Cape Central High Photos and History

Cape Central’s Dreaded Rope Climb

Ken Steinhoff — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:50:39 +0000

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I never played any team sports and, despite the fact that I’ve covered just about every big sporting event to come along, I’ve never had any interest in any them. Super Bowls, championship golf tournaments and college bowl games were just another day at the office. I’m a cyclist, but that’s pretty much a solitary sport, at least the way I do it.

PE was probably my least favorite class at Central High School. The rope climb, which was intimidating when I was a freshman, became one of my favorite challenges later on after I had spent a summer loading and unloading trucks for my dad’s construction company. I could zip up the rope using only my upper body after that workout.

Still, every time when I got up to the top of the rope and just before I slapped the rafter holding the collar that secured the rope, I wondered how often that thing got checked.

“What’s a Jesus Nut?”

I had similar concerns when I was doing a story on the sheriff’s helicopter (that’s me dangling in the rescue sling during a practice). On the first day, I asked the standard question, “What happens if the engine quits? Do we gently auto-rotate down or do we drop like a rock.?”

“Let’s find out,” Andy, the pilot said, gaining some altitude over a rural area. He cut the engine and we gradually descended toward what looked like a smooth, green pasture. Just before we touched down he fired up the engine and did an abrupt pull-up.

It wasn’t a green pasture, it was a green, algae-covered pond. We agreed that we wouldn’t mention the experiment in my story. Andy’s dead now, so I guess the statute of limitations has expired.

After establishing that a helicopter WILL set you down relatively gently if you aren’t aiming at a farm pond, the pilot said the worst thing that could happen would be a failure of the Jesus Nut.

Seeing the expression on my face, he explained that the Jesus Nut is the thing on the very tip top of the shaft that holds the rotor on. “If it fails, ‘JESUS!!!!’ is about all you’ll have time to say before things go REALLY bad.”

Now, I know what they should have called the thing that held the rope to the rafter.

Reversible orange and black gym uniforms

The girls had blue and / or green suits that ranged from “hideous” to almost not too bad, depending on what year you went to school. The boys were luckier. They had basic shorts with a shirt that was orange on one side and black on the other so you could tell teams apart.

These guys look like they are formed into lines so they can duck under the divider, run across the gym, perform some act of pain and run back. I don’t see any smiles.

Coach Goodwin checks his list

Coach Robert Goodwin and I had an uneasy relationship. Well, it was uneasy from my perspective. I tried to stay as far below his radar as possible. Since I possessed no jock characteristics, he generally overlooked me.

I DID make a mistake one day. He had us running endless laps of the track. “It’s good for you. Every lap burns out the nicotine equal to a cigarette.”

I don’t know what kind of scientific study he was quoting, but I made the mistake of piping up, “I’ve got a problem, then, Coach. I don’t smoke. I’m building up a huge nicotine deficit that’s going to come back and haunt me some day.”

He was not amused. I’m not sure, but I think I’m still supposed to be running around that track.

Calisthenics: Are we having fun?

If the weather was bad or the coach’s mood was bad, it was push-up, chin-up, jumping jack, sit-up time.

When I got to SEMO, phys ed was a requirement. By the time I got all the academic classes scheduled, the only PE class open was something with a fancy name that was really nothing but calisthenics. The instructor told us on the first day that we would do a series of tests to establish our baseline and that our final grade would depend on how much better we were at the end of the semester.

My momma didn’t raise a fool. When I took the baseline test, the coach was appalled at what lousy shape I was in. At the end of the semester, though, he was convinced that he was a great instructor because of my tremendous improvement.

The next semester, the only thing open was Beginning Wrestling. This did not sound good. The first day, two or three of us showed up; the coach said to come back for the next class to see if anyone else signed up. On the second day, he said the the group was too small, so he was going to fold us into the Advanced Wrestling class. I didn’t like the way that sounded.

I showed up for the first day of Advance Wrestling, took one look around the room and decided that I liked all of the body parts I was born with and dropped the class. That’s when I decided to transfer to Ohio University, where PE was not required.

Wibs BBQ in Jackson, MO

Ken Steinhoff — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:35:35 +0000

Five Generations of Steinhoffs have eaten at Wib’s BBQ Drive-In

Jackson’s Wib’s BBQ Drive-in was born in 1947, the same year I was. I don’t think my parents took me straight from St. Francis Hospital in Cape to Wib’s, but my grandson, Malcolm, was still in diapers when he made his first pilgrimage to the Mecca of Meat.

