We went to Wib’s BBQ in Jackson tonight. It gave us a chance to help Grandson Malcolm with a school project. He sent Mother “Flat Stanley,” a storybook character who was smashed “flat as a pancake” when a bookcase fell on him. He was, in fact, smashed flat enough that he can fit into an envelope and go all over the world having his photo taken in exotic locations – like in front of Wib’s. After we shot this photo, we went inside where I ordered two Brown Hots, french fries and slaw; Mother had chili (which she always complains is too spicy.)

When the server came by to see if everything was OK, I gestured for him to lean in, then said, “I think the kitchen made a terrible mistake with my order.”

He look properly concerned.

“They put meat on my sandwiches,” I replied.

Wib’s has the best sauce in town, but I think they must still be on the original pig they started the business with in 1947. There was a whole staff of young folks working there tonight and I think the cook must have a lighter thumb on the scale than the usual one.

North County Park Christmas Display

On the way back from Jackson, we stopped at North County Park to check out the Christmas displays. I’m not sure how many years they’ve been doing this, but it’s become a local must-see.

Some of the displays are very nice. Some are very imaginative. Some are, to be honest, tacky, particularly some of the commercial ones. More and more of them are memorials to family members who won’t be there for another Christmas. Those are touching.

Bumper to bumper traffic

We got there right after dark, so it wasn’t too congested. By the time we left, though, cars were streaming into the park. It’s considered good form to drive with just your parking lights on, but this car broke the rules (and I think him for giving me a little extra light on the scene).

One minivan in front of us had me perplexed. I could see through the back window that they were playing a kid’s movies on a DVD player mounted near the ceiling. Now, maybe I’m old-fashioned, but don’t you think it might have been appropriate to shut the thing off for 15 minutes and tell the kids to look out the bleeping window at the real world?

Past stories with a Christmas theme

Hutson’s Christmas Display

Old Town Cape’s 2011 ornaments

Old Town Cape’s ornaments up through 2010

The scariest Santa I’ve ever seen

Christmas confusion I

Christmas confusion II

Christmas confusion III (mystery solved

Steinhoff Christmas 1969

David Steinhoff’s Christmas bike video

St. Mary’s Christmas service 1967

Altenburg Museum Christmas Tree display

Common Pleas Courthouse Live Nativity scene 1965

Photo gallery of Christmas display

Here are other photos from the evening. Click on any picture to make it larger, then click on the left or ride side to mover through the gallery.

This is a swim meet at Capaha Park Pool on July 31, 1964, if we believe the note on the negative sleeve. There are big holes in Google’s Missourian archives for the last part of 1964, so I don’t know if a story ran in the paper. Some of the pictures are pretty marginal, but there are a bunch of Capaha Pool fans our there who will overlook the technical shortcomings. Click on any photo to make it larger.

I almost got electrocuted

All I remember about this swim meet was that I almost got electrocuted. My electronic flash – strobe – was sick, so I borrowed one from somebody so I could cover the meet.

In case you didn’t know, strobes work by sucking an electrical charge out of low voltage batteries and storing it in a capacitor until it’s boosted to hundreds of volts. When you press the shutter release, that closes a contact that sends all that voltage across the flash tube, producing a very short duration powerful blast of light. Later models operated off a 510-volt battery, but that’s another, equally painful story.

Keep the plug covered

The batteries would drain fairly quickly, so some of the strobes had ports where you could plug the unit into a regular electrical outlet. Well, what can go in, can also come out, so you’re supposed to keep the contacts covered with a plug when you’re not using it with AC power. The guy who loaned it to me either wanted to see me dead or he didn’t have the plug. I never did find out.

Photographer lights up

So, anyway, I’m walking across the wet pool deck when my finger accidentally touches those exposed contacts. The strobe says, “This guy must want to take a picture, so I’m going to dump my XXX volts and make a bright flash.” Instead of going through the flash tube, all those electrons took the path of least resistance – my body – to get to the wet pool deck. I thought somebody had tackled me from behind. I looked all around, though, and there was nobody close to me.

Flash was brighter than the photographer

I went on to cover the meet and POW!!! the same thing happened. This time I realized what was going on and made sure to keep my fingers away from the light-the-photographer-up contacts.

Remember braiding lanyards?

I think the kid on the far right is braiding a plastic lanyard. That was all the rage when I was in grade school. Square braiding was easy; round braid was a little harder. I can’t remember all the ways we used them. I think the challenge was in the braiding. Actual utility was secondary.

Wife Lila pointed out that these were taken before the lanes were painted on the pool bottom. Here’s what the pool looked like when they were getting ready for the season. It contains links to most of the other Capaha Park Pool stories we’ve done.

OK, that’s a bad pun, considering that the Capaha Park Pool is nothing but grass and memories these days. This single frame of some guys washing down the Capaha Park Pool was in with some stuff dated 5/1966, so I’m assuming that they were getting ready to fill the pool for the summer season.

I asked Wife Lila, a former lifeguard, if she recognized the guys, but she couldn’t put names to faces. Terry, Jacqie, can you ID them?

Other pool photos and stories

• Capaha Pool remembered by three lifeguards
• Photos of a dance held on the pool deck
• Photos of Jackson’s old pool
• Cement plant’s Natatorium
• 1960s aerial photos of park and surrounding neighborhoods
• Capaha Pool just before razing
• Missourian photographer Fred Lynch’s photos of equipment gobbling up pool.
• Wife Lila salvages a brick from pool

Early the morning of November 15, 1965, I got a call from The Missourian to saddle up my pony and head to the quarry at Trail of Tears State Park to cover a rescue. It must have been too chilly or too early for them to roust Frony out of bed.

