Cape Girardeau History and Photos
News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
Southeast Missouri State College’s Golden Eagle Marching Band appeared on national television in 1964. I don’t know which game this was, but it was a big enough deal I shot it on the family’s Zenith television in the basement.
Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.
The Missourian ran a story about Occupy Cape in the November 6th paper, so I was hoping to run into them. The comments after the story were one of the reasons I’m sometimes ashamed to say I’m from here. Speak Out and the comments that follow stories contain mean-spirited, Yahoo-level talking parts that pass for wit in this area.
In case readers missed it the first time, one of them felt compelled to ask the question, “How about occupying a job?” twice.
Another wrote, “I observed them marching on William, in the hood, not sure what they are protesting Bet you that most of them play dungeons and draggons in their mothers basements.” [Spelling and punctuation as printed in the paper.]
I would encourage you to read the story, then the comments. Some of the demonstrators in this photo posted long, intelligent responses to the jabs and jibes. Click on any photo, by the way, to make it larger.
I spent about an hour on the corner with the group, numbering at most eight, including me. I was surprised at the number of friendly toots and waves they got. Only four people hollered, “Get A Job!”
Eric, who is from the St. Charles area, would respond, “I’m working THREE jobs and going to grad school.”
The Old Man of the movement on Saturday was Walden Morris, 61, a civil engineer and an LSU grad. He had been out in Salt Lake City for a year and a half working on a gas and oil pipeline project when he decided to attend a rally just to see what it was all about. Before he knew it, he was on the State Capitol steps speaking to 400 people under the watchful eyes of TV cameras. “I had been waiting for that moment for years. I just let ’em have it.”
Chris McEwen, an art major from Mobile, Alabama, said he “got stranded in Cape for youthful reasons.”
“What was her name?” I asked. He grinned and said, “You got that right.”
He was on the street corner because he’s “fed up with the way the country is bring run.” He’d like to see money taken out of politics.
Nathaniel Lee, of St. Louis, came from a family of conservative Democrats. He has a dual major in accounting and international business. He’d like to get his C.P.A. and work as a federal auditor “trying to fix the system from within.”
The group has a website, Occupy Cape Girardeau.
I had to be amused at a note in the Nov. 12, 2011, General Assembly Minutes: “We opened by appointing by consensus Kerrick Long as this week’s facilitator, after which he read the Principles of Solidarity using the People’s Mic. The principles of solidarity were interrupted when an officer of the Cape Girardeau Police Department arrived and stated that the CGPD received a complaint about the demonstration at Freedom Corner earlier. He said if we did not keep quiet demonstrating by the road, we could go to jail. We apologized, and said we would be sure not to shout too close to the road. He told us we could continue using the People’s Mic at the benches since it was farther from the road.”
Being a bit of a rebel, I’d have asked the cop to bring out a decibel meter to tell me how much more we were disturbing the peace in the middle of the afternoon in a public park compared to other activities in the park. These folks have a lot to learn about civil disobedience and standing up for your rights.
[The Occupy movement doesn’t use mechanical megaphones. They use “The People’s Mic,” where someone who wants to say something speaks in short bursts that are re-shouted by the group. Considering that the largest assembly in Cape has been less than 20, I doubt that hearing the speaker is a problem.]
This was the last protest I covered in Cape. These SEMO students were protesting the Petit N’ Orleans restaurant’s dress code in 1967. The cops shut them down, too.
Brandon Burton, a pre-veterinary medicine major from St. Louis, is concerned about the rising cost of a college education.
Parts of the Occupy Cape website makes me think I’m back in my treehouse days when I see a whole section in the General Assembly Guide devoted to “Hand Gestures.” The movement strikes me as unfocused and a bit naive at times: long on feel-good rhetoric and short on practical solutions.
I will say, though, if you are tempted to roll down your window and shout “Get a Job!” pull over to the side and talk with these folks. You may find that you have more in common with them than you think. A couple of the members concluded that they and the Tea Party are both saying the same thing: the system ain’t working. They may disagree about what’s broken, how it got broken and how to fix it, but they’re starting from a common viewpoint.
Remember when you were a kid and lost a tooth? Your tongue kept going into the gap like it couldn’t believe something was missing. I had the same experience when we drove down Aquamsi Street south past the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)
Something was missing.
I happened to be looking at an earlier post of the Missouri Dry Dock area and saw what it was: the old brick building at the north end of the dry dock was gone. March 22, 2010, was a lot cloudier day than Oct. 20, 2011, when the top photo was taken..
I don’t know exactly when it was torn down, but all that’s left is a foundation north of the large yellow building and south of the bridge in this aerial taken April 17, 2011. The building on the left is SEMO’s River Campus.
When I ran photographs of a doctor’s office at 714 Broadway, several readers commented that the building looked a lot like what used to be Lueders Studio at 427 Broadway. I don’t know if they were built by the same person, but they were constructed in the same Spanish Revival style. I think the bricks above must have been painted, because I remembered the building as being more the same shade as the Wilson/Estes office. [Click on any photo to make it larger.]
