Palm Beach Bike Tours

Cape Central High School in the mid-60s

I shot the black and white picture of my alma mater, Cape Girardeau Central High School, in 1964 or early 1965 for the 1965 Girardot yearbook. It was taken with a Crown Graphic 4 x 5 camera. That’s all the tech info I have.

Cape Girardeau Central High School October 13, 2009

This picture was taken Oct. 13, 2009, at 21:39:50 with a Nikon D-40 digital SLR. The zoom lens was at 18mm (27mm in 35mm-speak).

I underexposed the picture 1-1/3 f/stops, with an exposure of five seconds at f/5. The  “film” speed was ISO 200.

I did a little tweaking with Photoshop, but I also remember doing some burning and dodging of the original B&W print.

(Editing film on a lap top is a little hit-and-miss. Everything looks different depending on the angle of the screen, so I don’t know how optimized the image is.)

1965 Girardot Photo Staff

Left to right: Jim Stone, Ronald Dost, head photographer Ken Steinhoff, Skip Stiver, Joe Snell, Gary Fischer. Taken in CHS darkroom c 1964. (NOW do you see why none of of the majorettes dated me?)

The more things change, the more they remain the same

The high school has been converted into a middle school. There are a bunch of new trees in front of the building (and it looks like it’s air conditioned now). The big sign that my senior class voted to put on the front lawn is gone. (I voted against it and thought we should buy books for the library). Another sign has popped up in its place.

Still, it looks remarkably like it did when I walked through the doors as a scared freshman.

Mother and I took a cruise around the area on some roads neither she nor I had ever gone down. There aren’t many of those, so it’s always fun to take off down some lane without having a clue where the road is going to take us.

This old house is one of only a couple of structures left standing in the old German community of Wittenberg, MO. When I photographed the town in the 60s, there was still a store and a number of families there.

Four decades of Mississippi River floods have pretty much erased all traces of the town.

Great persimmons

Mother always likes to go down to the Tower Rock Nature Area where there are three persimmon trees that produce prodigious amounts of fruit. We thought it would be too early to eat any since there hasn’t been a frost, but the ground was littered with seeds and squashed persimmons.

Mother fought off the bugs and the bees to eat her fill

Anybody who has eaten a not-quite-ripe persimmon will never forget the way they’ll flat turn your mouth inside out. She’s had enough practice to be able to pick out the good ones.

Not sure if the mantis is praying or preying

This praying mantis didn’t appear to be stalking anything, but they have a deserved reputation as an ambush predator. Larger versions will go after animals as big as rodents. Fortunately, this guy was of a milder flavor.

Busy as a bee or butterfly

The bees and butterflies must sense that warm weather is just about over.

Almost every flowering plant alongside the road was being visited by bees and butterflies.

I overheard talk in a store that we might see frost any night now, but the official weather forecast is still calling for the low 40s.

I’m kinda easing into this cold weather thing before hopping on the bike. That sounds crazy, but you have to remember that the heat index was 100 when we left Florida a few days ago.

I learned at a very early age NOT to jump into the swimming pool before about July. You don’t want to take a chance on having your heart stop.

First of order of business today was getting the van (mostly) empty. The main drag in Cape Girardeau was shut down for the university’s Homecoming Parade, so that caused some delay. After we dropped off the boxes of magazines at Annie Laurie’s Antiques, which has a new web page, by the way, the van was much happier.

My Surly Long Haul Trucker breathed a sigh of relief, too, when it was freed from its tight quarters. The racks did a good job of keeping it from getting squeezed.

Marty Riley doing pastels at Conservation Center

Our next stop was the Cape Girardeau Conservation Nature Center, where Wife Lila’s sister was doing pastels as part of a Participating Artisans program.

I confessed last week that I was no artist, so my admiration of folks who can translate imagination to ink, paint, paper or stone is boundless.

In addition to traditional artists, there was a man demonstrating flint knapping, a woman doing wood burnings and some guys doing chain saw carvings.

Cape Girardeau Conservation Center is a great use of tax money

I’m not sure that I had ever been to the Conservation center, even though it’s probably only about three miles from the house where I grew up. If you’re in the area, particularly if you have kids with you, it’s well worth a stop. They have an interesting mix of stuff going on all the time. Check their web site.

Almost every exhibit has some kind of hands-on activity, and the folks staffing the place are friendly and knowledgeable. (My mother said she was going to ask someone there if squirrels blinked, because she had never seen one do it. The answer, she found, was that, yes, squirrels blink.)

You can’t miss with cute kids and violins

On the way out the door, we spotted little kids (like maybe six years old) carrying tiny violins.

They were from the Southeast Missouri Music Academy Suzuki Strings. The little kids were deadly serious about their playing, as you can tell from the expressions if you click the photo to make it larger.

The kids put on a nice musical performance less than 75 feet from the fellow doing the chain saw carvings, aquariums holding a hovering gar and a huge Alligator snapping turtle. Not exactly what you would expect from a conservation center, but it shows the variety of activities it supports.

Wife Lila and I made it into Cape Girardeau tonight. The trip was fairly uneventful except for some killer rain around Nashville.

There wasn’t any chance that we were going to get blown around. Our Honda Odyssey was loaded about as full as you could pack it and still have the wheels turn.

In addition to the Surly Long Haul Trucker snuggled in the middle, we had big steamer truck that some elderly neighbors gave us 30+ years ago. It’s headed to Bro Mark in St. Louis.

Then there was eight or 10 boxes of old magazines – Life, Time, Saturday Evening Post and computer – dating back to the 1960s or earlier that are going to Wife Lila’s niece’s antique shop, Annie Laurie’s.

Mark’s Sears Spyder is headed back to St. Louis. Son Matt hauled it down to Florida to see if I could restore it, but it turned out a to be a bigger – read expensive – project than I could tackle. We wrapped the banana seat with shrink wrap to keep it from suffering any more wind damage.