Shari Stiver Archives

December 10, 2011December 10, 2011

Jim Stone and Main Street Neon

Jim Stone, Shari Stiver and I had our own mini-reunion October 2010 after the big official one. We promised to do it again. Jim had something come up that kept him from coming Octoberish, but I was lucky enough to still be in town the first part of December, when he could make it. We thought we’d give it another shot.

Right before we were to get together, though, Shari said she was suffering from a bout of bronchitis and wouldn’t be able to make it. We tried all kinds of entreaties.

Brother Mark and his friends had just finished baking hundreds of cookies; he’d send a sample of those down with her.
Jim offered to pick her up and drive her to Cape.
I offered to go half on a bottle of oxygen to keep her alive.

Finally, on Friday, it looked like she might make it, but, alas, she cancelled on us at the last minute.

“Jim, do you think this is the 2011 version of when she used to tell me, “I’d love to go out with you, but Friday night is the night I wash my hair?”

He was kind enough not to answer me, because I think I already knew the answer.

So, anyway, we spent the afternoon roaming around. Late in the afternoon, I spotted that the back door at Central High School was open. He hadn’t been back in the place in decades, so I said, “Let’s go.”

(I subscribe to the Roger Miller King of the Road Theory: “I know…every lock that ain’t locked when no one’s around” when it comes to this kind of thing.

Wandering the hallways naked

“I’m from Florida. You’re from Boston. We’re old and confused. We’ll just tell anybody that asks that we’re late for our math final and we can’t find our lockers and that’s why we’re roaming the hallways naked.” (Recurring dream / nightmare.)

Jim was properly impressed with the quality of upkeep. (We did note some peeling paint in the stairwell leading up to the auditorium stage.) I tried to convince Jim that we should go up to the third floor to his old haunts in the science department. He was reluctant to explore too far. He’s done some work for the State Department, so he might know more about rendition flights and whether they apply to people snooping around in old high school buildings than I do. We wiped our fingerprints off and exited the building, speaking to a number of people on our way out who didn’t give us a second look.

Jim wanted to cruise downtown to see if there was any life after dark, so we ended up at Port Cape Girardeau for dinner. I had some fancy-named nachos that were excellent – way better than the taco chips drenched in Velveeta cheese that you usually get.

Neon at Broussard’s

Instead of heading back to the car, I started strolling along Main Street. The neon lights and people on the street in front of Broussard’s Cajun Cuisine caught my eye.

Wow, more neon

I looked behind me and saw more neon.

You’re from Boston?

I was just lining up a third shot when I noticed that Jim was huddled in a doorway to get out of the slight breeze that was blowing down the street. “Stone, you’re from BOSTON. How can you be cold?”

“If I was in Boston, I’d have warmer clothes. I didn’t remember that Cape could be this cold.”

In fairness, a street thermometer showed the temperature to be about 27 degrees. One weather forecast said that we might experience record low temps for this date, although I don’t remember what the old record was.

So, instead of being able to bring you a nice collection of neon photos from Main Street, I had to put Stone in my van and crank the temperature up to Melt. You know how it is when folks get old. They can’t stand the cold like they once could.

How to Shoot a Barn

Well, that title is a bit presumptuous, but studies have shown that using the words “How to…” in the headline causes the story to rate higher with search engines.

When Friend Shari and I were on our way back from shooting Tower Rock Quarry and taking the scenic route where I discovered High Hill Church, she said to keep my eye out for old barns; there was one in particular she’d like to shoot again. She recalled doing it years ago and wanted to have another crack at it.

STOP!!!

We were tooling along down 177 near Egypt Mills when she hollered, “STOP!” She was always good at that. I locked down thinking she saw an 18-wheeler getting ready to hit us head-on and heard everything loose in the car slide forward.

She had spotted her barn. I threw it in reverse and cut over on CR 634 (I think) and pulled off on the side of the road with the hazard flashers on.

What are you looking for?

Being a former shrink, she’s always curious about the thought processes that go into making a photo. After dismissing her (and most other folks who ask that question), I’ve started to think about it. I told her that I would try to explain how I looked at the overall scene and then drilled into a detail here and there. As we walked around, I explained that sometimes everything would fall into place. Other times, I’d shoot a frame and decide that something didn’t work. Sometimes a slight change in angle would fix the problem; other times, there would be some extraneous object that would intrude that I couldn’t work around, and I’d move on.

I’m a sucker for contrast

I love dark photos where the light hits something and causes it to pop out. Sometimes, like in this shot, the light is striking it directly. More often, I look for a strong back or sidelight to make it translucent.

Signs that it wasn’t a good shoot

Leica made some great photo enlargers. One of the neat things about them was that their negative carriers were cut just a little larger than a 35mm frame. That let pure white light project down on the photo paper if you printed full frame. It was a point of pride to have your print have that black border around it because it showed that you “cropped in the camera.” In other words, you visualized the final product when you pushed the button.