I once wrote that there’s probably nobody who lived in Southeast Missouri between 1927 and 1986 who hadn’t had his or her picture taken by One-Shot Frony. You could say almost the same thing about Lueders Studio, which spanned an even longer period of time. There were other photos studios in that era, but Lueders was the one our family and Central High School turned to document students, engagements, weddings, anniversaries and other special occasions.
Here’s a description from SEMO’s Special Collections website: The Lueders Studio Collection spans seventy years of commercial photographic work by Herbert Lueders, and his sons, Paul and John. Herbert Lueders opened his studio at 427 Broadway Avenue in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1925. A distinguished photographer, Herbert Lueders won 18 merit awards from the Professional Photographers Association of America for his portrait work. H. L. Lueders’ oldest son, Paul, began the study of photography with his father at the age of eight. Paul joined his father’s studio after returning from World War II, eventually taking over operations and running the studio until his death in 1995. John Lueders, younger brother of Paul, worked for thirty years as the business manager for the studio, as well as a portrait printer and photo retoucher.
I’m pretty sure some of my baby pictures were taken by Lueders, but I didn’t have time to dig them out to check for his usual mark. The picture above was taken when Lila Perry was officially added to the family. It must have been taken after we got engaged in December of 1968, but before our wedding in June of 1969, because I don’t see a wedding ring on my left hand.
Lila thinks this is the best photo that was ever taken of her. Paul Lueders was a perfectionist. He didn’t like the way her dress fell and waiting for her to grow taller wasn’t an option, so he had her stand on a couple of Sagamore yearbooks (If you look closely, you can barely see them in the photo.
I feel a little guilty about reproducing these photographs. I still cringe when I think about a visit Jim Stone and I made to the studio one afternoon, probably to pick up our senior pictures. Jim was his neighbor, so he had the nerve to ask Mr. Lueders if we could borrow the negatives to make some prints. I know now how much of a faux pas that is: studios make their living off reprints.
Instead of throwing us out of the studio, he diplomatically said, “I’m very particular about the way my photographs are printed, and I don’t let anyone else make prints of the negatives because my reputation is on the line.”
When we made a pass through Cape in 1971, we stopped to have an updated portrait done. Mr. Lueders must not have had many people to talk technique to, because I remember him showing me more about large format photography than I ever saw in classes at Ohio University. Photos like ours and school photos were the bread and butter, but he also wanted to pull out dye transfer color that he had shot of Cape landmarks. He was proud of his work, for good reason.
In 1985, when Matt was 10 and Adam 5, it was time for an updated shot. These copies on a computer screen don’t do the original works justice. I’ve spent enough hours in the darkroom to know how hard it is to get the tonal range that Mr. Lueders did. He could hold detail in the darkest black and the whitest white.
After we moved to Florida, we posed for a local studio that had a reasonable reputation. When we went to pick up the prints, I told the photographer that they weren’t acceptable, then I went to get some Lueders photos to show him what a REAL portrait should look like. He reshot the photos, but I could tell that he would never be able to come close to the quality I grew up with in Cape. Those were the last studio portraits we had made.
This must have been taken in 1990, when we took our Great Western Vacation trip. The date’s not written on the back, but Lila guessed Adam was about 10, because that’s about when he started playing baseball. These were the first – and only – color photos we had made there. To be honest, I prefer the black and white.
Matt’s about 15 in this photo. Where Adam was into sports, Matt was interested in photography (and pretty good at it. Both boys won national photo contests).
When I heard that Mr. Lueders had died, I was afraid that a huge chuck of the region’s history could be lost, based on my experience in southern Ohio where I tried to track down the film of several old photo studios. In every case, the files had been consigned to the landfill.
That’s not unusual. I found these old glass negatives being used as window panes in a Perry County building in Frohna in 1966.
It was a great relief to hear that the Lueders photographs have been acquired to be part of Southeast Missouri State University’s Special Collections and Archives Digital Collections. The really neat thing is that they are putting the photos online.
The website says, “The Lueders Studio Collection is a “who’s who” of Southeast Missouri and the surrounding region, containing approximately 75,000 images of local people, families, politicians, businesses and events. While the Lueders Studio specialized in portrait photography, they also hired out for advertising work and photography related to insurance claims.
The photographs in the digital collection represent the studio’s commercial photography work, not portraiture. Interior and exterior views of Cape Girardeau businesses in the mid-twentieth century are represented here, along with street scenes, images of downtown floods, churches and schools, events and community groups.”
If you enjoy seeing the photos on this blog, you’ll REALLY enjoy seeing the wide range of photos in the Lueders Collection.
I’m sure we’ll be revisiting Lueders Studio again. Somewhere I’ve seen photos of Paul Lueders when he and Dad were in Central High School’s Kodak Club in the 1930s.