Out of the past 4/20/11

25 years ago: April 20, 1986

Arson is suspected in a fire that destroys a storage building at Riverside Home Building Center; gasoline, hidden inside a cardboard water heater container surrounded by similar boxes, is the source of the blaze.

Paul and Marilyn Schnare have purchased the property at 1110 Cape Rock Drive that was the location of Town and Country Gardens, and have opened a florist and garden business there; the new business is called Accu-Grow Gardens and Florist.

50 years ago: April 20, 1961

Ted C. Connell of Killeen, Tex., commander in chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, flies into Municipal Airport in the afternoon for a visit to the Post home this evening; while here he will formally recharter a Boy Scouts troop long sponsored by the Cape Girardeau Post.

A.C. Brase, owner of Eggimann Feed and Produce Co. and long active in county road activities, is named a commissioner of the Cape Special Road District, replacing the late Eddie A. Erlbacher.

75 years ago: April 20, 1936

Cape Girardeau's new police chief, Herbert F. Wickham, announces a campaign to rid the city of double parking on narrow streets; leaving cars in the street near the post office, particularly on Fountain Street, must be stopped, Wickham says.

Preliminary plans involving an expenditure of $160,000 for new generating equipment and other improvements at the electrical plant of the Missouri Utilities Co. in Cape Girardeau have been approved; a huge new turbogenerator has been purchased, together with other equipment that will add about 80 percent more generating capacity to the plant.

100 years ago: April 20, 1911

With the use of dynamite, Louis Houck is blasting out in an easy and efficient manner long ditches that will drain his land south of Cape Girardeau; Pressley Hopper is overseeing the blasting of ditches on the Houck farms.

Business is picking up wonderfully on Main Street; another pool hall is to be established in the small building adjacent to First National Bank on the south; Nick LaCroix, sometime trombone artist and moving picture manipulator, has severed his partnership with W.W. Norman and will move across the street to establish himself in the Whitelaw store.

-- Sharon K. Sanders