Cape Girardeau History and Photos

November 20, 2012

Thankful? Support Ken Steinhoff

Howdy, all. Special guest post today by me, Matthew Steinhoff.

If you like Ken Steinhoff, the CapeCentralHigh web site and want to support them both, please click the above magical button and go about your regular, online holiday shopping business.

Great Photographer, Writer; Lousy Money Extractor

My father, Ken Steinhoff, is horrible at making this photo and history web project pay. I keep telling him that people love his work and want to support his continued efforts. I keep telling him that if, just once and a while, he’d go ‘hey, folks, the next time you do some online shopping, click through from my web site‘, they’d do it.

The thing is, Dad hates trying to get people to part with their money. He won’t sell ads. He gives away photos as if they were water. I had to twist his arm and drag him kicking and screaming just to get him to put the passive Amazon.com links on this web site to begin with.

How Amazon.com Helps Dad

If you click any of the Amazon.com links on this page and then buy something within 24 hours, Dad makes 6%, give or take. You spend $100: he gets $6.

(It doesn’t cost you anything extra to buy through his links. In most states, Amazon.com doesn’t charge sales tax so there is an extra savings for you. Most of the time, the price you get from Amazon.com is less than you could buy the product locally. In most cases, the shipping is free.)

[Ken Steinhoff aside: I encourage you to spend your money with local businesses, but if you ARE going to buy on line, then listen to The Kid.]

Malcolm Steinhoff, Ken's grandson, does all his online shopping through Grandad's Amazon links. — Malcolm Steinhoff, Ken’s grandson, does all his online shopping through Grandad’s Amazon links.

$6 Doesn’t Sound Like Much

The average American will spend $854 on Christmas this year. Of that, $384.30 will be spent online. In the last 30 days, 8,272 have visited CapeCentralHigh.com. Of those 8,272 visitors, 4,460 have visited his web site more than 26 times in the last 30 days. (They’ve read 25,000 to 35,000 pages in that time.)

If I could just talk 500 of his regular visitors to do half of their online shopping through his Amazon link — about $200 each with $12 going to Dad — he’d make $6,000.

That $6,000 would just about cover what it costs to spend three months a year in Cape Girardeau, camera and computer equipment repairs and upgrades and pay the site’s web hosting bill.

Save My Parents!

You’re gonna shop online anyway. You’re probably going to shop at Amazon. When you do, please click any of the Amazon links on this web site. It’ll help keep the heat on and the parents off my sofa. Thank you!

Cheers,
Matthew Steinhoff

November 20, 2012December 5, 2023

The Pie Safe

This is the time of year when thoughts turn to pie and presents. Sharon Rose Penrod and her Pie Safe in Pocahontas can help you.

Let me go on record that I support buying from local businesses like The Pie Safe, where most of the ingredients are locally grown. Some of the vegetables come from a 100-year-old garden on on a farm owned by her husband’s family since the 1880s.

Pie Safe used to be bank

The Pie Safe started out as the Pocahontas Bank in 1910 with deposits of $10,000, but it didn’t survive the Crash of 1929. It served a variety of uses over the years, including being an insurance office and a home.

Safe has 24-inch walls

The ornate safe with its 24-inch-thick concrete walls still dominates one wall.

“It found me”

Sharon Rose and her husband, Monte, had been active in Jackson’s farmers market when she decided to turn her talent for baking into a business. “I didn’t find the bank, it found me,” she said of her building. The cafe has been open since June 12, 2012.

No real menu

The Pie Safe doesn’t have a formal printed menu. There’s a whiteboard with the specials scrawled on it, but “some days I run out of stuff, so I’ll tell customers, ‘Here are the ingredients I have. What would you like to make me out of them?'”

I showed up the other day just before closing time. “I’ve got my heart set on some of your coconut cream pie (topped with REAL whipped cream, not “calf slobber”).

“I don’t have any left,” she said.

The lip quiver worked

I put on my saddest face and gave her the patented lip quiver.

“OK, I might be able to whip one up while you’re eating,” she relented.

“I’ll chew slowly,” I promised.

When I finished up, she said, “I don’t think this is going to have time to set up.” I offered to eat a piece and take two with me.

“I don’t want to sell this”

“I really don’t want to sell this,” she remonstrated. “The whipped cream is sliding into the base. I’m not going to be able to cut it.”

“How about if I take the WHOLE pie? I’m headed up to the museum at Altenburg. I can pop it into the fridge in 20 minutes.”

Against her better judgement, she let me take it.

For the record, she was right. It never DID set up solidly, but Mother and I didn’t care. We were more interested in taste than appearance. We managed to polish it off in two days.

Got her baking skills from mother

She says she got her baking know-how from her mother, Shirley Schroeder Petschke, whose photos grace the walls.

Where is it?

If you can find Pocahontas, which is north of Cape Girardeau and south of Altenburg, you won’t have any trouble finding The Pie Safe, which is in the heart of downtown. (Don’t blink.)

It’s open from 6 am to 2 pm Wednesday through Saturday. The phone number is 573-833-6743. You can send Sharon Rose email at srpenrod@gmail.com

Tell her Ken said “Hi” and to start working on a coconut cream pie for when I come back in a couple of months.

Pie Safe photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side to move through the gallery.

November 18, 2012

The Candy Dish

Mother said Son Matt had mentioned something about a candy dish, so Mother asked if I’d take a photo of this green one to see if this is the one he was thinking about.

I posted the picture on his Facebook page and got this response: “Yes. That always used to be in the living room.”

Niece Kim Steinhoff-Tisdale wrote: “I think I remember that one! With all the stuff Gran has acquired throughout the years, it’s amazing how much I can actually remember! Man, I love that woman!”

Brother David chimed in: “That was the “original Gran’s” (Elsie Welch) candy dish.

So, Mother sent it south with me for Matt and his family. Grandson Malcolm will be the fifth generation of our family to eat candy out of it. Mother’s request: “Always keep it full.”

It made it to Florida

This is Matt holding the candy dish at Son Adam’s house in Loxahatchee, Fla., proving that I delivered it safe and sound.

November 17, 2012

General Sherman, We Need You

I was making great progress heading back to Florida from Cape. The weather was great, traffic was light to moderate, everybody was pretty well-behaved.

Well, there was a bit of a delay at Monteagle Pass, but we’ll go into that another day. I’ve got a couple of different routes I take; this time I opted to go through Atlanta on 1-75. I’ve been lucky the last few times, blasting through the area in about 30 minutes with only a few taps on the brakes.

Coming into town just about dusk, I thought I was gong to catch a break again. See how nicely the traffic is spaced out?

Look at all the taillights

Alas, around the corner was a forest of red taillights as far as you could see. It took 1-1/2 hours to do what I have been doing in 30 minutes. The skies were clear. There were no wrecks. It was just like everybody confused and thought the Interstate was one big parking lot and they needed to practice for Black Friday.

General Sherman had the right idea

I’ve always been convinced that General Sherman had the right idea of what to do with Atlanta.

[Wife Lila, who always exhibits better taste than I do, objected to my General Sherman suggestion, pointing out the death and destruction he meted out on horrific March to the Sea. Atlanta, to me, has been the source of major traffic jams, is the home of the Atlanta Braves and was where our corporate HQ was located. None of those things endear the city to me. Maybe we could just build bypasses that bypass the bypasses that exist around the city and leave General Sherman to his rest.]