Photos around Cape Archives

June 8, 2011September 18, 2011

507 – 515 Broadway’s Past

Reader Larry Points left a comment on yesterday’s story about Bob’s Shoe Service that set me off to do the research I should have done last night about businesses at in the 500 block of Broadway:

Am I mistaken, or was Wissman’s barber shop in this location prior to Bob’s Shoe Service (or perhaps it was in a storefront that went away for the adjacent parking lot)? My Dad’s Parisian Cleaners was across the street at 510 Broadway.

Here’s aerial photo taken April 17, 2011, that shows the neighborhood in question. Bob’s Shoe Service is at 515 Broadway. Wissman’s Barbershop was were the parking lot is to the east of Bob’s. Trinity Lutheran Church is at right center. Annie Laurie’s Antiques is the white building on the northeast corner of Broadway and Frederick. Shivelbine’s is across the street from Annie Laurie’s.

515 Broadway Background

Taken from stories in The Missourian:

June 17, 1921 – Ad for Scott’s Coffee Store offered 10 lbs. pure cane sugar for 75 cents and promised freshly made peanut butter while you wait.
Oct. 14, 1921 – G.W. Tallent had an addition built onto his barber shop because he couldn’t find a bigger building to buy.
Dec. 11, 1924 – The Square Deal Variety Store advertised you could buy a velocipede for $2.75 up to $12.
Dec. 15, 1930 – Curious ad says “Regardless of what your stamp book may state, Bankers’ and Merchants Christmas Saving Stamps are now good any time before or after the first of the year. Do your Christmas shopping with these Christmas Savings Stamps – Profit-Sharing Stores. (Then it lists more than a dozen merchants whose names you’ll recognize)
July 15, 1935 – Square Deal Variety Store celebrates 20th anniversary with double Eagle Stamps.
April 16, 1942 – The battle to defend Australia, New Zealand and the islands of the South Pacific against the Japs is of particular interest to Mr. and Mrs. C.H. Shively, who own and operate the Square Deal Variety Store. They spent about 13 years in Australia before coming to Cape Girardeau. He was a representative of an American firm selling merchandise in that area. They didn’t reside in any particular place, but were traveling all the time. Mr. Shively said that he stayed in at least 500 hotels, as many as three in one day.
Oct. 29, 1945 – Norval Randol, recently discharged from the Army after five years of service, has completed negotiations for the purchase of the Square Deal Variety Store and building from Mr. and Mrs. C.H. Shively. Mr. and Mrs. Shively have operated the store for 29 years, 22 of them in the present location. Prior to that, it was located in the I. Ben Miller drug store building.
May 22, 1948 – Narvol A. Randol, owner of the Square Deal Variety Store, has installed a complete sales and service department for Maytag appliances. Walter R. Balcom is manager of the department.
April 7, 1967 – Bob’s Shoe Shop, which has been located the past nine years at 633 Broadway in a building owned by Martin Hecht, has moved to new quarters at 515 Broadway. It now occupies triple its former space in a building purchased by the shop’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Fuller, from Rex Lambert, who formerly operated a fabric shop there, but has since moved to a new location on Kingshighway north.
June 29, 1975 – A story and pictures about Bob Fuller turning cowhide into fine saddles.
June 20, 1985 – Bob’s Shoe Service has expanded several times to offer the largest selection of boots between St. Louis and Memphis. The latest expansion was to acquire the adjoining building at 517 Broadway. This has been converted to the BOOT ROOM, a showroom featuring over 2,500 pairs of boots.

507 Broadway

A number of buildings were torn down on the south side of the 500 block of Broadway to create this parking lot. This photo is looking west toward Bob’s Shoe Service at 515 Broadway.

Missourian stories and advertisements:

