- Writing parking tickets with a friendly smile (4/23/24)1
- Mayor Ford, Kiwanis light up Capaha Park's diamond (4/16/24)1
- The rise and fall of Capaha Park's wooden grandstand (4/9/24)
- Death of Judge Pat Dyer, prosecutor of the famous peonage case here in 1906 (4/2/24)2
- A third steamer Cape Girardeau was christened 100 years ago (3/26/24)
- Cape Girardeau christens its namesake (3/19/24)
- The humanist philosophy of Lester Mondale (3/12/24)1
Riding the Mississippi in a No. 2 wash tub
My dad, Louis Sanders, used to tell stories from his days as a young man living near Commerce in Scott County, Mo. Frequently, he would refer to the time he saw a man float past that river town in "a No. 2 wash tub."
Despite my best efforts, I never was able to find an article about the mysterious voyager while my dad was living. But I did find it last week in the pages of the Southeast Missourian. Dad would have been 21 the year this happened. He was still living on the family farm with his parents and younger siblings.
Sorry to say, G.D. "Frony" Fronabarger was either out of town or didn't think a man floating down the river in a wash tub was worth his time. There were no photos of the event published in the Missourian. But here are the articles we printed:
Recently I found a story that explains the unhappy ending of Floyd Thompson's voyage.
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