Ken Steinhoff, Author at Cape Girardeau History and Photos

January 16, 2010

What Are These People Thinking?

[Non-Cape News alert. From time to time, I may toss in some stuff that isn’t exactly from or about Cape directly. This is a story about a week where I experienced the best and the worst that the newspaper business has to offer.]

I’ve mentioned that I spent most of my life in the ink-slinging business. C.J. and Dean, two of the best photographers and nicest guys I ever worked with joined me for lunch the other day while Dean’s wife was visiting relatives in the area. We spent almost two hours reliving stories we had covered, folks we had worked with and sharing a few sober moments thinking about ones who are no longer with us.

Dean died on the job one day

Died literally. Not figuratively. Literally.

He was covering a sporting event when a wild pitch going about 70 mph clocked him right in the temple, fracturing his skull in several places.

“I dropped like a rock. I stayed awake long enough to hand the the sports writer my car keys and to ask him to secure my equipment. I recall them loading me into the ambulance and I started fading away. The last thing I remember is telling the paramedic, “We have to get going.”

They lost him at least once on the way to the hospital and had to pull off to the side of the freeway to bring him back. A buddy who saw him shortly after he arrived at the hospital said he was sprawled on a table with no one around, with tubes coming out of him. He thought he was dead and offered up a prayer, he told Dean later.

The original prognosis wasn’t good. Even if – and that wasn’t a given – he started to come back, the doctors predicted it would be two years or more before he could do practically anything. Four months later, Dean was back shooting pictures.

Somebody PAID us to have this much fun

When we got up to leave, I said, “You know, there aren’t a whole lot of folks who weren’t in our business who could tell stories like ours. And the neat thing is that someone PAID us to have those experiences.”

Someone asked me later if I had taken pictures of Dean and C.J.. I confessed that the thought crossed my mind, but some days you take pictures home; some days you take memories home. That was a memory day, not a picture day.

That was the highlight of the week

It didn’t take long to hit the low of the week.

Last night I went to my old paper’s web photo gallery to see if any local staffers had gone over to cover the earthquake in Haiti. I only saw one local picture, but there were some excellent photos in the collection. Hard to look at, but excellent news photos.

The advertisements next to these horrific pictures was appalling

There’s a Jet Blue ad that says, “THIS DAY JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER” next to a father who has found his 10-month-old daughter in a pile of corpses.

A Palm Beach Post house ad has the headline “SURVIVING THE SQUEEZE” next to a photo of a pair of feet sticking out from under a collapsed hotel.

Another house ad headlined, “LOSING YOUR HOME?” runs next to a photo of the rubble of Haiti’s Presidential Palace.

The photos are graphic and not the kind of thing that I want to put here. I have screen captures of the photos and ads on this journalism site, if you want to see something embarassing.

In fairness, the photo gallery was probably put together by a third party and the ads are stuffed in at random, so it’s not a case where it’s being done deliberately. In many ways, I don’t consider that an acceptable excuse. I’m glad I got out of the business while folks who worked in newspapers actually read what we produced and were held accountable for it.

January 13, 2010December 23, 2011

See Your Toes, Win a Third Eye on Your Forehead

Fluoroscope in the National Museum of Nuclear Science

There’s been some talk lately about the machines at Buckner Ragsdale and the other downtown shoe stores that would let you see your toes inside your shoes.

[Chuck Blitstein jogged my memory about Gaylor’s in an earlier comment. That’s where we always went for my Buster Brown shoes.]

As I remembered them, you’d stand up on a platform, stick your feet through a couple of slots, push a button and look through a viewfinder at your toes while your gonads were exposed to massive jolts of X-ray radiation. That explains why Baby Boomers are sterile or why their kids have a third eyes in the middle of their foreheads.

Mother would never let me play on the Fluoroscope

Much to my disappointment, my mother would never let me play on the machine. My boys are equally disappointed that they don’t have that third eye, like all of their friends.

When Wife Lila and I took a mini-vacation to New Mexico to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary, we stopped in at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque. There, just before you exited, was one of the see-your-toes machines.

And, no, it wasn’t turned on, darn it. My mother wasn’t around and this was my chance.

January 13, 2010January 14, 2010

Dr. Herbert Is the Reason I Can’t Eat Popsicles

Ken Steinhoff in front of Dr. Charles T. Herbert’s office

A little white building that struck fear in my heart

Dr. Charles T. Herbert had an office in a small, white brick building at 824 Good Hope St., directly across from St. Francis Hospital. That was the place where my parents took me for all my vaccinations, school exams, Boy Scout camp physicals and for coughs and sniffles.