June 14, 1922 – Miss Minnie Brandon is expected to return home within the next few days from St. Louis where she purchased a stock of goods for a novelty store, which will open at 507 Broadway. The building she will occupy is now nearly completed. Miss Brandon is the niece of William Vedder.
Jan. 13, 1928 – Walter Mehrle will open the “Handy Grocery Store” at 507 Broadway, Saturday, and announced he will handle a complete line of groceries, vegetables, with a specialty of the last two. The building was formerly occupied by a fruit store. Mehrle was previously associated in the Mehrle Grocery Co. on the corner of Spanish and Independence streets.
Oct. 26, 1933 – Advertisement: J. Hughes Watchmaker & Jeweler. Repair work a specialty.
Jan. 4, 1936 – Attention: I have sold my interest in the Broadway Barber Shop and am now located at the old Talent Shop, 507 Broadway. Lester Wissman.
Mar. 18, 1938 – PATRICK – A son born yesterday at St. Francis Hospital to Mr. and Mrs. Lester Wissman, 1108 Independence street, was named James Patrick, his birthday being St. Patrick’s Day. Mrs. Wissman, formerly was Miss Marjory Davis of Jackson and Wissman operates a barbershop at 507 Broadway.
Aug. 31, 1939 – DAUGHTER – Mary Ann is the name that has been selected for the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Lester Wissman, 101 North Boulevard, born Tuesday. She is the third child in the family, but the first girl, the others being Joe and Pat. She weighed 10 pounds. The father is the owner of a barber shop at 507 Broadway.
Nov. 29, 1946 – A plate glass window was broken out of the Lester Wissman barbershop, 507 Broadway, early Wednesday night. Police said some young people were playing old-fashioned whip cracker and that a girl was swung around against the glass, breaking it. It was also said the girl’s hand was cut against the glass.

June 8, 2011November 16, 2011

I Loved My Red Wing Boots

I made semi-annual pilgrimages to this building displaying a boot for at least 20 years.

The Missourian announced on Jan. 27, 1985, that Bob’s Shoe Service at 515 Broadway was expanding. Owner Bob Fuller bought the building on the right from C.W. Bauerle, doubling his space from 1,500 square feet to 3,000.

The story said that Fuller had “been in the shoe repair business for 32 years, and in addition to this engaged for a time in making saddles, and at the present produces leather belts and other items. Fuller is assisted in his business by his sons, Wade and Scott.”

I’m not sure exactly when I bought my first pair of Red Wing boots, but it was sometime between The Athens Messenger and The Gastonia Gazette in the late 60s – early 70s.

Shoes through the ages

[Note the reflection in the bottom left of the photo. Click on it to make it larger. The Walther’s sign hadn’t been changed to Discovery Playhouse yet. These pictures were taken Oct. 24, 2009.]

I was no stranger to manly, blue collar shoes. Even back in grade school I wore a modified high lace-up combat-style boot. When I worked for Dad one summer, I had some low-cut work shoes that were sturdy and serviceable.

I think I wore loafers in high school. Not penny loafers, I’m positive. No tassels, either.

When I went away to college, I recall going through a Hush Puppy suede shoe stage. At some point, I bought some fur-lined slip-on boots in Ohio that were nice and warm when it got cold and nasty. I wore them until they became, shall we say, odoriferous, and I passed them on to Brother David, who wore them many more years. He lived in Oklahoma, where standards were lower.

Red Wing boots: perfect photographer shoes

Something lured me into Bob’s, where I discovered the Red Wing work boot, which I thought was the perfect footwear for a newspaper photographer.

They were quick to slip into.
If you polished them, they’d take a shine like an expensive dress shoe.
If you put mink oil on them, they’d get soft and repel water.
They were high enough that you didn’t have to worry about wading through water, sand or mud. (And, it didn’t matter if your socks matched. You couldn’t see them.)
You could climb rock cliffs, walk through construction sites without worrying about stepping on nails and be reasonably certain that you were safe from snakebite as long as you were around lazy snakes.

No BS uniform

Every once in awhile I’d want to go onto a construction site to shoot pictures, but some foreman would say, “Well, I’D give you permission, but you have to have a hard hat and the right kind of shoes. Safety regulations, you know. Sorry.”

I’d walk back to my car and dig out my safety-approved white hard hat. On the front of it was a drawing of a bull squatting down making a deposit, surrounded by the international symbol for “No.” I’d return to the foreman, don my “No BS” hard hat, hike up my pants leg to display my Red Wing boots and say, “OK now?”

Rarely did the foreman come up with another hoop for me to jump through.

Boots cost more than a suit

The only drawback was that the boots cost $75 in the days when you could buy a SUIT for $25. OK, let me amend that. I could buy a suit for $25.

Despite the high cost – more than half a week’s pay – I usually had at least three pair of the boots in wearing sequence.

A new pair for when I needed to be presentable – that set was polished.
The ones I wore for work – mink oiled and waterproofed.
A beat-up pair kept in the trunk for truly grody situations.

It just dawned on me that I haven’t seen a pair of Red Wing boots in the closet since Son Matt got big enough to wear my shoes.

June 7, 2011December 5, 2015

Cement Quarry Caves

Sometime back in the 70s, I heard that the Marquette cement plant was going to blow the caves that had been made to quarry limestone in the days before heavy equipment made removing overburden easy. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)

It might have been The Missourian’s story with a whole page of Fred Lynch photos on Page 6 that tipped me off. Here’s the link to the story about the caves. You’ll have to page back to see his pictures.

