Cape Girardeau History and Photos

July 29, 2012July 29, 2012

Shooting a Solar Eclipse

The negative sleeve read “Eclipse,” but I couldn’t figure out what the picture was showing. Then it dawned on me (no pun intended): you don’t point your camera directly at the sun unless you have heavy-duty filters in place. The way we were told to shoot the eclipse was to cut a pinhole in a piece of cardboard and use that to project the sun’s image onto another surface. (Click on it to make it larger.)

(I always took warnings seriously. When we got our first-ever Associated Press Laserphoto machine, I put up a sign on the inside that said, “Do Not Look at the Laser Beam with Your Remaining Eye.)

That tiny crescent of light toward the bottom of the picture was as good as it got. We didn’t have a total eclipse in Cape, so the whole sun wasn’t blocked out.

In trying to track down a date for the eclipse, I found a wire story headlined “Lucky Old Sun Stars in Show” on the front page of the Missourian on July 20, 1963.

The next day’s paper had a close-up of a crescent similar to mine. I was doing some freelancing for them by then, but I don’t think it was mine.

Tucker execution dominated news

The news that week was dominated by the pending execution of Sammy Aire Tucker for the murder of Cape Girardeau policeman Donald H. Crittendon on March 10, 1961. Auxiliary officer Herbert L. Goss also died in the shootout. A memorial for them is on the Common Pleas Courthouse grounds.

The Missourian headline on July 26 was In Puff of Poison Gas: Tucker Meets Death Quietly.

Lunar eclipse in Florida

That Cape solar eclipse sort of dampened my enthusiasm for eclipses, but I did shoot a total lunar eclipse in Florida in 2010. I have to admit that Terry Hopkins had the best idea:

Go out in the back yard and stare at the full moon.
Close your eyes.
Open your eyes.
Go to bed
Complain about how hard it is to get up

July 28, 2012

Is Flossie’s Cafe a Clue?

I have a couple shots of a building that looks like a barn or dairy being torn down. They were on a roll of random shots, including some from Capaha Park pool, I think. At first glance, I thought they might have been taken west of the intersection of Hwy 25 and Hwy 61 in Jackson, based on railroad tracks and the bridge at the right of the picture. That doesn’t feel right, though. Click on the photos to make them larger.

Flossie’s Cafe and Frontier motel

When I blew up the frame to try to remove scratches and dust spots, I noticed the billboards at the far right of the frame. One of them says Flossie’s Cafe with a Pepsi logo and something about breakfast. In front of it is a sign with an arrow pointing to the left for Frontier, which I assume is a motel. It’s AAA-rated and has telephones and “Free ‘T.V.”

Elect Bill Rose and drink milk

This photo has several more clues. It has to be Cape County, because we’re supposed to “Re-elect Bill Rose,” a Democrat, for County Collector. Another billboard advertises Quality Dairy Products from Southeast Dairy. There’s a Texaco station up (down) the road.

So, where is this? It has railroad tracks in it, so Keith Robinson will probably not only know exactly where it is, but he’ll tell us who drove the spikes and the name of his dog.

July 27, 2012January 29, 2016

Drought Barely Dampened

I’ve been in Cape a couple days more than a month in the hottest stretch of weather since 1936. It might have sprinkled a couple of drops during that time, but I don’t remember them. We’ve had some flashes and rumbles that got hopes up for nothing.

This afternoon, though, the skies started to darken and the radar started showing a line of reds and yellows headed our way. I bought Mother a new portable weather radio, so I broke it out of its blister pack and started wading through the miniscule type to figure out how to set it up for Cape county and the area where her trailer is on Kentucky Lake. I was getting pretty close to done, I thought, when NOAA squawked out a severe thunderstorm warning. It startled me so much that I almost pitched it like a snake.

I decided to run out to the car before the rain started to get my video camera. Maybe we’d get something worthwhile.

Video of approaching (but not arriving) storm

We caught some pretty impressive wind in advance of the storm – the airport south of Cape logged a 53-mph gust. The initial rain pelted down hard, but then slacked off. That’s probably a good thing: the ground is so hard that anything that splashed down would have immediately run off.

The .014 inches of rain recorded at the airport in about an hour and a half won’t go far in helping what has been classified as an “exceptional drought.” Be ready for higher food prices. There’s no relief in sight.

Storms of 2011

What a difference a year makes.

July 25, 2012

Analog Guy in a Digital World

Mother and I were behind a pickup truck at the stop sign at Old Cape Road and South Shawnee Blvd., when I happened to look through his rear window.

Perched on his dash was a huge clock with figurines on each side. This was truly an analog guy trapped in a digital world.

When I clicked on the image to make it larger, his clock appears to be showing about 4:47 p.m. The time stamp on the photo says 3:31 p.m. My camera was still sitting on Eastern Time, not Central Time. Bottom line: neither one of us had a clue about what time it was.

Repairing a grandfather’s clock

Reminds me of the old joke about the guy who needed to take his grandfather’s clock to the jeweler for repair. It was too big for his car, but the jeweler was only a block away, so he decided he’d carry it. That went fine for about 30 feet, but the clock was heavier than he had anticipated.

It got so that the distance he could move it grew shorter and shorter. He would stagger 25, then 20, then 15 feet before he had to set the clock down. Before long, 10 feet was the best he could do. Pick it up, stagger 10 feet, set it down, gaze at it until he gathered his strength, look down the block to the jeweler, repeat.

Finally, a little boy walked up to him and said, “Mister, you DO know that they make clocks you can wear on your wrist, don’t you?”

Can kids even tell time with watches with hands these days?