I was prone to sore throats, so I’d get hauled off to see Dr. Herbert and his nurse, Miss Mohr, several times a year. [Note: I originally spelled the name Moore, but consensus seems to be building that the correct spelling is Mohr. I’ll make the change, but I’m wishy-washy enough to change it back if the tide turns.]

I’d sit on this table that was covered with something like waxed paper and wait my fate. Eventually, he’d bustle into the room with the scary reflector thing on his head and reach for the tongue depressor.

Open W-I-D-E, here comes the depressor

That tongue depressor was made out of an unsanded 2×4. After about a half an hour of peering this way and that way, making “Uh huh and Hmmmm” sounds, he’d reach into a glass container that looked like a malt glass and extract a 12-foot-long cotton swab that he’d dip into Mercurochrome.

Putting all his weight on the tongue depressor which has been sandpapering my tongue, he’d jam that swab so far down your throat that I thought my toenails would be coated red. Then, he’d work it around like he was churning butter.

To this day, I can’t eat a Popsicle or anything else on a wooden stick. Some folks cringe when they hear fingernails on a chalk board. I don’t know if a tongue can cringe, but that’s what happens when mine is confronted with a wooden stick of any kind. Shivers are going up and down my spine right now just thinking about it.

Out of the Past

There was a note in The Southeast Missourian’s Out of the Past Column on Sept. 3, 2009, that mentioned the office:

25 years ago: Sept. 3, 1984

Dr. John M. Freeze, Cape Girardeau dentist, has purchased one-half of a building at 2857 Independence St., from Dr. Charles T. Herbert, whose offices occupy the other half; Freeze is relocating his office to the new space.

My mother thought that Dr. Herbert moved to Florida after he retired.

Dr. Herbert’s office in 2001

So, what’s the story about Mercurochrome?

It dawned on me that I can’t remember the last time I saw a bottle of Mercurochrome. It used to be a staple in Boy Scout first aid kits for cuts and scrapes. My grandson, Malcolm, is a walking petri dish and a spreader of Plague, but I haven’t heard his parents mention him getting his throat swabbed.

Someone else had asked that very question, “What happened to Mercurochrome?”

You’re dating yourself, pops. Few under age 30 have ever heard of this stuff. In 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared that Mercurochrome, generically known as merbromin, was “not generally recognized as safe and effective” as an over-the-counter antiseptic and forbade its sale across state lines. A few traditionalists complained: Whaddya mean, not generally recognized as safe? Moms have been daubing it on their kids’ owies since the Harding administration! But the more reasonable reaction was: It’s about time.

For many years the FDA, faced with the task of regulating thousands of pharmaceuticals and food additives, many of which long predated federal oversight, has maintained the so-called GRAS (generally recognized etc) list, originally compiled as a way of grandfathering in products like Mercurochrome that had been around for ages and hadn’t hurt or killed a noticeable number of people. Recognizing that from a scientific standpoint such a standard left a lot to be desired, the FDA has been whittling away at the unexamined products on the GRAS list over time. Mercurochrome and other drugs containing mercury came up for scrutiny as part of a general review of over-the-counter antiseptics that began in 1978, and for good reason–mercury in large enough doses is a poison that harms the brain, the kidneys, and developing fetuses. While no one’s offered evidence of mass Mercurochrome poisoning, the medical literature contains scattered reports of mercury toxicity due to use of the antiseptic, and these days the burden of proof is on drug manufacturers to show that their products’ benefits outweigh the risks.

I sure wish the FDA had come to that conclusion about 55 years ago and saved me from a lifetime of Popsicle deprivation.

January 12, 2010January 12, 2010

633 Broadway Falls to Wreckers

633 – 635 – 637 Broadway at the corner of Sprigg

The Southeast Missourian had a story and photo of the demolition of a building at 633 Broadway on Tuesday’s web page. The property has been part of an ongoing controversy for some time. Rather than steal their content, I would encourage you to read it there.

While I was in Cape this fall, I walked Main Street, Water Street and Broadway shooting store fronts to try to compare them with the historical pictures from the 60s. Here are some pictures of the three buildings that made up 633, 635 and 637 Broadway on the southeast corner of Sprigg and Broadway.

The section of the building that was torn down for safety reasons was the part with three windows on the left side.

I always hate to see parts of Cape’s past disappear, but I remember thinking that the building was in sad shape.