BELL REMOVES MICROWAVE TOWER: CITY FIXTURE OBSOLETE WITH FIBER OPTICS

Something is missing from the Cape Girardeau skyline today -- a 110-foot microwave tower that stood high above the Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. building at 800 Broadway for years.

"The tower, which was installed atop a two-story building, was taken down Monday," said Ed McFadden, an equipment engineer with Southwestern Bell at St. Louis.

The tower outlived its usefulness. "It will be sold for scrap," said McFadden.

The tower served as a critical link in the company's long-distance network and data service transmission between St. Louis and areas throughout Southeast Missouri for many years.

"We have not established a date when the tower was built," said McFadden. "But we're estimating that it was during the mid-to-late 1960s."

Over the past five years Southwestern Bell has been working on its new, underground fiber-optic technology.

"Removal of the tower marks the completion of the program to provide fiber-optic technology," said Jack Farmer of Fleishman-Hillard International Communications of St. Louis, which does work for Southwestern Bell.

The company, originally Cape Girardeau Bell Telephone and later Southeast Missouri Bell Telephone, didn't become Southwestern Bell until 1951.

The first telephone company here -- Cape Girardeau Bell -- was founded in 1898, with offices on the third floor of the Sturdivant Bank building on Main Street downtown. Its principal stockholders were M.A. Dennison, A.R. Ponder, J.L. Albert and J.F. Brooks.

By the mid-1920s, Cape Girardeau Bell had purchased and, or added exchanges at Ste. Genevieve, Jackson, Perryville, Flat River, Farmington and Kennett, and was known as Southeast Missouri Telephone Co. In 1929, Southeast Missouri Telephone purchased Southwestern Bell holdings in Southeast Missouri.

It wasn't until 1951 that the Southwestern Bell-Southeastern Bell merger was completed.

Telephone services here had grown from a few telephones in one city in 1898 to more than 60,000 telephones in 50 communities in 1955. The old crank telephones were out and the new rotary dial phones were in. Also gone was the nickel cost for using a pay telephone; the cost went to a dime in 1954.