When we were in Cape last fall, I managed to make four visits to the place, much to my mother’s chagrin. On the last visit, I ordered six Brown Hots to Fed-Ex back home to Son Matt, D-in-Law Sarah and Kid Malcolm.

Some folks have tried to pack them in dry ice, we’ve found that’s not necessary.

We pick up half a dozen Brown Hots, unwrap them until they cool down (to keep them from getting soggy), put each sandwich in an individual Ziploc bag, then Fed-Ex them overnight to. Heat ‘em up and they’re good to go. Haven’t had anybody die on us yet….

We’re pretty sure that at least five generations of my family have eaten at Wib’s.

I spent more time at Wib’s than Wimpy’s

While most of my classmates were hanging out at Wimpy’s and Pfisters, I practically lived at Wib’s when I was working for The Jackson Pioneer in the mid-60s.

The sandwiches were cheap, the waitresses were cute and they made the best shakes in town. (Unfortunately, they quit making shakes several years ago and the wonderful homemade pies are history, too.)

The waitresses are still cute

Best of all, it was located just down the road from the newspaper and courthouse and almost right next to a small park with a municipal swimming pool that was a great source of wild art.

(Nah, Jackson wasn’t THAT wild. Wild art is newspaperspeak for pictures that can run without a story. Think cute kids and animals.)

What’s special about the BBQ?

I don’t know. My mother claims that no pigs are hurt in the making of the sandwiches, and I have to concede that they are a little light on meat.

On the other hand, what’s there is nicely smoked and touched off with a peppery sauce that doesn’t overwhelm the taste of the meat. If you order a Brown Hot (the brown, outside, smokier part of the shoulder) with hot sauce, you’d better have a drink handy.

Meat is hickory-smoked

A short history of Wib’s is printed on the back of the menu. It was founded by Wib Lohman, who had a trucking company. He started out selling barbecue sandwiches to his drivers.

The original smoker used hickory and nothing has changed.

I took this picture of a robin stealing string out of a mop propped up against a stack of Pepsi crates next to some of the hickory used for smoking the meat on April 13, 1967. The next day, The Missourian ran the photo (or one similar to it) with a long, nonsensical story that was uncharacterstic of the paper. (Follow the link at your own risk.)

The piece didn’t have a credit line, but I assure you that I did not write it.

I can only assume that

Editor John Blue was out of town.
It was an extremely slow news day.

Note that the Pepsi crates have “Capaha” printed on them. I wonder if that means that they were bottled in Cape or the surrounding area. I know Cape had a Coke bottling plant on Broadway, but I’m not sure about Pepsi.

The outside doesn’t look like much

It’s just a concrete block building painted white. There’s plenty of parking and a walk-up area on one side. The front door was always notoriously hard to open, but that was solved when a local teenager ran into the front of the building June 17, 2008, doing about $25,000 in damage.

He fessed up to his parents and restitution was made. The front windows were changed to deeper ones and the balky front door was replaced.

One wag remarked, “That poor kid will have to leave town. He’s going to be known as the boy who drove into Wib’s for the rest of his life.”

Wib sold Wib’s to the Hoffmeisters in 1948

Wib Lohman got tired of running a seven-day-a-week, 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. business and sold it to Jack and Sweetie Hoffmeister, who ran it until 1972, when it passed on to A.D. Hoffman.

The Hoffmans own it now

It stayed in the Hoffman family when A.D.’s son and his wife took it over in 1986.

Wib’s opens at 8:30 a.m. (mostly for coffee drinkers; they usually sell less than 10 sandwiches before 11 a.m.) and stays open until 6:45 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Saturday they’re open 9 – 6:45. They’re closed Sundays and Mondays.

Prime time is the lunch rush when about 300 sandwiches are served.

Wib’s has a Facebook Fan Page

In the Old Days, the place had four car hops to handle drive-up orders. These days, if you don’t want to eat inside, you can go inside to a walk-up window to place your to-go order.

Every kid in Jackson must have worked there at one time or another. Many started in high school and continued through college. At least one couple met while working at Wib’s and the proposal took place in the parking lot.

Wib’s even has a Facebook Fan area with over 800 members.

