Cape Girardeau History and Photos

December 9, 2015

Sunsets and Geotags

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.

Keeping track of where I am

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.

December 8, 2015January 1, 2022

Silver Dollar Tavern Kaput

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.

Demolition started Saturday

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.

Names left behind

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.

Basement will be filled in

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.

Earlier Silver Dollar Tavern and Old Appleton stories

Y’all owe me a pair of shoes

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.

That’s a subtle plug to ask you to use that little yellow DONATE button at the top right of the page.

December 7, 2015

Roundabout To Eat Buildings

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….”

How to outfox the competition

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.

Victim of the roundabout

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.

December 6, 2015

Road Warriorette Reactions

All of my road warriorettes display different reactions to my driving. Foodie Jan is prone to scream “We’re all going to die!!!!” at the least provocation. She’s also the one most likely to question my food and lodging choices.

Curator Jessica is so young she still thinks she’s immortal, so she takes my driving quietly.

You haven’t heard much about Warriorette Anne lately because she abandoned me for Texas. She kept quiet even when she had good reason to scream. It was on that occasion that Mother, the original Warriorette, said she didn’t scream because she was biting down too hard on a pillow to keep from doing it.

(You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

Now that I think of it

I only knew of one time when Mother expressed any kind of shock.

I was trying to get a good photo of the world’s longest suspension pipeline that links Wittenberg, Mo., with Grand Tower, Ill. I had been there about an hour earlier and got some nice pictures, but after heading north along the river and not finding a good angle, I decided to race the sun back for this shot. I made it with about five minutes to spare. When I went airborne over the top of a levee, Mother yelled, “Whoa!”

I knew there was a road on the other side of the levee, but she, evidently, didn’t.

At the time, I wrote, “She never yells, ‘Whoa!’ She yells, ‘Gun it!’ She must be getting old.”

Getting to the point of the picture

Getting back to the original subject of the tree photo at the top of the page: Warriorette Shari, my old high school girlfriend (briefly, by her choice), and I were hammer down on NN north of where I took the silo picture when I smoked the brakes and did a sliding U-turn. Shari didn’t say a word, even when I pulled off on the side of the road and jumped out.

I had spotted a farm pond that was perfectly smooth and picking up the reflection of trees backlit by the setting sun. It captured the feel of The Bootheel for me: the endless flat ground, the green crops, the trees and buildings way off in the distance.

When I crawled back in the car, I tried to explain my philosophy of “Shoot It When You See It” because I was losing the reflections of the trees in the three or four minutes it took me to get turned around and start making exposures.

This old tree standing sentinel in the field has the same feel as the pond photo, but I like the reflections better in the first shot.

I almost always use a circular polarizing filter on my lens to protect it, reduce reflections and make skies more dramatic. Depending on the angle of the light, sometimes it doesn’t work at all or, like here, it causes part of the sky to be a different shade, which bothers me.