Author: Ken Steinhoff

Posted on

Sharon Woods Hopkins’ Killerwatt

Sharon Woods Hopkins, author of Killerwatt, is a Panther.

She divides the world of writers into two camps: the Plodders, who work on a set schedule and approach writing as a slow, methodical slog; and the Panthers, who pounce on writing whenever they have something to say and the time to record it.

[I’d add a third P – the procrastinators, which is me.] Click on any photo to make it larger, by the way.

UPDATE:

After I wrote this post, Sharon gently pointed out that it was time to get my hearing checked. She said she was a “pantser,” not a panther. It’s probably good I didn’t label her a “cougar.”

A pantser, Writer’s Digest clarified, “is a term most commonly applied to fiction writers, especially novelists, who write their stories “by the seat of their pants.” The opposite would be a plotter, or someone who uses outlines to help plot out their novels.

“I’m all Panther”

“I’m all Panther,” she said at her Painted Wren Gallery book signing on Nov. 4, 2010. “I sit down when I have time and when I know I can devote my time without interruption. I might write for five or six hours. I don’t plan it. I’m not by the clock.”

Cape area thriller

Sharon has written a mystery thriller with lots of Cape Girardeau area landmarks mentioned: Cape, downtown, Perryville, Scott City, Marble Hill and lots of familiar streets. (She did change a local hospital to St. Mark’s. “I didn’t want a lawsuit.”)

In fact, I told her after I had read the book that I had a minor quibble. I thought she might have been too explicit in her locations and directions. “Folks who don’t live here won’t care about the detail; folks like me get bogged down in following the chase by landmarks and say, ‘Wait a minute: Those streets don’t intersect.”

“You want an argument or a story?”

Sharon admitted that “some of the geography was tweaked to make the story work.” She mentions that in the acknowledgements: “As my dad would have said to anyone taking issue with that, ‘What do you want, an argument, or a story?'”

“It’s a ‘goal’ kind of novel” she explained. “The protagonist has a goal to get to (saving the country) and things happen to knock her back.”

That’s an understatement. People turning up dead, shot, nearly drowned and / or poisoned in the hospital go beyond the “knock her back” category in my book, but, of course, Sharon is a Canadian who ended up in Marble Hill married to my student body president campaign manager Bill Hopkins. She probably uses a different dictionary than most of us.

Rhetta isn’t Sharon per Sharon

Sharon denies that she modeled Rhetta McCarter after herself. I mean, they’re only both insurance/mortgage agents; only both drive hot old Cameros; only both have .38s, and only both got a mistaken voicemail message from a possible terrorist. Oh, yes, both of them got blown off by the authorities when they tried to report it.

“I’m not nearly as foolhardy as she [Rhetta] is. I wouldn’t have done the things she did to save the country.”

[I’m not sure if this is Rhetta or Sharon. I shot it at Sharon’s office party last year.]

“I draw upon real people”

If you are in Sharon’s orbit, you might find yourself in the book. “I draw upon real people. I took different pieces from real people I knew. I knew how the book was going to end and I had a beginning. In the middle, I would think that this might happen or that might happen and suddenly a character would appear. I’d think, ‘Oh, where did HE come from?’ He might become a central or a secondary character. When I’m in the middle of a book like this one or the one I’m writing now, these characters are real to me. I even talk to them. They’re real people.”

[Here are some real people from her office. I shot them at Halloween 2010. I don’t know if they are in the book. I don’t recognize their characters.]

Did I like the book?

So, did I like the book? I knocked it off in a couple of hours. When I was on the road, I’d pick a book that was interesting enough that I would keep reading it, but that wasn’t so interesting that I’d stay up all night to finish it. This would fall into the stay-up-all-night category.

In the interest of full disclosure, Sharon was kind enough to give me a copy of the book and to thank me (and others) for letting her pick our brains.

Bill said Sharon needed journalese translations

I got an email from Bill saying, “My wife is writing a novel where a bad guy gets killed in a car wreck.  I told her that her journalisticese needed to be honed by a professional (and that would be you).” She wanted a short news report about the first victim going into the Diversion Channel.

I complied with a Joe Friday, just-the-facts version that was more or less incorporated in Chapter One.

Then, not knowing when to leave well enough alone, I sent her this version. I’m not a fiction writer on purpose (if you discount some of the expense reports I submitted), so this was a stretch for me.

She made nice noises and refrained from saying that my narrative was longer than her novel. Since it’s never going to get published anywhere else, here it is. You have my permission to skip it. Nothing of value is going to happen after this paragraph.

Finding the vic in the Diversion Channel

Sheriff’s diver Frank James pulled himself out of the water by the tow cable attached to the Blue 2006 Toyota Celica. He opened the door and water, along with a two-pound catfish poured out.

