Cape Girardeau History and Photos

August 2, 2012August 2, 2012

Another Full Moon

When you’re shooting your second full moon of a visit, it’s probably time to start packing your bags. The moon phase ap on my Droid showed that the orb was 97% full last night, so I told Mother we better be ready to saddle up to shoot it tonight.

We pulled in to the parking lot at the base of Cape Rock to find eight or ten cars getting ready for the free entertainment. Just about that time, a long, long, long southbound freight rolled by in front of us. It kept coming and coming and coming, slowing all the time. Finally, with the last three empty hopper cars and a pusher engine blocking our view, it stopped. Dead, put-a-penny-on-the-tracks stopped.

We decided to go to the top of Cape Rock, but feared that it would be parked solid. To our surprise, there was only one car parked there, and it moved on, leaving us some prime real estate to watch.

While I was setting up my tripod, a guy on a bike rolled up. We did all the ritual chicken dances that people with similar interests do and got so involved that I didn’t pay much attention to the horizon. I’d look over my shoulder from time to time and think, “Nope, not yet.”

Well, I had misjudged where the thing was going to come up. On one of my shoulder checks, I looked a little more to the south and did one of those, “Whoa! Where did THAT come from?” Of course, I pretended that I had been patiently WAITING for the moon to get 10 degrees out of the water before shooting.

I shot a few frames with the longer lens on my video camera, but I like this one better because it shows how low the river is now. That’s one BIG sandbox down there. The river’s about three feet lower than it was when I shot the little picture above from Cape Rock last fall.

Checked out the casino

When some clouds covered the moon, we headed toward town. I thought maybe there would be some night working going on at the casino, but it didn’t look interesting. I opted not to try for a moon shot from the floodwall and the bridge because I had done those before. I decided to see what the view was like from the Common Pleas Courthouse.

When I came around the corner, the two women going down the steps were standing shoulder to shoulder trying to get a moon photo with their camera phones. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the puny little flashes built into those cameras weren’t going to do much good at lighting up downtown OR the moon. I didn’t do much better. It was already pretty small in the sky by now.

This view down Themis Street is pretty similar to the one I shot in March of 2010.

I may try this angle for my next full moon shot, but it had better not be taken on THIS trip..

August 1, 2012September 17, 2016

My Mother’s a Bag Lady

You never know what you’re going to find when you come back to Cape to visit Mother.

One year Brother Mark tipped me off early about the tragic accident involving her arm and her job on a riverboat.
I hated to do it, but last year I had to pull the plug on her.
Mother’s not exactly a hoarder. She keeps a neat house, but the attic and basement are a time capsule.

Click on any photo to maker it larger.

“She’s collecting shopping bags”

This year, shortly before Mother’s Day, Mark sent me an email saying, “Mother’s become a bag lady. She’s going all over town collecting shopping bags.”

Mark is prone to either subtracting relevant details or adding ones to make the story more interesting, so it helps to do some fact checking. I decided to wait until I got into town before becoming concerned.

Turns out that Mother’s Friend Katie was part of a crochet group that was cutting up plastic shopping bags to make sleeping mats for the homeless.

Cuts bags into 1-1/2″ loops

Mother decided she’d make a ground cover for Grandson Malcolm to use under his sleeping bag when he goes camping. It took her several weeks to score enough bags, cut them into 1-1/2-inch loops and crochet them into something large enough to use. It turned out to be soft, durable and colorful.

In the process of doing the project, she became an expert in the colors that different stores use for their bags. Like folks who can identify the name of a song after hearing two notes, she can look at a color in her mat and tell you exactly which store uses that bag.

Keeping her out of the heat

Mark bought her a box of unused blue and yellow bags (moving ahead of me in the will, drat), but I countered by making sure to grab any bags I see on top of the recycle bins when I walk out of a store. I warned Mother to be careful when she digs through them. One of these days she’s going to encounter a full diaper.

It’s been too hot and dry to mow, even for her, so she started a mat for Mark to use on a piece of lawn furniture in St. Louis. She was picking up speed. She got that one done in three weeks.

Like a sweater with 5-foot sleeves

As soon as she finished that, she started another one. It went so quickly that it got out of control and ended up too big for her intended purpose. That’s this one. She finished it Monday night after working on it a week.

Starting a new one

As soon as her needles cooled, she started a new one on Tuesday morning. Pretty good for a one-armed woman, I must say.

July 31, 2012

Ghosts of Central High School

I got permission to wander around the halls at what used to be Central High School, but I had to double pinkie swear that I wouldn’t show any student faces. That’s a big switch from the old days when you could shoot just about anything, but I agreed to the rule. I wanted to show those stairs we had climbed so many times, but a shot without students was dull and a shot WITH students would have landed me in detention.

You can click on any photo to make it larger. (If you see any recognizable faces, don’t tell on me.)

How to shoot a time exposure

This was my compromise. I shot a time exposure of the kids during class change. The pictures weren’t as successful as I had hoped – those kids cleared the halls way too fast, so I didn’t have time to experiment with settings.

To be able to shoot with a slow shutter speed, I had to drop my film speed down to ISO 200 and put my camera in shutter priority mode. That meant that I locked down two variables: film speed and shutter speed and let the camera control the lens aperture or opening (f/stop). The top photo was one second at f/11.

The light must have changed a little on this photo, because it had the same ISO 200 and one-second exposure, but the lens was at f/10. The one below was f/13.

These weren’t the only ghosts

The old stairs still made the same sounds as they did when we were there. They are as solid as ever. I hope the school board isn’t looking to turn it into a pile of rubble like Washington and Franklin Schools. If they try, I think they’ll have more than bees to contend with.

Terry Kitchen describes in a video just how unhappy the spirits were when he tried to move the old trophies out of our Central to the new school out in the hinterlands. You don’t muck with Central spirits.

July 30, 2012

A Non-Political Whitewash

When we hear people talking about a whitewash today, we generally think of “a metaphor meaning to gloss over or cover up vices, crimes or scandals or to exonerate by means of a perfunctory investigation or through biased presentation of data. It is especially used in the context of corporations, governments or other organizations.”

When we’re talking about trees like the one in this unknown back yard, “whitewash, or calcimine, kalsomine, calsomine, or lime paint was a low-cost type of paint made from slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) and chalk” was applied to the bark in the springtime.Click on the photos to make them larger.

Whitewash was also used by for painting barns and the interiors of low-income apartment hallways. It wasn’t good for this purpose because it had a tendency to rub off onto clothing. It was associated with poverty in an old saying that I don’t recall hearing in Southeast Missouri, “Too proud to whitewash and too poor to paint.”

Painting the elm trees

When I was a kid visiting my grandparents in Advance, it was a springtime custom for my grandfather, Roy Welch, to paint the elm trees lining the yard on Cypress Street with whitewash. Some folks say that it was to prevent “sun scald” or to protect the trees from insects. It didn’t do anything to keep Dutch Elm Disease from wiping them all out. I think it was done for cosmetic reasons.

This photo was taken on my fourth or fifth birthday, which would have been in March. That’s too early for the the trees in the background to get this season’s fresh coat. You can see that most of the white from last year has washed off.

So, is it still the custom to whitewash trees anywhere today? I can’t think of the last time I’ve seen it done.