Cape Girardeau History and Photos

Newspaper people are pretty blase about celebrities. Or, at least, they pretend to be, even if they’re not. Notice how business-like Society Editor Emily Hughes is while she’s interviewing heartthrob  Rory Calhoun in 1966 or thereabouts.

As a testament to Emily’s importance, she was the only person in the newsroom with an electric typewriter.

I’m not sure who the suits are with Calhoun. Someone said they thought they might have been from KFVS-TV. I don’t know if a story ever ran in the paper. The Missourian had a quaint style that said you never mentioned the call signs of the Cape radio and TV stations unless you couldn’t avoid it. They were to be referred to as “a local station.”

Proofreaders are visibly impressed

The proofreaders are leaning around to get a better look at the genuine badboy star of The Texan, and more than 80 movies. He had a part in just about every oater on the small screen. When Westerns fell out of favor, he appeared on police shows and sitcoms. In all, he appeared in more than 1,000 TV episodes.

His father died when he was nine; a theft of a revolver at 13 landed him in reform school; he escaped, robbed several jewelry stores and swiped a car. That and some other escapades got him boarding in the federal pen in Springfield, Mo., and San Quintin until he was just shy of 21.

He got his acting break when he happened to run into Alan Ladd while horseback riding in 1943. His agent changed his name from Francis Timothy McCown to Troy Donahue, then decided that the young man made a better Rory Calhoun. (His agent eventually used the Troy Donahue name for another actor, Merle Johnson. Who knows why he thought Francis made a better Rory than a Troy?)

Calhoun had quite a reputation as a lady’s man. When his second wife, Lita Baron, sued for divorce, she named 79 women with whom he had allegedly committed adultery. Calhoun responded, “Heck, she didn’t even include half of them”.

He died in 1999, at age 76.

Proofreaders could save you

I always had a soft spot in my heart for Missourian proofreaders. They weren’t supposed to look for errors of fact; they were only supposed to check the copy against the type proofs to make sure the typesetters hadn’t deviated from the original text. In reality, someone like Gloria Davis, far left, above, would walk over to your desk with a piece of perfectly clean copy and say, “There’s a smudge here. The pastors name is Boone, not Boob, right?” “Oh, yes, I guess the typesetter must not have been able to read that clearly. Thanks for catching that.”

Rory Calhoun visits the back shop

Visiting dignitaries generally don’t make it back to the composing room – the back shop – where the paper comes together. The group is standing next to a “turtle,” a heavy steel table on wheels that support the frame where the lead type is laid out. After the page is made up, the bolts on the side of the frame are tightened to keep anything from moving. The back shop foreman, whose name escapes me, is showing the visitors the tool used to tighten the bolts. The man in the plaid shirt to his right is Johnny Hohler.

Lester Harris, a repairman for Southwestern Bell, had a job that has to be just one twitch short of crazy. Seems like hunters and people with more bullets than brains like to use the telephone cable across the Diversion Channel for target practice.

When I did this story for The Missourian August 16, 1965, Jack Hogan, outside plant foreman for SW Bell, said that the cable had been put out of service 36 times in the previous three of four years. Some times only a couple of wires would be clipped, but on one occasion, the airport and the FAA Flight Service Station were knocked out for more than two hours, something that made the FBI cranky.

Lester Harris gets the call

When the phones go dead, Lester Harris is the guy they’d call out.

He had some high-tech equipment that would help pinpoint a break by detecting leaks in the pressurized cable.

But, shootings had been so common on this stretch of cable that he generally relied on a low-tech solution: he’d walk up and down the area until he spotted some fresh shell casings. The break wouldn’t be far away.

Causing damage to the circuits feeding the airport could net the shooter a $10,000 find and up to 10 years in federal prison.

“We don’t want to see anyone get in trouble, but when they start shooting at the cable running service to the airport, they’re endangering lives and there’s nothing funny about that.

Is the break near a pole?

If the break is near a pole, the repair can be made fairly simply working with a climbing belt and spikes.

Break out the cable buggy

If the break is away from a pole, then it’s time to break out the cable buggy. Think of a child’s swing suspended by two short chains attached to little pulley-like wheels. The telephone cable is suspended from a wire cable. The cable buggy rides on that wire cable and Lester rides on the “swing.”

Climbing aboard the buggy

Let’s put this in some kind of perspective: the reason Lester is there is because someone has been shooting at the telephone cable. Phone wire is softer and more delicate than the wire support cable, but who is to say that some stray bullets haven’t nicked some of THOSE wire strands, too, weakening it?

“I’d be a goner”

Soon, Lester is suspended 60 feet above the dark and muddy Diversion Channel on from a small wire cable that may or may not be damaged by gunfire.  “If I would slip off the board with all my equipment on and fall into the channel, I’d be a goner,” he said.

Splicing the line isn’t too bad in the summer, he said. Getting called out at 2 .m. to repair a shotgun-riddled cable in the middle of an ice storm is another story, though. On another night, when the river was high and the wind was blowing, he got “seasick” riding the buggy.

“People just don’t think,” he said. They just don’t realize the damage they can do by shooting at a cable.”