Fred Lynch retired in 2018 after capturing images for the Southeast Missourian since 1975, in that time moving from black-and-white to color, from film to digital and to video. The blog title is a nod to an earlier era of news photography and the 4x5 Speed Graphic: It's more important to be there for the shot than to worry about technical details.

Highway 61-Broadway aerial in detail

Posted Wednesday, April 15, 2015, at 12:00 AM

Here are close-up sections of an aerial photo made by G.D. Fronabarger in the 1950s. Each has a link to a previous blog about the building.

Arena Park is seen to the left.

The photo below shows General Sign Co., at left, next to the Seven Up Bottling Co. plant at Broadway and Kingshighway.

According to a Southeast Missourian story May 28, 1953, the 7-Up plant opened here in 1947. Its output at that time was 2000 cases, or 48,000 bottles, a day. If laid end to end, they would reach from the plant southward on Highway 61 to the Scott County line.

The local plant served an area from Festus south to the Arkansas border and from the river west to Ellington.