When I looked at these pictures, I found myself reaching for the Crop tool to hack out pieces that didn’t work for me. I might have thought the composition worked, but I hadn’t successfully ‘cropped in the camera.” When we did that in the real darkroom, we’d call it “pulling it out of our rear orifice (or something close to that).”

Here’s an example. This is the full frame photo of the splotch of red paint with an orange leaf in front of it and some tendrils of vine and their shadows on the gray, weathered wood.

I couldn’t find the center of interest. Is it the leaf? Is it the vines? Is my eye supposed to follow the vines up and down, left and right? What’s important?

Cropping helps, but it’s not the answer

In this print, I’ve taken the same picture, but I’ve cropped up from the bottom and down from the top so you don’t see any of the gray wood there. Your eye tends to go toward the lighter area of a print, so this keeps you in the frame better. It also brings your eye to the leaf. I would have cropped a little more off the left, but I like the shadow of the vine over there. If you look closely, you can see the vine, then the shadow. The shadows of the vines on the right become more prominent and more interesting. Still, if the first photo was a D-, playing with it barely raised the grade to a C+.

Photo gallery of barn pictures

It’s not one of my best barn sessions. I shot this particular barn when I was riding my bike in this area about eight or nine years ago. I didn’t capture Essence de Barn then, and I’ve missed it this time, too. Maybe this barn and I just don’t click. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

November 13, 2011

High Hill Church and Cemetery

Coming back from shooting the Tower Rock Quarry, Friend Shari suggested we go downtown to the Bluegrass festival. Rather than taking my normal route out of Altenburg, I said, “Let’s take the scenic route. That should drop us on 177 and we can go in from the northeast side of Cape.” (You can click on any photo to make it larger, by the way.)

“Let’s take the scenic route” would have been something I would liked to have said when we were dating, except that (a) I didn’t have my license yet and (b) Dad was a pretty good guy, but I’m not sure he, as designated driver, would have gone along with the idea. So, four decades too late, I’m married, in a minivan, in broad daylight, taking the “scenic route.” Somehow it just isn’t quite the same.

We went straight UP

I didn’t realize just HOW scenic it was. Shortly after turning off Hwy CC from C toward the Apple Creek Conservation area, we went straight up. I mean like waiting for the oxygen masks to deploy from the overhead storage compartment straight up. We were headed for the ridges.

See, back in the days before heavy construction equipment was even thought of, road builders didn’t have the ability to cut the tops off hills and fill in the valleys. You rode the ridges, which are generally pretty twisty-turny.

Shades of Wolf Creek Pass

A line from Wolf Creek Pass, a C.W. McCall song about a couple of truckers with a load full of chickens who lost their brakes on the downhill side of the Continental Divide came to mind. “Well, from there on down, it just weren’t real purdy; it was hairpin county and switchback city. One of them looked like a can of worms; another one looked like malaria germs.”

I looked at the GPS and told Shari, “We’re fixin’ to come up on a curve that would let us touch our tail if this thing was just a little longer.” I forgot to mention that Hwy CC turned into CR 535, which is gravel. We hit on uphill stretch that was so steep that we lost traction and I thought we were going to have to back down to the bottom to get a fresh run at it. It WAS scenic, however.

Church at the top of the hill

Finally, we hit the top of a hill where there was clearing. On the top of that clearing was a white frame building that looked like a church or a school house. I tried to make out a name, but couldn’t. It was getting late in the afternoon, so we kept plugging on.

Proctor & Gamble aerial

Eventually, we turned off CR 535 onto CR 525 and I saw on the GPS that we were getting closer and closer to the Mississippi River. Finally it dawned on me that we were coming into Neely’s Landing from the north. CR525 became Hwy J and hooked around the Proctor & Gamble plant. I had photographed it from the air in the spring, but didn’t have a clue how big it was until we kept passing gate after gate. That took us onto 177 like I had predicted. Eventually we made it to Water Street and heard some good music.

Let’s go back to the school

A couple of days later, I said to Mother, “Hop in the car. I’m going to see if you’ve ever been on this road before.” Unlike with Shari, we started on the south end of the road. She knew where Proctor and Gamble was, thought she had been through Neely’s Landing, but didn’t think she’d ever been up in the ridges around Apple Creek Conservation area.

I wanted to take a second gander at this building. It appeared to be in good shape. The paint was peeling off it, but it looked like a bad paint job, not neglect. There’s a chain link fence around the property that’s so new it still has the bar code stickers on it.

Looking through the window

The windows looked like they had been replaced not long ago; the pews, which looked padded, appear to either be new or in extremely good shape. The floor looks solid and the walls have either been stripped of paint or they’ve been recently plastered or drywalled.

