Answering the question: 'Can a woman be president'
Sen. Margaret Chase Smith by the U.S. Senate Historical Office. (Wikipedia; public domain) The world seems to be obsessed at the moment with the United States’ presidential election, pitting Democrat...
View ArticleMethodist bell ends up in Christian church
Anyone familiar with this blog probably has noted I have an interest in church bells. In the past, I have written about bells at First General Baptist Church, Saint Francis Hospital and St. Mary’s...
View ArticleGuernsey Club helped establish Cape County's dairy industry
A Southeast Missouri farmer tends his herd of cattle in this early photograph given to the Southeast Missourian newspaper by the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce. (Southeast Missourian archive) In...
View ArticleAn immigrant from Berlin
While Melva Rose Schrader and sisters Mary Russell and Helen Coerver Fox (featured in last week's blog) were pedaling across Europe in the summer of 1949, Cape Girardeau received a new resident from...
View Article3 Cape girls tour Europe on bicycles
The year before Melva Rose Schrader married Francis F. Lewis (shown here) on Oct. 21, 1950, at Trinity Lutheran Church in Cape Girardeau, she and two friends from Cape Girardeau -- sisters Mary...
View ArticleAn unsolved mystery from 1949
In 1949 Bill Watkins and his wife resided at 350 N. Fountain St. in Cape Girardeau. The two had a William Tell moment in July of that year, when Bill, 21, took a shot at a late-night prowler at his...
View ArticleCairo girl wins Olympic gold
Caroline Smith (Wikipedia; public domain) Caroline Smith is probably not a name known to too many Girardeans these days, but 100 years ago she brought reflected glory to Cairo, Illinois, and Cape...
View ArticleTheater stunt prompts police response
Perhaps E. Mike Doyle and J.H. Strain were feeling the strain of increased competition. The New Broadway Theatre had opened its doors in December 1921, and it’s possible Doyle and Strain had seen a...
View ArticlePolio: The devastating year of 1949
Circus folks, performing in Cape Girardeau as part of the Southeast Missourian's 50th anniversary celebration, visit with polio patients at Saint Francis Hospital on June 7, 1954. The children are...
View ArticleReflections on the death of Jerome 'Dizzy' Dean
The Southeast Missourian reported the death of baseball legend Jerome "Dizzy" Dean, 63, on its front page on July 17, 1974. An article by Missourian sports editor B. Ray Owen brought the sad news to...
View ArticleGeneral Baptists preserve old bell
I've written about bells before in my blog. One such article reflected on the silencing of the bells of St. Mary's Cathedral in 1988. An earlier blog tracked the bell that formerly hung at Saint...
View ArticleThad Stubbs calls it a career
For a business that operated in Cape Girardeau for 43 years -- on Broadway, no less -- there is very little in the files of the Southeast Missourian documenting Stubbs' Beer Garden. Located on the...
View ArticleThe Doyle house succumbs to 'progress'
The Doyle house, facing east, was at the southwest corner of Broadway and Lorimier Street. (Kassel Studio ~ Southeast Missourian archive)"Progress" has been the excuse given for the destruction of...
View ArticleMapping the recovery from the 1949 tornado
At 6:56 p.m. on Saturday, May 21, 1949, Cape Girardeau was struck by a tornado. Here are some statistics that demonstrate the destruction inflicted on this community of about 21,500: 22 persons killed;...
View ArticleMissourian survey demonstrates residents' indomitable spirit after 1949 tornado
Twenty years after the May 21, 1949, tornado, the Southeast Missourian newspaper published an article by managing editor John L. Blue recalling the events of that Saturday that left Cape Girardeau...
View ArticlePtlm. Boyd reads to youngsters
1974 has yielded a number of blogs for me in recent weeks. This latest one was published June 2 and tells of then Ptlm. Howard H. Boyd Jr. attempting to read a book about a garbage man to a group of...
View ArticleEddie Moss at Cape Civic Center
In the same edition that carried the feature story about Curtis Clymer and his riverboat models from last week's blog, a second article in the sports section caught my eye. The same photographer — Rick...
View ArticleCurtis Clymer's boat models
As a kid growing up in South Cape, I spent my summers helping my parents in the garden, mostly growing tomatoes, and working on models of sailing ships. The more complicated the rigging, the better....
View ArticleA family connection to the 1949 tornado
For most of my life, I didn’t know that my family suffered any loss in the tornado that devastated Cape Girardeau on May 21, 1949. My parents, Louis and Frances Sanders, weren’t married yet. Mom was...
View ArticlePiasa or Bald Eagle?
Old postcards provide us with images of bygone days. Even the colorized versions of old photographs help preserve history. But there is a danger that more recent postcards featuring reproductions of...
View Article
