December 2010

December 27, 2010December 28, 2014

Shoe Factory Neighborhood

I can’t believe I missed this aerial photo of the old shoe factory plant I shot April 14, 1964, when I ran the piece on the site being the new home of the Isle of Capri Casino. You can clearly see the infamous jog in Main Street that will be straightened.

Jog provided challenge

Reader John Burciaga shared this story about the jog: My only brother, Joe, Jr., 9 years older, was quite adventurous as a youngster. He and a buddy used to race side by side from downtown Main St. to the shoe factory site, where the sharp “dogleg” zig-zags left-to-right. This was always late at night, being careful police cars were not around, or traffic from the opposite direction. He never got hurt but I recall he tore a door off–reminding me a bit of the movie Rebel Without A Cause and the great chase to see who would bail out of his auto first before the drop-off.

This undated wreck photo from the 60s probably wasn’t caused by the zig-zag. It happened north of the jog and the car was southbound. You can barely see a building in the background that says “Cafe and Tavern.” The 1969 City Directory didn’t list the full name of the establishment.

Windows were painted

This shot of the wreck from the other direction shows the heavy-duty power lines feeding into the shoe factory and the painted windows. The only reason I can think for painting the windows would be to diffuse the light coming through them so there wouldn’t be any glare inside.

Old building at bottom of Mill Street

This old building at the bottom of Mill Street and south of the shoe factory, was still there in the spring when I shot a freight train going by.

Fairway Market No. 2

Missourian photographer Fred Lynch ran a Frony photo of shoe factory workers on strike in 1962 in his blog Dec. 3, 2010. He identified a building in the background as being the Fairway Market No. 2.

It’s been a number of things in the intervening years. Oct. 20,2009, a sign on the front of the building said that it was NOW OPEN as Margarita Mama’s. I don’t know how long they lasted or if they are still open. The Missourian had a number of stories detailing problems with the establishment’s liquor license.

I did see a notice that a tax lien against the property was discharged Dec. 10 of this year.

Red Star Baptist Church

The Red Star Baptist Church is outside the casino area, as far as I know, but I’m tossing in a photo of it since it’s been a Red Star landmark. I remember it being right on the edge of the flood waters in 1993. I’ll revisit that area when those negatives surface.

December 26, 2010December 31, 2012

Lila’s Chicken ‘n’ Dumplings

When it came time to plan the Steinhoff Christmas Dinner, the consensus was that we had hit the turkey saturation point after Thanksgiving. Wife Lila said she’d make her Grandma Hoffman’s Chicken ‘n’ Dumplings for a change. I did a video of the tailend of the project (nap magnet, you know) and talked her into sharing how she made them. (They’ve been rebranded Lila’s C & Ds since Grandma Hoffman is no longer with us.)

Grandma Hoffman’s Chicken ‘n’ Dumplings

In Lila’s words:

I learned to make chicken and dumplings when I was about 12 years old by watching my grandmother, Christine Hoffman. I stood next to her while she cooked and remembered what she did. Luckily she and I were on the same cooking wavelength, so what she did translated well. I understood ‘a handful’ of this or ‘about that much’ of something else.

The recipe that follows is transcribed from my memory. I never had specific measurements and the recipe was never written it down.

Chicken and dumpling ingredients

1 lb chicken
1 egg
1/2 cup sliced carrots
1/2 cup sliced celery
1/2 cup sliced onions
1 clove finely chopped garlic
1/2 cup finely chopped parsley (if using dry, use 1 tablespoon)
1 carton of chicken broth
all-purpose flour
Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Chicken preparation

I do the chicken in a pressure cooker for 20 minutes to speed up the process. Cook chicken with about 2 inches of water and add sliced carrots, sliced celery, sliced onion, chopped garlic and parsley. Add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt and a few twists of fresh ground pepper.

(Or if you have the time and patience, you can put it all into a stew pot, cover it with water and simmer it for 2 or 3 hours.)

Once the chicken is done, remove the meat and vegetables with a slotted spoon, so that you have only broth in the pan. Add a carton of low sodium, fat free chicken broth to that in the pot to make about 6 cups of broth and heat to a simmering boil.

Making dumplings video

In a deep bowl, whisk an egg and one cup of cooled chicken broth. Add flour in small amounts and whisk until mixture becomes too thick to whisk. Use a spoon to stir in more flour until the mixture is a soft dough.

