Cape Girardeau History and Photos

When I went back to Cape in the spring, I was curious to see if the old Fruitland School was still standing near the intersection of 177 and Route W. Dad built that road when I was two years old, and I remembered having a wienie roast there with the Steinhoff, Kirkwood and Joiner families.

The photo above shows Dad – L.V. Steinhoff – me and Carolyn Kirkwood. This was a rare outing for us. Dad wasn’t much big on picnics. “I eat sandwiches sitting on the ground six days a week. I don’t want to do it on the weekend, too.”

Old Fruitland School is gone

I imagine the old brick schoolhouse used to stand right about where the North Elementary School playground is today.

“Play like these are brownies”

Funny how stuff sticks in your head. I remember the ground was a little muddy where a bulldozer had gone by, leaving perfectly rectangular pieces of compressed soil behind in the tracks. “Let’s play like these are brownies,” Carolyn Kirkwood said. Even at two, I wasn’t falling for that trick.

Attending the event were L.V.,  Mary Steinhoff and Ken Steinhoff; Troas (Bones), Lillian and Billy Joiner; Jim and Maurine Kirkwood and Jimmy and Carolyn.

North Elementary School

This is a pretty, new, spiffy school. I still like the old brick one, though.

I’m always amused – OK, ticked off, if you have to know – at the people complaining about cyclists on Route W. That was considered a farm-to-market road in the days when Carolyn was trying to feed me mud brownies. Since I was there 60 years ago, I figure I’ve earned the right to ride it on my bike  without people honking at me.

On a sadder note, I’ve seen a lot of posting about this being the week that Elvis died in 1977. Like I wrote earlier, this is also the week that Dad died in the same year. There’s no doubt in my mind which one I miss more.

When I wrote about Bunny Bread the other day, folks immediately started remembering that Bunny Bread was a sponsor for Crusader Rabbit on KFVS-TV.

Crusader Rabbit was the first animated series produced specifically for television. The first episode, Crusader vs. the State of Texas, aired on KNBH in Los Angeles August 1, 1950.

Crusader vs. State of Texas

Kid Matt, who has a Bunny Bread T-shirt, but had never seen Crusader Rabbit, found a bunch of the cartoons on YouTube.

Episode 1 sounds vaguely topical these days. Crusader Rabbit is headed to the great Southwest because he heard a radio news report that “the Texans are chasing all of the jackrabbits out of Texas.” He was headed down to help his cousins, all of whom were named Jack. Along the way, he enlists the aid of his trust sidekick, Ragland T. Tiger (Rags).

Each episode broken into chapters

Each episode was broken into as many as 30 chapter, insuring that you’d have to be glued in front of the set every day to keep from missing the story line.

Budget wouldn’t buy lunch at Disney

Don Markstein wrote, “Television’s first cartoon series, Crusader Rabbit, embodied everything bad that came to be associated with TV animation. It was quickly and imperfectly produced on a budget that wouldn’t have bought lunch at Disney, it repeated the same episodes over and over, and its animation was limited almost to the point of stasis. It had only one saving grace — its young viewers thought it was funny.”

Crusader Rabbit had simple formula

“Crusader’s basic formula was simple — humorous adventure stories told (by narrator Roy Whaley) in short episodes, with cliffhangers, about a little smart hero (Crusader Rabbit, voiced by Lucille Bliss, who many years later was the voice of Smurfette), a big dumb hero (Rags the Tiger, voiced by Vern Loudon), and an inept recurring villain (Dudley Nightshade, voiced by Russ Coughlin). Ward would later become famous for another animated TV series with that very same formula — Rocky & Bullwinkle.

“Production ended in 1951, after 195 episodes had been made, and the creators went on to other things — in Ward’s case, bigger and better ones. The series was revived in 1957 (this time in color), and ran another 260 episodes; but without its creators (who had sold their interest in the characters), it never recaptured its earlier charm. The color episodes appeared in syndicated reruns as recently as the early 1980s.”

When I posted photos of a huge barn with a curved roof yesterday, I hoped someone would be able to identify it. There were a number of good guesses, but one of my regular readers who is too shy to post publicly – we’ll call her Shy Reader in the future – came up with the answer.

The mystery barn was on the I. Ben Miller Dairy Farm at N. Sprigg and Bertling. It was torn down in 1966.

I. Ben Miller Dairy Barn

The I. Ben Miller Dairy Barn was such a big deal that it got a got a two-column front-page writeup in The Southeast Missourian on Oct. 21, 1920. Click on this link to read the full account of all the modern features in the barn.

(The Missourian’s front page that day proclaimed that it had “more than 5000 paying subscribers and is delivered each evening in over forty Southeast Missouri towns by carriers.” It goes on to claim that “No other daily paper in a city of 10,000 has as large a bona fide circulation. The Missourian guarantees advertisers five times as many bona fide subscribers as any other paper ever published in Cape Girardeau.”

A landmark passes

Shy Reader, who is a much better researcher than I am, said she couldn’t find where The Missourian published the photos I ran yesterday, but there are some holes in the Google Archives for that period.

She DID find this photo taken about the same time, which shows the barn from a different angle. There’s no doubt that they’re the same building.