Author: Ken Steinhoff

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Moon Over Cape Girardeau

I work out of a Domke shooting vest instead of a camera bag. I find it puts everything where I can find it by feel, distributes weight better than a bag, is easier to maneuver in tight spaces and is less likely to get stolen than a bag you set down “just for a minute.”  A digital camera with a zoom lens has cut back on the amount of gear I hump around. I used to carry at least three camera bodies and five lenses, plus about 20 rolls of various types of film, not including all the small accessories.

My vest holds my Canon FS-100 video camera; a strobe; a polarizing filter (or UV filter, depending on what I’m using that day); some business cards; a digital tape recorder and lapel mike; spare batteries; a can of pepper spray; a lens cleaning cloth; a small LED flashlight and a few other odds and ends depending on the kind of shooting I plan to do.

On the way out to dinner with Mother Monday night, I grabbed my Nikon D-40 DSLR camera, but forgot to pick up the vest. I shrugged it off. I wasn’t really planning on shooting video anyway and the camera has a small flash built in.

WOW! Look at that moon!

When we came out of Ruby Tuesday and turned east on William, the first thing we saw was a monster moon.

I’ve got a thing for shooting moon pictures. I even lead bicycle Full Moon Rides on the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail where the moonlight is so bright that we don’t even need headlights to see our way (no motor vehicles allowed and there’s nobody there but us, the gators and the mosquitoes).

Something strange always happen. Sometimes a rider does the Frog Dance; on another trip, I thought I’d have to perform a buttectomy.

Even Wife Lila is moonstruck. She tries to make it to the beach for the Lake Worth Full Moon Drum Circle every month. Even when it rains, it’s good.

Oh, no, I don’t have the video camera

When I pulled off the road to shoot the moon photo above, I realized that I  didn’t have my video camera. The FS-100 has a longer effective zoom lens than my still camera. It was going to take that extra magnification to bring the moon in closer to my surroundings.

I banged off a few frames with some restaurant signs in the foreground, then made a mad dash for some downtown landmarks.

You can’t outrun Motorola or the moon

Cops used to have a saying, “You can’t outrun Motorola,” their two-way radios. I learned in high school that you can’t outrun the moon, either.

One night I spotted a moon like this one just cracking the horizon. I KNEW if I got to Cape Rock there would be a great photo. Good thing there weren’t any cops on the road that night. I bent every speed law between here and there, but still got to Cape Rock too late to catch the shot I really wanted.

I knew the same thing was going to happen to me again, but I had to give it a try.

Moon rising over Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge

I KNOW I promised a moratorium on photos of the bridge, but this was the only landmark I could find that I could get in the foreground with the moon before it got so high it became a tiny dot. As it is, it looks like something made by an undernourished paper punch.

Sorry.

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Don’t Stare at My Mother’s Arm

Liberty with the truth warning: there may be some parts of what you read next that might not exactly be lies, but they stretch the truth to the point of snapping. [The story was originally written to promote the Convention Bureau’s Storytelling Festival.]

What’s the matter with her arm?

Mother couldn’t figure out why my brother Mark’s friends always looked at her funny. They’d appear to be staring, then glance away quickly when she looked at them.

She found out later that Mark had told them, “Don’t stare at my mother’s arm, she’s self-conscious about it.”

“What’s the matter with your mother’s arm,” they’d ask.

It’s a long story

Here’s how he tells it in (mostly) his own words:

After Dad died and all of us boys scattered all over the country, Mother got a little lonely. She was okay financially, but she wanted to do something a little different to keep busy, something that would let her see the sights, be around other people and make herself feel useful.

She was a cook on a riverboat

She decided to work as a cook on a towboat, The Robert Kilpatrick. She worked 20 days on and got 20 days off.

She had her own small utility boat that was kept on the barge on a hoist.  When she  ran low on supplies, she would have the captain radio ahead to the nearest town and give them the “grocery list.”  As they came close to the town, they would lower her boat into the water. She would take off, load up the supplies (the store would meet her at the river with them), and then she’d floor it to catch up with the tow.

One day as the tow was being broken up and put into the lock and dam (modern day tows now “push” as many as 30 barges at a time and dams/locks were not designed to accommodate more than eight at a time, two abreast),  she decided she wouldn’t launch her own boat, she’d stay with the tow. She was getting ready to climb a steel ladder from the the barge  to the top of the lock so she could board a waiting cab to go into town for the supplies when something went terribly wrong.

