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NewsDecember 31, 2000

The river that made Cape Girardeau the trading center of Southeast Missouri eventually became more and more of a threat as 20th century attempts to channel the Mississippi made it more prone to flood. For much of the century, parts of Cape Girardeau lived under the threat of washing away, as much from small tributaries as from the Mississippi River...

The river that made Cape Girardeau the trading center of Southeast Missouri eventually became more and more of a threat as 20th century attempts to channel the Mississippi made it more prone to flood. For much of the century, parts of Cape Girardeau lived under the threat of washing away, as much from small tributaries as from the Mississippi River.

Most residents grew up happily unaware that early in the 20th century a railroad company blasted away the part of Cape Rock that thrust into the Mississippi River, leaving Cape Girardeau with no cape. Sometimes Progress gets in our way.

Until I was 7 my family lived on Terry Lane, a square block of small houses in the center of Cape Girardeau bounded on one side by Cape LaCroix Creek and on the other side by a corn field. After a heavy rain, the creek flooded and the whole block often was inundated. In 1699, three Catholic priests doing missionary work among the Indians erected a cross and held services at the mouth of the creek. The city fixed Cape LaCroix Creek's flooding problems long after we moved away to Montgomery Street on the town's southern boundary.

Montgomery Street at the end of the 1950s was a new subdivision. There were always houses under construction to play in and more corn grew behind the houses across the street. Our school, Jefferson, was on Minnesota Street, which turned to gravel just a few blocks south of the school and eventually took us to a small bridge over ... Cape LaCroix Creek.

We called it the Cow Bridge, and to boys not yet in junior high school this place might as well have been Morocco. The creek was filled with crawdads, and above it were wooded hills we explored like junior Lewises and Clarks. These woods, the school and our houses were our world.

When we weren't investigating construction methods and who knows who's woods, the neighborhood boys played the sport that was in season. In those days, the elementary schools competed against each other in flag football, basketball and baseball. Through these games, we learned of people from other lands -- the land of May Greene School where many of the people were black or the people of Alma Schrader School, where many of the people had nice cars.

With one exception, I do not know what the neighborhood girls did. They were superfluous to our existence except for Beth Cope, who could beat any of us at croquet and already drank coffee.

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One factor that seemed important in Cape Girardeau was community participation. When the city had its sesquicentennial in 1956, most of the men in town grew beards. They called themselves the Brothers of the Brush. The woman were called the Sisters of the Swish after the old-timey dresses they wore at the celebratory parade.

Another example: City Councilman Howard Tooke, who would go on to lead the city as mayor for 15 years, umpired my Connie Mack League baseball games at Capaha Park.

Capaha Park was and remains the axis Cape Girardeau turns on. Oh the baseball games, the Municipal Band concerts, the picnics, the walks around the lagoon, the swimming parties, the colors in the rose garden, the late-night basketball games, the kisses on Cherry Hill.

I never appreciated Cape Girardeau's full beauty until I returned from many years in California. California's beauty is breathtaking, physically and spiritually. Part of Cape Girardeau's beauty resides in my familiarity with the terrain. The map is in my heart. But it's also in the mixture of century-old French, Victorian and German residences and in the Spanish architecture downtown, all speaking to us from a past rich with different cultures, in the expanses of soccer and baseball fields and biking trail that have been the city's gift to its children, and in the lovingly restored Old St. Vincent's Church.

Cape Girardeau has many flaws. Black and white people still keep each other at a polite distance, though less so physically now than then, with more and more neighborhoods racially mixed.

The city tries, yet so far has failed, to find a way to keep the flood wall built to protect us in the 1950s and 1960s from separating us from our river heritage.

These ancient bluffs that overlook the river of the Mississippians and Lewis and Clark and Twain were not chosen by accident.

Cape Girardeau is like a woman who doesn't know she's beautiful. That may have a certain charm, but in the end she pays more attention to her imperfections and ignores her innate wonders.

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