May 2014

May 6, 2014

What Is the Green Stuff?

Mother and I were cruising around Allenville for a followup on an old story when we started passing field after field of green stuff. She thought it might be wheat, but she wasn’t sure.

I divide the world into two classes: food and feed. Food has feet or fins. If it doesn’t have feet or fins, then it must be feed for food.

So, what were we looking at? You can click on the picture to make it larger.

Travel update

Got a late start leaving Cape Monday, so I didn’t make it east of Louisville as planned. I stopped at a rest area with a decision to make: do I take a 22-minute nap and push on, or do I search to see if there is any lodging nearby. I selected Door Number 2.

There was a motel five minutes away in Ferdinand, IN. It was sometime around midnight-thirty (more about that in a minute), so I decided to stop.

I earned one discount because of the alphabet soup of travel organizations I threw out (I didn’t actually SAY I was a member of them; I just asked if they cut prices for them. I got another reduction by pointing out that I was the last person they were probably going to see that night, and I got another cut by being a member of their chain’s organization.

Time is a little confusing

Just before I headed to the room, the desk clerk said, “Time is a little confusing here. The motel is the the Eastern Time Zone; your cell phone is going to show Central time because the dividing line is the Interstate.”

He wasn’t kidding. My cell phone alarm went off at 9:32 a.m., but the motel’s alarm clock said 10:30. Must be tough to live around there.

I got into Athens in time to have dinner with Curator Jessica. She says I have to put on my shoes and pants tomorrow for a 3-hour oral history interview with the Ohio University School of Media Arts and Studies. Jessica is supposed to be asking me questions about what it was like to have gone to college shortly after the earth’s crust cooled. They told her that we don’t have to fill the whole three hours, but Jessica said, “I don’t think he’ll have any problem talking that long.”

May 6, 2014

Dino’s Pizza is Doomed

On the way down Broadway, I spotted Dino’s Pizza and recalled seeing a story in The Missourian that the building had been bought by the university and was going to be torn down. The April 28, 2014, Business Notebook said asbestos abatement would begin in the next few weeks, and demolition of the building would start the week of May 19. The property will be seeded and become green space, the university told The Missourian.

Building badly damaged by fire

The Missourian reported on August 11, 2011, that Dino’s Pizza at 1034 Broadway was heavily damaged by an early morning fire on August 10. Investigators thought it was an electrical fire. Two cats were removed from the building, but they died of smoke inhalation.

The building was condemned by the city a month after the fire. The Missourian reported that Owner Kostas “Gus” Demopoulos said the building will be demolished, but as of right now, he intends to rebuild. According to the condemnation notice, he will have 30 days after Sept. 25 to either repair or demolish building.

As you can see, the 30 days managed to drag out almost three years.

Nicholas Demopoulos died Feb. 5, 2011

I never had a Dino’s pizza so far as I know. Our family always headed to Tony’s Pizza Palace across from the Rialto Theater.

What I didn’t know until I read his obit was that Nicholas Demopoulos, who took over ownership of Dino’s, had been a pizza cook at Tony’s when he and his family came to Cape Girardeau from Greece in 1969. He had quite an interesting life.

Click on the photos to make the disappearing Cape landmark larger.

May 5, 2014

“Reality” Is Just a Level Adjustment

I’m pretty much a photo purist. I don’t set up photos and I try to manipulate the image only enough that the finished product matches what my eye and mind saw when I pushed the button. On one of my walks from the river at dusk, I saw the light reflecting off the BSNF train tracks between the floodwall and Water Street.

It’s pretty similar to a shot I took in 2009, but that didn’t stop me from shooting it again.

That’s pretty much what my eye recorded, except that my eye saw the reflections on the rails as more red.

So, is THIS real?

One of the first things I do when I open a frame in Photoshop is decide if it needs cropping. The second step is to adjust the levels of the highlights, shadows and midtones. The program has a feature so you can adjust it by a graph rather than with your eye. You just keep moving a slider until the highlights or shadows block up, then you look at the picture and see if you want to tweak it. Generally you do.

In this case, I blindly moved the highlight slider to what should have been the “optimal” point and let go of the button. As you can see, the photo is radically different: the red reflections are gone, the sky has turned a brighter blue and the mural on the floodwall has become more prominent.

Neither iteration of the photo captures exactly what I was looking for, but it goes to show how a few twitches of your finger on a mouse can serve up two radically different views of the same subject.

