Cape Girardeau History and Photos
News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
Photos taken in and around Cape Girardeau, MO
These photos of Trinity Lutheran Sunday School were shot May 14, 1967. They show that classes were shoehorned into every classroom, the gym, the stage, hallways, the basement and the bowling alley.
These have the feel of something I might have shot for the church for a fund raiser rather than a Missourian assignment.
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It’s Scout Week, so it’s an appropriate time to dredge these up. Some of these photos are of are men and boys I recognize being in Trinity Lutheran School’s Boy Scout Troop 8. The negative sleeve said they were taken at the 1963 Pre-Camporee. I can’t quite place where the event was held. Maybe someone else can clue me in.
I recognize a few of the boys. Two who were my age were Joe Snell and Ronald Dost.
Three of the adult leaders were Stan Snell, Harry Ruesler and Ralph Haman.
Loading them up
Dad (L.V. Steinhoff), left, loads up a batch of boys into his pickup. Clarence Schade is on the right.
Something was wrong with this photo. A closer look disclosed that it was a double exposure: two photos taken on the same frame of film. That’s pretty tough to do with most cameras because you cock the shutter for the next photo when you advance the film. About the only only way you can do it by accident is to load the film in the camera twice. (There’s another way, but you REALLY have to want to do it.)
It dawned on me, then, that in 1963 I was still using a Kodak Pony 135 camera. I had to go searching for a manual on line to refresh my memory. As soon as I saw it, it all came flooding back.
It was designed for folks who didn’t know much about photography, but it still required you to set your shutter speed, aperture and distance. On top of that, you had to remember to cock the shutter by pushing down on a lever on the front of the lens. After you had taken the photo, you had to turn a knob on the top of the camera to advance the film. If you forgot to do that and just cocked the shutter, you could take a double exposure like this one.
I wrote about Mr. Berkbigler earlier.
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Looks like someone is getting a new transformer or other high-voltage piece of equipment. These photos were on the same roll as the Scott City fire truck, so they may have been taken somewhere around there, but I don’t know that for sure. Click on any photo to make it larger (but don’t look too closely. This film is scratched up pretty badly).
I spent the last dozen years of my newspaper career as the telecommunications manager. That sounds a little odd, but telecom is all about managing projects helping people communicate. It was pretty easy to understand: you squirt electrons in this end and they come out way over there. I had installed enough two-way radios to have that principle down pat.
Lucky for the paper, there were two guys already in the department who knew what they were doing. My Number Two guy, Mike, had two main responsibilities: keep the phones running and kick me under the table if I started to say something dumb in a meeting.
My most important lesson came one night when the building’s electrical crew had to kill all the power to make some repairs. We had a telephone switch that we called The Cash Register because it handled the classified and circulation department call centers. It was an ancient box that was so old we couldn’t get new parts for it. We had to go out on the secondary market for used and abused stuff that had a failure rate of about two out of three.
Old equipment runs fairly well as long as you don’t shut it down. Unfortunately, when it came time to wake up The Cash Register when the power came back on, it decided that it LIKED napping. I was there that night, not because I was of any help, but just as a sign of support to my troops. About four in the morning, two hours before the call centers were supposed to open, I asked Mike the question that all techs hate to hear: “Any idea what the problem is?” The obvious, unstated answer is, “No. If I knew how to fix it, we’d have all been in bed two hours ago.”
Mike was the calmest, best troubleshooter I’ve ever seen. The world could be blowing up around him and he’d keep working through the checklist until he found out which hamster needed kicking.
He turned to me and said in quiet, measured tones and with great patience, “What we have here is AM and we need FM.”
We’re in my arena now. This is language I understand. “Amplitude Modulation instead of Frequency modulation? Those are radio terms. What does that have to do with a phone switch?”
“No,” he explained. “What we have is AM – Almost Magic. What we need is FM – Freaking Magic (except he didn’t say “freaking).”
That’s the night everything there was to know about telecommunications and most of life in general became crystal clear. It all boils down to AM and FM.
The first year I was telecom manager, I went into a capital budget meeting with a request to replace The Cash Register. Management asked if I could milk one more year out of it. Mike, unfortunately, wasn’t there to kick me under the table, so I said we’d try.
The second year, I went into the hearing with the same request, only more urgently worded. When management asked the inevitable question if I could keep it running one more year if they increased my maintenance budget I was ready.
“No, in fact, you can cut the budget to 25 cents if we don’t replace The Cash Register. That’s about enough to buy one bullet. It’s gonna be a toss-up whether I use it on the switch or me if it hiccups one more time.” They gave me the quarter-million bucks I’d asked for instead of two bits, so life was good.
Our universe was divided into Low Voltage and Sparky Stuff. Management must have known about my limitations because they put me in charge of the low voltage data stuff. Oh, sure, you might get a little 90-volt buzz if you happened to be holding onto a telephone pair if someone happened to be calling it, but that’s minor compared to what the Sparky Guys worked with.
From time to time we’d have to venture into the building’s power vaults. Newspaper presses and elevators and the like take a lot of juice, so our switch gear was almost this big. When you’re dealing with stuff like this, you don’t just push a button to connect to the outside world. We’d watch the Sparky guys pull down down a big lever attached to springs like this, then they’d beat feet to get out of the vault. After a few seconds, the spring would fire the connectors into the grid with an impressive CRACK!! and the smell of ozone. The spring-loading was to minimize the time and distance that an arc would jump. A human couldn’t do it fast enough.
After that impressive display, we’d slink back to our safe telephone switch room to see if we could find someone who could be persuaded to hold the two ends of a phone cable while somebody in another room dialed the phone number. Hey, even low voltage guys have to have fun.
Southeast Missouri State College – now University – was yanking buildings out of the ground like crazy in 1967. I roamed the campus taking photos of the work that was taking place so we could show it in the February 25, 1967, Achievement Edition.
This was the beginning of the Kent Library expansion project. Dearmont Hall is on the left.
I’ve always had a soft sport for construction workers, particularly crane operators, because of the hours I spent watching Dad operate a dragline. He could drop the bucket exactly where he wanted it, pull in a load of dirt or gravel, swing it over and dump it into truck without spilling a rock or banging the bed of the truck. The men working under him had absolute faith in his ability to hit his target, because a mistake could have killed them.
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.
One Missourian photo caption said, in part, that the 12-story structures on the new North Campus will serve hundreds of students when they are first opened in the summer. A service center has two high-rise dormitories attached to the corners. Under contracts recently awarded, two more buildings, identical to the first, will be built on the remaining two corners of the service center, which will provide students food service and recreation areas.
By building the tall structures in the valley of what past generations called the Home of the Birds, the college was able to keep the height of the buildings at the level of existing buildings. That avoided a top-heavy effect.
This photo is looking east toward the high-rise dorm area. Academic Hall, not visible, would be at the right.
This photo, taken November 6, 2010, shows Houck Stadium at the bottom. The large building at the top center of the picture is Kent Library. Dearmont Hall is on its right.
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