades not so steep; the road has been widened and most of the through traffic stays on the Interstate, so it’s not the white-knuckle drive you might remember as a kid. I actually enjoyed my cruise south along the new old road.

Fourche a du Clos Valley Roadside Park photo gallery

Take a load off and click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left of right side of the image to move through the gallery.

 

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Perfect River Night

I made a run downtown, but the place I needed to go was closed, so I took a stroll down to the riverfront. It was a perfect night. There was a guy sitting near the Broadway entrance to the floodwall playing a guitar. Next to him was a buddy with a huge boxer on a leash. He started to move him out of my way, but the dog was wagging his tail and I motioned him to stay put.

There’s something about the river at night that brings out the friendlies. It’s like the setting breaks down the barriers we erect when we’re walking down Main Street. Everyone who came by smiled and made a nice comment about the weather or the river. The temps were in the low 70s or high 60, with almost no wind.

The photo was kind of dull until these two young women walked down to the water’s edge to take photos with their cell phones. (It would have been better if they had strayed off to the left just a tad more. That would have made a nice triangle of them, the bridge and the bollard.)

I started to thank them for adding visual interest to my photo, but they didn’t speak much English (or they were faking it to get rid of the guy they thought was hitting on them). When I showed them their photo on the display of my camera, they nodded and understood.

Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge

I mentioned that we were on a pecan mission the other day. I knew of a couple of nice pecan trees right near the old Mississippi River traffic bridge overlook on the River Campus, so I pulled in to see they had dropped any nuts. Either they had been all picked up or my car headlights didn’t spotlight them, so I came up dry.

I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to shoot a four-frame panorama of the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge. Like always, you can click on the photos to make them larger.

 

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James McMurtry Concert

I like to listen to music while I’m working, and I like artists who use words well. When I saw that James McMurtry, son of Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry, was going to be in St. Louis, I polled Brother Mark and Friend Shari to see if they’d like to hear him. Mother said she was in until she found out that the show wasn’t going to start until 9 pm, so she bailed, leaving a ticket for Friend Shari’s BFF Linda. Mark invited Friend Robin.

I hadn’t planned to take any photos – I explained to Shari that I can either work or I can watch, and tonight I wanted to be a civilian and enjoy the show – but Robin said break-ins were common and I should take my camera with me.

The show was going to be in The Duck Room at Blueberry Hill. When I booked the tickets, it assigned us a Section, Row and Seat, but it also said Standing Room Only. Boy, was it EVER. (As always, you can click on the photos to make them larger.)

Where are the exits?

The first thing I do when I go into any room is to locate two exits. When we went down the narrow steps into The Duck Room, I couldn’t locate a second exit. Then, I looked up and saw the floor above us was wood, there was no sprinkler system and the audience was standing – not exaggerating – shoulder to shoulder. I elected to take a place where I could lean against the wall about 15 feet from the exit. That also kept me out of the traffic of people going back for drinks.

Unfortunately, the four guys who were standing next to me consumed four pitchers of beer after I started counting. They weren’t mean drunks, but they bobbed and weaved so it was almost impossible to keep anything close to a clear line of sight, and as the evening wore on, their loud talking and hooting drowned out the show.

How did I take the photo?

I mentioned that I like music with words. Unfortunately, the guy running the sound board thought louder was better. He cranked up the mike so loud that McMurty’s distorted lyrics sounded like Dylan gargling with a mouth full of marbles. I had a digital recorder in my pocket and it confirmed what my ears heard. McMurtry and his band play some mean guitar and drums – Choctaw Bingo had the crowd rocking – but you’d have been at a loss if you didn’t know the words.

I couldn’t resist banging off 36 frames during the show. I was pretty far back, and catching a view of McMurty between the bobbing drunks was like threading a needle with mittens on. Still, I like this shot of the performer framed between a shadow on the left and a ghostly face on the right..

From a technical standpoint, there was so much dark in the photo (this is a pretty tight crop) that the automatic meter wanted to open up the lens to let in more light. The part of the photo I was interested in, though, was McMurtry, who had a spot on him. I underexposed the shot about two stops or more from what the meter was calling for. That gave him the right exposure and caused everything else to go dark.

An interesting oops

I normally have my camera set to operate at 200 ISO, with the ability to go automatically to higher speeds when the exposure drops below 1/30 of a second. The other day, though, I wanted to shoot some interiors at the highest possible quality, so I locked the ISO at 200 and put the camera on a tripod. The shutter exposure was so long that I even used the self-timer set on 10 seconds. After I pushed the shutter release, the camera counted down 10 seconds before making the exposure. That allowed any motion from the button push to die down.