CapeCentralHigh.com Is Under Construction

Ken Steinhoff — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:42:37 +0000

Some days when your job is to FIX the bridge, unexpected things happen. I’m not sure exactly what happened here that caused Steinhoff, Kirkwood & Joiner’s truck and dragline to end up in the creek, but I suspect that it had something to do with a 100-lb load trying to cross a 10-lb-rated bridge.

You wonder exactly how many men it takes to look at a heavy piece of equipment in a hole before something productive happens. I’m going to guess action started about the time Dad put down the camera and said, “OK, enough standing around. Let’s get to work.”

You may have noticed some changes

We’ve changed the template that controls the look and feel of www.CapeCentralHigh.com. I mentioned before that I thought this was going to be a photo site, which would have looked really good in the template Son Matt recommended. When it changed to one with a lot of writing and comments, we thought this one would look better.

Let’s hope it doesn’t end up with a bunch of guys standing around looking at a broken bridge.

It’s going to take some tweaking

The old format used smaller headline and subhead typefaces. That’s why these suddenly look HUGE (and feel like I’m HOLLERING). I’ll find a way to fix that. Some things are in a slightly different places. We’ll try to get things back to about where they were so you don’t bump your shin on the coffee table on the way to the kitchen in the middle of the night.

Geek Talk

For any tech-types out there, this is the Atahualpa theme. I saw that Bob Rogers, a photographer I worked with in Athens, OH, was using it for his blog and I liked the way it looked. (Our original theme was Photocrati Lightbox 1.0.)

If you are interested in travel, cycling, RVing, eating, good photography and fascinating stories, give the newbohemians a read.

Meet the New Bohemians

Claire and Robert Rogers (Bob), married 19 years, bookends to the baby boomer generation, are dedicated to getting the most from this adventure of life. To that end, we seek our own fulfillment through adventure travel, creative pursuits, and living as simply as is reasonable.

Our web pages introduce several of our adventures: North America, Canada and Australia, 39,000 miles, carrying all the worldly possessions we would need for up to a year at a time, sleeping in a small tent, spending 24 hours a day together. We crewed on a sailboat in the South Pacific; four months of white-knuckle sailing and lazy days and nights with the mellow islanders of Melanesia, and most recently pedaling across the center of muddy, frozen and beautiful, Iceland.

Downtown Cape Girardeau Vintage Aerial Photos from the 60s

Ken Steinhoff — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:34:00 +0000

Fred Lynch had a Frony picture of cars parked on the Mississippi River wharf before the floodwall was built. I had a couple of frames I took from the air of the downtown area that shows the riverfront area after the floodwall and before the wharf area had been refinished.

(Click on the photos to make them larger. Click on the left or right side of them to step from one to another.)

Many landmarks are clearly visible. The most prominent, in the left center, is the Common Pleas Courthouse, high on a hill overlooking the city. Right behind and above the Court House, look for a white chimney. That’s the Southeast Missourian Tower, which stood 70 or 80 feet above the ground and could be seen as far away as McClure, IL. The tower was razed in 1978 when a new boiler was installed and it became obsolete. It also had shown signs of structural weakness.

Way up at the top center left is Academic Hall at Southeast Missouri State University. The tall, dark steeple of Trinity Lutheran Church is at the left of the frame.

Al’s Shops and the St. Charles Hotel

Here’s a view peeking over the floodwall from the south end of Main Street. Al’s Shops is clearly visible in both the aerial and this photo. Right over the top of Al’s, you can see the sign on the side of the St. Charles Hotel.You also can see the Firestone Store, Woolworth’s, J C Penney’s and Montgomery Wards.

I wonder if all the cars in the parking lot are shoppers or if they are store employees displaced when wharf parking was no longer available.

Stay at the St. Charles for $1.50 a night (and up)

Here’s a sign on Highway 61 between Cape and Jackson that promised ELECTRIC FANS and room rates of $1.50 a night and up at the St. Charles. It was taken April 16, 1967.

That’s even cheaper than the $2-a-night room I stayed in when I covered a Flying Saucer Convention in a small town in the Missouri Ozarks. I don’t recall if it had electric fans for the addition 50 cents. I know the bathroom was down the hall.

I’m still looking for some pictures I have of the St. Charles being razed. In the back of my mind, I see a crumbling brick wall and a window with either a bird flying through it or sitting on the windowsill.

