Lila Perry Steinhoff Archives

August 17, 2015

Liberty Bell of the West

Bill Nowell of Nowell’s Camera shop invited Girlfriend Lila and me to go on a ramble to Ste. Genevieve one weekend in 1966 or 1967. On the way, we stopped to see the Liberty Bell of the West. Back in those days, you could walk right up to it and give it a ring or two. Today, you have to push a button that causes a door to open, and you have to look through bars.

The bell was given by King Louis XV of France to the Catholic Church of the Illinois Country in 1741. The people of Kaskaskia rang it in celebration after American General George Rogers Clark occupied the town on July 4, 1778.

Photo gallery of the Liberty Bell in 2012

I haven’t run across the negatives from the Nowell trip, but here are some photos from 2012. Click on any photo to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery.

Kaskaskia Bell State Memorial 11-09-2012

August 11, 2015November 30, 2021

L.V. Steinhoff’s Hats

Brother Mark found a bunch of Dad’s hats in the top shelf of the guest room a few weeks ago. Some were in the original boxes.

We’re not hat people

I put out the word to family members that they were available, but, as Mark’s photo shows, you have to have a certain flair to pull off wearing a hat these days. We’re missing that gene.

We set the hats aside for future consideration by Niece Laurie of Annie Laurie’s Antiques.

Kitty Ruessler hat exhibit

I was watching Cape Girardeau County History Center Director Carla Jordan working on an exhibit of hats loaned by Kitty Ruessler the other night. I casually mentioned Dad’s hats to her, and she suggested we display those, too.

Dad’s hat’s

She found a hat rack and made them look good. I was amazed at how they were still in good shape. Dad died in 1977, and I’m sure they hadn’t been touched since then except to shove them in a corner in the closet.

Carla and her staff have done a great job of building unusual exhibits in the short time the History Center has been open. You should stop by. It’s across the street from the county courthouse in Jackson, in the old Andrew Jackson building. It’s open seven days a week. The hours are 10 – 4, Monday through Saturday, and 1 to 4 on Sunday.

Dad could wear a hat

Dad spent most of the week pushing dirt around building roads and bridges, but he cleaned up nicely.

Photo gallery of Dad and his hats

Some of the older pictures were taken when I was about two years old, when Dad, Mother and her parents piled into a car and headed off to Mexico and the American Southwest. One shot, which includes Wife Lila, was taken at Christmastime in Athens, Ohio. I took the two color pictures in 1961ish.

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

August 3, 2015August 3, 2015

Is It True?

Wife Lila and I were over in Jackson to see Carla Jordan at the new Cape Girardeau County History Center on Thursday. All the parking was taken up, so we circled the block hoping a spot would open up. Just as I turned west, she let out a shriek, “Stop the car!!!”

I thought I might have run over an armadillo or something, so I locked down the brakes. It turned out that she had seen the almost full moon and wanted to get out to take a photo of it.

I shot an obligatory photo of the orb, but that wasn’t what got ME excited.

A great nerve

In the early ’90s, I attended a conference on telephone technology where the cover of one of the handouts featured the 1851 Nathaniel Hawthorne quote below. That’s about the only thing I remember from the conference, truth be told.

Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.

As soon as I saw the sunlight glinting off the utility lines, I thought of those lines. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

We’re already obsolete

I just remembered one other thing about that conference. Another speaker broke the news that the new ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) telephone switch we had just spent close to half a million bucks on was already Old Technology. To prove it, he brandished a USA Today newspaper he had picked up in the lobby.

“Leaf through the ads in this paper,” he challenged. “See how many of them have a telephone number in them and then count how many contain a web address.”

I didn’t rush back to tell that to management.

August 2, 2015August 2, 2015

Picture This

I was going to write something profound about the 2015 reunion, but I need to let my thoughts simmer for awhile.

Maybe it’s my family’s brush with mortality lately; maybe it’s looking at that looping series of photos of our classmates who have graduated to the next level; maybe it’s just that the doggone stairs in the Arena building seem steeper than they used to. So, rather than post the rather melancholy thoughts that are floating around in my head right now, let’s just go straight to some happy pictures of the celebration we had.

2015 Reunion photo gallery

Click on any picture to make it larger, then use your arrow keys to move through the gallery. There are a lot of images of the photographer herding cats to set up the group shots. I’ll add that job to the list of career opportunities to avoid.