Cape Girardeau History and Photos

June 23, 2012

Kentucky Traffic Safety Message

We cheated death once more. pulling into Cape in late afternoon. I tried to shoot a few frames of the Nashville skyline at the split, but decided that I didn’t want the last photo before (or during) the wreck to be of the Nashville skyline.

Kentucky reinforces safety message

Had I seen this memorial to Kentucky traffic fatalities BEFORE I got to Nashville, I might not have tried to shoot the skyline photo from a moving car. I pull into that rest area on almost every trip, but I don’t recall seeing the memorial before.

June 22, 2012June 22, 2012

Northbound TN I-24

The trip back home to Cape has been mostly uneventful. Getting out of Florida was a wet slog, but traffic was light and my Rain-X meant that I rarely had to run my windshield wipers.

I’m not a big Stephen King fan, but I loaded one his books in my MP3 player and have had the miles click off listening to the horrible happenings in Desperation, NV. Maybe they’re clicking off so quickly because the book dampens any desire you have to go on backroads through desolate countryside.

Most of Thursday was spent escaping Georgia. It’s kind of disheartening to have to go through l0ng states like Florida and Georgia. You have a better feeling of making progress when you’re going through skinny states like Tennessee (if you’re going north and south, that is).

Atop Nickajack Lake bridge

Traffic was moving fine until I got to Atlanta at rush hour. Boy, RUSH hour is a misnomer. They should call it Crawl Hour.

I rounded a curve north of Chattanooga and mentally kicked myself for not being ready to shoot a high railroad bridge that crosses the highway.

I decided I’d better take advantage of the few minutes of daylight I had left to capture the foothills of the eastern Continental Divide.

The photo at the top was taken as we were starting to climb the big bridge over Nickajack Lake, about a third of the way between Chattanooga and Monteagle Pass. The second shot was taken just ever the top of the bridge.

Garish fireworks stand

This fireworks store has always fascinated me, but never enough to get off The Big Road to stop, particularly with a Stephen King horror book playing in the background.

I should be pulling into Cape late Friday afterno0n.

June 21, 2012December 28, 2014

Hirsch’s Northtown

When I published a piece on Hirsch’s Midtown, formerly known as Hirsch Bros. No. 1, and the establishment of Hirsch Bros. No. 2 as Hirsch’s Northtown, I mentioned that I didn’t think I had ever been in the Mill Street and Main Street store.

Susan Fee Means commented on Facebook, “Ken – if you’d ever been to The Mule Lip, across from the old shoe factory on Main St, then you’d been to the Hirsch #2 store. Or at least the building.”

I led a sheltered life. I was never in The Mule Lip or its reincarnation as Margarita Mama’s. Now that the casino has leveled that area, I guess I missed my chance.

[Note: we made it as far as Lake City, Fla., tonight. I’m staying in a nice Comfort Suites I’ve stayed at before. I pulled in shortly before midnight after driving through moderate to heavy rain most of the day. The desk clerk gave me her “Your eyes sure are bloodshot super discount” that she said was even better than the alphabet soup list of names I usually give her.]

June 20, 2012January 6, 2016

Flood Creates Big Thirst

A Florida Power & Light dike containing a cooling pond at a power plant in Indiantown, Fla., broke in the middle of the night in 1979, washing a railroad locomotive off its tracks and sending residents scrambling to their rooftops for rescue. At first light, I waded into this bar in Port Mayaca because I saw people coming and going from it.

Thigh-deep water didn’t keep them from serving drinks.

The photo moved on the Associated Press wire. This is the original print I transmitted, including the caption. Click on the image to make it larger.

Decoding the caption

WPB-9 – this was the ninth photo we had transmitted from our office in West Palm Beach that day. We might go weeks without moving a photo, so to have transmitted nine meant that it was a big deal.

(AP LASERPHOTO) – was a required slug.

(ps041645mbr) – I think this was some kind of time stamp. “mbr” meant we we a member newspaper, not an AP staffer or PR flack.

MO MO NOT FOR USE IN FT PIERCE, STUART, FT LAUDERDALE OR MIAMI. Local TV out. – This is where I wasn’t playing nicely with the Associated Press. MO Means Magazines Out. (If they wanted to use the photo, they had to negotiate with us directly.) We were in a highly competitive area, so we “embargoed” our photos from being used by any competing media. I got into quite a set-to with the head AP guy who complained after we expanded our embargo to read, “Florida Out; USA Today Out,” meaning that no paper in Florida nor USA Today could use our photos. The AP guy said, “USA Today is a national paper. They don’t compete with you.”

“They’ve got a paper box in front of my office. I consider that competition,” I retorted, standing my ground.

One of my gripes with the AP was that they were very demanding. They wanted the pictures right away, not caring if you had to meet your own newspaper’s deadlines or or you hadn’t eaten or slept for 36 hours. Oh, yeah, they paid you five bucks a picture and didn’t give the photographer a credit line until just a few years ago.

Why am I running this?

Why am I running this? It’s two in the morning, I don’t have the car packed and I’m supposed to pull out for Cape in the morning. It was this or nothing.

The photo won a couple of national awards. Maybe it was because some folks thought it was news that people around Lake Okeechobee COULD pour water out of a boot without having the directions written on the bottom.