Funny how some things flicker in and out of your memory.

Downtown Cape Girardeau, looking up Broadway

The Common Pleas Courthouse is, again central in the photo. Broadway runs from top to bottom at the right of the photo, Themis is behind and in front of the Courthouse, and Independence is at the left of the photo. Buckner Ragsdale is at the foot of Broadway. The building that became Port Cape Girardeau is at the foot of Themis. The peaked roof, one building to the right of Themis on Main St., is Hecht’s. I can’t make out its iconic wind vane in this photo, unfortunately.

The Idan-Ha Hotel at Broadway and Fountain is visible above The Missourian building and across from the Marquette Hotel. The KFVS tower hadn’t been built yet.

National Register Listings

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has an excellent resource for anyone interested in historical buildings. Go here for a listing for Cape Girardeau County’s National Register Listings. Some of the files are large, so they may not be suitable for folks with slow connections. There are histories of the buildings, maps and photos. It’s a great way to kill some time and learn a lot about the area.

The downtown area is covered by three files all tagged Cape Girardeau Commercial Historical District (with boundary increases).

If you are on Facebook, check out the Old Town Cape fan page and the Cape Girardeau fan page. There’s a lot of interest in Cape on the Internet.

Other visits to the riverfront and downtown area

I shot SEMO coed Amy Murphy on the riverfront with her new bike when I was in town in the fall. You can’t see much of the wharf area because the river was just about at flood stage.
Here are some night shots from downtown.
Midnight Madness in 1964
Dancing in the First National Bank parking lot at the foot of Broadway in the middle-60s.
Mississippi River on the rise.
Shopping for antiques in Cape.
“Big rains make big river,” things learned from guy who used to read the river gauge.

Joni Tickel DID Have Big Hair; PE Uniform Girls Identified

Ken Steinhoff — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:31:28 +0000

When I ran the photo of Coach Jane Womack and two girls in Central High School PE uniforms, I said I didn’t know who the girls were and asked for help identifying them.

The electrons had barely enough time to go squirting down the Internet pipes before the answer started coming back.

I was right about Coach Womak, said Libby Koch, who had her for PE and Government.

Bill East said the girls were Rosanne Hecht (center) and Joni Tickel.

I made the mistake of questioning his judgment by saying, “I’ll concede that MIGHT be Rosanne, but I don’t recall Joni ever having Big Hair.

Almost immediately he fired back, “Check out 1964 Girardot, p. 106, bottom, and p. 107, top.

Bill East must have the doggone Girardot memorized

Joni looks more Frizzy than Big Hair in this homeroom picture, but her hair color looks close to the PE photo. It certainly moves her into the realm of possibility, particularly when Sally Bierbaum Dirks chimed in to support Bill.

Patti fisher Caid, who was a Notre Dame student and shouldn’t have a dog in this hunt, posted, “There you go Ken, two against one! The odds are not looking good.”

By the time Jane Neumeyer and Sheila Hopkins Phillips weighed in on Bill’s side, I gave up.

Here’s Page 107 of The Girardot showing Roseanne Hecht

I ran the bottom of the page because it has a picture of Bill and Terry Hopkins on it. Both of them are frequent contributors to this site, so you might want to know what they looked like. OK, and the Barringer Twins are in the picture, too. That, of course didn’t influence my decision to run the picture.

Bill’s easy to pick out. He has the same expression in the picture I shot of the Teen Age Club dance that was moved to a bank parking lot. He’s in the right center of the first picture at this link.

Joni Tickel and Bill Withers as Royalty

I checked my 1965 Girardot and Wife Lila’s 1966 yearbook without seeing this picture, so I don’t know what the event was. Since she’s wearing short sleeves, I’m thinking it may have been a spring event that happened too late to make the yearbook. Ideas, anyone? Bill?

CapeCentralHigh.com’s Business Card

Ken Steinhoff — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:49:25 +0000

I mentioned that I was coming back to Cape next week to look for sponsors and advertisers. After procrastinating way too long, I stayed up until 2 a.m. trying to come up with some iconic photos that would work for the business card and for headers on a redesigned web site.

Son Matt came up with several designs (you can see them below), but the one above is the best at capturing the voice of CapeCentralHigh.com.

