ON THIN ICE: RESIDENTS RECALL WALKING ON RIVER

When Carl Long noticed a picture of two people walking on the frozen Mississippi River in Saturday's Southeast Missourian, it brought back memories.

"I took a second look at the picture," said Long, now a representative with the Leggett Group, a tobacco company. "I thought it may have been a picture of me and a classmate of mine who walked across the river in 1951."

But missing in the picture was a riverboat.

"A big towboat was cutting slowly through the ice on that Sunday in January of 1951," said Long.

Which meant that the ice really wasn't frozen solid.

But Long and Paul Norvell, a senior classmate at Cape Girardeau Central High School, had somewhat committed themselves to walking across the ice on that Sunday afternoon.

"Some other classmates at the school had been talking about walking out a few feet on the ice of the river," said Long. "We went a step further: We told people at school that come Sunday we were going to walk across the river."

Long admits they should have known better, but with many students and others on hand for the event, Norvell, who is now a coach, and Long couldn't back down: They started their trek.

"It wasn't smooth ice," said Long. "There were huge pieces of jagged ice floes, and occasionally some of the floes would actually move when we stepped on them."

The farther out the youths ventured the more people joined the onlookers on the Missouri shore.

The youngsters had planned to walk to the Illinois side and return by the Mississippi River bridge.

"It didn't quite work that way," remembers Long. "When we neared the Illinois shore we found an open channel and couldn't reach the shore.

"We knew then that we'd have to return across the ice-covered river to the Missouri shore."

The youths, keeping watch on the towboat that was moving about a half mph, had some scary moments.

"We couldn't find good, safe footing," he said. "More than once we stepped on a chunk of ice that moved, and we quickly had to take a big step in another direction."

Long said: "We didn't have time to be scared. By this time the crowd on the Missouri shore had increased even more.

"I can tell you that we didn't really draw a full breath until we finally made it to the Missouri shore again."

Like many youngsters who dared to walk on the river ice in 1951 - or any of the other 24 years that the Mississippi has been frozen -- they didn't tell their parents.

Many area residents, some now grandparents, like to recount their experiences trudging across the ice. Each admits that when they did it their parents were blissfully ignorant of the fact.

"My parents didn't know about our folly until the spring of 1951," said Long.

Long's parents, Mae and Pink Long, operated a grocery at 1,000 N. Main in Cape Girardeau. "Somebody told them about the incident in the spring of 1951," Long recalled.

"I can remember as a young lad in the Marble Hill area when we would hunt up small iced-over creeks," said Long. "The ice would crack and crinkle as we walked on it. But we realized later that the river cold be so much more dangerous."

Fifteen years earlier, during the 1935-36 freeze, four young men walked across the icy Mississippi at Cape Girardeau.

"I was attending college," said W. Hughes Davault of Jackson in a letter this week to the Southeast Missourian. "We heard the river was frozen over, so I drove my Model T Ford down to the river along with Art Schwab, Bill Slinkard and Meyer Grojean.

"When we neared the center of the river you could hear the water rushing by -- sort of a roaring sound," said Davault. "The ice moved up and down some, but we made it to Illinois, then returned."

"But there were lots of ice floes piled up, and you had to walk round them," said Davault. "I had heard about mule teams pulling wagons of coal across the river and wondered how they did it."

Davault recalled that a car could be observed on the ice around Cape Rock.