Ken Steinhoff, Author at Cape Girardeau History and Photos

October 9, 2011October 9, 2011

Pipeline and Perry County Photos

I played hooky last night. Son Matt and I were out late working on a couple of prototype books for me to bring back to Cape next week when we celebrate Mother’s Birthday Season. We printed up about 25 copies of Tower Rock: “A Demon that Devours Travelers” to see if there’s any market for a small, inexpensive photo book about Tower Rock in Perry County. We’ve been working with the Altenburg Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum on a bigger project, so we’re going to see if they think there is a market in the gift shop for this.

Longest Suspenstion Pipeline

On the way to photograph Tower Rock, I have to pass what has been called the longest suspension pipeline in the world, carrying natural gas from Texas to Chicago. Over the years, I’ve shot it from the air, from a ferry underneath it and from the Missouri and Illinois sides. It’s an interesting structure that looks different under every lighting condition. I haven’t done the layout and copy for it yet, so it may get folded into the Grand Tower book if my critics tell me that it needs more “weight.”

If things don’t change, I expect to be northbound toward Cape Tuesday. That means you may have to go back to reading some of the older pages for your morning fix if I don’t shoot something on the road. A good place to start is to go to the bottom of the page where it says “Sitemap” in tiny, tiny type. Click on that and it’ll take you to a listing of everything that’s been published.

October 8, 2011October 8, 2011

Home Safety Tip

Home Safety Tip of the Day: Remove the key from your double cylinder deadbolt lock, even if you’re only going to be gone a few minutes.

Wife Lila and I always make it a point to remove the keys from the front and back doors if we’re going to be gone for an extended period of time, but this morning we were going to be gone only for about an hour, so we didn’t bother. She was going to pick me up at the service station where I was having my oil changed, then we were going to have breakfast. We left the house at 9:10. We returned at almost exactly 10. I went to my home office to edit some photos, and she went to the back of the house, where I heard her say, fairly calmly, “Somebody has broken the glass in the back door and it’s standing wide open.”

My underwear was untouched

She dialed the West Palm Beach Police non-emergency number while I headed to the bedroom to see if it had been hit. I could see two of her dresser drawers open and two of mine pulled out a couple of inches. She noticed two wooden jewelry boxes were missing.

Now, before you get the wrong idea, we’re not big jewelry people. I don’t even wear the 20-year watch I got from the company. Most of her jewelry consists of inexpensive things I’ve picked up on the road, like when I covered the Queen’s visit to the Bahamas, or gifts from her mother and grandmother. They are things that aren’t worth a lot of money, but are priceless in sentimental value.

The contents of my dresser drawers were untouched. I guess the perp got it open far enough to see that it was my underwear drawer and decided that there couldn’t be anything of value in there based on the condition of my underthings.

The officer arrived within about 20 minutes and was a total pleasant surprise. I figured he’d show up, get enough for a minimal report and leave. Instead, he took a lot of time surveying the house and found some footprints in the backyard, which indicated that the bad guys had jumped the fence behind our house to get out. He left to walk the neighborhood to see what else he could turn up.

Good news

He came back about 45 minutes later and said, “I have good news and I have good news,” and handed Lila this school photo locket of Matt. He said that he guessed that Bad Guy One must have handed the jewelry box to Bad Guy Two so he could jump over the fence. One of the drawers must have come open and some of the stuff had fallen out. The other piece of good news was that a neighbor saw the mopes and followed them a couple of blocks until they disappeared. When the cop walked the path, he noticed that two businesses had video cameras that could have picked up the guys walking on the street.

This evening the officer called the house to make sure everything was OK and to tell us that the first video he watched didn’t show the faces clearly enough for an ID, but it gave him a direction of travel that might have taken them past a third business with high-quality surveillance cameras that he was going to check later. He was able to determine from the video timestamp that the burglars hit our house about 15 minutes after we left this morning. We don’t know if it was a random thing or if someone saw both of our cars pull out and figured the house was empty.

So, rather than just replace the glass on the back door, we’re going to replace the whole door with one containing hurricane impact glass. It’ll not only give us storm protection, but it’ll also make anyone who wants to break in have to work hard. The salesman said you can’t smash it with one blow of a sledge hammer, it’ll take several.

And, we’ll make sure not to leave the keys in the deadbolt. They might be able to come in through a window, but they won’t be able to walk out the doors.

