Cape Girardeau History and Photos
News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
Mother and I were heading to Annie Laurie’s Antiques tonight when we passed by Centenary Methodist Church. I don’t know that I had ever noticed the beautiful stained glass Nativity scene on the west side of the church.
It’s appropriate for the season, so enjoy. (The best part was I didn’t even have to get out of the car in the cold wind to shoot it.)
Howdy, all. Special guest post today by me, Matthew Steinhoff.
If you like Ken Steinhoff, the CapeCentralHigh web site and want to support them both, please click the above magical button and go about your regular, online holiday shopping business.
When you click the button, Dad gets a 6% referral fee from Amazon based on your purchases made in the few hours after the click. Spend $100, Dad gets $6. Amazon doesn’t mark up your bill. The products aren’t more expensive using the link. I really like Amazon because it typically has the lowest prices; if your bill is more than $35, shipping is free and, in most states, there is no sales tax.
(Of note, if you have a local business you want to support, please do so. My cousin owns a really great antique shop in downtown Cape and I’d much rather you do your shopping at Annie Laurie’s than Amazon. But, if you’re anything like most of America, you’re probably going to do $400 worth of online shopping anyway. When you do that shopping, I’d love for you to click the above link and shop Amazon.)
Mostly, this blog is a giant money pit. Which, more or less, is fine because Dad is retired and would drive Mom absolutely nuts if he didn’t have some venture to keep him busy. Plus, this blog entertains far more people than if he took up golf and chased a little ball into the gator-infested ponds of Palm Beach County.
That said, creating the content is very time consuming and pretty darn costly. Dad has spent at least a third of the year outside the state of Florida and has driven several thousand miles. There are the raw materials (cameras, disk space, computers), services (online backups, mobile data plans, travel expenses and web hosting (bandwidth, power, storage). And then there’s the pie. Pie doesn’t grow on trees.
1. 
Purchase a 2014 Cape calendar. Get more than a year’s worth of Cape Girardeau photos! Simple and easy.
2. Buy from Amazon. Dad gets about six-percent of your total. We have no way to knowing it was you who bought the 11-pound jar of Nutella
3. Click the yellow ‘Donate‘ button in the upper left-hand corner of the web site. This is my least favorite option because it doesn’t get you anything but a warm feeling deep in your soul. At least with the first two items you get a little something for yourself.
1. Gift Cards
2. 
3. Apple iPad
Don’t worry. This is just the annual fund drive. We’ll sprinkle in a few Amazon links (Haunted Cape Girardeau: Where the River Turns a Thousand Chilling Tales
Finally, a word of thanks from me to all you… Thank you for reading. Thank you for contributing. Thank you for sharing your stories and memories. And thank you for giving Dad an outlet to tell old stories and a reason to make up new ones. As long as you’re a willing audience, I don’t have to see Dad in golf pants
Cheers,
Matt
You can tell when your kids are getting worried that your outgo is getting bigger than your income. Sons Matt and Adam are so sure there won’t be anything left that they’ve stopped jockeying for top spot in the will.
Here’s a bunch of suggestions I made last year. If you click on the links there, you may find that newer versions of the product have come out. At least the links aren’t broken.
I love roaming around in cemeteries. It’s a good way to get a feel for communities: how old they are; who the prominent families are; when epidemics swept through… Most tombstones are pretty ordinary: birth date, death date and a standard inscription.
Sometimes, though, you stumble across stones with personality. This beautiful shoe in Bollinger County Memorial Park caught my eye from five rows away. I just had to see what that was all about. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)
It turned out to be a pair of tombstones side by side for Roger Elmer Damlow and Wilma Lee Damlow. His stone has the symbol of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America on it.
At the bottom is the inscription, “I MADE IT,” which you would think appropriate for a craftsman.
His wife’s stone, though, gives his phrase a different spin. “I SPENT IT,” it proclaims. Her stone is decorated with logos for designer products. (I have to wonder if those companies will go after her for trademark infringement or if they will be flattered to be remembered that way?)
Since neither of the stones has a death date on it, the couple is probably still alive and could tell the story behind the stones, but I’d rather speculate.
Penny Lou Klingel’s marker in Scott City’s Lightner & St. Joseph Cemetery was strikingly unusual from the front. I spotted its shape from a distance, grabbed a telephoto lens to get a closer look, then had to walk up to see what the back looked like.
It was worth the walk. The back side of the stone that had the kicker: “Later, Dummies.”
I can only guess that was one of her favorite sayings.
Here is a link to a set of tombstones I found in Athens, Ohio, this summer. One was heartrending; the other had a touch of whimsy.
The webosphere had been all agog this week because Oxford Dictionaries declared “selfie” to be the word of the year for 2013. For you old folks, a “selfie” is defined as a smartphone self-portrait shared on social media.
For you young folks, a “dictionary” is what we used to call a non-electric spellchecker that was accessed by sneakernet and could be used by only one person at a time.
While I was in Athens, Ohio, to do a presentation on the birth of the student rights movement, Curator Jessica finagled a field pass to the OU vs Miami of Ohio football game. Ostensibly she wanted me to shoot members of the undefeated 1968 football team to go along with action shots I have of them. I think she really wanted me to watch her younger sister, a member of OU’s Marching 110 prance around on the field playing her slidey thing. (Jessica is a band alum.)
I was less than excited. It was cold and parking was somewhere close to Louisville. Still, Curator Jessica can be persuasive.
Since I didn’t have to worry about game action, I wandered around looking at the spectators.
It became apparent very quickly that actually watching the game was secondary to gazing at portable electronic devices.
One of the female students I was photographing while she was busy texting away gave me a “What is this creepy old guy looking at?” look.
I walked up, introduced myself and said, “I’m here doing a compare and contrast with football games from back in 1968. See, in my day, we didn’t have these fancy gizmos to keep our friends updated on the game. We had to use smoke signals. The stadium people would have small fires in pots scattered through the stadium so we could keep in touch with the folks on campus.”
“Really?” she asked, not quite convinced.
“Sure,” I said. “Wander around after the crowd leaves and you can probably still see small circles here and there burned into the concrete.” Then I walked away.
There is no doubt in my mind that the young woman went back to her dorm and shared the information I gave her.
It is either going to be the start of an urban legend or a story that will haunt her when she goes back for her 30th reunion.
Here’s a photo gallery of a modern university football game, one with nary a signal fire to be seen. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the sides to move through the gallery. And, just like when I was a student, the stands emptied out as soon as the Marching 110 finished the halftime show. It’s good to see that some things never change.
