Cape Girardeau History and Photos

April 23, 2010November 24, 2016

Jefferson, Oldest Standing School in Cape

I went K through 8 at Trinity Lutheran School, so I don’t have much first-hand knowledge of Cape’s public schools. In fact, it was a bit of a challenge to locate Jefferson School, which turned out to the the oldest standing of Cape’s schools.

Located at Jefferson and Ellis

The school was built in 1904. You can read an excellent history of the school, which includes contemporary photos of the interior by downloading the National Register of Historic Places registration form. It’s a large document, so right-click on the link, then choose Save Link and open the file later with Adobe Acrobat.

Population quadrupled

The Civil War slowed population growth in Cape, but the population nearly doubled between 1900 and 1910, and had almost quadrupled by 1925 to 15,258. Much of the growth was in the working class neighborhoods in the area served by Jefferson School.

The building had four class rooms on each floor, with a central hallway and two narrow stairwells.

Was Black School 1953-1955

In 1953, Cape Girardeau schools were still segregated. Black students attended John S. Cobb School (originally named Lincoln School) until the school was destroyed by a fire. White students attending Jefferson were sent to May Greene School, and the 108 Black students were sent to Jefferson School.

Bob Miller wrote an interesting piece for The Missourian when classmates celebrated a school reunion in 2004.

When the school system was integrated in 1955, the school was closed.

Became apartment building

At some point, the interior was converted to apartments, with two apartments on each level.It also served as a union hall.

Much of the original wood trim, stairwells and windows are intact. Years of neglect, water damage and vandalism, have taken their toll.

I asked the developer who converted Schultz School into very attractive senior housing if he had considered taking on Jefferson School as a project. He said the building didn’t have enough possible living space to make it practical from his viewpoint.

Gallery of Jefferson School photos

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

April 22, 2010February 22, 2016

Earth Day 2010

Warning: non-Cape, obligatory Earth Day content follows.

When I was working for The Athens (OH) Messenger, I had to produce five photo essays a week. We called it The Picture Page, but it was really a 9×17-inch hole that was given to the photographers to fill during the weekdays. We had to find the subject, shoot it, write a minimal amount of copy and lay it out ourselves.

Deadline was 10 a.m. and I was sucking air. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to fill the space. I didn’t want to be the first photographer to end his career at The Mess by having a 9×17-inch blank space mark his professional obituary.

Please, let there be a picture out there

With the clock clicking down, I was frantically driving around hoping SOMETHING would catch my eye.

Suddenly, this tree popped out of the fog. I knocked off a couple of frames before the light changed, then blasted back to the darkroom. I needed to cut corners, so instead of spending seven minutes using film developer, I used paper developer, which produces more grain and contrast, but only took two minutes. Serendipity kicked in and the technique made the photo better instead of worse.

This and another photo of the park got me off the hook for yet another morning. It turned out to be one of the most popular photos I took in three years at the paper.

Hocking River flood control took my tree

About six months later, I went back to the site to shoot this photo. A flood control project to reroute the Hocking River was going right over my tree. This was the result.

Hokey Poem #22

I was flattered when Carol Towarnicky, a reporter I worked with at The Ohio University Post, wrote Hokey Poem #22, which said, in part,

. . . consider the man.
who records the land.
low-key, like the hills.
gentle, like those who
who dot the country side.

familiar, calm.
he grabs his camera,
squints, clicks, moves on,
nonchalantly.

who ridicules the thought
of an “eternal message,”
yet mourns the passage
of a tree.

I’m sure CT (I called her that because Towarnicky was a mouthful, even for someone with a name like Steinhoff) was rushing to meet a writing class deadline like I was trying to fill a hole on just another work day, but I still hold on to that tree photo and Hokey Poem #22. It’s funny how something seemingly insignificant can mean so much.

The First Earth Day

My photo of an abandoned strip mine in southern Ohio ran on the front page of The Athens Messenger on the first Earth Day. You can read the whole story about the picture here.

April 21, 2010June 19, 2016

Country Club Rises from Ashes

I wasn’t exactly a country club kind of guy. Tennis, for me, involved more ball chasing than volleying. Golf swings were too close to the scythe Dad had me swinging clearing brush alongside the highway.

Dad put me to work one summer doing construction work (the only time from the time I was 12 until I retired in 2008 that I didn’t work for a newspaper in some capacity). He sold it as an opportunity to make some money, but it was his way to demonstrate that college was better than hard labor under the hot sun.

Form oil is nasty

One assignment was to unload lumber off trucks coming in from the job sites. The worst job was humping 4×8-foot sheets of 3/4-inch plywood that had been used as concrete forms. Those unwieldy hunks of dead trees weighed almost as much as a scrawny 16-year-old.

I’d have to unload them from the truck, stack them, use a wire brush to scrape off any concrete that was sticking to them, plug any holes with corks, spray them with form oil and then stack them in bins that were frequently over my head. The form oil was nasty stuff that was designed to keep concrete from sticking to the plywood. It was designed NOT to come off.

As luck would have it, the one time a date invited me to a pool party at the country club was a day when I had spent all day unloading trucks. I could barely raise my arms, let alone swim. I was afraid that I’d leave an oil slick on the pool no matter how many showers I took. The pool and I survived, but I don’t recall being invited back.

I didn’t spend much time shooting these pictures. I was afraid someone might recognize me and hand me a scrub brush to clean off the oil stain I had left 40 years earlier.

This was probably not the building I was in for that swim date. The Missourian had a story that the original building, which opened in 1921, burned on a cold, sleety night Dec. 11, 1963. It’s likely that I had been in the old two-story building.

The Country Club has a spiffy website with some impressive pictures. The site says the formal opening of the new clubhouse was held exactly two years after the old one burned. It became the first 18-hole golf course in Cape.

April 21, 2010December 14, 2021

Who’s Been Writing On The Walls?

For once, I know the answer to the question, but I’m going to see if any of you ‘fess up. You’ll probably recognize a lot of the names scrawled here. I’m going to pose a question: where were these pictures taken?

Why only these names?

One thing I can’t figure out is why the names are all from about the same period. I don’t know if the walls were covered for years and then uncovered long enough for the graffiti to appear, then re-covered. It might be that earlier kids were too afraid to write on the wall and that later generations couldn’t write. Who knows?

Gallery of Graffiti

Click on any picture to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the photo to move through the gallery (hint: you don’t have to click on the arrow; anywhere on the side will do it.)

Is your name here?

Tell me the full story. Where is it, when was it done, was it done individually or in a group, anything at all.

I think the inscriptions are old enough that they qualify as history, not vandalism. After all, if they were a few hundred years older and carved on cave walls, they’d be considered petroglyphs and somebody would make the place a national monument.