RIVER CITY JOURNAL: ALL GOOD PLANS BOIL DOWN TO ONE THING: GOLF COURSE

You could move the Eiffel Tower to the banks of the Mississippi. But unless you offer golf, no one will go to the top.

Every town has its movers and shakers. The Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce honored some of the best and brightest at its annual award wingding last week. The city's downtown has its own dynamo in the person of Judith Anne Lang, who is involved in so many projects to improve the old business area that it's hard to keep up with all of them.

Isn't it interesting how many of the people who find positive ways to improve our river city are relative newcomers? Sure, there are lots of Cape Girardeau natives whose names belong on plaques. A lot of them have already been engraved. But when you look at today's crop of doers, its bursting with folks who decided to move here for one reason or another and then decided to find ways to make their adopted hometown even better.

That's good.

Like many other newcomers, Judith Anne has been in Cape Girardeau long enough to be called a native. I don't know what the magic number is, but when you've been here more than 20 years and you've jumped into just about every project in need of helping hands and good ideas, you deserve to be called a native, even if it is by adoption.

Judith Anne gave a talk at one of the Rotary clubs this week, the one that is usually called either the downtown club or the old men's club. The club doesn't meet downtown. It hasn't for years and years. And it can't be called the old men's club any more, because it has a lot of women who are members. Nary a one of them is old.

I'm a member of that club, and I've toyed from time to time with the idea of asking the women just how old they are in an effort to dispel that image of oldness. But it's just not the Rotary way to ask a woman how old she is.

In her talk to the not-so-old Rotarians -- who, by the way, enjoyed a much reduced average age thanks to an invasion of visiting Rotarians from that bunch of kids who call themselves the Cape West Rotary Club -- Judith Anne talked with her unwavering enthusiasm about all the organizations that are trying to make downtown Cape Girardeau a beehive of retail activity while preserving some of the fine old homes that were built when you could see the river without a periscope to look over the floodwall.

She went on about committees and associations and commissions. She made it pretty clear that a lot of people want to spruce up, clean up, fix up, build up and pump up the area.

In her talk, Judith Anne told the Rotarians -- I only saw about half a dozen who were nodding off, but they would fall asleep after a good-sized bowl of cereal, much less a buffet topped off by bread pudding -- about all the goals that have been established now that all those organizations have united for a common purpose.

You can imagine my chagrin, naturally, when Judith Anne ended her fine presentation without a single word regarding what has to be the most ambitious plan of all for downtown Cape Girardeau.

Yes, my feelings were a mite bruised.

How does Judith Anne or anyone else expect to make downtown Cape Girardeau into the riverbank Paris, Rome, London and Kalamazoo of the West without the magnificent 18-hole luxury golf course and courthouse/clubhouse that I've been promoting for the past two years?

I'm here to tell you that some of the best plans for a bright future in downtown Cape Girardeau have fallen by the wayside because things like the golf course were considered impractical or even implausible. But I'm also here to tell you that the movers and shakers of this world are golfers. And if you want to do something Really Big, it takes money. Golfers have the cash.

It's pretty simple when you think about it: Currying the favor of golfers is the ticket to a prosperous downtown. Which is why I'm sure the new microbrewery planned for the old Buckner-Ragsdale will probably have a putting green as part of its interior decor. It would just be a smart business decision.

I didn't make a scene during Judith Anne's Rotary talk. She's too nice a person for that. But she's a smart and energetic woman. I'm sure that any future talks about the dreams for downtown will include the challenge of building a golf course on a bluff overlooking the mighty Mississippi. I just know she will.

NEWS UPDATE: And for those of you still waiting for an explanation about the mysterious glowing powder found in the woods near my favorite hometown in the Ozarks west of here: The Missouri Department of Natural Resources, after two weeks of extensive testing, says the powder is harmless zinc sulfide used to make toys and watches and TV remote controls glow in the dark. The 10 barrels -- of which only seven remain in the woods -- are valued at $10,000. In the Ozarks, any number with that many zeros is a lot. Heck, there probably aren't that many fingers and toes in the whole county.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.