Cape Girardeau History and Photos

October 26, 2013

Frost Leaves Me Cold

When I walked out of my room at the motel where I’m staying in Athens, Ohio, I had an unpleasant surprise: my car was encased in a solid sheet of ice.

What is on the back of my van?

I spotted the housekeeper who throws me new towels every morning coming across the parking lot. She’s a friendly sort.

Leading her around to the back of my van, I asked, “What do you see on the back of the car?”

She looked at the car, then at me, and shot me a confused look.

This is against the law

“That’s a Florida license tag on this vehicle,” I clarified. “Don’t you folks in Ohio know that it’s against the law for a Florida vehicle to be covered in ice?”

She laughed, but it was a nervous kind of laugh.

I wonder if I’ll have new housekeeper in the morning?

Since I didn’t have Friend Jan along to scrape the ice off the windows, I just let the engine run for about 10 minutes, then scraped the ice off the mirrors with a credit card.

October 25, 2013

When I heard someone say, “It’s snowing outside,” I thought they might have meant that some tiny frozen pellets might be falling from the sky Thursday afternoon. No, this was the Real Deal looking down Court Street in Athens, Ohio.

Jessica captures flakes

Curator Jessica was wearing dark clothes that snagged a few of the fluffy flakes. You’ll see more of her over the next 10 days or so. For some reason, she doesn’t believe everything I’ve written about Cape, so she wants to see it for herself.

I’ve already warned her not to stare at Mother’s arm. I am not prone to exaggerate. (I can do it standing up, too.)

A view up Court Street

Jessica and Friend Carol don’t waste any time when they hear the lunch bell ring. They didn’t even look back to see if I had slipped and broken a shank or something.

Didn’t accumulate

The snow turned the ground white in a few places, but it didn’t last long. October is too early for much of a snow in Athens. It was all gone by the time we finished lunch.

Tom Hodson and Carol

After lunch, it was off to the WOUB studios for a radio show with our former OU Post buddy, Tom Hodson. He’s the director and general manager of WOUB Public Media and an excellent interviewer. The show will air online Sunday. When I get a link, I’ll post it. You are not obligated to listen.

Rapt attention or pizza?

After our dog and pony show co-sponsored by the Ohio University History Association and the Athens County Historical Society and Museum, we were mobbed by students with questions about what it was like in college when women’s curfews were enforced to the second.

It was either that, or they were attracted to the pizza a student brought in.

October 24, 2013October 24, 2013

Trick or Treat

Friend Carol and I spent Wednesday turning pages of Ohio University Posts as old and brittle as we are trying to piece to together the stories that go along with the pictures I took of the birth of the student rights movement at the university in Athens in 1969 and 1970.

Radio station WOUB is going to record our pearls of wisdom Thursday afternoon. I’ll hold my photos up to the microphone while Carol recites facts. I hope former Postie and now broadcast honcho Tom Hodson warns listeners that they are going to have to stare hard at their speakers to get the full benefit of the show.

WOUB did a nice promo on our presentation scheduled for Thursday night.

It was cold and rainy

After dinner, I confessed to her that I hadn’t shot anything to run on the blog. It was cold and rainy most of the day and colder and more rainy tonight. We drove around hoping I’d get inspired, but I quickly realized that I probably couldn’t get away with stopping my car in the middle of the street to shoot a picture like I could when I worked for the paper.

We stumbled around the hilly city streets trying to find a house she and an indeterminate number of her friends rented. Indeterminate because more people used it as a mailing address than actually lived there. Don’t ask. I didn’t.

We found it, but she wouldn’t knock on the front door.

Find me some Halloween decorations

Still zilch for art, I told her to start looking for Halloween decorations since I remembered Shawnee, a nearby coal mining town, used to have some strange ones.

This was the best she could come up with. There wasn’t enough light to shoot by, so I swung the car around until my headlights lit up the porch.

Sorry, folks, it was either this or skip a day.

P.S. to the Homeowner: If your Zappos shoes are missing, we didn’t take them. Carol said they didn’t fit.

October 23, 2013August 14, 2015

O.U. Is Not Your Mother

A friend and I are going to do a presentation to the Ohio University History Association Thursday evening on the birth of the student rights movement in the 1960s.

Ohio University was a little more progressive than SEMO (where wasn’t?), but my friend Carol Towarnicky had to take a bus from Toledo to Athens during summer break to appear before a hearing board that could have expelled her for breaking curfew too many times. Fortunately, the editor of The OU Post, where she was a reporter, backed up her story that she was covering news events.

Quick video overview

Here is a quick overview of some of the material we will cover.