Tragic accident took her arm

Suddenly the barges shifted in the lock and her arm was caught between the edge of the barge and the concrete dam wall. It pinched it clean off at the elbow.

Tragic, yes, but not enough to keep our mother down.  No  sir.  In fact, some of the guys in the machine shop – the burly  guys who ate steak for breakfast and kept the massive engines working  down below – fashioned her a couple of custom “snap on” tools that were a little more functional than the basic hook that was all insurance would cover.

One was a spatula that could easily turn extra large omelets (and used to scrape the grill to keep food from sticking to it); the other was a meat fork with three tines.  Two tines faced the the same direction so she could pick up meat from the grill, and one tine was bent 90 degrees in the other direction, so she could open and close the oven doors with it.

OSHA said somebody’s gonna get an eye poked out

OSHA thought the custom tools created a hazard to workers who might get impaled if the boat hit rough water and caused her to stumble, so she quit rather than kowtow to bureaucrats.

She became a Happy Hooker

Her next job was working for the city of Cape Girardeau as a wrecker driver.  She drove a tow truck all over town looking for scofflaws who had outstanding parking tickets so she could impound their vehicle.  Nobody ever tried to  stop her after she raised her artificial arm and clicked her custom tool fingers at them like mad magpies.

Prosthetic technology progressed to the point where she decided to give up the hook and custom attachments for an arm that was covered in soft plastic that was almost lifelike. The doctors did a great job of matching her skin tone, too.

She got so she’d play along

When Mark’s friends threw him a surprise 50th birthday party, Mother, Son Adam and I showed up. When she noticed some of the guests giving her arm a quick glance, she pulled her hand up into her sleeve so it looked like she had left her prosthesis  at home.

“You can’t take that slot machine”

Storytelling is in our genes.

My mother’s family owned several businesses in Advance at one time or another. One was a tavern that had a few slot machines to bring in some extra (if illegal) income. Her parents had to leave one afternoon and left her in charge. She was all of about 13 years old.

It must have been an election year, because the place suddenly filled with law enforcement officers who were going to confiscate the slot machines as being illegal gambling devices. Mother knew that one of the machines was full of money, so she stood up to the sheriff and said, “You can’t take that one. It’s broken. If it doesn’t work, it’s no more a gambling machine than that bar stool.”

They left it behind.

Don’t forget the Storytelling Festival

If you made it all the way down here, you must appreciate tall tales. When this story was first published, you could click on the photo below, which would take you to the Convention Bureau’s Storytelling Festival website. I had optimistically written, “It’ll help me convince the convention bureau folks that this would be a great place to advertise, and it’ll set you up for a weekend that sounds like a lot of fun.” It might have done the latter, but the former never happened.

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Big Bend Road Mystery

When I come to Cape, I like to cruise around looking for familiar places and to find roads my Mother and I have never been on. While on one of our explorations, we came across this foundation at the corner of Bertling and Big Bend Rd. Neither of us could remember what had been there.

The building had tile floors

The layout didn’t feel like a house or a gas station.

It was of considerable size

The two square foundations in front of the big foundation, with a walkway between them, are odd, too.

Where did these stairs lead?

We thought that it could have been some kind of business. Maybe the steps lead to the owner’s house higher on the hill.

I was planning to file these away until I could poll some other folks, but I saw that DrummingFireman was equally curious.

He posted a comment on Fred Lynch’s Southeast Missourian blog, “Anybody know, or have any pictures of what used to be at the corner of Bertling and Big Bend. There’s what looks like a foundation, and some concrete steps. Always wondered what used to be there.”

I figure I’ll throw this up for someone to fill in the gaps for Mother, DrummingFireman and me.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

You readers have done a great job helping solve this mystery. Fred Lynch and Sharon Sanders found photos of the old buildings and added a lot of details about the fatal fire and the history of the site. Only Sharon (and her predecessor, Judy Crow) could dig up stories about things like the Great Chicken Thievery that wasn’t discovered until a neighbor noticed chicken heads on the side of the road.

This is a great piece of historical reporting, even if you’re not from Cape.

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Jackson’s Hanging Tree in Danger

Bill Hopkins was kind enough to post a Facebook link to Brian Blackwell’s Southeast Missourian story that the Cape County commissioners are opposed to a new roundabout design in Jackson. Sounds like one of those Dull But Necessary stories real newspapers still have to cover.

