Out of the Past 1/25/09

25 years ago: Jan. 25, 1984

Financial Bancshares Inc., a Missouri multibank holding company, has completed an agreement to acquire a controlling interest in the Bank of Illmo at Scott City.

In two burglaries reported yesterday, more than $5,000 worth of tools and other items were taken from a Fruitland equipment shop, Missouri Industrial Equipment, and several hundred dollars worth of food were taken from North Elementary School in Fruitland.

50 years ago: Jan. 25, 1959

Oliver L. Parks of St. Louis, a prominent Catholic lay leader, philanthropist and former owner of Parks Air College in East St. Louis, Ill., speaks in the evening at the first annual banquet of the Guild of St. Paul at Cape Catholic High School.

Two Cape Girardeau youths, aided by a group of men, escaped without injury yesterday when they fell through the ice on the lagoon in Capaha Park while skating; Larry Barnes and Joe Heuer, both 16, sustained only minor cuts on their hands from their icy plunge.

75 years ago: Jan. 25, 1934

Surveys are being made in the Cape Girardeau area by G.S. McKean and F.J. Rhody Jr., engineers attached to the aeronautical division of the Department of Commerce, for the purpose of determining the location of emergency landing fields to be constructed along the St. Louis to Memphis, Tenn., government air mail route; one of the fields will be between Dutchtown and Delta.

A shantytown is springing up at the western gateway of Cape Girardeau; a few yards from Broadway, within view of U.S. 61 and inside the city limits by a few feet, the hurry-up village has formed almost overnight.

100 years ago: Jan. 25, 1909

Elmer S. Batterson, the town promotion man, arrived in Cape Girardeau yesterday and today is meeting with members of the Commercial Club; he will confer with businesspeople and suggest ways of bettering the town's commercial conditions.

Cape Girardeau Mayor W.C. Patton leaves for St. Louis, leaving Fred A. Kage in charge of the city; Patton will meet his brother, George Patton in St. Louis, and will then go on to California to visit his orange grove.

-- Sharon K. Sanders