Pitched story to architectural magazine

I pitched the story idea to an architectural magazine. They wouldn’t give me an assignment, but they said they’d look at whatever I shot. I don’t recall if they eventually turned the story down or if I never got around to submitting it to them. I think it was the latter.

So, the Kodachrome slides spent 30-plus years in storage, where the color shifted slightly.

Edward Hely founded company in 1904

The Missourian’s story said that Edward Hely started the stone company in 1904; it bore his name until 1931, when it became the Federal Materials Co. The quarry was known as the Blue Hole because of the color of the water when it filled up.

Marquette Cement bought the property in 1976.

By the time Marquette Cement bought the property in 1976, the two quarries were separated by just about 100 feet, most of which was taken up by a network of caves. Federal Materials found it easier to dig horizontally to extract the limestone than to remove 35 to 50 feet of overburden – earth and lower grade stone – to get to the rock.

When the tunneling stopped, the quarry was about 375 feet deep. The pillars averaged 150 feet in height and were 35 to 45 feet in diameter.

Caves collapsed in 1981

In its May 17, 1981 edition, The Missourian pulled out all the stops to cover the collapse of the caves. Fred captured the action and reporter John Ramey wrote a first-person account of seeing a million tons of rock collapse on itself. The story said that crews spent two months drilling 850 blast holes and loading them with 600,000 pounds of dynamite. Some of the deepest 200-foot holes contained as much as 1,400 pounds of dynamite.

You could walk a long way

Present-day Buzzi Unicem plant manager Steve Leus was part of the team that handled the blast. When he gave me a tour of the plant and the quarry last fall, he said, “I was in the caves myself. It was massive. You could walk a long way before you came to the end of that cave.”

Columns were massive

“The columns were massive,” he continued. “They had to be to hold up that roof.”

They way they mined in those days, he explained, was “they drilled into the side of the limestone, then they blasted, then they mucked it out. Basically what they ended up doing was tunneling.”

You wouldn’t make that mistake twice

“They had a feel for what size column to leave to support the roof, and, if they didn’t, they didn’t make that mistake twice,” Leus said.

Some of the tunnels are under Sprigg

Leus pointed out some of the tunnels that extend under Sprigg Street. “We don’t know how far back they go,” he said. Present-day safety regulations make it complicated to enter what is considered a mine, so no one in recent history has explored the caves. (I’ll have pictures of those in the future.)

Seep water poured down sidewalls

Ground water would find its way into seams and leak down the walls of the quarry. Pumps would send it on its way through underground pipes until it made it back to the Mississippi River.

Quarry was about 375 feet deep

When Marquette Cement acquired the Federal Materials quarry, the deepest part was about 375 feet deep. Access to to the bottom was over rough, steep and curving haul roads.

Shafts of light and darkness

You were constantly moving into areas of shade and darkness when you drove along the haul road and through the caves.

Enough stone for another 10-15 years

Leus said there is enough stone in the quarry to last for another 10-15 years. They’re expanding to the north and west now since they’ve gone just about as deep as practical at this point.

A 1981 story estimated the reserves would last about 30 years, so either production has slowed or more rock is being extracted than predicted. The cement plant owns property near Scott City that could be mined in the future.

A place of beauty

There was something to shoot in every direction. This made me think of the grand canyon.

A shame to lose them

It was a shame to lose these beautiful features, but safety regulations would bar anyone from seeing them today, so it may be better that the stone was turned into the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge and roads and buildings in the region.

More photos to come

I’ll have more photos of the quarry and the cement plant taken last fall. Some of the photos from the 9th floor of the plant show spectacular views all the way to Academic Hall. The day was so clear that Crowley’s Ridge was visible in the distance.

June 5, 2011September 18, 2011

L.O.S.T. Ate My Homework

I KNOW, I promised photos from down inside the caverns in the quarry, but I had a chance to go to on the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail (L.O.S.T.) tonight to see gators, great blue herons, osprey, little snakes and all kinds of wading birds. It was either that or edit photos that were already 35 years old. I figure you can wait another day.

We’ve had so little rain this year that we’ve moved into the “exceptional drought” category. What you see as grass in this photo should be water at this time of the year.

Sample of quarry cavern photos

Here’s an example of one of the photos taken inside one of the caverns before they were collapsed. More to come if the L.O.S.T. doesn’t call my name again.