Cape Girardeau History and Photos

November 9, 2012November 9, 2012

Hillcrest Inn BBQ

I have so many photos of my own to wade through that I usually don’t publish ones by other folks, but I found this offering from Jeffry Boswell Hawk, Class of ’61 too interesting to pass up. She writes about the Hilltop Inn, located on Kingshighway across from the StarVue Drive-in. I don’t recall ever seeing it, even though it’s just up the road from our house on Kingsway. I’ll let her and her brother, Wayne tell the story.

Family-run business

Hillcrest was a family-run BBQ Drive-In with inside and curb-hop service. We sold BBQs, Hamburgers, Cheeseburgers, Deep-fried Chicken and Shrimp, French fries, cole slaw, soft drinks, shakes and Beer (*with 3.2 alcohol). *That is why we (my brother and sisters) were able to work there for our parents.

Daddy’s given name was Homer Franklin, but back when he was very young, and I suppose, also very mischievous, there was a very popular book called, Peck’s Bad Boy. Peck’s bad boy’s name was “Jeff”. So, He ALWAYS went with the H.F.”Jeff”Boswell name. And, yes, I’m named after my dad’s nickname. Mom’s name was Erma.

Mom did all the cooking- Daddy helped as needed and ran the operation. We kids, waited tables, curb-hopped, filled the soda and beer coolers, swept and mopped floors, washed windows and dishes, helped prepare the hamburger patties, peel potatoes for the fries and put them thru a hand-pulled slicer. Custodial work was also our job as well as mowing the grass. That’s where I learned to operate a riding mower.

Outdoor beer garden

Daddy, with the help of my older brother Wayne, built covered picnic tables and an outdoor walk-in cooler which was surrounded with a bar and stools. The outdoor beer garden also had an archery range behind the building and horseshoe pits. There was also an outdoor jukebox in case someone wanted to hear their favorite music and dance.

Our indoor restaurant seated about 28 people in 7 booths that lined the walls; and probably about 10 tables with 4 chairs off the dance floor; with about 5-6 more tables on the dance floor. So probably about 80-to 90 people in tables and booths and a wrap-around bar with about 14-15 stools to allow for about 100 people. The food preparation went on inside the wrap-around bar.

Filled with dancing kids

Friday and Saturday nights, the dance floor was filled with high school seniors and college-aged kids from Cape and Jackson doing the jitterbug and slow-dancing. There was also a bumper pool table, pin-ball machine and a slide-bowling machine that were kept busy with players.

Sunday was usually family day for lunch and supper. Mom also made breakfast for some of the regulars from time to time. Several farmers would stop in for lunch.

Last business before Jackson

Hillcrest was the last business building on the right side of Kingshighway (61) with the StarVue Drive-In Movie until you got to Jackson.

Mom and Dad got a call about 8 am one Saturday morning telling them that Hillcrest was on fire. We lived out in Red Star with only Broadway straight thru to Kingshighway to get to Hillcrest, so by the time they got there, it was fully engulfed with flames. I still have a couple of burnt, melted dimes fused together as a memento- but many happy memories of our family working out there together!

(Daddy didn’t build another business there because he knew that the interstate would be built soon after and he thought that it would by-pass Cape and no one would be able to get off or drive ‘that far’ to the business.) If only we could have known what we know now!

– Jeffry Boswell Hawk ’61 – Jackson, MO

Across from StarVue Drive-in

I don’t know the exact date when we bought the Hillcrest, but it was sometime around 1955. We only owned the business, not the building. When the building burned down sometime in 1958, the land owner offered to sell us the 25 acres of land the building was on for $25,000. Unfortunately, our parents did not have enough money to buy the land at that time or money to rebuild the building and we lost our income when the building burned and our parents had to find another source of income. The land behind where the building was located, is currently occupied partly by a condominium complex.
– Wayne Boswell

November 8, 2012

Trading Stamps and Blessings

While we were rooting around down in a basement cupboard for the cigar box Dad always used to pick out pecans, we found another one that had these trading stamps in it. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

The 1968 City Directory lists the Top Value Redemption Store at 2146 William Street. I don’t know who gave out Triple-S Blue Stamps. Here’s a link to more than you ever wanted to know about trading stamps.