While our party was walking to dinner, I thought I’d try some street shots. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to put the ISO back on “float” mode. I composed this shot, squeezed off what I thought was going to be about a 1/8 second exposure, then started to put the camera down. Because the film speed was so slow, the actual exposure was 4 seconds, creating these streaks of light. Except that my friends (and brother) were hungry and there was a cold wind blowing, I would have experimented more with this.

Bottom Line on The Duck Room

I’ll never go there again.

  • Putting a bunch of drunks in a dark room where I could spot only one exit is a good way to kill folks. I don’t intend to be one of them. I’m not going to say that there WAS only one exit, but I’m a guy who looks for them and I didn’t see more than one.
  • The sound was lousy.
  • Two-plus hours is too long for my old legs to stand. It’s a good thing Mother bailed.
  • For the price of the tickets for a bad sound and uncomfortable surroundings, I could have bought multiple copies of McMurty’s CDs for the group and we could have enjoyed them in Mark’s living room.

 

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Hillcrest Inn BBQ

I have so many photos of my own to wade through that I usually don’t publish ones by other folks, but I found this offering from Jeffry Boswell Hawk, Class of  ’61 too interesting to pass up. She writes about the Hilltop Inn, located on Kingshighway across from the StarVue Drive-in. I don’t recall ever seeing it, even though it’s just up the road from our house on Kingsway. I’ll let her and her brother, Wayne tell the story.

Family-run business

  Hillcrest was a family-run BBQ Drive-In with inside and curb-hop service. We sold BBQs, Hamburgers, Cheeseburgers, Deep-fried Chicken and Shrimp, French fries, cole slaw, soft drinks, shakes and Beer (*with 3.2 alcohol). *That is why we (my brother and sisters) were able to work there for our parents.

Daddy’s given name was Homer Franklin, but back when he was very young, and I suppose, also very mischievous, there was a very popular book called, Peck’s Bad Boy. Peck’s bad boy’s name was “Jeff”. So, He ALWAYS went with the H.F.”Jeff”Boswell name. And, yes, I’m named after my dad’s nickname. Mom’s name was Erma.

Mom did all the cooking- Daddy helped as needed and ran the operation. We kids, waited tables, curb-hopped, filled the soda and beer coolers, swept and mopped floors, washed windows and dishes, helped prepare the hamburger patties, peel potatoes for the fries and put them thru a hand-pulled slicer. Custodial work was also our job as well as mowing the grass. That’s where I learned to operate a riding mower.

Outdoor beer garden

Daddy, with the help of my older brother Wayne, built covered picnic tables and an outdoor walk-in cooler which was surrounded with a bar and stools.  The outdoor beer garden also had an archery range behind the building and horseshoe pits. There was also an outdoor jukebox in case someone wanted to hear their favorite music and dance.

Our indoor restaurant seated about 28 people in 7 booths that lined the walls; and probably about 10 tables with 4 chairs off the dance floor; with about 5-6 more tables on the dance floor. So probably about 80-to 90 people in tables and booths and a wrap-around bar with about 14-15 stools to allow for about 100 people. The food preparation went on inside the wrap-around bar.

Filled with dancing kids

Friday and Saturday nights, the dance floor was filled with high school seniors and college-aged kids from Cape and Jackson doing the jitterbug and slow-dancing. There was also a bumper pool table, pin-ball machine and a slide-bowling machine that were kept busy with players.

Sunday was usually family day for lunch and supper. Mom also made breakfast for some of the regulars from time to time. Several farmers would stop in for lunch.

Last business before Jackson

Hillcrest was the last business building on the right side of Kingshighway (61) with the StarVue Drive-In Movie until you got to Jackson.

Mom and Dad got a call about 8 am one Saturday morning telling them that Hillcrest was on fire. We lived out in Red Star with only Broadway straight thru to Kingshighway to get to Hillcrest, so by the time they got there, it was fully engulfed with flames. I still have a couple of burnt, melted dimes fused together as a memento- but many happy memories of our family working out there together!

(Daddy didn’t build another business there because he knew that the interstate would be built soon after and he thought that it would by-pass Cape and no one would be able to get off or drive ‘that far’ to the business.) If only we could have known what we know now!

– Jeffry Boswell Hawk ’61 – Jackson, MO

Across from StarVue Drive-in

I don’t know the exact date when we bought the Hillcrest, but it was sometime around 1955. We only owned the business, not the building. When the building burned down sometime in 1958, the land owner offered to sell us the 25 acres of land the building was on for $25,000. Unfortunately, our parents did not have enough money to buy the land at that time or money to rebuild the building and we lost our income when the building burned and our parents had to find another source of income. The land behind where the building was located, is currently occupied partly by a condominium complex.
– Wayne Boswell

 

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