Out of the past 7/11/05

25 years ago: July 11, 1980

The new Municipal Swimming Pool on the campus of Central High School will be open to the public for swimming six hours a day beginning Monday; the new $1.3 million pool, a joint city-Cape Girardeau Public Schools project, had formerly been used only for organized swim classes during the week and was open to the general public for swimming only on weekends.

Cape Girardeau's temperature topped out at 98 degrees yesterday, down slightly from Wednesday's 100-degree mark.

50 years ago: July 11, 1955

FREDERICKTOWN, Mo. -- Two escaped Alabama convicts are being held in the jail here, after being captured shortly after midnight at the intersection of highways 70 and 67 by highway patrolman R.C. Caldwell.

In the cave-in of a sewer ditch at the south edge of Jackson in the morning, Jess Willard, 47, of Cape Girardeau is suffocated, and two other men, Joseph H. Walker of Cape Girardeau and Glenn A. Craig of Sikeston, Mo., are injured; the men, employees of the Gohrman Construction Co. of Kansas City, engaged in laying the sewer to the new disposal plant, are working in an 8-foot ditch when the walls collapse.

75 years ago: July 11, 1930

L.W. Baldwin, president of the Missouri Pacific Lines, and a number of other high officials of the railroad are in Cape Girardeau for a dinner meeting, celebrating the completion and inauguration of service on the new Missouri Pacific railroad from Illmo to Cape Girardeau; festivities are held at the Hotel Marquette.

Surpassing all records for the season and for the past 12 years, the temperature at 2 p.m. leaps to a new mark of 103 degrees and threatens to climb higher before the day ends; not since Aug. 3, 1918, when the mercury reached 107 degrees, has the temperature gone higher in Cape Girardeau.

100 years ago: July 11, 1905

Michael Ourth, an old resident of Cape Girardeau and well-known member of Justi Post 173, Grand Army of the Republic, died at his home on William Street last night after an illness of several weeks; Ourth was a corporal of Company L, 10th Missouri Cavalry, during the Civil War; he made his home with his sister and a niece.

Robert Keller, a prosperous farmer living on Rural Route No. 2, is in Cape Girardeau; he reports corn and timothy hay in good shape; a few days of dry weather is badly needed to complete threshing.

-- Sharon K. Sanders