Morrison Ice and Fuel Falls to Casino

When I posted an aerial shot of the Casino area and one taken from the river levee, I received two comments and an email that sent me looking for a better vantage point. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

From Keith Robinson: Ken, if you notice, there is a brick structure in the lower left of the above aerial photo. That structure was built around 1908 and was the Morrison Ice and Fuel Company. It remained as such until sometime around 1931, when it is identified on Sanborn maps as Riverside Ice and Fuel Company. This business made ice for sale to city residents and also served the local railroad by providing ice for the old ice-cooled reefer cars.

From Drew Wright: Ken, there is a great view of the construction progress from Mill Street, at the upper left of your aerial shot.

From Keith Robinson: Ken, I drove down to Cape last night to visit my brother, Karl,  and dad.  I took the time to drive by the construction site and discovered the old building is no longer there.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  I am even more interested in any ground level pictures that you might have.

Morrison Ice and Fuel is gone

Keith was right. When I went to the Mill Street vantage point, there was a big empty space where the brick building south of the pumping station used to be. The new paving in the foreground is the Main Street relocation. I’ll have more photos of it in the next few days.

Keith is a real bulldog

Keith might have been a Central High Tiger in the old days, but he’s turned into a bulldog when it comes to area history. As I’ve mentioned before, he’s a model railroader who is attempting to recreate everything connected with rails between Nash Road and Cape Rock. Because the F.M. Morrison building hugs the old Frisco Railroad tracks, it’s within his area of interest. BNSF conductor Randy Graviett gave me a friendly wave from his caboose this spring. (OK, he’s not exactly waving in THIS photo, but he DID wave.)

As an example of his diligence, I present this pdf document of F M Morrison links he sent telling the history of the nondescript brick building.

Added sand and coal to the ice business

F.M. Morrison decided to buy the best equipment available to corner the ice market in the Cape Girardeau area in 1903 when he established The Morrison Ice and Cold Storage Co. In 1906, he dropped the cold-storage business to concentrate on the wholesale and retail ice and fuel business. It wasn’t long before he added coal and sand to his holdings. These photos were taken in 2009, long before I had any idea what the building was used for.

Henry Vogelsang renamed it Riverside Ice and Fuel Co.

In 1922, Henry H. Vogelsang bought the business and renamed it Riverside Ice and Fuel Co. In 1928, 21 horses burned to death in a barn at Riverside. The damage, about a third of which was covered by insurance, was estimated at $5,000. The cause of the fire wasn’t immediately known.

Five businesses hit; total take: $35

A 1932 Missourian story reported that “Burglars ransacked five establishments in Cape Girardeau over the weekend, wrecking two safes and making off with only about $35; places entered were Cape Sand Co., Sides Oil Co., a gasoline station owned by Simpson Oil Co., Riverside Ice and Fuel Co. oil station and the Cape Girardeau Memorial Works office.”

That was a lot of burglarizing for such a small return.

Riverside became Pure Ice Company

Pure Ice Co., which was established May 26, 1926, on 314 S. Ellis Street (and still produces ice), eventually bought Riverside. When refrigerators first started coming out, Pure Ice sold Coolerator iceboxes, but marketed them as a replacement for the old-fashioned wooden iceboxes (with a $5 trade-in), not as refrigerators as we know them today. Home ice delivery went on in Cape until the 1960s.

The iceman was a familiar character in Cape. There was a surprisingly long obituary for Sam Randol, “well-known colored ice dealer. Randol was among the better colored citizens of Cape Girardeau and stood high both among the people of his race as well as among the white citizens. He had been in the ice business here since a young man and was known by most every family in the city.”

 

 

 

 

 

Hanover and Maryann Skating Rinks

Grandson Malcolm had his seventh birthday party at Atlantis Skating Rink in Lake Worth, Fla., just down the road from West Palm Beach. Sons Matt and Adam spent a fair amount of time down there and at the Palace Skating Rink (now defunct) when they were kids.