May 4, 2014May 4, 2014

May 4: Compare and Contrast

Mother and I were on our way to Wib’s in Jackson for my last BBQ before leaving Missouri. On the way past Jackson’s city park, a flash of glow-in-the-dark green and a small crowd caught our eye. I did a U-turn (causing Mother to gasp uncharacteristically when she thought I turned too quickly in front of an oncoming car) and headed into the park.

We drove around spotting other gaggles of kids in fancy clothes and even a horse-drawn carriage. Pulling up to the Green Gal gaggle, I rolled down the window and asked, “Wedding or prom?”

It was the Jackson High School prom.

The Green Gal Gaggle

The foursome provided names: Tessa Long and Amanda Matlock are in the front row, left to right, and their dates are Mitchell Graham and Alex Wright.

[Editor’s note: When I asked if was a wedding or a prom and was told “prom,” I joked, “Well, since you are all dressed up anyway, why don’t you go ahead and get married?” I got a call this morning that I must have had that on my mind when I was typing at 2 in the morning, because in the first posting of the story, I called Amanda Matlock “Amanda Wright.” I guess I was determined to marry her off. I have officially annulled her marriage and given her back her maiden name. Another note: the kids were home by 1 a.m. The prom ended at 11 and the stopped at Denny’s on the way home. I guess the younger Jackson generation doesn’t have the stamina that the Cape Central Class of ’65 had: our party lasted all night.]

Color coordination

Alex’s tie matches Amanda’s dress, but Amanda went him one better with her green socks and shoelaces. This is a gal who looks like she’s ready for some serious dancing.

Our May 4th memories will be different

When Tessa, Mitchell, Alex and Amanda wake up on May 4, their memories of that date are going to different than mine. They are going to remember the clothes, dancing, music and fun.

I’m going to remember four Kent State students who were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard on May 4, 1970. Former Palm Beach Post chief photographer John J. Lopinot sends me an email every year: “Never Forget.” I don’t intend to.

Another photographer and I were on our way to Marietta, Ohio, to a surplus store where we were going to pick up riot gear and head up to Kent State. We were about half-way there when a radio news bulletin reported the shootings, although the initial garbled reports had the guardsman as being the ones shot. We elected to get the gear and head back to Athens and Ohio University, because we didn’t know how our campus was going to react.

4,000 gathered on College Green

The protest movement up until that point was fairly small and made up of “radical” students. That afternoon and evening, though, as many as 4,000 students, professors, townspeople, preachers and even a congressional candidate crowded onto the College Green to listen to speeches and to figure out what was going to happen next.

The most moving moment was when a young woman who said she was a Kent State student came out of the darkness and grabbed the microphone. She said she and some of her friends had witnessed the shootings and had agreed to fan out to the other state schools to beg the students not to allow a similar bloody confrontation to happen.

“The kids at Kent are running scared,” she was quoted by Tom Price in The Athens Messenger. “Don’t bring that here. Don’t throw rocks here. You don’t know how good it is to be here tonight. Just stay this way, please. Keep cool and stay together, please – male and female – because there have been two girls killed and two guys.”

Ministers call for 24-hour memorial fast

After the young woman spoke, Rabbi Joseph Polak called for prayer, and silence fell over the 4,000 persons on the green. Each minister then offered his own short prayer.

“I’m calling you to prayer for your brothers and sisters at Kent,” the Rev. Thomas Niccolls said. “I’m calling you to prayer for your brothers and sisters in Vietnam. I’m calling you to prayer for your brothers and sisters in Cambodia.”

“As we pray for the dead and the dying,” the Rev. Robert Hughes said, “let us pray for the living and for ourselves. We have seen enough dying and enough pain for a lifetime.”

The Rev. Thomas Jackson concluded the prayer

“I’ve gotta try one more time. I just want a moratorium for one day on the terms ‘jock’ and ‘Greek’ and ‘hippie’ and all the things we use to punch each other out.”

Praying the students realize what it’s like when people who are shot and killed, the Rev. Thomas Jackson quoted a Kent State student who said he thought the National Guardsmen were firing blanks, “until I saw her head blown open.”

“It’s time to quit blowing open heads,” the Rev. Jackson said. “It’s time to quit splitting up and hating and disgusting each other. Can’t we just once do it? Just one day, that’s all I ask. Please remember that head that was blown open. Do something embarrassing tonight. Like don’t kill each other. Like touch someone. Be a fool.”

A lengthy standing ovation from the demonstrators followed Jackson’s prayer.

OU Closed on May 15

Ohio University managed to stay open until May 15, when it closed after two nights of tear gas and rioting.

Month: May 2014