“OK, haul away. It’ll be a lot lighter now,” he hollered at the tow truck driver.

He dropped his SCUBA tank on the ground, pulled off his gloves and mask and collapsed on the running board of Pumper 103 called in from Cape Girardeau for mutual aid.

“Not right now,” he said, shaking his head and giving a wave-off gesture. “I have to get my heart rate under control and get my thoughts straight.”

I had to rewind the movie

A few minutes later, he gave a head nod that indicated that it was OK to come over. “Man, I’ve never had that happen before,” he said. “I had to sort of rewind the movie in my head to make sense of it all.”

“Here’s the way it’s going to work,” he continued. “I only want to have to tell this story once. Shoot, I only want to have to THINK about this story once. The deal is that’s it’s off the record. I don’t want to see a tape recorder. I don’t want to see a notebook. If I ever hear that you’ve told anyone what I’m about to tell you, then you’ll never get anything from me again.

“When I’m done with this, I’ll give you a formal statement. I know you don’t like doing that and you’re on deadline, but that’s the way it’s gonna be.”

I’ve done tens of dives

Seeing a shrug that he accepted as agreement, he kept going. “I’ve done tens of these dives; scores if you count training. Normally they go the same way. Either the car is empty and you have to search around because the person was ejected or escaped and left the scene, or the person is still strapped in their seatbelt. That’s one of the good things about seatbelt laws. It makes it easier to find the vics.

“Anyway, I hooked up the tow cable so the car wouldn’t get away, then I deployed two floating air bags to keep the car from sinking any more. There was no rush. This was recovery, not rescue. The water pressure was equalized between the inside and outside, so opening the door was no sweat.

“This wasn’t one of the lucky ones where the poor stiff was belted in. I swept under the dash area, but no joy. When I was outside the car, the only way you could tell which way was up was by a dim glow above you. Inside the car you didn’t even have the glow. The water was so murky that my light wouldn’t penetrate more than about six inches.

“Someone was watching me”

“After searching the front part of the car, I stretched out to swim over the seats to get into the rear. I had the strangest sensation that someone was in there with me, watching me. Your mind plays tricks like that when you’re in the dark. It’s easy to get turned around.

“Suddenly, this hand came down from nowhere and started to grab my regulator. Jesus, it was like something out of a Grade B horror movie. I started thrashing around trying to get out of there and suddenly it had wrapped its arms around me. I was on the verge of panic. I was sucking air out of the tank like crazy. I had to get out before that thing either grabbed my mask or I ran out of air.

“Just then I realized that this thing wasn’t going to hurt me. It was just the vic who had floated to the ceiling of the car. I had pushed off between him and the car seats. My air bubbles must have displaced enough water to move him and cause his hand to drop down into my field of vision.

“Holy crap in a canvas bag!”

“Holy crap in a canvas bag! I had to stay in that car long enough that I didn’t look like some kind of wild-eyed freak show when I surfaced. The guys would never have let me live that down.

“After I settled down, I did a quick feel of the victim. I couldn’t detect any obvious signs of trauma that would account for his death. I can only speculate that the car went under quickly and he couldn’t figure out how to get out. He managed to get his nose into a tiny air pocket that must have kept him alive for quite a while. God, that must be a rough way to go. That poor bastard.

“OK,” he said.” I needed to tell that to someone. I didn’t want the guys I work with it to hear it because they’d always wonder if I’d freak out some day and get someone hurt. I don’t talk about stuff like that with my wife. Get your notepad out we’ll do this version for the world.”

He put on his official face and dictated,  “Deputy Frank James arrived on the scene of a one-car auto accident on the west side of the Diversion Channel bridge on I-55 north of the Scott City Exit…”

I should have been a reporter

After I threw this together, I realized why I never saw reporters with muddy shoes. They make all this stuff up. It’s us poor photographers who have to actually be there.

Shameless Plug: Buy MY Book

Carla Jordan, director of the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum has agreed to sell my Tower Rock: A Demon that Devours Travelers photo book by mail if anyone doesn’t want to make the trek to Altenburg. Here’s the contact info. The price is $14 plus postage.

Lutheran Heritage Center & Museum
P.O. Box 53
75 Church Street
Altenburg, Missouri 63732

Telephone
573-824-6070

Email:
info@altenburgmuseum.org

 

 

 

Posted on

1964 Capaha Park Swim Meet

This is a swim meet at Capaha Park Pool on July 31, 1964, if we believe the note on the negative sleeve. There are big holes in Google’s Missourian archives for the last part of 1964, so I don’t know if a story ran in the paper. Some of the pictures are pretty marginal, but there are a bunch of Capaha Pool fans our there who will overlook the technical shortcomings. Click on any photo to make it larger.

