There’s quite a difference in the way the Benjamin F. Hunter Cabin looked February 9, 2016, and the way it looked when I photographed it in August 2014. Click on the photos to make them large enough to see how much the building has deteriorated in less than two years.
The structure, which was built outside Sikeston in the 1880s and taken apart in the 1980s, was a preservation project undertaken by Southeast Missouri State University in the 1990s. It quickly became a house without a home, with the university proposing, then discarding a number of possible locations.
Gravity will take its toll
The story I did in 2014 said Dr. Bonnie Stepenoffcontinued work on the cabin in the mid 1990s, including repairs on the roof, chinking and daubing the walls, placing a gate around the property, reglazing the windows, and conducting additional student research.
From the amount of light streaming through the gaps between the logs, I would say most of that chinking has fallen out. The roof has holes in it, and you can see some of the logs have fallen out just between 2014 and this week. Unless something is done fairly soon, gravity is going to take over and all that will be left will be a stack of rotting logs.
Of course, that’s the university’s approach to preservation: neglect a property until you can say that fixing it will cost more than tearing it down.
Don’t let those warm days fool you. Winter still has a few tricks up her sleeve. I went to bed uncharacteristically early Monday night because I didn’t want to start a fire to take the chill off the basement where I work. I woke up around 3 in the morning craving a snack and saw that it was spitting snow. When I went to bed around 4, it was coming down pretty hard and blowing across the street.
This was the view outside my car windshield this morning. (Florida Friends, you can click on the photos to make them larger. They will NOT radiate cold through your computer monitor, so it’s OK.)
A look to my left
My jacket and stocking cap were in the back seat, though, so I punched the button that should have opened the sliding side door. No luck. I guess enough ice had formed to make the door think there was some kind of obstruction and it wouldn’t play nicely until the van warmed up a bit.
I let the motor run for a few minutes to let it and my heated seat chase the cold away. My side windows were fairly clean.
And, a look to the right
The yellow 1977 Datsun pickup truck is still in the driveway. We sold it to a young couple who are going to fix it and drive it around Cape, but they are busy closing on a new house. I told them they could leave it here until they had a driveway of their own to park it in.
It’s funny how many people use that as a landmark when giving directions.
I see the forecast for Wednesday night calls for a 22% chance of snow. I hope it gets cold enough to freeze the ground. I need to order another load of firewood.
My Odyssey van took a dusting of snow on Tuesday afternoon in stride, even making me switch the heated seat setting from High to Low and turn down the heater.
Predictions had been all over the place for the days leading up to the “snow event,” as the TV folks like to dub it. At first, we were going to get a mix of sleet and freezing rain; then they thought snow would be 1-2 inches, then 2-4, then 4-6, and once it went all the way up to 10-12, before dialing back to 6-8 or thereabouts. In reality, I doubt if we got more than two inches.
“Asking for a friend”
Since I’d been gone a bit, the cupboards were mostly bare. (Question: if you’ve had milk in the fridge for, say, six or eight weeks, and it has lumpy stuff floating on the top of it, is it safe to call it cottage cheese and eat it if you pour on enough sugar? As Bill Hopkins would say, “Asking for a friend.”) Even I know that if something in a plastic zipper bag has something green growing in it like these plants at the old Plaza Galleria, it is best to carry it outside immediately.
I wasn’t looking forward to braving the lines in the stores to stock up, but it wasn’t too crazy. I DID note a lot of bread, milk, chips and toilet paper in the baskets fore and aft. I didn’t see much beer or booze, however. I guess Cape folks keep plenty of that on hand just in case someone slips Prohibition back into the lawbooks without anybody noticing.
“I give up! Take me home”
What did I see the next morning? My poor van was holding up its little arms like a dying cockroach and begging to leave the land of Wind Chill to go back to a place where they talk about the Heat Index in January.
Actually, the idea of lifting my wipers was something Kid Matt passed on: “The lifting the wipers thing seems a new trend based on this article from Cleveland. Everyone in Oregon and Washington seemed to be doing it…”
I’m not sure I’d do that in a parking lot where it might tempt vandals, but I was cool doing it in my driveway. I didn’t go anywhere today, so I didn’t test how well it worked. We’re supposed to get some indeterminate amount of snow Thursday and Friday, so I’ll get another shot at it.
It BETTER snow this winter. I bought 50 pounds of ice melt. The way the woodpile is going down, I may be trading it for firewood soon.
Newspapers are big on year in review stories because they can be written well in advance as space fillers for the slow holiday weeks. Why should I be any different (except for the part about doing it well in advance)?
I have to admit I’ve slacked off this year. After almost three years of posting seven days a week except for when there was a technical glitch, I took some big chunks of time off when I was caring for my mother before she died this spring. Once I found that the world wouldn’t end if I skipped a day or three, I started doing it more often when I was busy.
The most popular post last year was a piece I originally posted in 2011 about the burning and sinking of the steamboat Stonewall near Neely’s Landing. Two or three hundred people burned or drowned in the disaster. Sixty or 70 bodies were buried in a mass grave that I have searched for unsuccessfully.