The Star Gas stamps came from the Star Service Station at Broadway and Frederick. A book containing 90 stamps would earn you $1.50 worth of gas when the price was about 36.9 cents per gallon. I took a photo of a perky blonde who looked like she might have been promoting Plaid Stamps in what I thought was a Cape store, but it turned out to be in Jackson. She was dressed like the dancing silhouette at the middle right.

I wouldn’t wish that on anybody

Lew was a photographer on the Ohio University Post. He was a nice guy with curly red hair and a pale complexion. He and a beautiful black reporter became an item. You could tell they were getting serious by the sparks that flew between them, and I don’t mean the static electricity kind you get by shuffling your feet on the carpet.

One day they came over and said, “We going to get married and we’d like for you to be Lew’s best man.”

I gave them a long lookover, then, in my most southern of Swampeast Missouri tones drawled, sorrowfully, “You know I like you two, but I’m sorry, but I can’t give you my blessing. There are some things that are just wrong. Wrong. I’m sorry.”

They were crestfallen. They hadn’t taken me to be One of Those People.

“Lew, your last name is Stamp.”

Looking at his bride-to-be, I continued, “Your first name is Plaid. There is no way in the world that I want to be a part of making you Plaid Stamp until death do you part.”

Of course, I relented. I tried to recruit Lew to work with me at The Gastonia Gazette, but he had the good sense to turn me down. He still pops up on Facebook from time to time.

November 7, 2012February 6, 2015

Elephantiasis and The Kid

“KID!!!” bellowed the burned-out copy editor who had come to The Jackson Pioneer from The Kansas City Star. I was “KID!” until I was about 25, but in this case, I really WAS a kid. It was the summer of my junior year of high school.

He was editing my “exclusive” interview with Gary Rust, a Goldwater supporter and a delegate to the 1964 GOP National Convention.

My lead was “One week out of the year, once every four years, the nation is stricken by elephantiasis.”

“Kid,” he continued, in a quieter tone, “either you don’t know that elephantiasis is an African venereal disease that causes your nuts to swell up so big you have to carry them in a wheelbarrow, or you DO know and you are the most astute political writer for your age in the country.” After a pause, he said with a sly grin, “Either way, I’m not going to change it.”

[This isn’t the grizzled copy editor, by the way. It is Gary Friedrich. Gary played a role in the SEMO Fair investigation.]

Cow Palace Conclave

I’ve been telling that tale for years, but, truth be told, I wasn’t absolutely, positively sure that it was true. HAD the story actually run?

When I came home this time, Brother Mark gave me a huge, wax-coated cardboard box that had once contained chicken pieces. In it was a stack of clips from the paying-my-dues days at The Jackson Pioneer, The Central High School Tiger, The Ohio University Post and a smattering of other things.

For better or worse, near the middle of the stack was my June 24, 1964, story as I had remembered it. (Like always, you can click on the photos to make them larger.)

How to get a newspaper job

Rust had gotten me the job in the first place. I was a Barry Goldwater fanatic; had worked on a political campaign a year or so before; Friend Shari’s grandmother was a big poobah in the Republican party, and The Pioneer was a Republican paper. The Pioneer’s publisher, John Hoffman III, had been injured in a car wreck that had killed his wife. Rust thought Hoffman could use some help, so he introduced us. [That’s Hoffman in a wheelchair covering a high school football game.]

Hoffman said, “We’re not making much money; we can only afford to pay you $75 or $100 every two weeks.”

Not completely understanding how this negotiating game was played, I promptly said, “I’m just getting started out. I’ll take $75.”

