News photos that have grown whiskers and have become history
Families and guests of employees of the old Marquette Cement Plant could go to the Marquette Lake to fish when I was a kid. I was taken on a late-afternoon visit to the lake on a day when the setting sun gave everything an orange glow.
The private lake is located behind what is now known as Buzzi Unicem on South Sprigg Street.
Anybody ever lucky enough to fish there?
A couple of decades ago, World War II veterans started the Avenue of Flags tradition on Cape County Park North on Highway 61 between Cape and Jackson.
On patriotic holidays, including September 11, volunteers put up flags representing a deceased veteran who served in a war era or in combat.
While I was walking around looking at the flags, I noticed this one that was a bit yellow. It had a hole or two in it and part of the edge was fraying. There was no name on the pole, that I could see, so I don’t know who it represents.
Just then, a gentle breeze stirred the flag and I saw a square field of stars. This was a 48-star flag. Alaska gained statehood in 1959 and caused the rows of stars to be staggered. This flag could be as much as half a century old. I’d love to know the story behind it.
Cars with license plates from all over the area drive by. Some stop and their occupants take photos. The late afternoon wind was calm, so the photos weren’t as dramatic as other holidays.
Some visitors pause to look at the Law Enforcement Memorial for officers killed in the line of duty. Others charge off, apparently to track down a specific flag.
A Missourian story said that one person can put up the nearly 700 flags in less than two hours.
Display of the flags is governed by the Federal Flag Code. If there is a 40 percent or greater chance of rain, the flags aren’t displayed. Flags are supposed to be up only between sunrise and sunset unless they are illuminated. When we passed the park after dusk, the flags had already been put away for the next patriotic holiday.
A number of images and events come to mind on Veterans Day. Watching the Vietnam War play out nightly on the family’s Zenith television set in our basement is one.
Gary Schemel was one of Central High School’s first casualties in the Vietnam War.
A fellow vet posted this 1932 poem on The Wall in his memory:
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
A father an mother leave the Athens County Courthouse with a box of medals awarded posthumously to their son in 1969.
Missing from this handmade memorial to this generation’s war dead was the name Liz Jacobson, my son’s 21-year-old former girlfriend, who was killed by an IED while on a convoy in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Adam got permission to add her “stone.” On it, he wrote some lines that she had sent him: “We’re only on this earth for a little while, so live life to the fullest and carry a smile.”
This photo was taken in 2007. I wonder how many more Liz Jacobsons there would be there in the picture today.
I don’t agree with all of the political sentiments this woman is wearing, but I can get behind the Support Our Boys in Vietnam button she sported at a pro-war march in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1971.
Pigeons show no respect to this Civil War soldier in Washington, DC.
Wife Lila’s niece, Laurie Everett, wanted to go a photo expedition. The first couple of locations didn’t pan out, so we headed to South Cape (as The Missourian used to refer to it euphemistically) to see if anything was still left from the 60s.
We drove down a gravel road until it became a couple ruts that ended at Cape LaCroix Creek, just upstream from where it dumps into the Mississippi River. On our left was a railroad trestle dated 1929.
If we were standing on the other bank or on the bridge, we could probably see the river around that last bend. There is another bridge downstream that I didn’t notice until I looked closely at the aerial photo at the bottom of the page.
The view upstream looking at Sprigg St. is a much more attractive creek than it was in the days when it carried offal and other unspeakable things from packing plants located on its banks.
Long ago, that bridge on Sprigg would have been a toll bridge leading to Tollgate Hill that I wrote about earlier.
Here is a photo of the area taken last weekend. Sprigg St. is at the bottom of the picture. The 1929 railroad bridge is above Sprigg. The third bridge is another railroad bridge. The Blue Hole Garden would have been where the green trailer is at the bottom right of the aerial photo.