Everyone who grew up in Southeast Missouri in the 60s will recognize it.
It’s black and white.
It has the feel of the site.
It’s visually interesting.

Someone’s farm from a speeding car

This is the first design he sent me.

I really like the image. Based on the comments I received when it ran, so did you. The only problem was that it just a little bit too rural to say “Cape Girardeau” at first glance. Cape’s a relatively small town, but it IS a town.

The Bill Emerson Bridge was striking

Wife Lila’s eyes popped when she saw it. It’s great from a graphical standpoint. The subtle colors are nice and the elements come together to give a nice place to put the text. It was also the subject of my very first blog post on Oct. 20, 2009.

It would make a GREAT business card for someone in Cape, but it screams Today, and my site is all about Yesterday.

Then Matt tried the old Traffic Bridge

I knew right away that this was going to be the one, but I didn’t like the Class of 1965 line. That’s not to say that I’m not proud to be a member of the Central High School Class of 1965. I am.

It’s just that that’s not particularly relevant to the site nor to who I am. I’ve never identified much with the schools I attended, whether it was Central, SEMO or Ohio University. I was always a photographer, an observer on the sidelines, whose primary allegiance was to the publication I was working for, whether it was The Tiger, The Girardot, The Capaha Arrow, The Sagamore, The Jackson Pioneer or The Missourian.

Besides, the site has already switched from a narrow focus on a single high school in Cape Girardeau to the area as a whole. I’ve run pictures of shoppers in Jackson (even if I didn’t know that’s where I was), an I-55 interchange at Scott City, the Bald Knob Cross, Ernie Chiles riding around Horseshoe Lake and written about my wooden stick phobia because of Dr. Herbert.

I have Notre Dame and College High students clamoring to see their pictures and I’ve just scraped the surface of my SEMO art.

I had him change Class of 1965 to 1960s Cape Girardeau. I’d like to have used Coming of Age in Southeast Missouri, but that was too long.

Brother Mark weighs in

I sent the choices to my brother Mark, who does advertising for Schnucks. (I see they spell it without the apostrophe these days.) Being my brother, he wee-weed all over my choices and pitched the shot above.

Matt asked if I could reshoot it with the film arranged differently so the type would show up better. “You can shoot it in black and white, if you like,” he said.

I explained that I had a couple of problems with the image

It couldn’t be re-shot. I took it while I was unrolling the Coffee Can Film for sleeving in plastic pages. That train had already pulled out of the station.
It looks like I’m pitching photo finishing or commercial photography, not nostalgia. It’s not a bad graphic, it’s just not the message I wanted to convey.

Cape Girardeau , The City of Roses

That reminded me that Mark has a bunch of Cape memorabilia at his home in St. Louis. Way over in the corner of a picture, I had this shot of a City of Roses license plate frame. THAT would have made a great graphic, but the quality wasn’t good enough. I’m going to reshoot it when I go back home. It might find its way onto a page header.

What do you think?

The RIGHT answer is that I made the right choice. Remember, I have photos and I’m not afraid to use them.

Girls, Did You Have the Ugly Phys Ed Uniform?

Ken Steinhoff — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:42:13 +0000

There’s been a lot of discussion on the alumni newsletter email lists about the “ugly” (OK, I think someone called them “hideous”) uniforms the girls had to wear for physical education class.

I found this picture of Coach Jane Womack demonstrating the finer points of serving a volleyball to a couple of students. They have their names on the uniforms, but I couldn’t quite make them out. Maybe someone can identify them.

Those uniforms aren’t exactly “hideous”

These must have been a later, more compassionate version, because even I remember something that was a cross between bloomers and a bag that the girls were forced to wear.

I’ll keep looking for the other uniforms. Ladies, how much would you pay me to lose THOSE negatives?

UPDATE! UPDATE! UPDATE!

The girls have been identified. Here’s the whole story.

Alma Schrader School Turns 50 This Month

Ken Steinhoff — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:13:54 +0000

I saw a story in The Missourian that Alma Schrader School is going to hold a 50th Anniversary Celebration March 11.

The school was on my old paper route. I guess the reason I always thought of it as being a “new” school was that it WAS new – only a couple of years old – when I was slinging newspapers in the neighborhoods around it.