Mary Ann Roller Rink was on Kingsway

I better get this confession out of the way up front: I don’t have any photos of skating in the Cape rinks (that come to mind). My skating days came before my photography days, so I didn’t take any pictures. Parents in those days were smart: they’d drop the kids off in the parking lot, then make a break for it, not returning until the rink was ready to close. Taking pictures was not on their agenda.

Just like riding a bicycle

I’m guessing that it’s been at least 20 years since I was on skates. At that time, I made it around the floor a couple of times without falling and then decided to rest on my laurels instead of my backside. I had good intentions of showing up and wowing the younger generation with my skating prowess. Son Matt assured me “it’s just like riding a bicycle.” That was reassuring until he finished his sentence with “it hurts just as much when you fall.”

Matt lacing up skates o’death

I showed up late, but Matt came rolling up with a pair of skates my size and promptly imprisoned my feet in them. I stood up and realized that my skating days are long behind me. I clomped on the wheels, not even trying to roll on them.

Sugar-fueled kids bouncing off the walls

Had I been there by myself, I might have given it a try, but I was sharing the world with a couple hundred sugar-propelled kids who brought back nightmares of studying Brownian Movement (the presumably random drifting of particles suspended in a fluid). There was no predicting where one of these out-of-control bodies was going to come from, nor when it was going to collide with me.

I opted to sit down and strip off my skates before I broke a hip or worse.

Dark as inside a whale’s belly

Once I got rid of the skates o’death, I tried to take pictures. This particular skating rink, while nice, is a combination of being inside a whale’s belly at the bottom of the ocean from a lighting standpoint and being inside of a boiler factory from an auditory standpoint. Squealing little girl voices hit pitches that should shatter glassware and pop balloons.

It has VIDEO games

Atlantis is a long way from Cape’s skating emporiums. It has VIDEO games.

Most of my skating was done at Hanover Skating Rink, a Quonset hut on Perryville Road across from the church of the same name. Friday night was Skate Night to my peers. I begged my parents to take me every week. I remember Dad grumbling one night when it was spitting sleet and the roads were icing up, but he took me.

Hanover was low rent

Hanover was low rent. The wooden floor was dirty, and when it rained, you had to dodge puddles where the roof leaked. The skates you rented were metal jobs that attached to your street shoes by tightening clamps with a skate key. Get them too tight, and the soles of your shoes would bend until they were U-shaped and the skates would fall off, leaving them dangling from your ankle by a leather strap while you were circling the floor. That was not good. You quickly learned to fall with your fingers wadded into a fist if you wanted to keep them.

Rental skates were a challenge

Get the clamps too loose and the skates would fall off, leaving them dangling from your ankle by a leather strap. That, too, was not good.

Real shoe skates had the wheels attached to a high, lace-up boot that had a rubber brake under the front toe. Good skaters could slow to a stop by turning one skate at an angle to bleed off speed. Klutzy skaters used the rubber brake. Skaters who used rental skates (pretty much assured to be klutzy) had to scuff the toe of their street shoe to slow down, with predictable damage to the shoe.

Getting TO the floor was a challenge

The shoe rental counter at Hanover was on a raised part of the building that had been or could be used as a stage. You’d check out a pair of skates, apply them to your feet, then make your way over to the edge of the stage, which was about four feet above the skate floor. Somehow or another, you’d sit on the edge, turn around, then lower yourself to the skate floor while trying to keep the skates from squirting out from under you when you finally got down. There may have been stairs to make this process easier, but I don’t recall using them.

There were general skates, reverse skates, couples’ skates, races by age and, of course, the Hokey Pokey and Crack-the-Whip. Judy Schrader was my regular female skating partner. We didn’t do any of that mushy skating stuff; we just held hands and skated fast.

Maryann Skating Rink was upscale

Maryann Skating Rink was in Cape, on Kingsway Drive where it intersected with Broadway, just across from Pfisters. It, like Hanover, is no longer there.

