Out of the past: April 15

1996

The City of Cape Girardeau is getting aggressive with airport marketing; it's spending part of the airport's $538,000 annual budget on advertising, surveys and promotional open houses in hopes landings and takeoffs will increase; airport management funneled $375 a month into radio advertising on KGMO and sister stations KAPE and KYRX; the ads, which run Thursdays through Sundays to target business travelers, feature phrases like "take off with great bargains" and "Cape Girardeau Regional Airport, your gateway to the world"; newspaper advertising, paid for in part by Trans World Express, will begin soon.

The Bel Aire Bar and Grill in downtown Cape Girardeau is under new ownership; Debby Dees of Scott City is the new owner of the restaurant at 24 S. Spanish St., which offers burgers, Jamaican pulled chicken and barbecue.

1971

Reflecting on charges brought against the Little River Drainage District, chief engineer Earl Schultz says the district had no intention of harming anything by its brush spraying program along Southeast Missouri drainage ditches; the spraying program resulted in fish kills, estimated at 25,000 in Cape Girardeau and Stoddard counties and 40,000 in New Madrid County; Schultz adds the business from which the district purchased the herbicide indicated it was safe for spraying along the ditches.

Talk becomes action as the City of Cape Girardeau begins in earnest the first step toward extension of New Madrid Street from Big Bend Road to Kingshighway after years of planning; this initial phase entails cutting across the north campus of State College to open a stretch of the proposed street from Sprigg at Emerald to North Henderson.

1946

Entrances, lavatories and cafeterias of Cape Girardeau's public schools were sprayed with DDT on Saturday in a move to check the annual spring foray of insects, few in number this year following an application of the deadly substance last fall; the spraying was done by attendance officer Waldo Withers and John Brennan, chief maintenance man.

A bid of $13,173.60 by C.A. Hood for the widening and improvement of Independence Street from West End Boulevard to Keller Avenue is accepted by the Cape Girardeau City Council; the property owners will pay $2 per front foot and the Cape Special Road District will bear the cost above that figure; the total frontage is 2,429.1 feet.

1921

The Southeast Missourian, in an extra edition, reports the early morning escape of Ralph Brashear from the Cape Girardeau city jail, where he was being held in connection with the murder of policeman Willis Martin on Feb. 27, as well as for a number of robberies; Brashear saws off a bolt that held the lower hinge on the door leading into the cage, works the bolt out with his fingers, pushes the door out at the bottom and squeezes through the aperture; after sawing through two bars on a front window, he uses a blanket to slide down to the ground; he is gone an hour and 20 minutes before an alarm is raised.

Phil Ketter, former Western Leaguer and player of wide experience, has been placed in command of the Capahas; he issues a call for all baseball players in this section to report to him at Fairground Park today or tomorrow at 2 p.m. and try for places on the Cape Girardeau team.

-- Sharon K. Sanders