Patches from the Past

Patches 01-07-2015Wife Lila was shuffling some stuff around this afternoon and ran across this pile of patches. (You can click on the photo to make it larger.)

When the Kid Matt and Kid Adam were in middle school and early high school, they had denim jackets that Lila would decorate with patches we had picked up from our travels and from Scouts. The ones on the left are mostly Scout patches; the ones on the right include a lot we got from our Great Family Vacation Out West in 1990.

When the kids outgrew their jackets, their mother would painstakingly take off the old patches and either move them to a new jacket or replace them with newer souvenirs.

The kids got T-shirts from me

Matt and Malcolm Steinhoff in Bunny Bread Shirt 04-20-2005When I was on the road, I’d look for custom T-shirts. If there was any kind of big event going on, some entrepreneur would come up with a design, run off a couple hundred shirts and skip town before anybody came around checking if he had a license. I saw a T-Shirt guy get rousted by a couple of cops in Key West during the Boatlift. After a few minutes of conversation, the cops walked off with shirts and the guys were given two days to get out of town (by that time their stock would be gone).

They were usually cheap – $3 or $4 apiece – they were easy to pack, and they were unlikely to be worn by any other kid in their classes.

In that category: Cuban Boatlift; the Whigham, Georgia, Rattlesnake Roundup; Wheeler’s Bar’s Million-Dollar Log; the Pope’s visit to Miami; all kinds of hurricane commemorative shirts; Don’t Mess with Texas, and one from Two Egg, FL. I have two large plastic containers of shirts in the top of the closet just waiting for a quilt or something to spring from them.

That’s Grandson Malcolm in a Bunny Bread T-shirt picked up in Cape at the Used Bread Store. He’s a lot cuter nowadays. His father, Matt, is, well, older.

Rusty – Wild as the Rest

Ruesler's signTerry Hopkins‘ dad’s box of General Sign Company signs coughed up this billboard of Rusty, Rueseler’s Chevrolet’s mascot along with the “Rueseler’s are as Wild as the West Rest!” slogan.

Neon version of Rusty

Rueseler Chevrolet Summer 1966A neon version of Rusty graced the top of the dealership on South Kingshighway. Here’s a link to more photos and the story.

It has a bunch of comments from folks who remember buying muscle cars there, and a note from someone who knows what happened to the big sign.

Fort A Changes

155 BellvueJesse James sent me a set of photos he shot while he was in Cape over the Christmas holidays. He happened to be at the end of Bellevue, which was the site of Civil War Fort A.

The old apartment building at 155 Bellevue has been razed and the land cleared for some kind of project. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

Not much of a loss

Bellvue Street - site of Civil War Fort A 04-07-2011I usually lament the passing of buildings, but this apartment wasn’t much even when I used to visit a reporter friend there in the mid-1960s. Here’s what it looked like in 2011.

I did a Missourian search to see if there had been any stories about what was going on, but nothing popped up. Most of the briefs associated with that address were miscellaneous moperies that showed up in the police briefs.

It looks like Jesse’s photo shows the tree behind the apartment has been saved.

From the air

Aerial of Fort A area at east end of Bellvue Street 04-17-2011Here’s an overview of the neighborhood taken in 2011. The apartment is the white building to the left and below the Fort A label.

A Missourian hangout

Missourian 2Arlene Southern’s apartment was the unofficial hangout for The Missourian’s younger staffers. Jerry Obermark, left, covered cops. Denny O’Neil was one of the most talented writers I ever worked with. He and Jerry went with me to cover the Buck Nelson Flying Saucer Convention in the Missouri Ozarks.

I chased former managing editor Don Gordon down in North Carolina a couple of summers ago. He still talked about how preppy-looking Mary Beth Vawter talked her way into an interview with Barry Goldwater’s wife when Barry was campaigning in Cairo in 1964.

Tall-hair Arlene was the improbable choice for religion editor. She might have been the one who made the mistake of slugging the church briefs “god junk.” Her readers weren’t happy when the composing room forgot to take the slug out before the story ran in the paper.

You notice the table is set for four. I must have been relegated to the kids’ table.

They should hire some high school kid

155 BellvueOf course, grousing about our jobs, pay, hours and assignments took up a lot of our time. I remember when the gripe stick was passed to me one night.

I said, “Yeah, they ought to hire some high school kid to do the scut work to free us up to do really important stories.” When I looked up, everybody was grinning. That’s when I realized that was exactly what The Missourian had done: I was that high school kid.

There was a rumor that some illegal herbs might have been burned in that apartment, but the group protected my innocence and never did anything like that in my presence. They probably should have loosened up a bit so I wasn’t so surprised when I got to Ohio University. The first time I went to a party, I thought, “Wow, these college students must be really poor: they’re having to share a cigarette.”

Fantastic view of river

155 BellvueThe very thing that made it a great vantage point for controlling the river during the Civil War makes it a great location to live today. I’d love to sit on a deck or balcony and watch the river go by.

View from Broadway

155 BellvueHere’s the view of the property looking north from the parking lot of what used to be the former First National bank at the corner of Broadway and Main.

Thanks to Jesse for the news tip and the photos.

Cotter Cemetery

Coltter Cemetery 04-29-2014The Neely’s Landing posts generated quite a few comments about cemeteries in the area. When Dick McClard and I were roaming around, he took me to the Cotter Cemetery on private property off CR 525.

We knocked on the door of a nearby house, but nobody came to the door. Dick said he had met the folks on earlier visits, so he felt comfortable walking over to the fenced, well-kept cemetery.

Edward Cotter’s stone says he was born in Cork, Ireland,on Christmas Day, 1812, and died March 3, 1875, at the age of “62 Yr’s 2 Mo’s 6 D’s.”

The Find A Grave website says the place is also called Hays / Hayes and Bray Cemetery. You can see a list of 12 of the internments here.

Earlier Neely’s Landing posts

Cotter Cemetery photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.