Instead of having a dirty wooden floor, Maryann had a gleaming, polished maple floor. Officious guys were all over the place doing fancy skating and enforcing real or imagined rules designed to preserve decorum on the floor. Hanover relied on Darwin to sort out behavior.

My skates had wooden wheels

Skates in those days had wooden wheels. After you had used them awhile, they needed to be reground because they developed flat spots and wore at an angle from skating in the same direction all the time.

I took in my skates for grinding at Maryann and was chastised by the worker. “You really shouldn’t skate on the sidewalk with these. It’ll ruin them.” I was too loyal to Hanover to tell the guy that the only skating I ever did was on that church rink. Maryann was cleaner, newer, had better floors and a fancier concession stand, but Hanover was where I felt comfortable.

When I told Son Matt about wooden wheels, he thought I was pulling his appendage. He couldn’t understand how there would be enough friction between wooden wheels and a wooden floor to get any traction. To make sure that I wasn’t misremembering things, I called Brother Mark, who confirmed that my green and white skate case is still in Mother’s attic and that the black shoe skates in it have wooden wheels. His old skates, which had plastic-style wheels, are in a similar red case.

Son Matt demonstrates his skating prowess

The biggest change in roller rinks over my generation’s is that the wooden floors have given way to polyurethane and the wooden wheels have been replaced by plastics. If it wasn’t for kids hollering and little girls squealing, the actual skating would be almost noiseless.

Jackson skating rink

Future Central High School Principal Fred Wilferth was a partner in the Jackson Skating Rink, which opened in 1950. I wrote about it earlier in the year.

Groggy Geeks Work Magic

It’s been a challenging few days in the data world. Son Matt maintains my blogs, leaving me to worry about the content side. He decided to move them to a newer, faster, better, spiffier, shinier server.

At about the same time, Son Adam, President/CIO of DedicatedIT (also known as DIT because DedIt sound too much like DeadIT),  wanted to move his company’s servers to a new, more bulletproof hosting center in Miami. He provides managed services to a bunch of companies all over the region. He and his engineers are sort of like remote IT staffs who keep the hamsters turning for companies who find it better to contract for his services than to have their own staffs.

Colohouse is first class

When you have, not only your own business, but all of your clients depending on you, then you have to have as much redundancy and security as possible. That’s why DedicatedIT elected to move its equipment to Colohouse in Miami. The Category Five hurricane-rated building used to be a phone company central office. To give you an idea of how well THEY are built, BellSouth didn’t lose a single central office when Hurricane Andrew ripped through South Florida in 1992.

Does the finger have to be attached?

Even though the building is located in a somewhat shaky neighborhood, security is tight. You have to be buzzed into the building by a security guard who is on duty 24/7. Your ID is checked and a photo is taken. You’re then issued a swipe card that will give you access to an elevator that will take you to the floor you are approved for. When you get to the actual data center, you have to have a second swipe card for that room AND have your fingerprint scanned by a biometric reader. (I’m not sure if the finger has to be attached to the body, which gives me a bit of pause.)

Casual dress code

Wife Lila, who is Executive Vice President of the company, was excited about being issued a biometric ID card.  I’m secretary of the company, but all that means is that I get to sign my name a couple of times a year on papers they assure me that I don’t really need to read. I didn’t even get an access card. I think that’s because they want to keep me as far away from the hardware as possible.

A Brazilian bytes of storage

DedicatedIt has a Brazilian bytes of data storage. Well, maybe not a Brazilian, but one of those ‘illion things. It’s got dual power supplies fed by separate circuits coming in from diverse commercial power grids, backed up by building UPSs, backed up by generators.

These guys are connected

You’re not limited to one Internet service provider: there are more than a dozen carriers in the facility and it’s a landing point for international underseas cables (not that DIT needs that). Suffice it to say that Colohouse has its act together. There are bank after bank of equipment cabinets used by smaller clients like Adam’s, then there are the BIG players who have enough equipment that their racks are surrounded by black chain link fencing.

