Pat Stephens: 51 Years at The Post

Pat Stephens in her office at PBNI 08-29-2008Pat Stephens started at Palm Beach Newspapers in 1965, the year I graduated from Cape Girardeau Central High School. My first newspaper photo was published April 18, 1963, so I started in the ink-slinging business a little before her. The main difference is that I took a buyout in the fall of 2008 and put the newspaper business behind me.

Two days before I walked out the door for the last time, I wandered the building shooting pictures of the people who were special to me. Pat was at the top of the list.

Pat, 69, was on The Post’s payroll right up until the day she died, Thursday, April 7, 2016. That’s 51 years working for the same company. In contrast, I passed through nine papers (counting high school and college pubs) in four states in 45 years.

Post reporter Sonja Isger wrote an excellent obituary that Pat would have thought was “too much.” [I hope it doesn’t get trapped behind the paper’s paywall.]

The headline was appropriate: “Remembering The Post’s Constant Caretaker.” She was one of those unsung heroes the public never knew about, but was a big reason your paper hit the stoop in the morning. Reporting, writing and editing the paper is all well and good, but if the ink doesn’t get squirted on the toilet paper, it doesn’t matter.

An early member of the 20-Year Club

PBNI 20-Year Club members 08-17-2008She started in the production department back in the days of hot type, and shepherded it though several confusing iterations of publishing and pagination systems.

Pat shows up in the middle of the middle column listing the earliest members of the Twenty Year Service Club. Click on this, or any of the photos, to make them larger.

Pat became office Mac expert

Pat Stephens in her office at PBNI 08-29-2008When the paper transitioned from manual to electric typewriters; from hot type to cold type and then to computer-output pages, Pat went along with the ride. The editorial and advertising systems were on Macs, and she became the office expert on them.

As a PC guy, I would mock Macintosh computers (Know why a Mac mouse has only one button? It’s because that’s as high as a Mac user can count.), but never to Pat. It just wouldn’t have been right. She took pride in her equipment.

She loved her one-eyed horse

Pat Stephens in her office at PBNI 08-29-2008She loved her aging, one-eyed horse, Baxter, and would talk about him often when things were quiet.

Winner of the Purple Cow

Pat Stephens in her office at PBNI 08-29-2008Her hard work won her the company’s Purple Cow award, displayed proudly on her bookcase.

I worked a lot of long hours at weird times, but I don’t think I was ever in the building when Pat wasn’t. If some department manager (usually a new hire with all the answers) would decide that all the world’s problems could be solved by shuffling workers from one cube to another, Pat would show up with her gray rolling cart to swap pieces-parts and huge, 24-inch monitors that were so big that you could put four wheels on them and they’d pass for Volkswagens.

At times like this, she might be heard uttering her opinion of such tomfoolery, but then she would mock-slap her face twisting her head from the “force” of the blow.

The pressure relief valve

Pat Stephens in her office at PBNI 08-29-2008Every paper I worked for had one place and one person you could visit when the pressure lid was about to blow off the cooker. Judy Crow’s morgue was that place at The Missourian. (In these more sensitive times, the morgue has been rebranded “the library.”)

Pat’s office was the relief valve at The Post. Pat would listen patiently as you blew off steam, nodding appropriately at the right times, all the time plying you with her ever-full candy dish. Her office was full of plush animals and pictures of horses and wildlife that would have been kitschy in any other context, but were oddly comforting in Pat’s Place.

I always liked this shot of Pat’s menagerie keeping an eye on her.

Heaven’s candy jars will be full

Pat Stephens in her office at PBNI 08-29-2008Pat Stephens was probably one of the last generation that could go to work at a newspaper right out of high school and stay at the same place for 51 years. I am proud to have been her colleague and her friend. Heaven will be a better place now that there is someone there to ride the horses and keep the candy jars full.

Louis Houck’s Statuary Collection

Louis Houck's Statuary Collection 04-25-2014 Yesterday we showed the exterior of the old First Baptist Church, now Southeast Missouri State University’s Aleen Vogel Wehking Alumni Center. Today, as promised, we’ll “go inside” to see the Barbara Hope Kem Statuary Hall, an auditorium created from the former church’s sanctuary.

I thought the layout of the sanctuary area where the statues are displayed looked a little strange for a church. Two of my readers commented that was because the banks wanted to hedge their bets, so they required that the building be constructed so it could be used as a theater in case the church couldn’t pay off the loan. The balcony, Liz Lockhart wrote, even had space for a projection booth, should it ever be needed.

