Cape Girardeau History and Photos

February 27, 2011March 6, 2011

Marty at Lake Worth Street Painting Festival

For the fourth year in a row, Cape Girardeau artist Marty Perry Riley (CHS class of 68) was convinced to leave the snow, sleet and rain of the Midwest to come to Lake Worth, FL, to participate in the Lake Worth Street Painting Festival February 26-27.

Largest of its kind in the U.S.

The organizers claim the festival is the largest of its kind in the United States. About 400 artists come to South Florida to create masterpieces on blacktop with chalk. The streets become an art gallery for two days, then are wiped out by traffic on Monday.

Commissioned by Dedicated IT

She was commissioned by her nephew, Adam Steinhoff, to produce the art for his company, DedicatedIT, a computer networking company that provides managed services for businesses in South Florida.

Lion theme

Marty chose a lion theme for this year’s drawing. Last year she drew irises.

Crowds enjoy watching artists

Thousands of spectators wander the streets watching the artists, listening to music and sampling foods of every type. It was a perfect Florida February weekend.

Thanks to Wife Lila, Son Matt and Sis-in-Law Marty for the photos. I was on a bike ride on Lake Okeechobee where I saw more gators per mile than any time in years while the festival was going on.

February 25, 2011February 25, 2011

Central High Safety Week

I wasn’t going to bother doing anything with this because the negative was scratched up and it was just another bulletin board shot.

When I looked more closely, however, I saw that the Safety Week display Joanne Bone was putting up a collection of spot news photos I had taken of overturned trucks and cars, fires and other Bad Things. What the heck, I always like to show off my work, even it it’s too small to see.

Remember the gory movie?

Did you have to sit through the gory traffic safety movie assembly, too? I was probably the only kid who watched it thinking, “Wow, that would have been a lot better if the guy had stepped over there a couple of feet,” or “a second light would really have improved that.”

Check out the ring

When I enlarged the photo on the screen to touch up some scratches and dust, I got a gander at the size of the ring on Joanne’s left hand. Either she bought her class ring super-sized, thinking she might grow into it some day or she was going steady with some big guy. (Clicking on the photo will make the it slightly larger.)

February 25, 2011

Arena Park Stock Car Races

Arena Park is about 1.2 miles from our house. When the wind is right, we used to be able to hear the stock car races at the park. This was back in the days before central air conditioning, so our windows were open with a big attic fan providing what little cooling breeze was out there.

Dad and I weren’t what you would call car people, but there was a period when we’d go out to catch the races. I don’t know if it was because he knew some of the racers or if it was just something to do to kill time in the evening.

Tom worked at The Missourian

(At least, I THINK his name was Tom.) I recognize at least one of the drivers as a guy who worked in the composing room at The Missourian.

Lester Harris when not climbing poles

When I did a story on a telephone company repairman, Lester Harris, a number of people mentioned that he raced cars. He shows up in several photos.

Hard to shoot at night

I knew I had a few stock car photos kicking around, but I didn’t know that I had this many. Some of them are of marginal quality because they were shot at night with flash at long distances, but I’m including them to round out a portrait of the event.

These photos were taken in 1966. I shot a scuffle at the track that ran earlier this year.

Stock car photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

February 23, 2011

Goin’ to the Dogs: Animal Photography

Every day there were tons of rolls of blank newsprint waiting for ink to be squirted on them. Some days you had assignments to shoot photos that would illustrate stories. Other days, the editor would ask, “Got any wild art?”

Wild art – sometimes called CLO, for Cut Lines Only – was a photo or photos that would stand alone without a story.

Photographer wasn’t human

All newspaper photographers have to be generalists who can do a competent job shooting whatever arises, but most of them have things they do better than others. I had one guy who had an uncanny ability to shoot sports. He could read the plays better than the athletes; be where the action was going to happen; nail the ball, the number and the action, perfectly exposed and tack-sharp. There was some speculation that he wasn’t human.

Others were great at lighting. They could make interiors and food come alive. A few were good at coming up with illustrations for stories that didn’t lend themselves to straight journalistic photography.

I was most comfortable shooting portraits, documentary picture stories and spot news.

Animal photos were the exception

I was lousy at feature photos and wild art. I always wanted to turn feature situations into stories. Very seldom did I ever stoop so low as to shoot animal photos like these.

Tuned to a different frequency

An unsolicited portfolio arrived at the office when I was trying desperately to fill the fifth of five positions that had just come open when the staff was raided and a husband-and-wife team left for a bigger paper. The applicant was someone we had never heard of, working at a small paper we had never heard of, but his feature photos were phenomenal. So phenomenal, in fact, that the chief photographer and I grilled him hard. “We don’t set up photos here, and your pictures look, to be blunt, ‘too good to be true.’ How did you happen to shoot photos X, Y and Z”

“I just get these feelings,” he said. “I think, if I stand in this place, it’s like I can see in my mind what’s going to happen.”

It turned out to be true. It was like he was tuned to a different frequency than the rest of us. If he had been as good at picking lottery numbers as he was in being able to predict what was going to walk into his camera frame, he’d have been rich.