I almost got electrocuted

All I remember about this swim meet was that I almost got electrocuted. My electronic flash – strobe – was sick, so I borrowed one from somebody so I could cover the meet.

In case you didn’t know, strobes work by sucking an electrical charge out of low voltage batteries and storing it in a capacitor until it’s boosted to hundreds of volts. When you press the shutter release, that closes a contact that sends all that voltage across the flash tube, producing a very short duration powerful blast of light. Later models operated off a 510-volt battery, but that’s another, equally painful story.

Keep the plug covered

The batteries would drain fairly quickly, so some of the strobes had ports where you could plug the unit into a regular electrical outlet. Well, what can go in, can also come out, so you’re supposed to keep the contacts covered with a plug when you’re not using it with AC power. The guy who loaned it to me either wanted to see me dead or he didn’t have the plug. I never did find out.

Photographer lights up

So, anyway, I’m walking across the wet pool deck when my finger accidentally touches those exposed contacts. The strobe says, “This guy must want to take a picture, so I’m going to dump my XXX volts and make a bright flash.” Instead of going through the flash tube, all those electrons took the path of least resistance – my body – to get to the wet pool deck. I thought somebody had tackled me from behind. I looked all around, though, and there was nobody close to me.

Flash was brighter than the photographer

I went on to cover the meet and POW!!! the same thing happened. This time I realized what was going on and made sure to keep my fingers away from the light-the-photographer-up contacts.

Remember braiding lanyards?

I think the kid on the far right is braiding a plastic lanyard. That was all the rage when I was in grade school. Square braiding was easy; round braid was a little harder. I can’t remember all the ways we used them. I think the challenge was in the braiding. Actual utility was secondary.

Wife Lila pointed out that these were taken before the lanes were painted on the pool bottom. Here’s what the pool looked like when they were getting ready for the season. It contains links to most of the other Capaha Park Pool stories we’ve done.

 

Posted on

High Hill Church and Cemetery

Coming back from shooting the Tower Rock Quarry, Friend Shari suggested we go downtown to the Bluegrass festival. Rather than taking my normal route out of Altenburg, I said, “Let’s take the scenic route. That should drop us on 177 and we can go in from the northeast side of Cape.” (You can click on any photo to make it larger, by the way.)

“Let’s take the scenic route” would have been something I would liked to have said when we were dating, except that (a) I didn’t have my license yet and (b) Dad was a pretty good guy, but I’m not sure he, as designated driver, would have gone along with the idea. So, four decades too late, I’m married, in a minivan, in broad daylight, taking the “scenic route.” Somehow it just isn’t quite the same.

We went straight UP

I didn’t realize just HOW scenic it was. Shortly after turning off Hwy CC from C toward the Apple Creek Conservation area, we went straight up. I mean like waiting for the oxygen masks to deploy from the overhead storage compartment straight up. We were headed for the ridges.

See, back in the days before heavy construction equipment was even thought of, road builders didn’t have the ability to cut the tops off hills and fill in the valleys. You rode the ridges, which are generally pretty twisty-turny.

Shades of Wolf Creek Pass

A line from Wolf Creek Pass, a C.W. McCall song about a couple of truckers with a load full of chickens who lost their brakes on the downhill side of the Continental Divide came to mind. “Well, from there on down, it just weren’t real purdy; it was hairpin county and switchback city. One of them looked like a can of worms; another one looked like malaria germs.”

I looked at the GPS and told Shari, “We’re fixin’ to come up on a curve that would let us touch our tail if this thing was just a little longer.” I forgot to mention that Hwy CC turned into CR 535, which is gravel. We hit on uphill stretch that was so steep that we lost traction and I thought we were going to have to back down to the bottom to get a fresh run at it. It WAS scenic, however.

Church at the top of the hill

Finally, we hit the top of a hill where there was clearing. On the top of that clearing was a white frame building that looked like a church or a school house. I tried to make out a name, but couldn’t. It was getting late in the afternoon, so we kept plugging on.

Proctor & Gamble aerial

Eventually, we turned off CR 535 onto CR 525 and I saw on the GPS that we were getting closer and closer to the Mississippi River. Finally it dawned on me that we were coming into Neely’s Landing from the north. CR525 became Hwy J and hooked around the Proctor & Gamble plant. I had photographed it from the air in the spring, but didn’t have a clue how big it was until we kept passing gate after gate. That took us onto 177 like I had predicted. Eventually we made it to Water Street and heard some good music.

Let’s go back to the school

A couple of days later, I said to Mother, “Hop in the car. I’m going to see if you’ve ever been on this road before.” Unlike with Shari, we started on the south end of the road. She knew where Proctor and Gamble was, thought she had been through Neely’s Landing, but didn’t think she’d ever been up in the ridges around Apple Creek Conservation area.