I don’t have any pictures from when the school opened, as far as I know, but I was there for what I assume was the first day of school on Sept. 6, 1967, if my film sleeve label is correct. I’m also guessing that this is a kindergarten class, based on the signs.

This poor boy never had a chance

I’m going to bend the rule that “good photographers never show their bad pictures” by including some that are a little on the marginal side. You may spot yourself, a sibling or a neighbor and won’t mind if the exposure is a little off or it could be sharper.

The difference between boys and girls

Gender differences show up even in kindergarten. The boy has this “Oh, my god, I’ve got a girl hanging off the end of my arm” look on his face. His buddy on the right is thinking, “Neat sneakers.”

The girl in the background is placing an imaginary order for her bridesmaid dress.

Who was Alma Schrader?

It dawned on me that I’ve said or written Alma Schrader School scores of times without wondering, “Who the heck is Alma Schrader and what did she do to get a school named after her?”

It’s almost like memorizing someone by naming something after them turns them into a phrase instead of a person.

The Missourian had a long front page obituary for Miss Schrader when she died January 15, 1959. She taught in Cape Girardeau for 50 years, including serving 34 years as principal at May Greene School. (Quick pop quiz: who was May Greene?)

Miss Schrader was born in 1886, the daughter of a shoe cobbler who had a shop on North Middle. She started her teaching career in 1906 at Old Lorimier School, where she taught for three years. She spent three years as a teacher at the old Jefferson School at South Ellis and Jefferson; she was promoted to principal, a post she held until 1921. When the new May Greene School opened in 1921, she was named the school’s first principal. She continued to work with the school system after her retirement in 1956.

Gallery of Alma Schrader School Kindergarten Class 1967

Click on any picture to make it larger, then click on the left of right side of the photo to step through the gallery.

Central High School Then and Now

Ken Steinhoff — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:39:19 +0000

Central High School for the 1965 Girardot yearbook

I shot this night-time photo of Cape Girardeau Central High School for the 1965 Girardot yearbook. About all I know about it is that it was taken on 4×5 film with the school’s Crown Graphic press camera mounted on a tripod.

Cape Central High School (now Junior High School) Oct. 13, 2009

I published these two photos on my bike blog back in October to show how easy digital photography is to do, but I should have put them up here, too.

When I shot the original Girardot photo, I had no idea until I got the film processed in the darkroom if I even HAD a photo. If the exposure had been off or if I had bumped the tripod, it would have meant setting up on another night to try again.

I shot the second photo with a Nikon D-40 DSLR

The second photo was taken Oct. 13, 2009, at 21:39:50 with a Nikon D40 SLR. The zoom lens was at 18mm (27mm in 35mm-speak). I underexposed the picture 1-1/3 f/stops, with an exposure of five seconds at f/5. The “film” speed was ISO 200.

How do I know all of that? It’s easy. The camera records that info when you push the button. I shot exactly eight frames to get this picture. The exposure was OK on the first photo, just letting the camera do its thing, but I took a few more “insurance” shots at different settings to be on the safe side. The last photo is the one that had the best exposure and was sharpest. The best part is that I could look at the photo as soon as I took it to see if it looked good.

I underexposed the scene to keep from burning out the highlights. (It always easier to lighten shadows that are a little dark than it is to get detail back into the light areas if they are overexposed.) I picked a relatively slow film speed, which necessitated a five-second exposure, to have less “grain” or “noise.” Both photos required a little burning and dodging to take down highlights or bring out shadow detail.

Central High School looks pretty much the same today

Our 1965 Central High School has been converted to a junior high, there are a bunch of new trees in front of the building, and it looks like it’s air conditioned now.

I suspect the changes to the building are a lot fewer than the changes undergone by the photo staff that worked on the 1965 Girardot. I know I have a lot less hair to comb.

The photographers are, from left to right: Jim Stone, Ronald Dost, head photographer Ken Steinhoff, Skip Stiver, Joe Snell and Gary Fischer. It was taken in the Central High School darkroom sometime in 1964.

Our old darkroom is now a copy room

I was disappointed, although not surprised, to see that the room where students learned the magic of photography has been turned into a copy room. All of the plumbing and darkrooms at my old newspaper were ripped out five or more years ago now that digital photography has replaced silver film and paper prints.

The shelves that were behind us in the Girardot photo staff photo are still there, but our processing sink is gone and only the stubs of plumbing remain. I printed the spot news photo that launched a lifetime career in that room. Copy machine or not, there will always be a piece of me in there.

