April 2012

April 30, 2012May 24, 2015

Location, Location, Location

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.

April 28, 2012

Fall Cometh Before the Spring

I should have run these during the fall, but it’s hard to say what’s going to catch my eye on any particular evening. These were taken in the fall of 2009 in Memorial Park Cemetery. If you click on the photo to make it larger, you can see flowers on some of the graves. It’s pretty hard for florists to compete with the natural beauty of nature.

Those aren’t persimmons

Mother’s a real fan of persimmons. We usually make it up to Tower Rock where there’s a great tree. When I took a closer look at the leaves on the ground, I saw the ground was covered with what looked like persimmons, so I made a mad dash up to the house to bring her back to see the treasure I had discovered. I don’t know what they were, but they turned out NOT to be persimmons.

Beard’s Sport Shop, 818 Broadway

A reader was asking me about 818 Broadway. It’s been a whole lot of things, but it’ll always be Beard’s Sport Shop to me. When I photographed it in 2009, the sign on the front of building said Grace Cafe, but I think it had already closed its doors. I used to go to Grace Cafe when it was located in the old Vandeven’s Mercantile building at Pacific and Broadway because they had a fast internet connection.

Ornate decorations

I never noticed how ornate the trim was on the building until I looked at these photos. I thought that it might have been added recently, but Fred Lynch had a Frony photo of Beard’s and Wayne’s Grill that shows it clearly in 1961.

When Friend Shari and I shot the interior of the Broadway Theater in December, we retreated across the street for some coffee to thaw out. I couldn’t remember the name of the place, but a Missourian business column on April 18, 2011, said “Calix Coffee opened at 818 Broadway, at the former Grace Cafe location in Cape Girardeau. Owner Andrew Whaley, Jackson, previously worked at Grace Cafe as a barista. The shop sells coffee and fresh baked pastries, and Whaley hopes to add sandwiches and salads in the future.”

That must be it.

You can barely make out the Beard’s sign in a photo I ran the other day of a wreck at night on Broadway.

Interested in Pinterest?

I’m always a little slow in adopting new social media, but Son Matt added a new button to the front of the blog. You’ve been able to “Like” a page on Facebook and Google+ for some time. Starting last week, you could “pin” an image on Pinterest. It’s probably easier to show you some of my stuff that’s been “pinned” than to try to explain it. It’s sort of a nice way to get a high-level feel for the kind of stuff I shoot.

April 27, 2012

Jeane Adams’ End of Summer

One of my Missourian jobs was to edit the weekly Youth Page. It wasn’t heavy lifting: I had to edit copy submitted by student reporters and staff writers, lay out the page, write the headlines and come up with pictures for it. Whenever possible, I tried to assign them to myself for a few extra bucks in my paycheck. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)

Needed: end of summer story

I’m not sure which came first here, the chicken or the egg. Since it was summertime, the page was probably pretty light of school news, so I must have decided to do some kind of end of the summer story. Whether I ran into Jeane Adams while looking for that story or whether I ran into her and decided to build a layout around her, I don’t recall. I had never seen her before this shoot and never saw her again after we were finished.

At any rate, we wandered around town shooting things she remembered about the summer. I may or may not have gotten a photo release from her parents. We usually didn’t bother with that formality in Cape. I DO recall going by her house to tell her parents what I was up to. They trusted me enough to turn her loose for the afternoon. Their trust only went so far, though. I had to drag her younger sister or cousin or some kid as a chaperone (or because they wanted a free babysitter).

Jeane was a natural

Some days you’re lucky enough to find a natural model. Jeane was one of those people who came alive in front of the camera.

Ran one big photo with overlays

I wanted to run a series of shots (remember, I’m getting five bucks a picture), but I couldn’t justify filling the page with her. I compromised by doing something I hadn’t tried before. I made one big print, then created a layout of smaller prints stuck down to the big one with rubber cement. I cringe at photos that are cut into weird shapes, but even the diagonal crop of her looking at the river works in this case. I’d have shifted up and to the right if I was doing it again, but…

Pulling off something like today would be a piece of cake with Photoshop, but it was a bit more of a challenge in the days of film and darkrooms.

All over Cape

I’m not sure where the log photo was taken, but the train was at Arena Park and the river photo was Cape Rock. We probably shot the dog photo at her house.

Jeane was going to be a sophomore

I thought she was younger than high school, but the caption under the photo said, “Miss Jeane Adams, like most youngsters at this time of year, is sitting and thinking of all the things she had done over the three months of ‘freedom’ from teachers, homework and tests. The days of romping with her dog, riding the Arena Park Dinky to far-off places and just sitting watching the river go by are rapidly drawing to a close. Jeanne, who will be a sophomore at Central High School this fall, is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Milford Adams, 605 Albert. This dog’s name, incidentally, is Chico.”

Based on that she would have been Central Class of 1968. I looked for her on Classmates.com, but she wasn’t there and the class yearbook wasn’t online.

Where did this girl come from?

This little girl was in the middle of the roll of Jeane photos. I have no idea where we stumbled onto her, but she was too cute to pass up.

Month: April 2012