Steinhoff family Archives

September 23, 2011September 24, 2011

Ohio Halloween Horrors

I saw Halloween decorations and costumes displayed in one of the big box stores tonight. Later, I was moving a bunch of old slides out of Kodak slide trays and putting them into plastic sleeves to save space when I ran across this copy slide of a print. The two events brought a story to mind.

What’s that hanging in the tree?

I was blasting through the rural Southeastern back roads on my way back home right after dusk when, rounding a curve, my headlights picked up something odd on the side of the road. When I got to where the beams lit it up a little better, I slammed on my brakes. It was a body hanging in a tree out in the middle of nowhere.

Murder wasn’t unheard of in that part of the country, but I hadn’t read about any lynchings in our area in decades, so my first thought was a suicide. (All of the murders I had worked were pretty straight-forward; they just got the job done without getting creative.)

I positioned my car to where it lit up the area, then cautiously approached the scene. When I got close enough to get a flashlight on it, it became clear that I had been taken in by a dummy hanging in the tree. I looked around to see if there were any teenagers laughing at the sucker, but there was nobody around.

Only a journalist would have mixed emotions about this: happy because it wasn’t a body; feeling foolish about being suckered in; being disappointed because he didn’t break a story.

The next morning I mentioned my find to some of the guys in the office. “Oh, yeah,” one said. “They’ve got a quaint custom in that area of hanging dummies at Halloween time. If you go back, I bet you find more.”

Indeed, when I went back in the daylight, I found this guy hanging in the middle of downtown Shawnee.

“It’s too grim”

Wife Lila, proofreader when I finish a post before she goes to bed, and general arbitrator of good taste, said, “It’s too grim. I didn’t make any changes, but I didn’t like it.”

So, to lighten the mood, here are some examples of Halloween costumes she inflicted upon the kids over the years.

I’d be lion if I said Matt made a pretty woman

Son Adam, left, went for the full-face mask effect the year Wife Lila did this makeover on Son Matt.

I shouldn’t mock Son Matt too much. Mother managed to make me into such a convincing girl that I won a prize in Mrs. Kelpe’s first grade class because nobody could guess who I was. I was still in costume when we went down to visit my grandmother in Advance. She had a bunch of club women over that afternoon and they were properly impressed with my transformation. Just to set the record straight, I scrawled “I BOY” on a piece of paper and kept showing it to them.

Going to the dogs

Both boys got a crack at the dog costume. This was Matt in 1978.

Matt as firefighter

This might have been the only costume I contributed. Matt swiped my bunker coat, fire helmet and Red Wing boots for this Halloween.

September 13, 2011September 18, 2011

David Steinhoff’s Birthday

You don’t see as much stuff about Brother David here as you do Brother Mark and Mother. Part of that is that David moved out to Tulsa, while Mark lives in St. Louis, so it’s a lot easier to see them when I come back to Cape. I’m bad about dates, so I let not only David’s birthday, which is September 12, slip by, I forgot that the 11th was David and Diane’s 35 wedding anniversary.

Stories about David

I’d like to find the photos of him when he drove my shiny new car from North Carolina. I bought the car the weekend before we were to move from Gastonia to West Palm Beach because I trusted the dealer. Wife Lila had her own car to drive, and I had to pilot the rental truck with all our belongings. David hadn’t had his license all that long, and I don’t think he had ever driven a stick shift before, but I put him in the car for a couple hours of driving lessons, then we headed south.

I’m pretty sure I said something like, “It almost all Interstate. If you can get it into fourth gear, leave it there until you can coast off the highway when you run out of gas.” He and the car both made it to Florida.

Gallery of David Photos

Here’s a quick selection of David Steinhoff photos over the years. I promise that I’ll do a better job next year of finding some better photos. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

September 8, 2011February 26, 2015

Mother Covers SEMO Fair

I had some old scans of the Southeast Missouri District Fair that I was going to post, but then I opened my email to find that Mother had been out to see this year’s fair being set up. She shot these with her Kodak digital camera and uploaded them from her iPad. Not too shabby for somebody who’s going to turn 90 next month. I think she did it all without leaving her car.

