Cape Girardeau History and Photos

August 11, 2015November 30, 2021

L.V. Steinhoff’s Hats

Brother Mark found a bunch of Dad’s hats in the top shelf of the guest room a few weeks ago. Some were in the original boxes.

We’re not hat people

I put out the word to family members that they were available, but, as Mark’s photo shows, you have to have a certain flair to pull off wearing a hat these days. We’re missing that gene.

We set the hats aside for future consideration by Niece Laurie of Annie Laurie’s Antiques.

Kitty Ruessler hat exhibit

I was watching Cape Girardeau County History Center Director Carla Jordan working on an exhibit of hats loaned by Kitty Ruessler the other night. I casually mentioned Dad’s hats to her, and she suggested we display those, too.

Dad’s hat’s

She found a hat rack and made them look good. I was amazed at how they were still in good shape. Dad died in 1977, and I’m sure they hadn’t been touched since then except to shove them in a corner in the closet.

Carla and her staff have done a great job of building unusual exhibits in the short time the History Center has been open. You should stop by. It’s across the street from the county courthouse in Jackson, in the old Andrew Jackson building. It’s open seven days a week. The hours are 10 – 4, Monday through Saturday, and 1 to 4 on Sunday.

Dad could wear a hat

Dad spent most of the week pushing dirt around building roads and bridges, but he cleaned up nicely.

Photo gallery of Dad and his hats

Some of the older pictures were taken when I was about two years old, when Dad, Mother and her parents piled into a car and headed off to Mexico and the American Southwest. One shot, which includes Wife Lila, was taken at Christmastime in Athens, Ohio. I took the two color pictures in 1961ish.

Click on any photo to make it larger, then use the arrow keys to move around the gallery.

August 10, 2015

Barn Along the Highway

It’s gone in a blink of an eye, that’s even if you manage to see it down in the hollow. This old barn is on the north side of Highway 61 just west of I-55. Every time I head over to Jackson, I take a glance over there to see how the old building is coping with gravity. (Click on it to make it larger.)

Even though I know where it is, I’m always past it before I think about pulling over for a quick photo. I paused for a fraction of a second this afternoon to say hello to it.

There was a mailbox just up the road, but the shoulder isn’t all that wide and traffic was heavy, so I didn’t try to read it.

August 9, 2015August 9, 2015

My Truck Book

For the record, I was meticulous in caring for my books and comics. I normally would blame any damage to printed materials on my destructive younger brothers.

I’m going to have to fall on the sword when it comes to My Truck Book, though. THEY may have torn the cover off and dogeared the pages, but I plead guilty to scrawling on the pages, producing graphic images far superior to anything I did in Art 101 in college.

If I (OK, Google) translated the MCMXLVIII Roman numerals correctly, this book dates back to 1948.

The Milk Truck

Most of the trucks in the book are still with us in some form or another, but they are a lot smaller than today’s behemoths. The “trailer truck” had but 10 wheels instead of 18, for example.

Because of changing life styles, though, some have disappeared forever. When was the last time you saw a guy in a white jacket show up at your house carrying a bunch of glass bottles of milk?

(Any guy who shows up in a white coat at my house is more likely to be hiding a straitjacket behind his back.)

The Coal Truck

How many homes still have active coal bins?

Interestingly enough, the next page shows what we would recognize as a garbage truck today, but “The Ash Trucktakes away ashes and garbage.” If he can’t park his truck close enough to the garbage can,” it continues, “the ashman carries the tub on his shoulder or even on his head.”

I wonder if that’s where the expression “heaping hot coals upon his head” came from? (Yes, I know the phrase shows up in the Bible in Proverbs and Romans, but it’s still something to contemplate.)

The Laundry Truck

This was clearly before the days of washing machines in the home. Trucks like this one would drive all over town picking up dirty laundry and taking them to places like Rigdon’s Laundry.

Note the boy in the foreground putting on his skates. Wonder if he got yelled at by his mother for skating while wearing his good school pants?

Street-Car Emergency Truck

Cape had street cars at one time, but I don’t recall ever seeing anything this fancy to making repairs.

The Heavy Machinery Truck

They call it a “heavy machinery truck.” We always called it a “lowboy.” New ones have more wheels and fancy hydraulic lifts, but look essentially the same.

