Ken Steinhoff, Author at Cape Girardeau History and Photos

July 19, 2013

Downtown Jackson

Buddy Jim Stone, still vibrating from excitement after chasing a huge magnet up the Mississippi River yesterday rousted me out of bed to go to breakfast Thursday morning. I took him to the Pie Bird in Fruitland.

I got some work done in the afternoon and hooked up with him for dinner. He was in a dead cow mood, but didn’t want to go to the chain steak joints around the I-55 / mall area.

We headed to Tractors Classic American Grill in downtown Jackson. Not a lot of stores were open, but the street had plenty of cars and trucks parked on it. (Watch out when you open your passenger side door: the curb is high enough that Jim smashed my car door into it. Twice. Once in, and once on the way out. I think it was the scientist in him. He wanted to prove the event was reproducible.)

Good service, decent food

I was pleasantly surprised to find they have a non-smoking area that was more smoke-free than my last visit several years ago. Our waitress was friendly, helpful and attentive. My medium steak was a little overcooked, but not enough to send back. Everything else, including a fresh strawberry pie, was excellent.

After a number of glasses of wine, Jim volunteered to pick up the check.

I think he’s going to use my photos to prove this was a business trip. He was going on and on about how he was prepared to take the bullet if anyone on the riverbank took a potshot at his magnet.

Then, he went and banged my car door on the curb again.

July 18, 2013

Big Magnet Passes Cape

Jim Stone, Central High School science whiz, emailed me all excited about a big magnet that was going to be passing through Cape on the Mississippi River. He sent me a link with a near-live GPS tracking do-hickey so I’d be sure to know when it was coming.

That’s Jim on the right. He’s a Professor of Physics at Boston University and an all-around big-whoop in the world of chasing tiny particles that may or may not exist and if he finds them I don’t know if he’s going to put them in a coffee can or what.

That’s not the way he explains it, but that’s the short version. The woman in red was just a tourist who stopped by the Trail of Tears overlook. Click on any photo to make it larger.

It’s coming! It’s coming!

The Paul Revere of the magnet world sent me a frantic text Wednesday morning: “Magnet already past Cairo. Will pass Cape in about 2 hours. I will miss it since I am just now boarding my flight. I’ll check when I land but will most likely catch it at St Louis or slightly south. It seems to be moving rather fast.”

He sent the alert at 6:30; I got it at 8:30, so I figured two hours from Cairo would mean that I would miss it by the time I put my pants on. I pulled up the tracking chart and saw it was just making the curve down by New Madrid. Jim may be a great physicist, but he didn’t learn one basic rule: boats go faster downstream than they go upstream. It was going to be awhile before it got to Cape.

I had some interviews in Perry County, so I passed the ball to Fred Lynch and James Baughn at The Missourian. James managed to snag it as it was passing Cape.

A pretty day on the Mississippi

Jim’s plane landed and he caught the magnet at Cape Rock. I wrapped up my interview and blasted off to the overlook at Trail of Tears. The route I took was hilly and curvy and one where I know (I hope) every curve, so I made good time. The brakes sure smelled hot when I pulled in, though.

Jim wasn’t there, but I heard boat radio traffic that sounded like two barges were setting up to make a pass. Sure enough, way down to the south, I could see a towboat pushing a single barge with a white thing on top of it. It might have been unique, but it wasn’t too exciting to look at.

Passing the lookout

I called Jim to tell him it had arrived, but would probably take a good 20 minutes or more to make it out of sight. His timing was perfect: he made it when it was almost right in front of the lookout.

Wire break = kaput

A very nice woman was intrigued by the idea of something going by that was too big and delicate to be lifted by helicopter and couldn’t be hauled by truck from Brookhaven National Laboratory at Long Island, New York, to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the Chicago suburbs, its new home.

Jim went into great detail about how its core was created with a single coil of wire and if that wire was broken or damaged, then the whole thing was kaput. (I’ve been photographing the last generation of German speakers in the pioneer communities of Perry county, so I’m hearing stuff like “kaput” all the time.)

He went on to explain the calibration process and how they fine-tune it by placing a piece of paper under a single strand of wire until the magnet output is exactly even. Once that’s done, they throw a pet throgmorton (or something that sounded like that) into the middle of the magnet and check for deviation.

Check break room for refrigerator magnets

“If they find a deviation, I assume the first thing they check would be if anybody added a refrigerator magnet in the break room,” I volunteered. Scientists take these things seriously, so I could tell he was not amused.

When he thought I wasn’t looking, though, I saw him writing “Check break room for refrigerator magnets” in a small pocket notebook.

If you really want to know what the magnet is used for, check out the Fermilab website. My explanation is easier to understand.

Had time for burgers at Mississippi Mud

As soon as the target was out of sight, we headed up to Altenburg to the Mississippi Mud Tavern in Altenburg, where I had the second-best hamburger of the whole Florida-Missouri expedition.