I know I saw the negatives from that morning somewhere recently, but I must have misplaced them. I’ll make do with a copy of the front page of that day’s Missourian. Someone other than me drew in the X and apparently “enhanced” the tops of the bluffs. Or, it might just be that the microfilm reproduction makes it look that way.

The Associated Press picked up the photo, probably because of the St. Louis connection. I think it might have been my first Wirephoto. I was excited about it in those days. I was less excited 20 years later when they were still paying a lousy five bucks per photo.

Student spent night trapped on bluff.

You can read the whole story in The Missourian,but you have to work for it. The Google index is messed up, so that link takes you to the November 12 edition. You’ll have to keep scrolling to the right until you get to the front page of the Monday paper. While you’re scrolling, you might want to pause to read the Nov. 13 account of the fire and sinking of the cruise ship Yarmouth Castle. Gordon Lightfoot immortalized it in Ballad of Yarmouth Castle on his Sunday Concert album, arguably his second most famous song after The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Here’s the short version: William A. Erfurth, 22, a SEMO junior from a St. Louis suburb was trying to scale a 300-foot bluff north of Trail of Tears State park on Sunday when his footing gave way. He managed to scramble to a rock about 60 feet from the top of the bluff where he was stuck for about 13-1/2 hours until he was rescued the next morning.

A buddy, Don Powers, 25, of Webster Groves, who didn’t make the climb, built a fire and kept talking to Erfurth though the night. It took longer to get help than it might have because Erfuth’s keys were lost in a comedy of errors. Erfurth had the keys with him up on the bluff. He threw a small rock down so that Powers would have an idea of where to look for the keys. He then wrapped the keys in a handkerchief and threw them down. “They haven’t been found yet,” Erfurth commented. That meant that Powers had to walk out for help.

Rescuers came from Mississippi County

A Mississippi County Rescue Squad eventually made it to a point where they could drop ropes to the stranded youth. The climbers included Joe Lankheit (or Lankhett), Mike Bryant, Dewey Bickford and Ralph Carr. Chief Sam Story said the ascent was made at “considerable hazard” to the four men.

Besides the Sheriff’s Patrol and the Mississippi County unit, members of the Highway Patrol and the Cape Girardeau Auxiliary Police were on scene during the night. Robert Eckelmann, auxiliary chief, said he and Frank Maevers tried to reach the top of the bluff by jeep, but the terrain was too rough. Erfurth was unharmed.

The cliff is located about 1-3/4 north of the end of the Moccasin Springs Road. Most of the rescuers rode to the scene by handcars of the Frisco Railroad. (I don’t remember if I got a ride on a handcar or if I had to hoof it.)

Quarry looks pretty from the air

I asked pilot Ernie Chiles to fly close to Trail of Tears on our way up to Perry County in April to see if I could spot the quarry. It was much bigger than I had imagined. That early morning in 1965 was the first (and last) time I had been there. I’m going to hazard a guess that some of you have been much closer to it than I’ve been.

Scott Moyers did a story in Tuesday’s Missourian about Capaha Park Lagoon’s algae problem. This isn’t exactly a new problem. Here are some pictures from the mid and late 1960s when there was a cleanup campaign on. I’m not sure when they were taken, nor who the subjects are. A couple of the men look familiar, but I’m going to let someone else put names to the faces.

Lagoon dates to early 1900s

Scott’s story says the 3.5 acre lagoon was put in shortly after the property was transformed into a fairgrounds. The city acquired it in 1914. Generations of Cape Girardeans have enjoyed fishing, ice skating, duck feeding and even jumping into the lagoon.

Lagoon has become shallow

Over the years, silt has filled up the lagoon to the point that it’s only about five feet deep, about half of the 10 to 12 feet years ago. Algae grows in warmer, shallower water, particularly when the summer has been as hot as this year’s. The lagoon hasn’t been dredged in about 20 years, the story pointed out. What makes me uncomfortable is a comment from Mayor Harry Rediger, who said that the permanent solution is to come from the parks department’s creation of a strategic plan for the entirety of Capaha Park.

“Another idea is to change the concept of the lake a bit.” he said. “I can’t report on it just yet, because it’s still in the planning stages. But we do intend to fix that in some manner – it’s just that how it’s to be fixed has yet to be determined.”

When city officials start talking about making changes to something that’s been a part of the community as long as Capaha Park, warning flags start waving. I look at all the park amenities that we grew up with: the lagoon, Cherry Hill, the band shell, the train from the cement plant, the pool (oops, guess we can scratch that one) and I don’t see many things I’d change. When you hear the drumbeats for “improving” Capaha Park, better start going to meetings and letting your voice be heard. We know how Bloomfield Road has been “improved.”

November 2011 aerial of Capaha Park

Broadway and Southeast Hospital are on the right. The pool is empty, but not razed yet.

Other stories about Capaha Park Lagoon

• Capaha Park aerial photos taken in 1964
• Treasure hunter with lagoon in background
• Lagoon frozen over in 1968.
• Capaha Field and lagoon
• Kids jumping into it.
• Kids fishing in it while a dog eats their lunch

Gallery of Capaha Park Lagoon photos

A collection of photos taken over a period of time. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.