I wanted to take a second gander at this building. It appeared to be in good shape. The paint was peeling off it, but it looked like a bad paint job, not neglect. There’s a chain link fence around the property that’s so new it still has the bar code stickers on it.

Looking through the window

The windows looked like they had been replaced not long ago; the pews, which looked padded, appear to either be new or in extremely good shape. The floor looks solid and the walls have either been stripped of paint or they’ve been recently plastered or drywalled.

No name on the building

There’s a wooden plaque that looks like it might have contained a name at one time, but there’s no visible writing on it today.

Small cemetery behind church

There’s a small, well-kept cemetery behind the building.

The gravestones are relatively new

I didn’t spend much time poking around, but one of the oldest markers I saw was for a World War II PFC named Ralph Craft. He was born (it looked like) Sept. 6, 1925, and died Oct. 17, 1946.

This stone, which looks like it might have been chipped by a mower, only dates back to 1949.

Some markers are from the last decade

A large percentage of the makers are from the late 1990s up to as recently as 2010.

Restroom facilities out back

An outhouse serves as a restroom.

Child’s grave has surprise

I always have a strong emotional response when I see a child’s stone in the cemetery. This one was particularly touching because of the toys on the right side of the stone. I don’t know if they are still there because there’s little traffic in the cemetery or if any visitors who do come this way respect what they stand for.

While photographing this pair of stones – a brother and a sister who died of unrelated causes – I thought something looked odd, but couldn’t quite place what it was. Then it dawned on me: the statue of the dog is holding a lantern. And, the bulb in the lantern was glowing in the late evening light. (You might even be able to see it in the photo if you look closely.) That’s when I noticed it was a solar light.

Blumental graves gave clue

Reader Keith Robinson was in town visiting his dad and stopped by. I was describing my mystery when he suggested we pull up Google Maps to see if we could spot the building. Indeed, it was clearly visible, but unidentified. Up the road a piece, though, was a marker for High Hill School.

I did a search of Missourian archives for High Hill and came up with some obits for several people, including Michelle Blumenthal. They mentioned interment in High Hill Cemetery. A couple of them said the deceased had been members of High Hill Church of God.

Michelle’s brother, Christopher Michael Blumenthal, died at 12 of complications from heart surgery in 2003. Dammit, it’s OLD people who are supposed to die, not kids.

So, it looks like the cemetery is named High Hill and the church might be as well, although I don’t know if it’s still a Church of God congregation. I don’t know if High Hill School still exists, either. Looks like another excuse to take the scenic ridge route.

 

 

Posted on

Veterans Day Flag Display

Mother suggested we swing by North County Park to see the flag display on the way to run some errands. I have to admit that I wasn’t all that crazy about doing it because I shot it Veterans Day 2010.

Here’s something I learned at my third newspaper: Things are going to keep coming around like clockwork. When you shoot an event the first time, it’s exciting. Well, maybe not exciting, but interesting. When the anniversary of that event comes around the next year, you have to scratch to drum up some enthusiasm for it. Just before the third iteration of it came around, I found myself gathering up my portfolio and sending out resumes. There was always a little cog in my head that would click when I recognized it was time to head out to a new newspaper.

Finally, by the time I got to The Palm Beach Post, I figured out that all newspapers were screwed up and, when you find one that’s a little less screwed up than most, you should stay. When I was coming up on my magic three-year anniversary at The Post, they made me department head, so I could send other photographers out to shoot that recurring assignment.

Headed off to active duty

So, anyway, we ended up at the park. Even though I had been there, done that, it’s such a moving spectacle, particularly on a windy day, that I had to get the camera out. There was a photographer and a young couple dressed in Navy duds blocking traffic while she was taking their photo. When I say “young,” I mean young enough that they looked like they should be playing with plastic boats in the bathtub, not going off to active duty, which is where they were headed.

It’s considered bad form to horn in on another photographer’s shoot, so I took this from a discrete distance and then left them alone.

Just back from Afghanistan

When I got out of the car, a young guy wearing a black Airborne T-shirt had just taken some photos and was walking back to his car.

“Sure is purty, ain’t it,” I said in passing.

“It is to me,” he said. “I just got back from Afghanistan.”

All I had time to say before he disappeared was, “Thank you for your service.”

Missourian blogger James Baughn beat me to the story this morning, but I can’t improve on his headline, “Blog without words: Veterans Day flag display at Cape County Park North.”

More flag photos

Be warned: if I’m in Cape next year at this time, I’m either going to have to get my portfolio ready to mail or I’m going to have to skip going to North County Park. Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the picture to move through the gallery.

About Proudly powered by WordPress