News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
Brother-in-Law John and I spent a whole day validating the Rule of Threes: every project will cost three times as much as anticipated, require three times as long as planned, and will take at least three trips to any place you plan to buy parts. Actually, I’m pretty sure we were into the Rule of Sixes and Nines on a couple of items.
I’m too tired to tell the whole story tonight, but I’ll give you a hint that it involves something in this photo.
I was racing the dark Monday to shoot the remains of the Silver Dollar Tavern on Apple Creek when I popped over a hill on Highway 61 south of Old Appleton and saw this farm in the sunset. I did one of my patented U-turns to capture the golden glow. That’s the reason photographers call the hour after sunrise and before sunset the Golden Hours.
I had some tighter shots, and I debated cropping up from the bottom, but I like the way the manmade yellow highway divider lines echo the color of the backlit grasses.
One of the challenges in shooting lot of pictures is that you sometimes forget where you were or there aren’t clearly identifiable clues to help you orient yourself.
You can buy GPS attachments to plug into your camera, but they are bulky and expensive. Kid Matt came up with a cheaper solution. Since I already have an Android phone on my belt all the time and an iPad in the car, he suggested I get a program called Geotag Photos Pro that would capture the GPS track of where I’ve been. Matching up the track time with the filestamp time associated with a photo, can tell you where it was taken.
It sounds complicated, but I was happy to find out that it is harder to explain than to use. The map above shows where the photos were taken. The yellow marker that has the 16 means that 16 frames were exposed near there. The orange 4 represents four frames taken with a second camera body. They were both taken from the same location, but the camera times were off by a few seconds, which caused them to appear to have been taken at different locations. I’ll synchronize the devices better before I do this again.
It’s going to help out a lot now that I’m spending a lot of time roaming around in rural areas I’m not really familiar with.
A reader sent a message this morning, “Ken, as I drove down 61 this morning, something was missing. I think the Silver Dollar Tavern has been razed.”
I needed to get an oil change and run some other errands, so it was almost dusk when I got up there. Indeed, the Perry county landmark was nothing but a heap of twisted, smoking debris.
I always liked seeing the old silver-clad tavern, but I have to admit that getting rid of it opens up a nice area for a park, something the town is talking about developing. As always, you can click on the photos to make them larger.
Larry Hull, whose trucking company was tasked with razing the building, said the city was afraid someone would get hurt prowling around inside the old structure or that vandals might torch it, with the danger that the fire could spread to other buildings.
They started tearing it down Saturday after making sure there were no environmental hazards that would create a problem.
I’m not sure if the names painted on the west basement wall are for three guys, Don, Jerry and Wood, or if Wood is a last name. Whoever they are, they were “Van’s Helpers,” probably referring to Van Ferral, who bought the tavern in March, 1965.
Once the debris stops burning, the basement will be filled in and the bank smoothed down. Within a few years, only memories will remain of the old watering hole that had been around since at least 1948.
I was being very careful walking around the mud, trying as much as I could to stay on what looked like gravel. That worked great for awhile, but, eventually, I heard a “SLUURPPP” sound as my foot hit a spot that WASN’T gravel and I felt cold, wet mud the consistency of chocolate pudding well up above my ankle. It wasn’t gumbo enough to suck my shoes off, but I don’t think I’ll be wearing them to church any time soon.
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When I drove past this building one day, it said Southeast Missourian. A few days later, the sign was gone and the Jackson bureau office was closed for good. When I competed with Missourian reporter Bob Todd in my old Jackson Pioneer days, and filled in for him when I started working for the Cape paper, the office was in a tiny building where the Cape County Archive Center is today.
We filed our stories on a 110-baud Teletype that looked like this. Everything you typed showed up on a companion machine in the Cape newsroom. It printed in all caps, there was no backspace, and you had to type in a slow rhythm to keep from going faster than the machine could handle.
One of my jobs at The Pioneer, a paper with more characters than character, was to plagiarize Bob Todd’s county commission meeting reports. I still think my rewrites were better than his originals, even if I didn’t copy his signature transition phrase, “In other business….”
I could have sworn I had told this story before, but I couldn’t find it in the archives. Anyway, it might explain why I was able to make the transition from the newsroom to telecommunications late in my career.
On Election Day 1964, Jackson Pioneer Publisher John Hoffman told me I had better be wearing running shoes because “Bob Todd keeps the only pay phone nailed up, and you’ll be running back and forth from the courthouse with election returns all night.”
I gave that some thought, and toward the end of the business day, I went to that pay phone, took the receiver off the hook, and put a sign on it that read, “Phone Out of Order. Has Been Reported to Phone Company.” My theory was that since it was late in the day, nobody would bother to call Ma Bell, particularly since someone else had already done it.
When the returns started trickling in, Bob sauntered up to the phone with a bunch of results in his hand, glad to see it unoccupied, then his shoulders slumped when he read the sign. I let him contemplate it for a minute, then I stepped up, hit the phone’s hookswitch, dropped a dime and called The Pioneer. When I hung up, I told him what I had done, and we agreed to share the phone for the rest of the night.
A sign on the door read, “Due to MoDot needs to demolish this building for the planned roundabout, the Southeast Missourian’s Jackson office will be closing September 30, 2015. It has been our pleasure to serve you at this location for the past 22 years. After September 30, please continue to call the Southeast Missourian at 573-243-6635 of 573-335-5611 for assistance, or visit our office at 301 Broadway in Cape.”
A Missourian story (not written by Bob Todd) reported that the DOT has acquired the right-of-way from all but one property owner. This is a different location than the roundabout that would have wiped out Jackson’s Hanging Tree and a good part of the courthouse lawn.