What are those strange symbols?

Any idea if the decorative brickwork above the door leading to the auditorium on the left means anything or if it’s just an accent to break up the otherwise dull brick wall?

Cape Girardeau’s Art Deco Esquire Theater

Ken Steinhoff — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:27:18 +0000

Esquire Theater Oct. 28, 2009

Cape Girardeau’s Esquire Theater opened Jan. 21, 1947, to 1,300 customers in two showings. A block-long line of moviegoers were treated to a double feature of Blue Skies and Two Years Before the Mast at 6:15. A late crowd caught the 9 p.m. showing.

It was the third of Broadway’s theaters – the Rialto and the Broadway were the others – to open. Within 18 months of each other, all three were closed by 1985. The Esquire was the last to go dark.

There’s a lot of interesting reading in the National Register of Historic Places registration form filed in 2005. [This link takes you to a pdf file that may require a special plugin for your browser.]

Windstorms and a truck accident damaged the marquee

The city blocked off the sidewalk in front of the movie theater when the marquee was deemed unsafe. This photo was taken Oct. 24, 2007, before it was removed.

The Esquire gave its last first-run movie show – Prince’s Purple Rain on Oct. 7, 1984, with four shows – 2:00, 5:00, 7:15 and 9 p.m. Newspaper accounts of the day don’t say if that particular movie led to the theater’s demise. (It scored 7 Rotten Tomatoes on the Tomatometer.)

The Esquire experienced a brief revival on Mar. 22, 1985, when it opened as a second-run movie theater, charging $1.50 a head, but it closed again in December of that year. A church held services in the building for a time. It’s being used for storage today.

When it was built, the local newspaper said that it had more than a mile of neon lights, more than any other theater in the South. Sometimes boosterism collided with facts, so this may or may not have been exactly true.

Terrazzo tile extension still visible

The National Register application says the interior of the theater retains its original space configuration of lobby, foyer, auditorium, restrooms and projection room. Many of the original interior finishes, including the mosaic tile and painted designed walls in the auditorium remain. The original seating and screen have been removed.

The multiple-colored terrazzo floor of pink, gray, buff and green blocks in a geometric designs runs up to the red doors and into the lobby.

Curved glass blocks guide you into the entrance

The gently-curving glass blocks that guide you into the entrance of the of theater are a characteristic of the Art Deco style of architecture. Other Art Deco touches are the use of steel, marble, colored steel enameled panels and curved walls.

When construction started in 1946, the projected cost was $75,000. By the time it was finished, the total cost had doubled to $150,000. Gerhardt Construction Company of Cape was the general contractor. Preston Neon Sign Company installed the neon lighting.

Few homes had air conditioning in the Esquire’s heyday, so Cape Girardeans took refuge in the movie houses during scorching summers. A heating and air conditioning system installed in the basement was powerful enough do a complete air exchange in the theater every minute.

The 100′ x 60′ building used no lumber in its construction to make it as fire safe as possible.

Remember the fancy ticket dispenser?

When you finally made it up to the ticket window, you would speak to the cashier through a hole in her glass window, tell her (it was always a woman) how many tickets you wanted and for what ages. She would push some magic button (I don’t know if it was hand or foot-operated) and the requisite number of tickets would come shooting out of slots in the top of the counter.

The apparatus is still there, but it’s been heavily decorated with bird poop over the years.

Help! The Beatles movie played the Esquire in 1965

I wrote earlier about ordering special infrared film and flashbulbs to cover the teenybopper reaction to the Beatles movie Help! when it played at the Esquire in September 1965.

You can read the whole account at this link. Who knows? You may see yourself in the audience.

Did you ever try to sneak in through the fire exit door?

And, if you did, were you caught by one of the male ushers (they were always male) who prowled the aisle maintaining order. Hint: it was a Bad Idea to sneak in during a daytime movie. The blast of bright daylight was sort of noticeable in the darkened theater.

Do you miss those days when unruly patrons were shushed or ejected?

Did you work at the Esquire?

Were YOU an usher, cashier or concession stand worker? Based on the stories that Wife Lila tells from her days as a cashier at the Rialto, I bet you have an experience to share.

Here’s a gallery of Esquire photos

Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the photo to step through the gallery.