Must have been after gold

Either the bad guys heard us coming home and took off before we saw them or they were interested in only gold and silver jewelry. None of the electronics, computer or camera equipment was touched. After the officer gave us the OK to move stuff around, Lila found that they had dumped one of the boxes out and left some novelty holiday earrings behind, plus this set of 60’s stained glass Peace earrings.

Both the Steinhoffs and the bad guys would have come out ahead if I had just taped a 20-dollar bill on the door with a note saying, “This is more than you’ll get for fencing all the jewelry we own. Please take this and move on to the next house.”

October 7, 2011

Peeling Paint Photos

When Son Matt found the photo of Paul Lueders that ran earlier, he also stumbled across some of his frames of a subject I’ve been looking for. I’m going to see if anyone can remember where this mural existed. (Don’t cheat and look at the filenames.) You can click on the pictures to make them bigger.

Horse-drawn fire engine?

It’s hard to tell with a lot of the pieces gone, but it looks like it might be a horse-drawn fire engine. The Dalmatian and the guy in a uniform (in the closeup at the top) send me in that direction.

I’m still looking for my film from this shoot. It’s gonna be in the bottom of the last box I pull out.

Other Cape murals

City Hall / Lorimier School

Dr. Herbert’s office (clown mural not shown, but talked about)

Lutheran Church mural on building that may be torn down to make parking lot.

Sharon Sanders Blog

I frequently send you over to look at Missourian photographer Fred Lynch’s blog, f/8 and Be There. Well, another Missourian writer has launched a blog: Sharon Sanders, the paper’s librarian. She just published a touching tribute to her father, who died at age 94. If you like my stuff, I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading her column. Rumor has it that it’s going to run on Thursdays. Leave her some comments so she feels appreciated. It’s lonely when you’re first starting out and you don’t get feedback.

I had lunch with a young staffer last time I was in Cape. My advice to her was, “get to know your librarian. She can make you look a lot smarter than you are, help you flesh out stories or even give you enough info to write one without heavy lifting on your part.” I never met a newspaper librarian who didn’t love to go digging in what we used to call “The Morgue” for you. I envy Fred for being able to turn to Sharon for help researching his photos.

October 6, 2011March 20, 2021

Saxon Lutheran Memorial Fall Festival

October 8 is the 31st Annual Saxon Lutheran Memorial Fall Festival on the outskirts of Frohna.

To give you an idea what you might see, I’ll post a collection of photos I’ve taken from the mid-1960s up to the last couple of years. They’ve been taken at different seasons and at different times of day, so even photos of the same building will look different.

Ferry story brought me to Memorial

The Wittenberg Ferry Dedication was coming up, so The Missourian sent me up to Wittenberg and Frohna to shoot things that people might see. I remember thinking that the log cabins (thought to be slave quarters) were interesting, but looked liked they’d fall down if the termites quit holding hands. (By the way, all of the black and white photos date back to 1966.)

Much restoration done in 40-plus years

This photo, taken Nov. 13, 2010, from about the same angle, shows the restoration that has been done to the buildings.

Germans didn’t waste anything

My eye was drawn to the window in this upstairs bedroom when I was there in 1966 – the window panes were glass negatives. Someone thought they might have come from Lueders Studio in Frohna.

Three were in good shape

Three of the six panes had negatives that appeared to be in pretty good shape.

Century-old portrait

Thanks to the miracles of Photoshop, I was able to make positive images of the negatives. Considering that this was taken from a handheld photo of a window frame, filed away for over 40 years, then digitally inverted, it’s pretty darned good. Based on the clothes, I’m going to guess we’re looking at a family portrait that’s nearly 100 years old.

Alas, glass has been replaced

When I met Curator Lynda Lorenz in 2010, the window was one of the first things I asked about. She hadn’t heard the story of the glass negatives and didn’t have any idea what had happened to them.

Don’t look for the Frohna Mill

By the way, if you’ve been to the Memorial before and had used the Frohna Mill as a landmark to know where to turn, you’ll be disappointed. Demolition started in the fall of 2010 and was finished before the end of the year.

Lynda said her husband and other volunteers salvaged as much of the mill as they could before it was hauled off.

Cats and chickens abound

There are cats and chickens everywhere. Lynda said the cat population averages about three to 17 cats, depending on the season, how many sneak into tourists’ cars and how hungry the hawks are.

Check out Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum

While you’re in the neighborhood, you should swing over to Altenburg to check out the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum. I don’t know if they have their Christmas Tree exhibit up yet this year, but it’s worth seeing.

Saxon Lutheran Memorial photo gallery

Here’s a gallery of photos taken in 1966 (black and white) and recently. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.