October 2014

October 19, 2014

Parking Downtown and at Casino

You wouldn’t have had to fight for parking at noon-thirty on Wednesday August 13 when Ernie Chiles and I flew over the Isle Cape Girardeau Casino.

I didn’t look at it under a magnifying glass, but I DID blow it up a bit on the screen to let me count about 244 cars, two buses and what might be an RV in the parking lots. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Here are some earlier posts about the casino and shoe factory area.

Downtown parking

I looked at a series of frames that showed the downtown shopping area parking lots from the city lot south of Independence to the two lots north of Broadway, plus Water Street and east of Spanish Street. The photos were taken on the same pass, just minutes before the Casino photo. I counted about 210 vehicles ion the downtown shopping district.

[I cheated a bit. Because of the angle, I couldn’t see cars parked on the east side of Main, so I doubled the number of cars parked on the west side, assuming that the same number of parking spaces were occupied on that side.]

(Sorry for the cloud shadows at the top left. I tried get Ernie to lasso them and drag them out of the way, but he said that kind of thing was out of his pay grade.

It would be interesting to know how many of the cars in both locations were owned by employees rather than customers.

Other downtown aerials

October 18, 2014

Cape Supply Co. Warehouse

Mother and I picked up a chicken pot pie from KFC, then we headed north on Sheridan Drive to go home. When I got to the large building at 24 South Sheridan, I stopped to try to remember what that used to be. Roofers Mart is in it today, but I knew that had to be a recent tenant.

The Missourian came through, as usual. The paper had a full page advertisement announcing the formal opening of the new Cape Supply Company in the November 7, 1951, edition. It described a “modern warehouse” that was built with floor space “considerably more than an acre which is entirely free of posts.” Railroad tracks could accommodate 10 boxcars, with six of them being unloaded at one time. It could hold 100 carloads of product, which would supply dealers within a 125-mile radius. It had enough truck docks to handle 25 vehicles at a time.

In typical newspaper advertising puffery the paper said, “These facilities provide the most efficient means of merchandising and handling of building materials known.”

Dow Chemical came in 1966

Dow Chemical Co. announced in the June 11, 1966, Missourian that it was establishing a manufacturing plant in the former Cape Supply Co. warehouse. The plant, Dow executive Paul Meeske said, would produce insulated building materials for use in the construction of low-temperature spaces.

I don’t know what companies occupied the space between Dow Chemical and Roofers Mart.

I thought Ralph Edwards may have been there at one time, but I couldn’t find any stories to support me. I also vaguely remember a company that made some kind of fishing equipment in Cape that might have been in there. Can anyone confirm my theories or come up with better ones?

October 17, 2014

Birthday Season 92-364/365ths

Wife Lila arranged for Mother’s Almost Birthday to start off with a delivery of a bouquet of of cupcakes from Class of ’66 classmate Marilyn Maevers Miller. Miz Miller is an artist in the kitchen. (If you are interested in any of her handiwork, drop me an email.)

“That’s not for eating”

Marilyn also dropped off a huge pot of mums from her garden in Charleston. She saw me eying them hungrily, and quickly let me know they were real, “not for eating.”

Only amateurs have birthDAYS

When you’re pushing 93, you’ve had time to figure out how to stretch your birthday into a Birthday Season. Brother Mark and I got her a new TV for her bedroom a couple of weeks ago (that was a selfish move on my part: the old one weighed as much as a Volkswagen and didn’t play nicely with the antenna I had installed in her attic). Mark and Wife Robin are driving down for the weekend Friday, and Wife Lila is due from Florida next week.

Some packages from the Western Branch of the Steinhoff arrived marked “Do Not Open Until Your Birthday.” Curator Jessica will be here around Halloween, and I am hoping that she’ll fill the holes in her suitcase with some of HER fine baked goods to carry on the celebration.

As soon as she sees the taillights of my van pulling out of the driveway, she’s thinking about flying out to Tulsa for Thanksgiving. We’re hinting strongly that Florida would be a good place to spend Christmas.

So, light a candle on October 17, and let Mother know you blew it out in her honor.

Past Birthday Seasons

October 15, 2014

Better Than I had Expected

I did a post October 1, 2014, where I was chasing a sunset. In it I mentioned that I had missed making a good shot a few days earlier because the light went away before I could I could change my exposure.

I have to get a bunch of prints edited tonight and off to Kid Matt for an exhibit in Altenburg on October 23, so I was looking for something that wouldn’t require much research. In sifting though what I had talen recently, I ran across the bad sunset photo. It was about three stops underexposed, but I could see the golden tassels that attracted my attention. Click on the photo to make it larger.

Can I bring it to life?

The first thing I did was crop out a lot of the sky because it was blown out. I went so far as to crop out ALL the sky and planned to let the golden reflection in the water puddle carry the theme. Doing that made the composition awkward because the cornfield didn’t look “right,” so I loosened it back up. It still might be a tad tight.

The next step was to boost the highlights to emphasize the backlit weeds. Next, I brought down the shadows. That made the contrast greater. I opened up the midtones a little so you could see the details in the green grass. The cornfield had gone an ugly dark color, so I “dodged” the shadow areas and the highlights to bring out the “cornness.” [The spellchecker doesn’t like that word. If it doesn’t exist, it SHOULD.]

So, I was able to dig into a digital darkroom bag of tricks to save a photo I was ready to discard. Interestingly enough, the first frame of a total of 10 exposures taken in less than 60s seconds was the best. What I like is that even though the picture was “saved” in the darkroom, it is faithful to the way my eye saw it when it was taken.

It ain’t great art, but it’ll do so I can get on with my other work for the night.

Here’s the original

You can see why I thought it was a goner when I first saw it.