Month: August 2010

Farmers and Merchants Bank at the corner of Sprigg and Good Hope, with its strong brick walls and huge columns, looked like a bank should look. Dad had an office for his construction company on the second floor of the building, and we always thought it was neat that we had a key to the front door of the place.

My first savings account was in that bank. I was really disappointed that it didn’t look like Scrooge McDuck’s Money Bin. And, I was even more disappointed when I found out that they didn’t keep all the money I gave them in a separate place so I’d get back the same coins I gave them. When I got my paper route at 12, Dad set up a checking account for me, and I wrote checks from that day on. I carried a copy of my birth certificate for ID.

Like Cher is Cher, Dutch was just Dutch

The fellow sitting in front of the bank is Dutch, a laborer who worked for Dad. Long before Britney and Paris and Cher and the other one-name celebs, Dutch was Dutch. I know he HAD a last name, but he was always just Dutch. Now that I think of it, most of the core workers were one-namers. There was Sylvester the mechanic, Fred (Robinson) the heavy equipment operator, Doc the carpenter and Dutch and Peewee, the laborers.

I’m not sure where he and Dad hooked up, but he’d keep Dutch on the payroll well into the winter, after all the construction jobs had wrapped up for the season. He gave him his own hammer and his own shovel, and you’d have thought they were gold-plated.

Dad didn’t like union jobs

Dad generally didn’t like to bid on union jobs. He had no patience with all the jurisdictional stuff that went along with them. “If I truck a dragline to a union jobsite,” he griped one day, “I have to have a Teamster  drive the truck. When it gets there, I have to have a laborer lay down timbers to back the dragline off the truck; I have to have a union crane operator run the dragline and an “oiler” who stands around in case it needs any kind of maintenance. If I’m in a non-union area, I can get by with two men – one if he’s really good.”

Anyway, Dad came home from work one day really ticked off. “Some union carpenter threatened to shut down the whole job because he caught a laborer – Dutch – carrying a hammer on his belt. When I told Dutch he was going to have to take it off, I thought the man would start crying.”

This must have been the grand opening of Griff’s Burger Bar. I don’t have any idea who the two men are or the exact date it was taken. I’m going to guess sometime between 1966 and 1968.

Millikan Car Lot is in the background. There was a story in the August 12, 1968, Missourian that reported that four wheel covers, valued at $138, were stolen from a vehicle at Millikan Car Lot, 1803 Independence. Based on that,  Griff’s must have been the the eatery at Caruthers and Independence.

I didn’t see any mention of the opening, but the Google archive index may have missed it. A couple of want ads looking for night managers ran in 1966 and 1969.

Griff’s employee engagement announced

There was a Missourian engagement announcement published  May 10, 1968, that said that “Mr. and Mrs. Norman V. Niswonger have ann0unced the the engagement of their daughter, Miss Laura Mae Sample, to Leroy Friedhof, son of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Friedhof. Miss Sample is a senior at Central High School. Mr. Friedhof is a senior at College High School, and is employed by Griff’s Burger Bar. A late August wedding is planned.”

[UPDATE: make sure you read the comments below to find out more about the Friedhofs.]

Brad Elfrink in his workshop

Cape is a place that overlaps and interlocks. My friend and former co-worker, Jan Norris, asked me if I’d meet up with Brad Elfrink while I was in Cape. He does beautiful “whimsical hand crafted collectibles” that she wanted photographed for her button site.

Brad and his wife live on Sprigg St., just down from William, which is why I photographed that corner for a recent page.

He and I talked about local landmarks that have quietly disappeared. I told him I had been looking in vain for a unique house in the neighborhood that I photographed in the 60s. He broke the news that it had been torn down, but that he had some of the decorative bricks from it in his back yard. (More about Brad and that on that another day.)

I prowled St. Francis Hospital

I mentioned that I sort of “found a way” into the nearby boarded-up St. Francis Hospital just before it was torn down. I wanted photos of the interior (and to make off with the room number tag off  the room my mother was assigned after I was born).

“Do you recognize these rocks?”

“Do you recognize these rocks?” he asked me.

I took a wild stab and said, “Did they come out of the grotto in the gardens behind the hospital? I always thought that was neat.”

St. Francis Hospital Grotto

Yep, Brad saw it being torn down and scavenged a few rocks for future use.

Nun Circus

The photo above of the grotto was in a film sleeve slugged Nun Circus, with no date or other info. From a technical standpoint, the frames were overexposed and overdeveloped, which caused the whites to block up to the point they were almost unprintable.

I’m going to put up a photo gallery of the “Nun Circus” and some of Brad’s recovered Grotto rocks. I apologize for the quality of the black and whites. I rationalize that their historical value may outweigh their poor quality.

St. Francis Photo Gallery

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

Typical Cape serendipity

Friend in Florida with no connection to Cape puts me in contact with an artist who just happens to have salvaged pieces of two buildings I had photographed in the 1960s. Things related to Cape don’t have Six Degrees of Separation. You can make the connections in no more than two or three.