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Restaurants (Colored)

I’ve spent most of this trip interviewing folks who lived in what we called South Cape. I’ve learned some things about that area that most of us “north of the hill” – Tollgate Hill – never knew.I'[ve heard tales of prejudice and discrimination in Cape – and the amazing lack of it in some other cases.

It’s going to take some time for me to boil it down and digest it. I need to talk with more folks, but it’s time for me to saddle up and head back to Florida.

Today was a wrapping-up day. The car had to go in for a minor repair; I was supposed to pick up some rubber stamps (not in); I roamed around shooting some quick topics to give me stuff to post while I’m on the road. One of my stops was to say goodbye to Friend Shari’s mother, LaFern.

(She thinks I’m a witch or a genius  – she said it was the latter, but the look in her eye let me know it was the former – because I brought her dead computer back to life just by pressing the ON button.) As a reward, she gave me a 1944 Cape County telephone directory. (You can click on the images to make them larger.)

Cape County Restaurants

Like most people, the first thing I did was check for family connections – I recognized some. Then I leafed through the classifieds to do a light-weight piece on businesses that had come and gone. When I got to Page 32, which covered Rental Agencies (see Real Estate) to Service Stations (see Filling Stations), I thought I had found an easy and popular topic: Restaurants.

“Restaurants (Colored)”

Then, I saw the heading that appeared BELOW Restaurants.

When did this become unacceptable?

I wrote about Brother Mark and me hitting a bunch of antique shops in 2008. I ran across this set of postcards for sale and said, in part, “I saw a reminder of just how far we’ve come in this country. One night this week we’re watching Barack Obama stumping to be President of the United States and a day later, we’re looking at a collection of black memorabilia of the most racially offensive nature I ever recall seeing.

There wasn’t a stereotype left untouched. Lil Black Sambo and Aunt Jemima were tame compared to this stuff.

I’m not knocking the antique shop for carrying it. It’s probably valuable to see how crap like this was acceptable at one time.”

“I’m not going to point any moral”

With apologies to The Beatles, “I read the news today, oh, boy.”

We’re going through a period of anger and angst about another group looking for its civil rights.

Pete Seeger said it better than I ever could in his song, “Waist Deep in The Big Muddy:”

“Well, I’m not going to point any moral,
I’ll leave that for yourself“

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Eyeing The Rock

The Mississippi River keeps creeping lower and lower. On July 19, the Cape river gauge read 11.23. On August 2, it was down to 9.35. That’s not good enough. It needs to be at 7.0 feet in Cape to be able to walk across to Tower Rock, locals tell me. Here’s where you can check the river stage at Cape. By the way, you can click any photo to maker it larger.

Itchin’ to go

Members of the Southeast Missouri Geocaching fan page are just itching to get on top of Tower Rock so they can claim bragging rights to an exotic cache. If you’ve never heard of the hobby, here’s a website that does a good job of explaining it.

I was going to meet Cacher Randy Friday to see if we thought it was safe to make it to The Rock for the rest of the group on Saturday. Unfortunately, I have to swing by LeGrand Bros. Transmissions first. My check engine light came on and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t something serious before being That Guy stuck on the side of the road with his hood up and a mournful expression on his puss. You might recall the sad story of my transmission from last year.

Anyway, a nice guy hooked up a $9,300 computer to my car, went for a short test drive and said I needed a new throckmorton that bolts onto the franjipannni. The good news is that it’s on the exterior of the trannie and shouldn’t take more than two heartbeats and a hamburger to fix. (Once the part gets here, that is.) The best news is that it’s covered under warranty.

So, if Sir Randy gives me the All Clear, I’ll sound the trumpets and a whole herd of folks will be hanging all over The Demon The Devours Travelers on Saturday. If not, they’ll try next weekend. I just won’t be there to see it.

Surely they need a souvenir

Maybe they’ll stop by the Altenburg Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum where they can pick up a souvenir copy of my book on Tower Rock.

FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE

Cacher Randy called around 10 a.m. to say that it’s a no-go. He waded out until the water was waist-deep (deeper than I would have gone) and felt the current “tugging” at him. He decided to turn back. Wise decision. He also noted that the bottom was slippery.

How do I get there?

