Cape Girardeau History and Photos

May 17, 2012March 3, 2015

Ties at a Basketball Game?

I couldn’t figure out what my old debate partner Pat Sommers was up to. He was in what appeared to be Houck Field House spiffed up in a coat and tie. Check out his front pocket. He was pulling out all the stops. You CAN click on the photo to make it larger, but I’m not sure how much Pat you really want to see.

Now that I think of it, Pat always dressed out of the ordinary. He wore dark sunglasses to a showing of the Beatles movie Help! At least he behaved more appropriately here than he did in this photo. Here’s what a modern version of Pat looks like.

Christmas Tournament

The next frame showed basketball action between Notre Dame and the Eagles. That led me to believe that it was taken during the Christmas tournament that brought mixes of teams to Houck Field House. Pat wasn’t the only one who dressed up. If you look at the crowd, there’s a pretty good scattering of ties. I wonder if high school kids still dress up for basketball games.

Happy New Year

Helping confirm the time of year was a frame on the roll that had a hand-stenciled Happy New Year sign taped to the Steinhoff living room window.

May 15, 2012May 16, 2012

How to Survive Nuclear Attack

You could find just about anything at the Southeast Missouri District Fair. These women wanted to give you a pamphlet on how to “Survive Nuclear Attack.” If you had more questions, you could fill out a form (using a pencil secured to the table with a string) and drop it in the Question Box. I wonder it they were the ones who turned in the radio active girls.

The boys in the background probably have copies of the of the Cape Girardeau Police Department’s Police Safety Report and have been taught to Duck ‘n” Cover in school. My bet is that they’re more interested in trying to win the free bicycle from the Western Auto booth than in nuclear holocaust. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)

Crafts and produce

Cape was still rural in the mid-60s, so you’d find lots of hand-crafted items and big watermelons.

In addition to commercial exhibits, you could find ones that had hand-lettered signs warning “Alcohol is not a food. Alcohol is not a medicine. The first and major effect is to numb the brain.”

It might have been raining outside, based on the wet hair on a couple of the girls and the wet shirt on the boy in the bike picture.

Trying to get lucky

This appears to be a booth for selling life insurance, so I don’t know what these boys were trying to win with the forms they were filling out. The boy standing on the left has a raft of shamrock necklaces around his neck. Maybe he thinks they’ll bring him luck.

Now I see what they were doing. When I made the frame larger, I could barely see that you could win a bike or a hair dryer. I bet that round thing on the table at the right was the hair dryer. I think I know which one the boys were trying to win.

Food for survival

Cape Girardeau had its share of pretty flower gardens, but a lot of back yards grew enough vegetables to keep the family well-fed.

THAT’S an ear of corn

The fair was where farmers came to hear about the latest and greatest developments to help them produce more with less.

Here are some past fair stories:

May 15, 2012

Academic Hall Construction

Some things, like SEMO’s Academic Hall never seem to change. This is what it looked like April 15, 2011. You can click on the pictures to make them larger.

Academic Hall 1966ish

Cape Girardeau was a black and white town in the middle ’60s.

Speaking of that, I’ve been talking about sending out a book proposal. I was putting the final touches on it Sunday night (Monday morning deadline, but, of course, I wouldn’t procrastinate) when I noticed that none of the books I had seen by this publisher had any color in them. When I shipped off the package, I asked the editor if they were a black and white publisher only. The sad answer was, yes. Because most of their books are old images from dusty archives, they don’t run color.

I thanked them for considering me, then withdrew my proposal. Looks like it’ll be a little longer before you have a chance to hold something in your hands. It’s gonna happen, but not as soon as I had hoped.

2012 Academic Hall renovation

Brother Mark slowed his car down long enough to snap a few frames of repair work being done at Academic Hall.

Academic Hall terraces

You can see the green terraces that Major James Frances Brooks designed for Louis Houck and that showed up in photos of the 1967 graduation ceremonies.

Terraces from Mother’s scrapbook

Here are the terraces from Mother’s scrapbook. The photo was probably taken in the late ’30s or early 1940s. Note the old car in the shadows.

May 14, 2012

Broadway Construction Project

Brother Mark was down in Cape for Mother’s Day. He’s got an advantage when it comes to jockeying for a favorable position in the will. He’s 125 miles away from Mother; I’m 1,100 miles away.

He jingled the keys and mother hopped in the car to go exploring. Mark stopped long enough to shoot these pictures of the 200 and 300 blocks of Broadway. The city’s embarked on what is either a very good or a very bad idea. They are enlarging the sidewalks on the north side of the street to make the area more attractive to pedestrians (at the expense of parking on that side). Here was the Broadway end-to-end piece I did recently, by the way.

Narrow lanes worry me

We had a West Palm Beach mayor (thankfully, gone) who went on a traffic-calming binge. There were a number of streets that were wide enough that a car could pass my bike without having to cross the centerline while still giving me the legal three feet of clearance. He started choking the lanes with traffic furniture where he didn’t narrow them and added speed humps willy-nilly. By doing that, he made it impossible for a car to pass without going over the centerline, which irritated folks if there was oncoming traffic.

So, if you see me cranking my way up the Broadway hill, just know that I’m going as fast as I can and that it wasn’t MY idea to make the lanes smaller. Oh, and the sidewalk isn’t an option. Bikes don’t belong on sidewalks.

It IS pretty, though.

Brother Mark’s photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then click on the left or right side of the image to move through the gallery. I don’t know why he’s being so nice to me. There’s nothing to put in the will, it’s past his birthday and Christmas is a long time off.