LETTERS FROM HOME: LET'S GET QUIRKY AND PUT ON A SHOW

Feb. 1, 2001

Dear Julie,

DC and I had just tuned in the public radio program "Whad'Ya Know?" when the host announced the "Let's Put on a Show!" contest. The prize is the opportunity for a town to host "Whad'Ya Know?" one Saturday morning in April. Those who enter must give good reasons why their town deserves to be set upon by a radio show known for its quirkiness.

To illustrate, this Saturday's show will offer an interview with a Green Bay, Wisc., mortician who offers coffins in the Packers' colors.

Why should "Whad'Ya Know?" come to Cape Girardeau? What oddness do we have to offer?

Three decades ago, nearby Piedmont was swarming with UFOs. A couple hundred years ago, nearby New Madrid was the epicenter of an earthquake that made the Mississippi River flow backwards.

Cape Girardeau has nothing so dramatic. We're the hometown of a famous conservative talk show host, but he probably isn't quirky enough. We probably have more buffet restaurants per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. And our most recent Democratic candidate for Congress campaigned by singing "This Land is Your Land" in the back of a convertible during the homecoming parade.

But it's doubtful any of this would get us into the finals of the contest.

We do meet one of the other requirements: talent. Liesl Schoenberger is only in high school but plays Tchaikovsky and Bill Monroe on her fiddle like a pro. We have wonderful organists, pianists, harpists, singers, guitarists. All the riverboat passengers who stop by love Jerry Ford's Dixieland band. Talent isn't our problem.

How about this: We're the City of Roses, but the Ten Mile Rose Garden was torn down to make room for the interstate highway.

Now our essential quirk has become obvious. Cape Girardeau is a geographic oddity, one of the few inland capes in the U.S. Quirkier still, we are the only inland cape whose cape appears to be missing.

Ensign Jean Girardot is supposed to have established his trading post in 1733 at a spot on the Mississippi called Cape Rock. But where is the cape? The river makes a gentle turn right at the bluff, but is it enough of one to merit the name cape? Were early travelers of the river so hard up for a respite from the swift waters that they promoted a bend into a cape?

One local legend is that a railroad company dynamited the cape away at the beginning of the 20th century. But Dr. Frank Nickell, our local historian extraordinaire, says there's nothing to back up the legend.

He questions whether the demolition of the cape happened at all. "I think this is a case where the story is better than the facts."

His view: The river simply changed its course in the years after Girardot arrived. Infrared photographs show the river once ran much farther east before reaching Cape Girardeau.

He thinks the river probably turned west at Picayune Chute across from Cape Rock and must have created a much bigger loop than currently exists.

All through the riverboat years of the 19th century, no traveler's journal ever remarked upon the cape. Maybe that's because it was no longer here.

Whad'ya know? Cape Girardeau has no cape.

Love, Sam