Dad’s lowboy

Dad was pretty proud of his lowboy, but it had a tendency to get into trouble. I’m not sure who was driving the truck this day, but I’m pretty sure he missed a zero or two when he read the weight limit sign on the bridge.

That mishap has photographic proof that it occurred. Dad came home crankier than usual one night, but I’m not sure if the following story is completely true.

Ran out of air

Seems like they were hauling a piece of heavy equipment across the Missouri Ozarks to a job when the air brakes went out on a steep downhill run. Much like the boys going down Wolf Creek Pass in C.W. McCall’s song by the same name, “from there on down it just wasn’t real purdy: it was hairpin county and switchback city. One of ’em looked like a can full’a worms; another one looked like malaria germs.”

In the song, the hapless truck “Went down and around and around and down ’til we run outta ground at the edge of town. Bashed into the side of the feed store… in downtown Pagosa Springs.”

In Dad’s version, told a good 20 years before McCall’s song was written, the driver plowed into the front porch of a general store in some small town. There wasn’t much damage to the truck or the building, but Dad said there was an old man sitting there at the time of the crash who dashed into the store, grabbed a roll of toilet paper and shouted, “Charge it!” before disappearing.

August 8, 2015August 9, 2015

I.H. Severn and Harry Truman

I’m starting a new project. David Kelly, whose family has farmed in the Pemiscot county area for generations, asked if I’d like to work on a documentary about the Missouri Bootheel.

After spending most of the driving on back roads and getting a feel for part the area, I mentioned that I was surprised to not see more small churches and cemeteries. He said we were near one that had an interesting tombstone bearing a presidential signature.

Isaac Harmon Severn obituary

The sun was coming from the wrong direction to get a really good shot (click on it to make it larger), so I’ll let an obituary posted on the Find A Grave site fill in the blanks. (It’s a lot longer than I’m posting here, so you might want to follow the link.)

If we were to die tomorrow, do you think perhaps the next day our family would receive a message of condolence from the president of the USA? For most of us, the answer is no. But for the family of Isaac Harmon Severn of Steele, who died here in 1949, the answer was yes. His friend, Harry S Truman was president of the United States and was told about Severn’s death (probably by their mutual friend Judge Roy Harper but that is uncertain). So Harry sent a telegram to the family expressing his sorrow at the death of his friend and political ally and that message continues to attract attention at a local cemetery.

Truman and Severn good buddies

Truman and Severn had been good buddies, “big political friends,” as some put it, and fellow Democrats, for some years. Severn, Harper, Max L. Kelley and others journeyed together to political rallies at such places as Springfield or Kansas City.

And so it was that when Harmon Severn died, HST reached out from Washington, D.C. to touch the grieving family. They appreciated that and decided to inscribe Truman’s message on Severn’s gravestone: “Please extend my deepest sympathy to the family and friends of Uncle Harmon Severn, of whose passing I learned with deep regret. He was my friend through thick and thin and I shall always hold him in grateful remembrance.”

Never forgot a friend

Harry never forgot a friend, it has been said, and he obviously never forgot “Uncle Harmon” – his friend in the deepest part of the Bootheel of the state that sent him to the Senate, a stepping stone to the White House.

Woodrow Davis, a grandson of Mr. Severn, remembers that the message from Truman was a telegram, so it would not have had a handwritten signature. However, the maker of the headstone was able to duplicate a signature from another source, and thus this attention-compelling stone.

“Give ’em hell, Harry”

There are those who think Mr. Severn might have been responsible for the slogan,”Give-em Hell, Harry.”

Severn used to yell out that phrase when Harry Truman would jar down on a particularly telling point while addressing crowds in pre-election gatherings in Steele. It may be that others did the same and that the phrase did not originate in this community, but some think it did. They recall political speeches at Main and Walnut when Mr. Severn shouted out the slogan while punctuating the air with his walking cane.

Severn took on the railroad

In 1910, Severn sued the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad Company for $175, the value of a mare he said was killed by a train that “omitted to either sound the locomotive whistle or ring the bell when approaching the road crossing at a distance of eighty rods therefrom.” He won the suit, but it was reversed on appeal because of confusion over whether the horse was killed in Cooter township or Virginia township.

I bet he punctuated the air with his walking cane when he heard the verdict.