Out of the past: Aug. 11

1995

COMMERCE, Mo. -- This small Mississippi River town could be getting smaller; the town board has applied for $1.7 million in federal and state money to buy 72 houses and vacant lots in the flood-prone area; the houses would be torn down and the lots cleared.

Dr. Roy Wilson, director of the state Department of Mental Health, visits Cape Girardeau, accompanied by state representatives Tom Marshall of Marshall and Patrick Naeger of Perryville; they meet with about 30 mental health professionals and interested residents at the Community Counseling Center.

1970

The Cape Girardeau Board of Education has revised the school dress code; patterned as a shortened form of the code of last year, it eliminates a positive restriction on hemlines; the new policy says "the length of all girls' clothes shall have no arbitrary restrictions, but shall be within reason."

Cape Girardeau, Sikeston and Poplar Bluff, Missouri, are feeling the effects of the strike by truck drivers employed by United Parcel Service; the strike involves about 450 members of Teamsters Local 688 of St. Louis who work for the parcel delivery firm.

1945

WASHINGTON -- The Big Four powers agree to accept Japan's surrender offer provided the supreme military commander of the Allied victors govern the Japanese through the authority of the emperor; there is little hope here that a reply to the U.S. conditional acceptance of the Japanese surrender offer -- and a possible end of the war -- will be received before late tomorrow or Monday.

Now the role played by Cape Girardeau's Groves Corp. in winning the war can be told; for more than two years, company officials and employees have kept closely guarded a military manufacturing secret -- the production of power and precision wire-wound resisters, which were essential components of electronic equipment for communications and radar; so highly secretive were operations at the plant, located on the second floor of the Groves Motor Co. building, 42 N. Sprigg St., that employees had no inkling of the purposes of the resisters.

1920

Judge Almon Ing of the Butler County Circuit Court takes the bench in place of Judge John Snider in Common Pleas Court here and will substitute for him on the rest of the jury cases this week; Snider is suffering from rheumatism.

Concrete flooring on the new Sloan's Creek steel span bridge is completed, and there remains only the graveling of the approaches before the structure is ready for use; the bridge connects the Red Star and Roberson-Gale Addition to the city of Cape Girardeau; last year, the old bridge was washed away.

-- Sharon K. Sanders