At night, he’d turn him loose to roam the building to keep visitors out. The key was to figure out where the dog was before you climbed through a window.

SEMO boys were housed in the Marquette and girls were housed at St. Francis Hospital when there were dorm shortages.

We have lots of stories about developing color on the run. The lab techs always thought we got better results on the fly because of the light, continuous agitation it got.

We had our share of misadventures, though.

1. When possible, we’d rent a van and take the middle row of seats out to give more room to spread stuff out. One day I happened to walk into the studio to find a van seat in the corner of the room. It had been at least three weeks since we had last done a color run, so it was apparent that rental companies didn’t give vehicles much of a check when they were returned.

2. I was driving a brand-new van with seven miles on the odometer when I hit the gas just a little too hard before the lab tech got everything situated right. The cooler tipped over, spilling water and chemicals all over the carpeting. Fortunately, we hadn’t left the office parking lot, so we could replace all the stuff. When I turned the van in, I said, “You might want to check the seals around the windows in the back. The carpet is all wet.”

3. For night runs, I bought the lab techs little LED lights that were mounted in what looked like an eyeglass frame. That way they could see what they were doing without blinding the driver. What they also did was to look like some kind of death-ray aliens to cars passing us on the road.

I never knew the Marquette was used for SEMO student housing. That might explain the trashed rooms I saw upstairs in the hotel after Thad Bullock bought the hotel.

SEMO also used the old Saint Francis Hospital on Good Hope St. for student housing before it was demolished. Again I toured the trashed building before it was torn down. That might explain why SEMO is back in the on-campus dorm business as they have built some new dorms in recent years.

It is obviously KFVS’s Don McNeely behind the microphone on the roof. He is also in one of Frony’s 1957 homecoming parade shots in front of the old house. At the time they did not do TV of the parade so McNeely was watching it with everyone else.

I was amused at your picture of Bob Wiley developing film in the plane. Only once did I accomplish a similar feat. When Senator Bob Dole campaigned for president in Cape Girardeau – don’t ask me the year- his plane landed at 11 am. To make the deadline for the afternoon edition, I developed the B/W film in the car while driving back to the Missourian, agitating five seconds every mile. I slapped the wet negative in the enlarger, heated it up, made the print, made the deadline and headed to the university for Dole’s speech at 12:15 pm. Not bad.

The KFVS (In Living Black & White) vidicon cameras were an event for those rooftop and street level remotes. Could be Bob Hirsch was still the engineer/producer/button pusher for those live broadcasts.

I departed KFVS for a dissolute “unemployed” fall semester in ’66 and joined Zimmer (elder) and Speidel at KZYM in Jan. ’67.

Amazing how a few B&W images can trigger all those neurons! Thanks, again, Ken!

[I'm working on a posting about KFVS. I'm trying to find a picture of my brother Mark firing up the huge Cat diesel generators in the building's basement. I have a picture of him operating a camera, but the generator shot is eluding me.]