Bands Archives

March 13, 2014December 9, 2021

1964 Football

There are more questions than answers here. I’m pretty sure this is a SEMO football game, although it doesn’t look exactly like Houck Stadium to me. It must have been 1964 because there is one frame of a banner tow plane pulling a sign that says, “Vote Republican AU H20.” It was really scratched up, so you’ll just have to trust me on it.

Band and twirler action

That’s a pretty big crowd on the field at halftime.

Someone was hurt

Teammates carry a player off the field.

Photo gallery

Most area football games were played at night, so I rarely had a chance to shoot from this vantage point. Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery. Feel free to tell us what we’re looking at.

February 28, 2012

Central Majorettes 1964-65

I may have run one or more of these photos before – it’s getting harder and harder to remember what’s run and what hasn’t. Well, if I WAS going to repeat something, I can’t think of anything better than this. Click on the photos to make them larger.

This is the photo that ran in the 1964 Girardot.

Kneeling: Pam Parks, Ann Seabaugh.

Standing: Becky McGinty, Linda Maddux, Susan Seabaugh, Robin Kratz, Vicki Berry, Della Heise.

Alternate shot of the 1964 Majorettes

The order is slightly different, but you should be able to figure out who is who.

1965 Girardot majorette photo

This is one of those groupings that make it difficult to write a caption. Do you list them by row, by clockwise or do you do what the editor did and punt and just list the names.

Jane McKeown; Gwen Petty; Della Heise, drum major; Phyllis Metzger; Ruth Ann Seabaugh, head majorette; Toni Grose, Nancy Swan.

1965 majorettes in gym

We must have wanted to hedge our bets by taking a second shot inside the gym. Note: don’t shoot flash directly at a shiny ceramic brick wall. The light will bounce right back at you. Somebody must have helped line up this shot. I could have gotten them lined up, but I wouldn’t have come up with that toe-point thing.

Leading band down Broadway

Ruth Ann Seabaugh is in the lead. It must have been a day that warmed up. I see lots of folks in the crowd holding their coats and jackets. The boy second from the left seems to be checking out Toni’s ankles pretty closely.

Other majorette photos

May 18, 2010October 19, 2011

Capaha Park Pool Party

I got an email this morning from The City of Cape Girardeau promising that the new Cape Splash Family Aquatic Center will be opening on May 20. (Whoever came up with that name must have been paid by the word. I bet everybody ends up calling it The Water Park.)

I showed some photos of it under construction last month (and discussed Jackson’s Lickitysplit Water Slide).

Capaha Pool Dance

Let’s don’t dwell on the future, let’s wallow in the past. This appears to be a dance on the deck of the Capaha Park Pool. I don’t have a clue what the event was, when it was held or why.

It had a band

It was a big enough deal that a real band was playing and there were lots of spectators outside the fence. Despite all of the electrical cords stretched across the pool deck, apparently nobody got electrocuted. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that.

I DO remember covering a swimming event there one night with a borrowed electronic flash. The way old-time strobes worked was that batteries would charge up a capacitor so there was lots of juice just waiting around to arch across a tube, producing a blast of light that was thousandths of a second in duration.

I was walking across the pool deck when my wet finger touched the place where the charging cord would normally plug in. There SHOULD have been a cover over those contacts, but there wasn’t.

As soon as my finger completed the electrical circuit, all of the voltage stored in the capacitor tried to light me up like a xenon tube. Failing that, it dropped me to my knees like I’d been poleaxed.

It wasn’t life-threatening, but it WAS unpleasant.

Looking for non-fried memories

This wasn’t the only time I had something like that happen. I was walking across a wet football field one night when I was knocked flat. I assumed that I had stepped in front of a play accidentally, but there was nobody around me.

I got up, took a few more steps and it happened again. Turned out that I had a short in the 510-volt battery pack that powered the electronic flash. The massive charge was looking for a path to the wet ground, and I happened to provide it.

Maybe one of you who hasn’t had his or her short / long-term memory fried by high voltages will be able to tell us who these folks are and what they are doing.