Out of the past: Dec. 20

1996

Plagued with financial trouble, the Cape Girardeau Civic Center will welcome an alternative school with open arms and open palms; the Alternative Education Center, part of Cape Girardeau public schools, will be moved from the Salvation Army building at Good Hope and Sprigg streets to the Civic Center building on Broadway; when the AEC moves in, it will bring $8,500 grants along with it; the school system will also pay most of the utilities.

Funding for half the cost of a new vocational-technical school in Cape Girardeau cleared a first hurdle Thursday when the State Board of Education asked the governor to include in its budget $3.15 million for the project; the money would help construct a 90,000-square-foot area vocational-technical school; state funding would be contingent upon approval of a bond issue by Cape Girardeau School District voters.

1971

FISK, Mo. — Firemen remain at the burning rubble of the Jolly Gas Co., virtually destroyed by fire fed by a series of gas explosions Saturday; authorities blame the incident -- in which three persons were burned -- on negligence.

Cape Girardeau Post Office employees are working overtime to handle the extra load of Christmas mail; as a result, mail delivery here is running on schedule with no delays, says T.E. Taylor, superintendent of mails; the Postal Service hasn't employed extra people nor put any extra trucks into use here to handle the holiday mail volume, which is at least three times as heavy as normal.

1946

Chaplain Henry F. Gerecke, who holds the rank of Army major, came home to Cape Girardeau yesterday from St. Louis and will return there Saturday; Gerecke tells of his experience as the Protestant chaplain for the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.

City officials are continuing their study of the proposed corporate limits extension following a report by Cape Girardeau Mayor R.E. Beckman to council members he and engineer John R. Walther had gone through the county tax book and found the land proposed for annexation would show a return of $3,600 in real estate taxes annually.

1921

Members of the Cape Girardeau Fire Department are to be equipped with smoke masks; this was decided at a meeting of the City Council yesterday; the masks will allow the firemen to make their way into a building filled with smoke and fight the fire more effectively.

In naming C.C. Hearne county farm agent, effective Jan. 1, officers of the Cape Girardeau County Farm Bureau have the satisfaction and advantage of picking a man who has been under their close observation for almost four months; Hearne came here Sept. 7 to help revive the Farm Bureau; he has pulled the bureau out of debt and has increased membership in the county to 825 members.

— Sharon K. Sanders