Jo Ann Bock recalls details about life in Cape Girardeau back to the Great Depression in her book

You learn a lot from living a long life in a small city, and former Cape Girardeau Central High School teacher Jo Ann Bock's book, "Around the Town of Cape Girardeau in 80 Years," is proof.

Published last year by the Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University, the 203-page work melds Bock's recollections with details about life in Cape Girardeau back to the Great Depression.

"Being a college town, Cape draws a lot of people from the different arts and professions," she said. "As far as personality, the neighborhoods are usually congenial. I think it's a pretty laid-back community."

Bock's parents, Charles and Lela Burton, moved to Cape Girardeau from St. Louis in 1930 with her and her older brother, Dick, to be near relatives and for Charles to seek work, which he obtained at a cement plant where he contracted the tuberculosis that led to his death 13 years later.

"It worked because the people around you were kind," she said. "We joined a church and made friends, and Dad spaded the gardens of neighbors for a quarter or 50 cents."

“Around the Town of Cape Girardeau in 80 Years” by Jo Ann Bock. (Laura Simon)

Having sold more than 400 copies since last year, the book is available for $15 at the Southeast Bookstore, the Book Rack and Amazon.com. It's organized as "The Early Years," "Business Districts," "My World of Music," "Friends and Family," including a baker's dozen of Bock's "The Best Years" columns for the Southeast Missourian and "The Joy of Writing."

She went from waitressing at Hill's Eat Shop on Broadway, across from the Southeast Missourian, to writing for the newspaper as a high school senior. She continued at the paper, part time and full time, until returning to Southeast in 1962 to become an English and journalism teacher.

Bock and her late husband, Howard, director of the Central High School Media Center, had three sons, Brian, Burton and Bradley. Her husband, an engineer-gunner on a B-26 bomber, earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. She has five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Bock's involvement in music led to a humorous meeting with her future husband when they were students at Southeast while rehearsing for the musical "Is College Dead?"

She was singing a popular World War II-era song, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old," when a sandbag, used as a counterweight for hoisting things above the stage, fell, brushed her skirt and hit the stage floor.

"It was real strange how I met him," said Bock, 84. "I was doing my solo and all of a sudden, 'Bang!' Howard was up there operating the sandbags and one of them broke and slipped. I looked up and thought, 'Wow! I didn't get hurt, but it was a very close call.'

"We met at the after-show party two weeks later and started dating. He felt bad about it, but those things happen."

Illustrating the fateful event, Bock stands and sings the Rosemary Clooney song -- "They're either too young or too old, they're either too gray or too grassy green. The pickings are poor and the crop is lean. What's good is in the Army, what's left will never harm me ..."

Bock's editor, Dr. Adam Criblez, said she "is a magnificent storyteller who excels at making you feel as if you are there with her."

In an email, Criblez wrote, "In 'Around the Town,' readers walk alongside Jo Ann down Broadway as it looked in the Thirties and Forties, They feel as if they are singing with the Girardot Rose Chorus [group of Cape Girardeau women who sang in the barbershop quartet style] in the 1970s."

Criblez added, "This book is not a chronological narrative of life in southeastern Missouri. Instead, it is a series of related tales, small, easily read tidbits transporting readers to a different place and time."

Bock said former history center director Frank Nickell first encouraged her to write the book, which lists the names of 742 families, not counting her relatives.

Having retired from teaching in 1990, she feels she left education at the right time because it was getting too technical and losing its most appealing characteristics.

"Give me a blackboard, a piece of chalk and an overhead projector and I can inspire students by example," she said.

"When I gave them an assignment, I sat there and did the same thing. You have to find topics they're interested in. I loved spelling bees, and I don't know if they still do that."

Coming from journalism, Bock said, she learned that writing comes harder to students who don't have that talent.

She and her husband were charter members of Good Shepherd Lutheran Chapel. She recently rejoined the church's choir when she found she missed singing.