Out of the past 5/7/11

25 years ago: May 7, 1986

A Scott City sailor is among those aboard the battleship USS Missouri, which has been returned to active service in the Navy; Alan Eftink, a 1983 graduate of Notre Dame High School, works in the engineering department of the once-mothballed battleship.

Hands Across America -- what organizers call the "biggest community effort in the history of man" -- is still short of volunteers; local leaders are asking men, women and children to join the effort to join hands May 25 for 15 minutes along a stretch from Cape Girardeau to Apple Creek; it would be one of 6,000 links in a 4,000-mile-long chain extending from Los Angeles to New York.

50 years ago: May 7, 1961

Parades of thunderstorms and threatening masses of clouds rolled across Cape Girardeau skies yesterday and today, bringing 2.63 inches of rain and sending streams out of their banks; the total rainfall with Friday night's precipitation amounted to 5.58 inches.

R.B. Dillard, 34, of Laredo, Texas, escapes death in the afternoon when he crash lands his war-surplus F-51 (Mustang) fighter plane at Municipal Airport after circling the port for close to an hour, prevented from making a normal landing because his wheels wouldn't come down; the crop-duster, who had purchased the plane earlier in the day at Indiana, gets out of the plane, lights a cigarette and says, "I'm sure glad to be down."

75 years ago: May 7, 1936

By unanimous vote, members of the Louis K. Juden Post of the American Legion has decided to purchase the 3-acre Fort D tract near May Greene School and to proceed at once to make it into a memorial and a public park; the post intends to restore the old Civil War fort to its original state; an option on the property was secured from Mrs. Mary H.G. Houck.

Workers are pouring concrete for the skeleton of the fifth floor of the new addition to the Hotel Marquette; by the first of next week, the sixth floor of the superstructure can be erected and shortly thereafter the brick work can begin.

100 years ago: May 7, 1911

Three churches in Cape Girardeau are still without pastors; they are the Episcopal, Baptist and Christian.

Charles Ward and son, while passing through Jackson on their way to Cape Girardeau to consult an oculist in regard to the boy's eyes, are thrown from their buggy when their mule becomes frightened by an auto and runs off; the buggy is demolished; the boy escapes unhurt, but Mr. Ward receives a number of painful cuts and bruises.

-- Sharon K. Sanders