If it was on I-95 it’d get a speeding ticket

Their new Internet connection is blinding fast. To geek out, it has a ping of 4ms, download speed of 94.7 Mbps and upload speed of 77.19 Mbps. Putting that in perspective, my home connection, the fastest business class service that Comcast offers, has a 12 ms ping, download speed of 23.15 Mbps and upload speed of 4.79 Mbps.

You get what you pay for

So, if Sons Matt and Adam have it all figured out, why were we down for two days? Well, the first and best answer is that I got the service I pay for. The paying clients had to have their stuff up and running within the middle-of-the-night maintenance window. I got taken care of after the folks who pay the bills.

55-gallon drum of coffee

Our part of the process started at 2:30 Sunday morning, when our home was invaded by a horde of techs bearing donuts and a 55-gallon drum of coffee. They needed to borrow our two vans to haul equipment and staff to Miami. In addition to Matt, who doesn’t work for DIT, these folks were involved in the big move: Paul Vedder – Support Engineer; Nick Yastremski – Support Engineer; Ben Posner – Lead Support Engineer; Scott Maulsby – COO, and Aaron Underhill – Account Manager. The guys were so psyched that they practically vibrated, and that was BEFORE they tapped the coffee.

Eventually, the coffee wears off

I have seen – and worn – this expression on the morning after a big cutover.

Where ARE those electrons going?

Wife Lila and I were like the generals who came down from the mountains after the battle was over to shoot the wounded. Matt had finished his piece and had headed home.

We drove down to Miami late mid-morning after all the heavy lifting was over. The wires were plugged in and lights were flashing all over the place. Adam was hunched over a laptop trying to figure out why some of the electrons were getting lost getting from Point A to Point B while some of the other guys were standing by with buckets to capture any errant 1s and 0s that escaped. (Well, that’s what it LOOKED like.)

Like changing your home address

One of the things that made the process more complicated was that they were creating “virtual” servers to replace physical equipment. It makes it easier to administer, is more efficient and doesn’t require as much rack space and power as a bunch of individual computers.

The Post Office makes mistakes, too

It’s sort of like taking a big subdivision where everybody lives in separate houses and moving all the families into a big apartment building. It takes awhile for all the magazine subscriptions and bills to arrive at the right new address. That’s one of the reasons I was offline. When you change your ip address the word has to go out to DNS servers all over the world (those are the things that tells the computer world that CapeCentralHigh.com is really address 123.123.12.101, not 321.321.21.101).

Just like not all magazine companies get your address changed at the same time, neither do the DNS servers. Comcast, my ISP, was particularly slow, so I couldn’t connect to do updates. It was like the mailman delivering your Playboy magazine to the little old lady next door.

To make matters worse, the person who had my email ip address before me must have been a spammer because the mail I was sending was being blocked at the far end. I had the same thing happen when I changed from BellSouth to Comcast.

The cat licked my monitor

That’s probably way more than you ever wanted to know about why I didn’t have new content for two days. Next time I’ll just say that my cat licked the monitor and erased it.

 

Two Steps Forward, One Back

I haven’t been goofing off the last couple of days. My sons have been doing upgrades to the server that drives this bus and moving DedicatedIT’s equipment to a better service provider in Miami. I was planning to publish photos of that move and explain some of the stuff behind the curtain that brings this blog to you.

Unfortunately, a piece of the program that resizes photos when I upload them isn’t working correctly. Son Matt, who provides tech support for the blog posted this as his Facebook status:

Post 1:Malcolm is in bed. Sarah is in Cocoa Beach this week and I’m exhausted from two late nights at the data center. If you need me, I’ll be in bed, asleep.”

Post 2: “PS: Don’t need me.”

Let’s see if we can get back in the groove Monday.