More colorful than in 1964

Looks like the fair is a lot more colorful than the old days when we lived in a black and white world.

Photo gallery of 2011 SEMO District Fair

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

September 6, 2011February 18, 2017

First Book of Last Times

A couple of my former coworkers put together a book called The First Book of Last Times. (If you are intrigued enough to buy it, click on the link and I’ll get 6%, without it costing you an extra cent.)

The Amazon description says, “First times get the glory and the high fives. When you first rode your bicycle without training wheels or got that first haircut without the booster board, the whole world applauded. But what about those last times, as forgotten as a petrified Fruit Loop under the sofa?

“One day you’re a kid playing hide and go seek and jacks on the front stoop and next thing you know you’ve moved on. No more “Ollie ollie oxen-free” and “Onesies and twosies. That changes now. In fact, we here at the First Book of Last Times remember them and celebrate them. And then we kick off our shoes and slide in our socks.”

That’s the old skate case

That’s the skate case I mentioned in my piece about my grandson’s 7th birthday and my memories of skating at Hanover and Maryann roller rinks in Cape.

Brother Mark crawled up in Mother’s attic to look for it when he went to Cape for Labor Day. Thanks to him for the photos.

The funny thing is, I would have SWORN the picture of the girl was white. I guess I must have been thinking of the trim at the top and not the red girl skater. That poor case sure has its share of dents and dings.

See, the wheels ARE wood

I hope Son Matt will believe me now that the skate wheels WERE made out of wood. Looks like someone took the shoelace out of the left skate. I thought I had a pompom on the toes, too, but I could be wrong there. The rubber toe stops are worn down quite a bit. Once you got proficient, you usually stopped or slowed down by turning your skate sideways to scrub off the speed. That kept you from wearing out the toe stops. You’d also use the stops for quick starts by tilting the skate down and pushing off the rubber for the first couple of strokes, sort of like a runner used a starting block.

I don’t know what the leather strap was for, nor where the red paint on the side of the wheel and the side of the shoe came from. The red paint was probably the work of my destructive younger brothers, who destroyed my pristine comic book collection as soon as I went off to college.

The wheels look like they’re covered in dust. Do I recall correctly that the Hanover rink would put a resin powder or something on the floor to give us better traction? Or was that just some kind of absorbent to blot up the spilled blood?

What does this have to do with the Last Times book?

It occurred to me when I looked as these photos that I don’t remember the last time I put those skates on. I wonder if I KNEW it was the Last Time? Wife Lila remembers going skating with me at Hanover. I wonder if the Last Time was with her?

On the way to dinner with Son Adam, we were talking about this topic, which caused her to flash on a time when he was sleeping on the living room floor when he was four or five. “When I picked him up, I thought, is this going to be the last time I’m going to be able to do this?”

I thought the last time I walked out of the newspaper after close to 35 years would be traumatic, but it turned out that the paper left me long before I left it. I thought that would be a Major Last Time, but it was anticlimactic.

What are your Last Times?

If you need hints, click on the link below and buy the book. Retired newspaper guys need all the help they can get.

When did you have your last burger at Wimpy’s or a Mighty Caesar at Pfisters?
Or a barbecue at the original Blue Hole BBQ by the cement plant?
When was the last time you stayed in a motel where you had to put a quarter in a slot to keep the TV playing? Or in one with Magic Fingers?
When did you last think of a Cape phone number as being EDgewater5-XXXX or a Jackson number being CIrcle2-XXXX?
When did you last cruise down Broadway after putting in a buck’s worth of gas?
When was the last time you crossed the old bridge?
When was the last time your mother left you off at the comic book rack while she was shopping at the grocery store?
When was the last time you rode holding onto the front of the grocery cart and pretending it was a railroad car?
When was the last time you pumped your arm up and down to get a truck driver to honk (scaring the wits out of your dad?)

Let’s hear it from you.