Wall to wall people

Rust described the convention as “wall to wall people.” Always a sucker for numbers, I shared that the event was linked to the world with 30 TV cameras, 325 teletypewriter lines, 264 radio circuits and over 3,000 telephones.

He said the convention was basically a “fight between the liberals and the conservatives of the Republican Party. By the end of the week everyone was trying to outdo the other in being a conservative. About 80% of those attending the powwow were behind Goldwater.”

Counting hand claps

I never watched one of those political events afterward without thinking about an observation he made. It was reported that immediately after Goldwater spoke, there was a brief silence before the applause.

“It wasn’t the type speech you clap or applaud. It was more an outline of his principles and philosophies, and it was a shame to have to applaud, but we were all politically-minded enough to know there was probably someone in the back of the room marking down ’26 hand claps for Nixon – hmmmm, only 22 hand claps for Goldwater…’”

Could have torn them up

Rust told the group, including candidates Jean Ann Bradshaw, Truman Farrow, Robert Hemperley and Harold Kuehle, that most of the Goldwater people there were “most generous and decent. At any time during the convention, they could have torn them (the Scranton people) up on any vote.”

Goldwater’s success came as a shock to many people. Rust said, “We found ourselves with a winner and we didn’t even know how to celebrate.”

I’ll tell you later about another paper in the stack: my story of covering Ronald Reagan stumping for Goldwater and how I got to meet the new Linotype operator.

You can see photos of Goldwater campaigning in Cairo here. There was some talk about The Pioneer’s staff throwing yellow food coloring in the Jackson Courthouse fountain so Jacksonians would wake up to real gold water, but I don’t know if that got beyond the talking stage. I doubt that they could have scraped together enough money to buy the food coloring.

Gary Rust went on to become a newspaper publishing magnate in the region. I don’t know if he ever saw my story.

November 5, 2012

Dutchtown Straw Poll

Tuesday is Election Day. Mother’s phone here in Missouri has been ringing constantly with political robocalls. Because she is one of the few people left in the world who actually gets legitimate phone calls, she answers it. If she hears silence, she hangs up. This afternoon I even heard her mutter something when she hung up, but I was blessedly too far away to hear what she said. From the tone, I don’t think she wished them a nice day.

Went hunting nuts

Sunday afternoon, to keep from going nuts, we decided to go hunting nuts. Well, we didn’t actually start out that way, we just ended up there. We drove down a lane in Dutchtown next to our property and scooped up about a quart of pecans. They were a little on the small side, but they cracked easily and tasted pretty good.

Dad used to spend half the winter sitting in his recliner picking out pecans. We set up his old nutcracker in the basement workshop vise and even found the cigar box he used to put the cracked nuts in. It even had his old nutpick in it.

She’s got all the entertainment she needs to carry her through to warm weather.

The Dutchtown Straw Poll

On the way back down the lane to go home, I noticed the late afternoon sun lighting up the weeds. Like the polls driven by the robocalls, the Dutchtown Straw Poll was flicking left and right in the wind. The Undecideds were definitely driving.

The 2012 Election may not be decided by Tuesday night, but the phones will be a lot quieter. I share the hopes and prayers of all the election supervisors all over the county: please, please, please let it be a landslide for one side or the other.

Photo tips:

What makes the photo work is the backlighting. I exposed for the highlights, letting the backgrounds go dark to provide contrast. Most snapshooting guides will tell you to have the sun at your back. That makes for evenly-exposed, but deadly dull photos. Most of my scenics use strong sidelighting or backlighting that brings out the texture of the subject.

All of the weeds aren’t sharp because the depth of field is very shallow in a close-up. On top of that, there was a stiff breeze that kept whipping them around. Some of the blur is movement, other is because the subject kept moving into and out of focus. I like the horizontal shot because all of the out-of-focus stalks are bending to the left (that’s not a political assessment), taking your eye to the weeds that are in focus.

As always, you can click on the photos to make them larger. If you suffer from allergies, though, you might want to leave them small and keep your distance.