Towboat Albert M Archives

I’ve been pulling together enough photos from the ’60s to fill a calendar from October 2013 through December 2014. If you are a regular reader, there’s a good chance you’ve seen most of the pictures. I’m racing to get it done and a sample run printed before I leave for Cape June 25.

One of the tasks is to narrow down the photos to ones that you could stand to look at for a month. For example, here are three shots of Cape Rock. (I mean, you CAN’T have a publication about Cape without showing Cape Rock, right?

Do you like the one of the Towboat Albert M?

Towboat Issaquena

Or, do you like the Towboat Issaquena passing the water plant intake north of Cape Rock better?

Submarines vs towboats

Maybe you think submarines and not towboats when you remember Cape Rock. Anyway, if you had to make the choice, which one do you think best represents your memory of Cape Rock. (No, a totally black page won’t work.)

Lots to work out

I have to finish a photo exhibit for the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, get photos together for a future gallery show in Cape next year, rough out a couple of Ohio calendars and assemble a portfolio for some folks in St. Louis. If the blog is a little light for a few days, I hope you’ll understand.

Back to the calendar

So, who is interested? I’m estimating them to cost about $20 each. I have to see if there is anyone in Cape who will handle them locally. Since you folks are scattered all over the country, I’ll have to find out what it will cost to mail them. I think the folks at the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum found it was about $5, including shipping materials, but don’t hold me to it.

If there’s enough interest, I may try to knock off a color calendar of contemporary SE Missouri photos for this fall or next year.

Is it worth the effort?

Earlier Calendars

I’ve published three so far.

Glimpses of East Perry County

Ordinary People

Trinity Lutheran Church in Altenburg

Trinity Lutheran Church (same link as Ordinary People above)

These shots were on the rolls with the photos Jeane Adams I used for the End of Summer story. Some of her photos were taken at Cape Rock, so that explains the towboat photo. The Mississippi River looks almost as low as it was last fall. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)

Google is a wonderful thing. I blew the picture up large enough to be able to see that the towboat was The Albert M. of B & M Towing. A search found that the craft has been built by St. Louis Shipbuilding and Steel Company of St. Louis, located on the site at the foot of East Davis Street in the Carondelet section of St. Louis, where James B. Eads built the Union Navy’s gunboats during the Civil War. It was called the Rohan Boat, Boiler & Tank Company when it was acquired by Herman Pott in 1933 and renamed St. Louis Shipbuilding & Steel Co. It closed in 1984.

Research by someone named Ingo Steller said that the The Albert M. was built in 1965, so it was fairly new when it passed Cape Rock in September of 1966. It was renamed the The Liz Brent, and, most recently, rebranded as The City of Greenville.

Here’s a launch of a towboat I covered in in 1965 or ’66.

Dennis Scivally’s bridge

I had to smile a little when I saw this frame of the stone bridge in Dennis Scivally Park. At least three Facebook friends posted photos of that bridge on their Facebook pages today. It has to be one of the most-photographed landmarks in town since it was built in 1941. Here’s what the park looked like about this time last year.

For some reason, I didn’t shoot anything of Jeane in the park. There’s no telling why you get a feeling for a place on one day and not another.

Beating the heat

I guess I couldn’t persuade my model to hop on this cow cooling off in a pond. Looks a lot like the ones trying to keep from melting in Perry County last summer.

Cape Central High Photos

Ken Steinhoff, Cape Girardeau Central High School Class of 1965, spent half a century in the ink-slinging business for papers in Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida.

He retired in 2008 and has been spending time scanning hundreds of thousands of images because “photos once taken as news have grown enough whiskers that they’ve become history.”

Please comment on the articles when you see he may have left out a bit of history, forgotten a name or when your memory of a circumstance conflicts with his.

(His mother said her stories improved after all the folks who could contradict died off.)

Your information helps to make this a wonderful archive and may end up in book form.

Tag: Towboat Albert M

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