Put a generous amount of flour on a pastry cloth. Place a 3-inch in diameter ball of dough on the cloth and cover it with more flour. Pat the dough flat and flip it several times until it looks rectangular. Flour a rolling pin and very lightly roll the dough thin, about 1/8-inch thick.

Cut with pizza wheel

Use a pizza wheel to cut the thin dough into dumpling sized squares. Drop the cut dumplings, one at a time, into chicken broth brought to a rolling boil.

While the first batch of dumplings is cooking, place another 3″ ball of dough on the floured pastry cloth and repeat the process.

When the next dumplings have been cut, use a slotted spoon to remove the first batch of dumplings from the broth into the container with the chicken. Repeat the process until all the dough has been used.

The broth will be thick by the time the last batch of dumplings is cooked. Empty that last batch of dumplings and the remaining broth into the container with the rest of the dumplings, chicken and vegetables.

Stir to mix with a wooden spoon. (A metal utensil will cause the dumplings to tear.)

This amount serves 4 to 6.

Other Lila cooking tips

Wife Lila has helped my former food editor coworker Jan Norris with some other cooking projects:

December 26, 2010

Teen Age Club Mystery Men

I was experimenting with new film and developer combinations to find ones that would let me shoot under the lowest light levels. On a trip back to Cape, I stopped by the Teen Age Club and shot a roll of film I was testing. For some reason or another, that film got stuck away somewhere for about ten years.

By that time, I figured it would be heat or light fogged, but I went ahead and processed it anyway. I was surprised to find that it had these images had survived. Since any real use had long passed, I threw it in with the rest of the coffee can film, where it languished until this weekend.

I sort of like this shot of the kid on the motorcycle. He looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t put a name to the face.

Who are these guys?

All I know is that they were shot at the Teen Age Club. The negative sleeve says 10/9/68-2. That could mean one of three things:

The film was one of two rolls shot on 10/9/68
The film was processed along with another roll on 10/9/68
The film was placed in a recycled sleeve I had kicking around that had the date 10/9/68 on it.

The two adults show up in a lot of the pictures.

Keeping a close eye on things

They look like no-nonsense guys.

But they had good rapport with the kids

Teen Age Club photo gallery

Since I have questions and no answers, I’ll throw everything into a gallery, including some marginal shots, and let you fill in the blanks. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery.

December 23, 2010

Cape Snows of the 1960s

I see that there’s a pretty good chance Cape is going to have a white Christmas. I haven’t gone back to see if my supposition is true, but it seems like Cape is getting more snow that when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s.

When the first possible hint of snow was in the news – remember, we didn’t have The Weather Channel back then – we were nose-glued to the window. We didn’t have a lot to go on: there was a weather map in the paper with some squiggly lines, a few radio newscasts and a morning and evening TV news program. We didn’t have satellite images and fancy computer models. (Here in Florida, we had one local radio talk show host who said his station had Dope-ler Radar. Some dope would amble over and look out the window to see if anything was falling out of the sky.)

We kids were hoping that it would snow enough to close the schools. All night long, I’d creep into the living room and look up at the street light in front of the house to see if I could catch a hint of a snowflake. Unfortunately for us, it seemed like the snow always stopped somewhere around Perryville and school would be open. If there was a dusting of white heavier than dandruff on a black suit, we’d whine, “What are they trying to do, get us killed on the road?”

No children were harmed

When you look at the video of the snowball fight that produced this still frame, you might wonder how any of the Steinhoff children reached majority, but I assure you that no children were harmed in the making of this movie. I’m pretty sure that Mother exacted some kind of revenge on Dad, though.

Hacking a path to the wood pile

We had a wood fireplace in the basement that heated the room where we spent most of our time. The chimney flue went up the middle of the house, so the basement fire caused the wall between the kitchen and the living room to get toasty warm, helping the furnace stay ahead of the cold. Unfortunately, the wood pile was 75 feet from the basement door. We had to clear a path before we could bring in the wood.

Home movie of snows

Here are several clips of snows that were filmed at our house on Kingsway Drive near Kurre Lane. You can tell by the snow depth that they weren’t all taken at the same time, but I don’t have an exact date except after 1960. These were taken with an 8mm Bell & Howell movie camera, dubbed onto VHS tape and then converted to a digital format with an ION Audio VCR 2 PC USB VHS Video to Computer Converter.

Those white lines in some of the clips were scratches on the film made forty-plus years ago.

It’s Christmas Eve. I suspect that most of you will have better things to do over the next few days, so we’re going to slack off. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year if we don’t see you before then.