Plaster casts came from 1904 World’s Fair

Louis Houck's Statuary Collection 04-25-2014The statues and other pieces of artwork were bought by Louis Houck after he saw the August Gerber’s reproductions of classical, medieval, renaissance, and modern art works displayed at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. He acquired the casts for $1,888.25.

Lauren Kellogg Disalvo’s master’s thesis, THE AURA OF REPRODUCTION: PLASTER CAST COLLECTIONS AT THE 1904 LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION, contains a large section on Houck’s purchase.

Disalvo writes that Houck’s donation of the statuary stipulated that a room be dedicated to them where they could be permanently displayed. The display opened in March of 1905 with the statues in Academic Hall.

Statues damaged and destroyed

Louis Houck's Statuary Collection 04-25-2014The casts remained there until 1959, when they were dispersed all over campus to make room for additional classroom space. They suffered from benign neglect over the years, with many being damaged or destroyed. One of my readers wrote that he had seen broken statues in the basement of Academic Hall when he was a student.

(For all I know, Venus de Milo might have had both her arms before SEMO got hold of her.)

Judy Crow takes up the cause

Louis Houck's Statuary Collection 04-25-2014In 1975, my friend, Judy Crow, Missourian librarian, wrote a story bemoaning the fate of the Houck collection.

The result was, Disalvo writes, “the plaster casts were gathered, restored and transferred to the Southeast Missouri Regional Museum. The casts remained in the museum until it relocated to the new Rosemary Berkel and Harry L. Crisp II Southeast Missouri Regional Museum. According to the museum director, Dr. Stanley Grand, the plaster casts were not included in this new museum since the new museum would focus on the archaeology, history, and fine arts of the Southeast Missouri region.”

I’m not surprised that the River Campus, which knocked down the handball courts, one of the Cape’s oldest landmarks, couldn’t find room for Houck’s donation. The irony is the university probably wouldn’t be in Cape Girardeau today had Houck not used his influence to rebuild Academic Hall after the first one burned down.

Class of 1957 raised $100,000

Louis Houck's Statuary Collection 04-25-2014In 2007, the Class of 1957 raised $100,000 to have the remaining 38 surviving casts restored and moved to the Aleen Vogel Wehking Alumni Center, formerly the First Baptist Church, where they now line the walls of an auditorium area, called the Barbara Hope Kem Statuary Hall.

The display is open to the public. Admission is free. I think Houck would approve.

Louis Houck Statuary photo gallery

Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.

Broadway and Sprigg

Missourian Librarian Sharon Sanders runs an interesting blog on Thursdays called “From the Morgue.” Back in the less PC Good Old Days, that what we called the repository of yellowing clips carefully snipped out by the custodian of the newspaper’s history. Folks like Sharon and her predecessor, Judy Crow, really DO know where the bodies are buried and can find the skeletons in closets going back generations. You do NOT want to get on the wrong side of the newspaper librarian. They used to possess both sharp tongues and sharp scissors.

I’m not sure what Digital Sharon could do to a reporter who didn’t bring back a much-handled envelope of old clips, but I bet it wouldn’t be pretty. On one of our first meetings, I started to raise my camera to take her picture. I don’t normally take no for an answer – I’ve shot Popes and Presidents, rioters and guys with guns – but I put my camera down when she shook her head. I knew right away that she wasn’t somebody to mess with.

I felt fortunate to escape with my life and a photo of a stack of aging clips.

Broadway and Sprigg

Her blog Thursday said one of her most-requested photos is of the building that used to be at the northeast corner of Broadway and Sprigg Street. It’s a vacant lot next to the Last Call Bar today. She’s done all the historical heavy lifting about that block, so it’s worth heading over there.

I don’t have any photos going back that far, but I do have the area today.

This aerial from November 2010 shows a number of landmarks. The red building is the Last Call she mentions. The white building diagonally across the street is the infamous 633 – 635 – 637 Broadway trio of buildings that have been a source of controversy for a long time. One building was razed and the other two are being renovated. In the center of the picture is Trinity Lutheran Church. The brick building to its left is Shivelbines Music and the white building across the street is Annie Laurie’s Antiques.

Last Call

It’s hard to miss the Last Call if you’re eastbound on Broadway. Its red colors are set off by a blue sky.

Blue-sided building is gone

The blue-sided building with the iconic mural at the top center of the aerial and the ones next to it were torn down at the end of 2011. Walther’s Furniture, across the street, has turned into Discovery Playhouse.

Like a gap in a first-grader’s grin

The northwest corner of Broadway and Sprigg has another empty spot. That’s where the old Chris Cross Cafe used to be. This view is south on Sprigg toward Broadway somewhere around 1966 or 1967. The three-story building on the south side of Broadway was the Cape Hotel. It burned and the spot is occupied by a Subway today.