Hang on for the interesting part

A point of contention is that the roundabout could endanger a tree that was used to hang people who were convicted of murder. The tree is more than 100 years old and is the last “hanging tree” in the county, Presiding Commissioner Gerald Jones said.

The proposed roundabout would come within a few feet of the tree trunk, causing possible damage.

“If these three commissioners agree to give up that much of our beautiful courthouse lawn, there would be a three-person hanging on that hanging tree,” Jones said. “And I believe that would be us.”

I had to see the Hanging Tree

I mean, after all, I WORKED for The Jackson Pioneer, right across the street from the County Courthouse. I had never HEARD of the Hanging Tree. This was embarrassing. Besides, it was lunchtime and a trip to Jackson would give me another excuse to swing by Wib’s BBQ.

After having a brown hot (with Cole slaw on it), fries and a Mr. Pibb, I was off to the courthouse. The only problem was I had no idea which of at least three trees could be the Hanging Tree. I needed expert guidance.

Let’s start at Mapping & Appraisal

The very nice woman behind the counter in the Mapping and Appraisal office didn’t even smirk when I asked if she knew anything about the Hanging Tree. She simply said, “Come over here,” leading me to a window. “It’s that one.” She pointed to a tree that I had dismissed as being too low to the ground.

“I thought that one looked like a broken-down Redbud tree. It doesn’t look like it’d be tall enough to hang anybody,” I said.

“My husband said that all of the old-time bad guys must have been four feet tall, but that’s the tree.”

A cool-looking Cape County Plat Book caught my eye, so I started to hand over my pocket plastic. “We don’t take those,” she said kindly.

“Will you take a check?”

“Sure.”

I handed her a West Palm Beach check signed with an illegible scrawl and she started to walk away. “Don’t you want to see any identification?” I asked her.

“Nah, I have your business card. I can find you.”

THAT’S how you know you’re back home. Of course, having a Hanging Tree outside your window may make you a little more sure that nobody is going to write you a bum check.

“Trust, but verify”

The Jackson Pioneer was a solidly Republican newspaper. The first major political speech I covered was Ronald Reagan stumping for Barry Goldwater in 1964. (We’ll cover that experience some other time.) That got me thinking about Reagan’s favorite saying, “Trust, but verify.”

I went up to the second floor of the courthouse to an office overlooking the purported Hanging Tree. Not only did another nice lady verify Mapping and Appraisal Lady’s tree choice, but she pointed to a big painting on the wall with the story of poor John Headrick, the last person to take a ride on the tree on June 15, 1899.

Who was John Headrick?

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail. I’m going to save myself a bunch of typing by sending you to The Southeast Missourian’s July 22, 2001, version of The Hanging of John Headrick that’s next to the picture on the wall.

Here’s a genealogy site with another  account that has slightly more and / or different details of the Headrick case.

Bottom line is that John Headrick was a 19-year-old hired hand who worked for James M. Lail. Headrick may or may not have been romancing Lail’s daughter, Jessie, but he was fired after he was arrested for stealing a buggy.

He returned to the farm, had a confrontation which resulted in Lail being shot dead. Lail’s wife, Vernie, trying to cover his body to protect him, was shot, beaten and stabbed by Headrick. While he was distracted by the daughter, Mrs. Lail ran for help. Headrick expressed a certain degree of admiration for the woman when he discovered she was alive, “By God, the old woman is gone, you can’t kill her, can you?”

Sheriff John H. Jenkins rounded up a posse of 30 to 40 men to hunt down Headrick and caught him hiding in Milt Golson’s barn.

On Nov. 19, 1898, Judge Henry C. Riley sentenced Headrick to “be hanged by the neck, between heaven and earth, until he is dead.”

The Missouri Supreme court affirmed the conviction and the execution was carried out on the Hanging Tree on the Jackson courthouse lawn.

Sheriff Bernard Gockel reported to the court, “I hereby certify that I served the within and attached Death Warrant, at the County of Cape Girardeau, State of Missouri, on the 15th day of June A.D. 1899, by reading the same to the within named John Headrick, and on the same day between the hours of six o’clock and seven o’clock, A.M., and at the same County and State, and within the Jail Yard of said County, within an inclosure surrounded by a fence higher than the gallows and sufficiently closed to exclude the view of persons on the outside, I did inflict the death penalty by hanging the said John Headrick by the neck until he was dead.”


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