Mark Steinhoff Archives

December 24, 2014

Rerun: Santa Mystery Solved

As promised, I’m taking a short break over the holidays and offering up rerun links to older posts.

This story about Christmas shoppers from December 9, 2009, was one of my earliest posts. I made some guesses about where they might have been taken in Cape.

It set the tone for all my posts to follow:

I got most of the facts wrong
My readers went to great lengths to prove I was wrong and to provide the correct information.

By December 12, Brother Mark, Bill Hopkins, Chuck Blitstein, Jesse James and Brenda Bone Lapp chimed in with opinions, speculation and photographs, but it took The Missourian team of Fred Lynch and Cathy Hancock to determine the photos were taken in Jackson, not Cape.

Hey, close is good enough in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear war; I mean I was only seven miles off, give or take?

We know where this is

By December 14, the Fred and Cathy team helped figure out where in Jackson these photos were taken, too. Jim Vangilder filled in more blanks.

After that, I wasn’t afraid to post mystery photos. With few exceptions, someone always stepped up to the plate to provide the (maybe) correct information.

This is one of those exceptions: nobody has come up with who these cheerleader-looking types are.

August 3, 2014August 2, 2021

Neighbor Rhonda Turns 50

When we moved into our house on Kingsway Drive 58 years ago, Bob and Mary Tinker lived across the street; the Grays lived next to them, the McCunes lived in a small cottage down the hill, and the Hales and Heislers in their farm houses finished off the neighborhood. We were way outside the city limits and cows grazed in the field behind our house.

That’s Mrs. Tinker in front of her house.

Boltons came Memorial Day 1994

Bill and Rhonda Bolton moved into the house on Memorial Day, 1994. Even though they’ve been living there 20 years and have been the best neighbors you could want, we all still call it the “Tinker House.”

They keep an eye on Mother for us. When Brother Mark kept getting a busy signal on her phone one night, he called me and I reached out for the Boltons and Carla Jordan, who lives over by Food Giant. It turned out to be a false alarm: Mother had failed to hang up the phone properly and that’s why it rang busy.

When Mother’s mower stopped while she was massacring grass the other day, Bill came over to help her push it away from the street. It’s nice to know you have friends and neighbors who will come running if you need them.

Come over for Rhonda’s party

Bill stopped by Friday to invite Mother to Rhonda’s 50th birthday party on Saturday. I’m not sure if he used the phrase, “if you can make it up the hill,” but that would have insured that she would attend.

“A good time was had by all”

That’s a line that one of The Missourian’s country correspondents would tack on to any story involving more than two people, even if it was a funeral. In this case, it was true. There was a nice mix of family, friends and neighbors, good food and even a photo booth.

Birthday party photo gallery

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

July 13, 2014

North Riverfront Park

Brother Mark and I rode our bikes from his house near the Botanical Gardens, past the Gateway Arch, and onto the St. Louis Riverfront Trail, over Chain of Rocks Bridge and into Illinois. You can read an account of our 2004 adventure on my bike blog.

Chain of Rocks Bridge

The blog has some neat photos and some interesting history of the Chain of Rocks Bridge, which used to be part of U.S. Route 66. The unusual bridge has a 22-degree bend in it to allow river traffic to have uninterrupted navigation of the river.

Quick tour for Curator Jessica

When I took Curator Jessica to the airport last November, we had some time to kill, so I took her to the North Riverfront Trail where we parked at the Union Electric Light and Power Company. Whenever I park at a trailhead, I scope out the lot for broken glass that indicates that cars have been broken into while their owners were away. Bad guys figure that you’re going to be gone for awhile.

The lot passed that sniff test, but I still felt uneasy for some reason. I’ve parked there before and ridden my bike in the area without my hackles going up, so I don’t know what I was picking up.

Floodwall Art Project

We passed the Floodwall Art Project, a seven-foot tall, 150-foot long tile mural designed by ceramic artist Catherine Magel and created with the assistance of at least 1,500 youth and adults from at least six St. Louis communities. The mural displays the history of the natural world beginning with microscopic life forms, moves into sea life, graduates to earth creatures, then ends with migrating birds.

Here’s where you can find out more about the Great Rivers Greenway. You can click on the photos to make them larger, too.

I felt uneasy

Curator Jessica was thoroughly enjoying herself, but my feeling of unease was growing. We were the only ones around, so there was no obvious reason why I was picking up bad vibes, but I suggested that we head back to the car.

This weird feature on a pedestrian overpass is unsettling, but I don’t think it was what was poking at my lizard brain.

I told Jessica that my misgivings were probably unfounded, but I had learned over the years to trust that instinct that something isn’t as it should be. She gave me her normal eye roll and “crazy guy” look, but didn’t object to moving on. I fully expected to see my car broken into when we got back to the parking lot, but everything was as we had left it.

I’ll have to see if I get the same feeling the next time I go there.

July 5, 2014

Hula Hoopla

I was looking at a digital copy of our 8mm home movies shot in the 1960s. This brief clip brought back memories of the hula hoop craze in the late 1950s. The things were all over the place: schools incorporated them into recess and PE programs; Life magazine loved to run hula hoop pictures, and Brothers Mark and David had to give them a go in our back yard.

Wikipedia has a pretty good history of the hula hoop.

Here’s a hooping video

Our two hoops were part of the more than 50,000 hula hoops that were being produced every day at the height of the craze.

P.S. This is a silent movie. Turning up the volume isn’t going to help.