A reader asked how to get there. This map shows you the scenic way I get to Altenburg on my bike. In my Tower Rock book, I describe the path from Altenburg to Tower Rock this way:

Tower Rock isn’t some place you stop on the way to somewhere else. You have to REALLY want to go there.
You start by passing through Altenburg on Missouri Highwy A.
After going up and down some steep hills, just before you get to what’s left of the German pioneer village Wittenberg (population: two buildings and three people), you’ll see a small sign off to the right pointing to Perry County 460, a steep and washboarded gravel road.
Off to your left, you’ll pass the Texas-Illinois Natural Gas Pipeline bridge, called the longest suspension pipeline in the world. It carries gas from Texas to Chicago.
Not far from there, the road narrows. Now things get interesting if this is your first trip. You’ll make a sharp 90-degree bend to the left and cross over the BNSF railroad tracks and make an immediate right-hand 90-degree turn paralleling the river.  There are no warning devices, so Stop, Look and Listen before getting on the tracks.
The stretch along the river is narrow and there’s a steep drop-off to the water, but you seldom meet a car. Eventually, you’ll come upon a parking area at the Tower Rock Natural Area, donated by Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bussen to the Missouri Conservation Department.

 

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Another Full Moon

When you’re shooting your second full moon of a visit, it’s probably time to start packing your bags. The moon phase ap on my Droid showed that the orb was 97% full last night, so I told Mother we better be ready to saddle up to shoot it tonight.

We pulled in to the parking lot at the base of Cape Rock to find eight or ten cars getting ready for the free entertainment. Just about that time, a long, long, long southbound freight rolled by in front of us. It kept coming and coming and coming, slowing all the time. Finally, with the last three empty hopper cars and a pusher engine blocking our view, it stopped. Dead, put-a-penny-on-the-tracks stopped.

We decided to go to the top of Cape Rock, but feared that it would be parked solid. To our surprise, there was only one car parked there, and it moved on, leaving us some prime real estate to watch.

While I was setting up my tripod, a guy on a bike rolled up. We did all the ritual chicken dances that people with similar interests do and got so involved that I didn’t pay much attention to the horizon. I’d look over my shoulder from time to time and think, “Nope, not yet.”

Well, I had misjudged where the thing was going to come up. On one of my shoulder checks, I looked a little more to the south and did one of those, “Whoa! Where did THAT come from?” Of course, I pretended that I had been patiently WAITING for the moon to get 10 degrees out of the water before shooting.

I shot a few frames with the longer lens on my video camera, but I like this one better because it shows how low the river is now. That’s one BIG sandbox down there. The river’s about three feet lower than it was when I shot the little picture above from Cape Rock last fall.

Checked out the casino

When some clouds covered the moon, we headed toward town. I thought maybe there would be some night working going on at the casino, but it didn’t look interesting. I opted not to try for a moon shot from the floodwall and the bridge because I had done those before. I decided to see what the view was like from the Common Pleas Courthouse.

When I came around the corner, the two women going down the steps were standing shoulder to shoulder trying to get a moon photo with their camera phones. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the puny little flashes built into those cameras weren’t going to do much good at lighting up downtown OR the moon. I didn’t do much better. It was already pretty small in the sky by now.

This view down Themis Street is pretty similar to the one I shot in March of  2010.

I may try this angle for my next full moon shot, but it had better not be taken on THIS trip..

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My Mother’s a Bag Lady

You never know what you’re going to find when you come back to Cape to visit Mother.

Click on any photo to maker it larger.

“She’s collecting shopping bags”

This year, shortly before Mother’s Day, Mark sent me an email saying, “Mother’s become a bag lady. She’s going all over town collecting shopping bags.”

Mark is prone to either subtracting relevant details or adding ones to make the story more interesting, so it helps to do some fact checking. I decided to wait until I got into town before becoming concerned.

Turns out that Mother’s Friend Katie was part of a crochet group that was cutting up plastic shopping bags to make sleeping mats for the homeless.

Cuts bags into 1-1/2″ loops

Mother decided she’d make a ground cover for Grandson Malcolm to use under his sleeping bag when he goes camping. It took her several weeks to score enough bags, cut them into 1-1/2-inch loops and crochet them into something large enough to use. It turned out to be soft, durable and colorful.

In the process of doing the project, she became an expert in the colors that different stores use for their bags. Like folks who can identify the name of a song after hearing two notes, she can look at a color in her mat and tell you exactly which store uses that bag.

Keeping her out of the heat

Mark bought her a box of unused blue and yellow bags (moving ahead of me in the will, drat), but I countered by making sure to grab any bags I see on top of the recycle bins when I walk out of a store. I warned Mother to be careful when she digs through them. One of these days she’s going to encounter a full diaper.

It’s been too hot and dry to mow, even for her, so she started a mat for Mark to use on a piece of lawn furniture in St. Louis. She was picking up speed. She got that one done in three weeks.

Like a sweater with 5-foot sleeves

As soon as she finished that, she started another one. It went so quickly that it got out of control and ended up too big for her intended purpose. That’s this one. She finished it Monday night after working on it a week.

Starting a new one

As soon as her needles cooled, she started a new one on Tuesday morning. Pretty good for a one-armed woman, I must say.

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