Cape Girardeau History and Photos

May 10, 2010

Serendipity in Old Town Cape

I was walking down Main St. in October shooting mug shots of store fronts. Some of the buildings had neat patterns of light and shadow. Others had some nice reflections. Others were just there.

I shot 10 frames of this building or parts of it. None of them were particularly inspiring. Just record shots in case it burned down next week.

What’s that in the window?

It wasn’t until I looked at the photos on a large screen that I saw the cat in the window. Here’s a slightly tighter crop of the same photo. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

He / She was in the frame taken at 15:50:18 and was gone in the next frame at 15:50:25. I would love to lie and say I saw the feline and managed to capture the decisive moment, but shooting it was pure, dumb luck.

Serendipity made the photo, not the photographer.

May 9, 2010November 30, 2023

You’ll Have No Name Except Deportee

Forty years ago, a photographer named Dallas Kinney won The Palm Beach Post’s first (and only) Pulitzer Prize for Migration to Misery. It was a series of photographs of migrant farm workers who made the circuit from North Carolina to South Florida following the harvesting seasons.

You can see his images here.

Dallas’ work is one of the things that drew me to The Post. I never came close to winning a Pulitzer, but I spent months and months – most of it on my own time – in the farming areas around Belle Glade, Pahokee and Immokalee in Florida documenting as much as I could about how produce gets to our tables.

Woodie and Arlo Guthrie’s Deportees

At some point, I heard Arlo Guthrie singing his dad’s song, Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos), an account of a “skyplane” that blew up over Los Gatos canyon while it was flying illegal workers back to Mexico. The news accounts listed the names of the flight crew, but as far as the 27 men and one woman being deported, the “radio says they are just deportees.”

No name but “Wetback”

That song came to my mind when I was hanging around the Collier County Stockade when the Border Patrol was making one of its sweeps. Since they were “detainees” and not inmates, the stockade officials didn’t track their names, just the count.

They were known by no name except “Wetbacks.”

Over the years, I married the photos and song into a slide show I used for dog and pony shows. I’d post it that way, except that it would violate Copyright and YouTube would pull it down.

Gallery of farm worker photos

Click on the first image, then click on the sides to move through the gallery. The lyrics to the song, Deportees are the title of each picture (at the bottom left).

[Editor’s note: some of the photos may not be of the best quality. They are second or third generation copies of second-quality prints left over after I sent the best ones to engraving. Some day I’ll get around to scanning the original negatives, but not this time.]

May 7, 2010

“New” Cape Central High

When I was in Cape this fall, I made a run out to the new Central High School. It’s not exactly on the beaten path. I had to pull out my GPS to find it. It’s a far cry from a neighborhood school where a good percentage of the students live within walking distance.

I didn’t spend too much time there. I popped in long enough to shoot something specific for a piece I’ll be running in the future.

Phil Ochs came to mind

The place is so spread out that a line from Phil Ochs‘ I’m Going to Say It Now popped into my mind, “To get around this campus, why you almost need a plane.” It takes an aerial to get a good overall photo of the place. (I would have created this using Google Maps so you could pan and zoom into it, but the most recent photos there had a big cloud obscuring the school.)

School cornerstone says 2002

I think this might have been the cafeteria.

The school’s cornerstone is dated 2002, so I guess it’s only us old farts who think of it as the “New” Central High School, much like the students who went to the Central High School on Pacific Street probably still call our school on Caruthers “New” Central.

Wonder if we could tour “Our” Central?

The reunion organizers have scheduled a tour of the new school, but to be honest, I’d rather prowl the halls of the building that houses OUR past. Wonder if it could be arranged?

I spent the better part of a day in the “Old” Central High School on Caruthers and a couple of days in the the Central High School on Pacific. I’ll be posting those pictures before too long.

It was astounding how well maintained Central was. The halls and walls were shiny and clean.

May 5, 2010September 17, 2022

Cape Central Shop Classes

This is going to be an easy posting for me. Easy, because I don’t have any details and I won’t have to do any research. I think I recognize some of the boys in the pictures, but I’m going to let you fill in the blanks.

As a special bonus, I WILL share with you all I have learned about electrical and plumbing repairs. It will become abundantly clear that I didn’t take any shop classes.

Sylvester, don’t die on me

I’ve always admired folks who can fix things. Dad had a mechanic, Sylvester, working for him. Sylvester was functionally illiterate, but he was a whiz with tools. He had an innate sense of how things fit together and how they worked.

During the winter, when they couldn’t build roads and bridges, Dad would put him to work performing maintenance on the heavy equipment. One day, Dad went into the mechanic shed and saw a whole dragline broken down to pieces, parts, nuts and bolts. Everything was neatly arranged so that it could be put back together using whatever plan Sylvester had in his head.

Dad shook his head, said, “Sylvester, don’t die on me,” and left him to his work.

Electricity is trustworthy

Electricity is easy. You do the work, then you turn on the power. One of three things happens:

It works. Life is good.
It doesn’t work. Life isn’t quite so good, but you start all over and fix the problem.
Sparks fly and smoke fills the room. That’s the least good, but, now you know right away that there’s something wrong and you can fix it.

Plumbing is sneaky

Plumbing, on the other hand, is sneaky. You can do your work, turn on the water main and have water squirt out in the sink like it’s supposed to.

It’s only at 2 a.m. on the second day out of a three-week vacation that it decides to break somewhere in the wall. When you come back, your first clue that something is wrong is when you look in the living room window and a fish is staring back at you.

Do NOT open the front door. You know that annoying little kid who lives next door? Pay HIM a quarter to do it.

Gallery of shop class photos

Click on any photo to make it larger. Click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery. If you click and sparks fly out of your computer, it’s an electrical problem. If you see a fish swimming in your monitor – and you don’t have a water-themed screen saver – that points to plumbing. Sorry, that’s the best I can do for you. (BTW, Sylvester didn’t die before he got the dragline back together.)