Cape Girardeau History and Photos
News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
The only person I recognize for sure in this photo taken behind Central High school is Vickey Berry, second from left. She was listed as a majorette in the 1964 Girardot, but I don’t think any of the other girls were in the yearbook photo. The tentative way everybody is holding their batons makes me wonder if this is a practice or a tryout?
That looks like the driver’s ed car parked in the background.
Here’s an earlier piece I did on majorettes. Maybe you can put names to faces from the photos.
I see SE Missouri may be looking at another wave of ice and snow, so I ALMOST hate to post this. Friends Jan Norris and George Primm have been talking up riding their bikes on the trails in Palm Beach County’s Riverbend Park near Jupiter, Florida.
When Anne Rodgers sent me a message saying she had an afternoon free for a ride, I set aside stuff I was supposed to be doing and decided to see if I could still ride a bike. For the record, the trail, is beautiful. It’s not long, but there are lots of loops and it is very peaceful. (At least on a weekday when very few people were around.) Click on the photos to make them larger.
Before I started this blog, I did one on PalmBeachBikeTours.com. I was riding as much as 3,000 miles a year, with metric centuries (62 miles) a couple times or more a month and a century (100-miles in a day) a couple times a year.
Interestingly enough, I rode a lot more when I was working than after I retired.
My Surly Long Haul Trucker touring bike has relatively wide tires that rode very well on the hard-packed shell rock trail.
Here’s part of the account I sent to Curator Jessica when she asked how my ride went: I am severely diminished.
The first loop was a beautiful shaded trail with abundant wildlife. Then Anne, bless her heart, (an old Southern expression) suggested we ride another trail. She, being young and eager, led the way. THAT trail led under a bridge and then into single track mountain bike country that took us to a part of trail with water and ruts that could have been called the Grand Canyon had that name not already been taken.
That trail changed from packed shell rock to grass. Fortunately, that didn’t last long. Unfortunately, the next segment was patches of sugar sand with stretches of mud and water. We had strayed onto an equestrian trail.
Anne is a twig. I looked at Anne’s tire tracks. She was sinking in about half an inch. I’m two Annes and was plowing a rut. I was operating at wobble speed or less and my heart rate monitor was approaching the line marked “Red Fountain.”
I told Anne that I was on the verge of bonking and needed to fuel the furnace to tide me over until we could find a nice place to dive into the sub sandwich she had brought along. We each had an energy gel that is about like a gummy worm in consistency.
We hadn’t gone very far when I got impatient and bit down on the gel. On my second bite, there was a very un-gel-like crunch. I told Anne to hold up a minute while I fished around in my mouth. Just as I had suspected, I had pulled a dental crown loose.
I ended up pushing my bike about half a mile because it was too soft to ride.
Once we got back on the main loop again, we made much better time more comfortably. We weren’t going so fast, though, that we missed this herd of deer chowing down on grasses. They showed interest, but not fear, even when I got to within about 50 feet of them.
Two guys on mountain bikes rode up while I was shooting the deer. They were nice enough to stand back to keep from spooking them, but I motioned the one guy forward so he’d have a better chance at getting a shot. The deer drifted away slowly, but they must be used to seeing people in the park.
The parking lot we started from is also where there is a canoe concession to float the Loxahatchee River. If you are in Florida and want to have a taste of what the region used to be like, Riverbend Park is the place to go. Just stay out of the sugar sand and don’t crunch down on a sticky energy gel.
Oh, by the way, right after the dentist got me all numbed up, he told me he wasn’t going to be able to reuse the old crown and asked if I wanted to discuss payment options. NOW would be a good time for you to click that big red button at the top left of the page to order something from Amazon to help me pay for my new crown.
Morgan’s Furniture Store in downtown Advance at the corner of South Ash Street and West Gabriel Avenue was the sponsor of one of the first local radio commercials I remember hearing. The appliance and furniture was always referred to in a booming radio voice as Big and Friendly Morgan’s.”
Just down the block from the furniture store was Morgan’s Funeral Home. Lloyd Morgan was the first young man from Advance to go away to learn the science of embalming.
I called Mother and said, “I have some Advance questions: which Morgan owned Morgan’s Furniture and were all the Morgans related?”
Jack Morgan, she said, was the furniture guy. “When I was about 9 years old, I had diphtheria and people were supposed to stay away from me, but Jack was my ‘boyfriend’ and he brought me a bouquet of flowers.” In later life, he was known for his odd dressing habits: his socks were frequently mismatched and his shoes untied.
Lloyd, the undertaker, she said, liked his spirits and would come into the Welch tavern to play the piano and dance. “He was a monkey, for sure.” A small paperback book on the history of the town reported that “Lloyd always drove a good car, but he never took the key out of it. ‘One of my friends might need a car real badly sometime and not have the time to look me up.’”
Mother’s brother, Kenneth, my namesake, would go on ambulance calls with Lloyd, she said. “Times were tough back then and not everybody had money, so Lloyd would take chickens or whatever they could spare.”
I was picking through some aerials from November 2010 when I spotted this single frame of the Beechwood Club. It’s the blue-green water surrounded by a square concrete pool deck.
You can click on the photo to make it larger, but I checked: there are no visible skinnies being dipped. While trying to figure out the correct plural of skinny, I came across this link (it’s safe for work, don’t worry). Who knew you had to LEARN how to do it?
The paved road running in the foreground is Highway 25. Take it left, go around a curve and down a hill and you’ll find yourself in what’s left of Dutchtown. Go right and you’ll pass through Gordonville on your way to Jackson.
When I wrote about the Beechwood Club on March 24, 2010, I uncovered some interesting tidbits of history about the place. Based on reader comments, though, I missed some of the most interesting goings-on.