I calculated that it was going to take about 1-1/2 hours for it to get 15 or so miles up to Tower Rock. My guess was pretty close. We had scarcely pulled in before we could hear the throb of engines coming up the river. The Miss Kate and her precious cargo managed to make it past The Demon That Devours Travelers, so we went upriver to catch it passing under what was (and may still be) the world’s longest suspension pipeline.

Passing the pipeline

We had a pleasant conversation with some guys enjoying the breeze and some brews. While we were standing there, Jim noticed a sign that had been used for target practice.

“What if somebody took a shot at it while it was in transit? That thing passed through Kentucky and Tennessee where somebody might have been tempted to take a potshot at something that looks like a flying saucer,” he obsessed.

July 17, 2013

Future CVS Site Stirs Memories

I was roaming around Cape looking at all the bare ground where buildings had been torn down. One that caught my eye was at Christine and William across from the Town Plaza. There’s a new Plaza Tire directly south of it.

I mentioned to someone that a sign said a new CVS pharmacy was going on the bare lot, but I couldn’t remember what had been there before.

My friend said she couldn’t remember, but had read the project had been delayed because a couple of big underground tanks had to be removed.

I remembered those tanks

That shot me back over half a century ago. One of the most significant moments of my boyhood came flooding back.

Here’s how I remembered it: When I was about 10, Dad was setting a big tank for someone. He had the load locked down and suspended about five feet off the ground while a worker for his client was leveling the dirt below it. He stepped off the crane for a break, then sent me back to get his jug of iced tea. When I climbed up into the cab, the tank owner went berserk. “Kid, get DOWN off there. If you touch something, you could kill that man.!”

I froze until Dad hollered back, “If I thought he was going to touch anything, I wouldn’t have sent him.” Turning to me, he said, quietly, “Fetch me the jug, please.” I realized then how much confidence Dad had in me.

Missourian librarian Sharon Sanders pulled up a Frony aerial of the area right after the Town Plaza was built. From all the trucks parked around the lot, it might have been a trucking depot at one time. That would explain why they needed the tanks.

July 15, 2013July 16, 2013

Dempster Hall Fire

I’ve given up chasing sirens, but I couldn’t help but notice a big column of black smoke in town this afternoon. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

A few years back, I pointed to smoke off in the distance to a friend of mine who was married to a newspaper photographer. She said, “There are two kinds of people in the world who see smoke: firefighters and photographers.”

The Cape fire department has been doing some practice burns, so I assumed that’s what it was until I got closer and saw it was coming from near the middle of Southeast Missouri State University. The school has a propensity for tearing down landmark structures to build parking lots, but it usually doesn’t turn on its own.

Localized plume

When I first rolled up, the plume of smoke was fairly localized, but it didn’t take long before it looked like it might be spreading. It had the look of a roofing tar fire to me. They burn hot and black and spread as the tar turns to liquid. I was told the building was undergoing some maintenance work, so that wouldn’t surprise me.

Pulling hose

They had positioned the ladder truck where they could get a look at what they were dealing with, but hadn’t tied into a hydrant yet.

There was a white-shirted officer standing with his back to the pumper when it started backing up. I kept waiting for him to move, but there was so much noise he must not have heard it coming, and he must have been in the truck’s blind spot. At the last second, I hollered “HEY!!!” as loud as I could and the truck stopped. Either he became aware of the man behind him or he heard my shout.

A bystander commented, “I thought he was going to run over that guy.” So did I.

Where are my Missourian buddies?

I kept looking around for Fred or Laura from The Missourian, but didn’t spot them. I made a courtesy call to Fred, but got his voice mail. “Maybe I’ll have a chance to make the paper”, I thought.

I’d love to frame a $5 check from The Missourian for old times’ sake. It would drive the accounting department crazy when it didn’t clear.

I was living at home when I worked for the paper, so I had minimal expenses. Every few weeks, John Mehrle from accounting would come up and ask me to cash my paychecks so they could balance the books. That was the LAST time I ever had that luxury.

The high point of the day was when a cop came and pushed the onlookers back, but walked right past me. I guess carrying real cameras still makes you look like you belong.

No sale

Once they got the master stream playing on the fire from the ladder, the black smoke quickly turned white, then disappeared. It was all over except for mop-up and investigation.

I headed home to edit my film. Drat, The Missourian’s website already had a decent photo up that was tagged “Submitted by Alicia Lincoln.”

“Submitted by” is code for “We got it for free.”

I stopped by to see Editor Bob Miller, who liked a couple of the shots. “Are you giving them to us?” he asked.

“I’d like to get the same token $5 per shot I got in 1963,” I said.

“We can give you credit”

“We can give you credit,” he countered.

“That’s my problem: I have lots of credit. I just don’t have any money to pay the credit card bills when they come due.”

When I shot my first real newspaper photos in 1963, I got a front page byline and a check for $10 in the mail the next day. I wonder if I would have been ruined for honest work had that unexpected check not come? Bylines are cool, but bylines and money will hook you faster than crack.