No name on the building

There’s a wooden plaque that looks like it might have contained a name at one time, but there’s no visible writing on it today.

Small cemetery behind church

There’s a small, well-kept cemetery behind the building.

The gravestones are relatively new

I didn’t spend much time poking around, but one of the oldest markers I saw was for a World War II PFC named Ralph Craft. He was born (it looked like) Sept. 6, 1925, and died Oct. 17, 1946.

This stone, which looks like it might have been chipped by a mower, only dates back to 1949.

Some markers are from the last decade

A large percentage of the makers are from the late 1990s up to as recently as 2010.

Restroom facilities out back

An outhouse serves as a restroom.

Child’s grave has surprise

I always have a strong emotional response when I see a child’s stone in the cemetery. This one was particularly touching because of the toys on the right side of the stone. I don’t know if they are still there because there’s little traffic in the cemetery or if any visitors who do come this way respect what they stand for.

While photographing this pair of stones – a brother and a sister who died of unrelated causes – I thought something looked odd, but couldn’t quite place what it was. Then it dawned on me: the statue of the dog is holding a lantern. And, the bulb in the lantern was glowing in the late evening light. (You might even be able to see it in the photo if you look closely.) That’s when I noticed it was a solar light.

Blumental graves gave clue

Reader Keith Robinson was in town visiting his dad and stopped by. I was describing my mystery when he suggested we pull up Google Maps to see if we could spot the building. Indeed, it was clearly visible, but unidentified. Up the road a piece, though, was a marker for High Hill School.

I did a search of Missourian archives for High Hill and came up with some obits for several people, including Michelle Blumenthal. They mentioned interment in High Hill Cemetery. A couple of them said the deceased had been members of High Hill Church of God.

Michelle’s brother, Christopher Michael Blumenthal, died at 12 of complications from heart surgery in 2003. Dammit, it’s OLD people who are supposed to die, not kids.

So, it looks like the cemetery is named High Hill and the church might be as well, although I don’t know if it’s still a Church of God congregation. I don’t know if High Hill School still exists, either. Looks like another excuse to take the scenic ridge route.

November 1, 2011July 4, 2016

Unofficial Class Reunions

I think I’ve run into more classmates this visit than any other, just by the luck of the draw. It started out with the Class of 1961 and its 50th Reunion. Then, I got a call from frequent contributor Keith Robinson, who said he was in town from Kansas City. (I let him slip away without getting a photo of him, drat.)

Shari Stiver came down from St. Louis over the weekend and she, her mother and I roamed around Cape and Perry Counties in search of interesting things. The low water level on the Mississippi River let us go out on an old quarry south of Tower Rock that is usually covered by eight or 10 feet of water.

Terry Hopkins

Monday, former earth science teacher, ham radio operator, pilot and first teacher I ever called by a first name, Ernie Chiles, and Terry Hopkins from the Class of ’66 shared lunch at Mario’s Pasta House. I didn’t bother to shoot a photo of Ernie because, except for being a bit grayer, he looks just like he did when he was standing in front of a class at Central. You can click on Terry’s photo to make it larger. Terry wrote a touching piece about how important the Capaha Park Pool was to him when he was growing up.

Ernie’s plane is sick

The weather has been great for flying, so I was hoping to refresh my stash of aerials, but Ernie says his plane is down having a carburetor rebuilt. I recall that he was having to play with the mixture a bit on our last flight because the engine kept sputtering.

“I’ve never left anybody up there,” he said, reassuringly.

Reminds me of the time I was flying in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s helicopter and we suddenly dropped like a rock to a not-so-soft landing on the beach. “What was THAT all about, Andy?” I asked the pilot.

“See that red warning light. That detects flakes of metal in the transmission. Sometimes that means nothing. Sometimes that means the thing that keeps that big fan over our head turning is chewing itself to bits. You’re better off if you figure out if it’s something or nothing while sitting on the ground.” We got a ride back in a squad car and the chopper got a ride back on a flatbed truck.

Pat Sommers

Pat Sommers and I were debate partners. I’ve written about Pat before, much to his chagrin. What you do in high school can come back to haunt you if your friend is a pack rat photographer.

While we were trading war stories about debates won and lost, Pat reminisced about the feeling of power he had when he was waving the gavel around after being elected Speaker of the House when we went to the State Student Congress. (I was elected Outstanding Senator or Representative.)

Central had a showing much stronger than what our numbers would have led you to believe possible. It came about because we put together a coalition of all the smaller schools to challenge the numerical superiority of the metro areas of St. Louis and Kansas City. That, or we just got lucky.

All this socializing is playing the dickens with my work schedule, but it’s been fun catching up with old friends.

Tag: Shari Stiver