Photos around Cape Archives

May 10, 2010

Serendipity in Old Town Cape

I was walking down Main St. in October shooting mug shots of store fronts. Some of the buildings had neat patterns of light and shadow. Others had some nice reflections. Others were just there.

I shot 10 frames of this building or parts of it. None of them were particularly inspiring. Just record shots in case it burned down next week.

What’s that in the window?

It wasn’t until I looked at the photos on a large screen that I saw the cat in the window. Here’s a slightly tighter crop of the same photo. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

He / She was in the frame taken at 15:50:18 and was gone in the next frame at 15:50:25. I would love to lie and say I saw the feline and managed to capture the decisive moment, but shooting it was pure, dumb luck.

Serendipity made the photo, not the photographer.

May 7, 2010

“New” Cape Central High

When I was in Cape this fall, I made a run out to the new Central High School. It’s not exactly on the beaten path. I had to pull out my GPS to find it. It’s a far cry from a neighborhood school where a good percentage of the students live within walking distance.

I didn’t spend too much time there. I popped in long enough to shoot something specific for a piece I’ll be running in the future.

Phil Ochs came to mind

The place is so spread out that a line from Phil Ochs‘ I’m Going to Say It Now popped into my mind, “To get around this campus, why you almost need a plane.” It takes an aerial to get a good overall photo of the place. (I would have created this using Google Maps so you could pan and zoom into it, but the most recent photos there had a big cloud obscuring the school.)

School cornerstone says 2002

I think this might have been the cafeteria.

The school’s cornerstone is dated 2002, so I guess it’s only us old farts who think of it as the “New” Central High School, much like the students who went to the Central High School on Pacific Street probably still call our school on Caruthers “New” Central.

Wonder if we could tour “Our” Central?

The reunion organizers have scheduled a tour of the new school, but to be honest, I’d rather prowl the halls of the building that houses OUR past. Wonder if it could be arranged?

I spent the better part of a day in the “Old” Central High School on Caruthers and a couple of days in the the Central High School on Pacific. I’ll be posting those pictures before too long.

It was astounding how well maintained Central was. The halls and walls were shiny and clean.

May 1, 2010April 20, 2025

Jackson’s 1938 Swimming Pool

I get amused when I hear people complaining about federal stimulus programs, because a lot of the same gripes were made about FDR’s alphabet soup of the CCC, NRA, WPA and the like.

In 1938, Jackson agonized over spending $2,000 for materials needed by the WPA to build a swimming pool for the city. The Missourian reported June 7, 1938 that a delegation argued “that such a pool is a necessity, that other cities nearby have such pools and that the pools are frequented a great deal and pay for their upkeep. It was also said that the construction of a pool in the Sanford Park would redeem the park which has become more or less of a white elephant to the city and that, unless something is done to utilize it, the park might as well be sold.

“It was also pointed out that daily Jackson people visit the swimming pool in Cape Girardeau, that, if Jackson had a pool, graduating classes from other towns could be invited to use it, that the pool would serve to keep the youth of the city off the streets in the idle summer months, that the Board of Education is spending $10,000 of the people’s money on a stadium that is used probably four or five times a year, and that only $1,500 of the people’s money is being asked for to build an $11,000 swimming pool that would be used 120 days a year.

The pool, as planned, would hold 140,000 gallons of water. The biggest concern was how much it would cost to maintain the pool. The City Council ducked making a decision by ruling that it would circulate a petition “to ascertain the feelings of the citizens regarding the matter.”

Jackson Swimming Pool and Drive-in

The voters must have decided they wanted the pool, because it WAS built. This aerial photo from the late 60s shows the pool in the middle of the photo. Jackson’s Drive-in Theater is at the bottom right. It’s the site of the new pool, which replaced the 1938 WPA project in 1976.