I followed up the original post with a few others:
You readers were extraordinarily kind when I wrote about Mother’s death in June. An account of the family’s rather unconventional graveside ceremony was the second-most read story for the year. My family and I appreciate the many notes you all left.
Mother seldom said, “Goodbye.” She preferred “See you later,” and Brother David scratched that phrase on her casket before it was lowered in the ground.
Kermit “Moose” Meystedt
Our lives are marked by special dates and ceremonies. When we are kids, we attend birthday parties of our classmates. As we get older, we’re go to proms, ballgames and dances. Not long after that, it’s weddings, followed by baby showers. We have a bit of a gap before we start attending the funerals of the parents of friends. Finally, when we are at the stage where we have more yesterdays than tomorrows, it’s our turn to show up in the obituary pages.
Curator Jessica and I toured the Kent State May 4 Vistors Center on one of my Ohio rambles. We were fortunate enough to meet Dean Kahler, one of the students shot by the National Guard that day in 1970. He is one of the most remarkable men I’ve met, and I don’t say that about a lot of people. His story was in fourth place.
His description of that day is haunting. Click on the video if you don’t follow a single other link.
“I knew I had been shot because it felt like a bee sting. I knew immediately because my legs got real tight, then they relaxed just like in zoology class when you pith a frog,” he said. He never walked again, but he has turned into a highly competitive wheelchair athlete.
After the shooting stopped, he called out to see if there were any Boy Scouts around who could turn him over. “The only thought that came into my head was if I was turned over, would I bleed more internally than externally? I thought (shrugs shoulders) there’s a 50 / 50 chance that you’re going to die one way or the other. I knew I might die. I had a really good chance of dying, so I wanted to see the sky, the sun, leaves, peoples faces. I didn’t want to be eating grass when I died.”
Tower Rock Quarry Exposed
I started posting old story links to a Facebook page for folks who are interested in the Mississippi River. That’s probably why this 2011 story about Tower Rock and how the low water had exposed an old stone quarry south of the Rock was pushed to fifth place.
Mary Welch Steinhoff 1921- 2015
I wrote so many stories about Mother (some of them were even true) that complete strangers would come up to her in the grocery store and ask if she was “Ken’s Mother?” She pretended not to like that, but I know she enjoyed the attention. When I wrote her obituary on June 23, 2015, I came up with a list of more than three dozen links before I quit searching. I guess that’s why she became the mother everybody had (or wished they had had).
You can’t know how comforting it was to read the comments you left about a woman many of you knew only through my late-night ramblings. She had a great run. October will forever be Birthday Season.
The picture is a card sent to Mother at the Lutheran Home from someone who had never met her in person. I think it captures her spirit.
The Old Burnt Mill
Sometimes you run across a reference to a place and you just have to go searching for it. That’s how I ended up at the Old Burnt Mill in Perry county.
It’s an interesting building with a fascinating history of hubris, double-dealing, maybe a murder and a haunting.
This picture drives me crazy
This copyrighted photo of girls wearing “ugly” gym suits has been stolen by I can’t count how many websites. It’s been shared hundreds of thousands of times, even though I’ve been quick to file DCMA takedown notices every time I find it posted.
The crazy thing is that hundreds swear that the photo was taken at their high school and even contains their sisters. Trust me, I took the photo and have the original 4×5 negative in a file box. It was taken at Central High School. And, if Rosanne Hecht or Joni Tickel aren’t your sisters, then you’re wrong.
For the record, I love it when people share links to my posts, but I get really cranky if you copy and publish a photo without permission.
It was only number eight on the hit parade, but it would be a lot higher if the folks who ripped it off had posted links.
CHS 2015 class reunion
It’s not fair that Terry Hopkins can still fit in his letter jacket without sucking in his stomach so much that his eyes bug out. There was a big difference between the last get-together and the 2015 Central High School reunion. We’ve all gotten a lot grayer and a lot less spry. (Except for Terry, of course, who was probably the reason that the post scored the number nine spot.)
A celebration of Wimpy’s
The Centenary United Methodist Church held a one-day only Wimpy’s Day, featuring the original Wimpy’s family cooking to the original recipes.
There’s quite a difference in the way the Benjamin F. Hunter Cabin looked February 9, 2016, and the way it looked when I photographed it in August 2014. Click on the photos to make them large enough to see how much the building has deteriorated in less than two years.
I did a post December 13, 2014, that explored some of the history of the reconstructed log cabin on the road to Old McKendree Chapel.
The structure, which was built outside Sikeston in the 1880s and taken apart in the 1980s, was a preservation project undertaken by Southeast Missouri State University in the 1990s. It quickly became a house without a home, with the university proposing, then discarding a number of possible locations.
The story I did in 2014 said Dr. Bonnie Stepenoff continued work on the cabin in the mid 1990s, including repairs on the roof, chinking and daubing the walls, placing a gate around the property, reglazing the windows, and conducting additional student research.
