Out of the past 2/2/06

25 years ago: Feb. 2, 1981

Plans for expansion of the Cape Girardeau County jail are still in limbo, says County Presiding Judge Gene Huckstep; he traveled to Jefferson City last week to meet with Larry Linke, assistant director of the Missouri Council on Criminal Justice, about the possibility of the county receiving some recycled money which the MCCJ staff must dispose of prior to closing out the program.

A Cape Girardeau woman who has been a longtime supporter of the home rule charter form of government, Kathryn E. Braasch, becomes the second candidate to file for the Cape Girardeau Charter Commission, which would be responsible for drafting a charter for the city if residents approve the concept in April.

50 years ago: Feb. 2, 1956

The heaviest rain in 6 1/2 months -- a total of 1.90 inches -- poured down on Cape Girardeau in the 24-hour period ending at 7 a.m. today, helping to replenish the reservoir of underground water which had been severely depleted by a long winter drought.

A footnote in Cape Girardeau history was turned up this week by a St. Louis graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, who found in looking through a list of graduates that Louis Lorimier Jr. was the 25th cadet to graduate from the nation's top military school; Melvin A. Young, brother of Mrs. Lionel Minnen of Cape Girardeau, wrote her that in reading a register of graduated cadets he found the Lorimier name from Cape Girardeau in the 1806 list.

75 years ago: Feb. 2, 1931

The county court orders the payment of $5,000 annual salary to prosecuting attorney S.P. Dalton, in ruling on one of the disputed salary questions growing out of the last census.

Hope for the passage by Congress of the refunding bill to aid drainage and irrigation districts is expressed by A.L. Harty, president of the Little River Drainage District's board of supervisors.

100 years ago: Feb. 2, 1906

Seventeen reservations of rooms in the men's dormitory at the Normal School were made Wednesday, the first day that the rooms were subject to this privilege; Albert Hall will become the men's dormitory when Leming Hall is completed for the women, about March 1.

About 500 of the new books have been catalogued and placed in the new library at the Normal School; they are mostly along the lines of history, psychology and pedagogy.

-- Sharon K. Sanders