All good things come to an end

Oct. 13, 1965, The Missourian ran a story that said the old pool was too old and too small. James R. Nelson, summer pool manager and principal of Jackson High School, said the pool had become outmoded, machinery is believed to be in danger of collapse and huge leaks are releasing tremendous amounts of water. In one three-day period with no activity, the pool leaked 90,000 gallons of water, about half its capacity.

Nelson thought the problem was in the circulation system. When the pool was built, pipes were laid in the concrete around the pool. During the first 20 years of operation, the acid level of the pool was rarely checked and it was believed that acid over the years had eaten the pipes away. The presumed result was that the circulation system consists of holes in the concrete instead of pipes. Water leaked out at every joint or crack in the concrete. Water in the pool met safety standards, but just barely.

Pool has been filled in

I’m not sure when the old pool closed, but a new pool, opened in 1976. The old pool has been filled and turned into a Tot Land. If you look closely at some of the photos in the gallery, you can still see where the lifeguard chairs were mounted and see barely make out the NO DIVING markers.

Jackson Pool Photo Gallery

Here is a collection of vintage and current photos of the Jackson pool. Click on any image to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the photo to move through the gallery.

April 29, 2010April 30, 2010

Bill & Sue Roussel Keep the 50s Alive

Every class needs a Keeper of The Flame. Bill and Sue Roussel produce The Tiger Update, an email newsletter that keeps more than 1,000 classmates and friends of the Cape Central High School 1950s decade in touch with each other. It’s a combination of good news, bad news and shared memories.

Sue sort of fell into the job by accident when she tried to track down classmates for a reunion. Before long, she was getting letters (some hand-scrawled in writing styles that indicated that penmanship might not have been the person’s best class), emails and phone calls. “I created a monster,” she said.

Sue raises people from the dead

Bill says his wife is a “bird dog for details. She hasn’t mastered walking on water, but she’s started raising people from the dead. She’s gotten reports of classmates who have died and called the family for more information. Several times they’ve responded by saying, ‘Well, let me hand the phone to him and he can tell you himself.'”

Now that the classmates are getting older, it’s not unusual for some of the newsletters to be grim reading with accounts of deaths and illness. “Since everyone has scattered out, used to we didn’t find out someone had died until five years or the next reunion. That’s why I put the obituaries in there,” Sue explained.

Bill recently had a scare

Overnight, he had an onset of confusion where he couldn’t even identify family members. He was taken to a hospital emergency room where a CAT scan showed that he had bleeding on his brain. He was rushed to surgery, where several holes were bored into his skull to relieve the pressure.

His recovery was miraculous. I had never met Bill and Sue, and I was a little reluctant to impose on them so soon after this medical emergency, but they said to come on over. It never dawned on me that the vital, vibrant guy who opened the door could be Bill, considering the seriousness of his condition only days earlier.

Sue knew her friends on the newsletter would be concerned, so she fired off email and Facebook updates as soon as she got the good news about Bill. There was a huge outpouring of concern, with as many as 40 friends showing up at the hospital.

“Between the newsletter and Facebook, it was like practice for the funeral,” Bill quipped.

“If we took money, it’d be work”

Sue said the updates take about three or fours each. “People ask us why we don’t charge anything. We tell them, that if we took money, then that’d be work. Right now it’s fun.”

The Tiger updates started out as a once a month thing. As more and more people started contributing, their frequency increased. Usually there is at least one update a week, but during Christmas season, there may be enough content to have two or three a week, Sue said.

Keeping memories alive

Bill said that Tommy Meisner – Class of ’58 – told him, “I can look at that update and there’ll be just one little incident or one picture of a place that I’d figure would be all gone – that I’d have no memory of that left – but my mind will get to working on it. I’ll work on it for days. Then I’ve generated a whole bunch of other memories. It’s magical.”

If anyone wants to sign up for the Tiger Updates focusing on the 1950s, leave a comment and I’ll pass it on to Bill and Sue. Jerry and Margi Stout Whitright do a similar newsletter for the 1960s classmates. I had hoped to stop in and see them in Ellijay, GA, on my way south, but our schedules didn’t match up.