Out of the past: Feb. 15

1992

A 1,500-pound crossbred Brahma bull brought an unexpected, heart-pounding ending to a rodeo at the Show Me Center last night, when it jumped a fence and ran through the aisles, creating panic among some spectators; the bull quickly was lassoed by rodeo cowboys and brought under control, but not before it sent some in the crowd and members of the rodeo band fleeing for safety.

Bluff City Beer has announced plans to move its headquarters from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, to Cape Girardeau; the new office building to house the headquarters is being built next to the company's warehouse on Siemers Drive.

1967

Members of Lt. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey's Class of Eagle Scouts will receive scouting's highest honor Sunday in a ceremony at State College Academic Auditorium; there will be 55 Southeast Missouri Scouts, representing 17 communities, who will be honored for their attainment of the Eagle Scout rank.

Cape Girardeau has its first full-time director of recreation; Arvon Phillips, supervisor of recreation at Parsons, Kansas, is confirmed by the Cape Girardeau City Council at a salary of $7,800 per year.

1942

Registration of men 20 to 44 years of age, inclusive, for possible military service continues for a second day in Cape Girardeau and Jackson; registrations will expand to the rural county Monday; orders received at state headquarters from the War Department forbids the disclosure of any registration numbers.

Construction of a new hangar was started yesterday at Consolidated School of Aviation on Highway 74, south of Cape Girardeau; the new unit, added to the south end of the present building, will increase the plane capacity from 12 planes to 32, this providing not only for the housing of all the school's planes, but a number of private ships as well.

1917

Phil A. Hafner, editor of the Scott County Kicker at Benton, Missouri, dies in the morning of heart disease; Hafner was born in 1858 at Santa Fe, Illinois, the town that is now Fayville; Hafner apprenticed at the Cairo (Illinois) Bulletin and later moved with his parents to Commerce, Missouri, where he worked as a printer on the old Commerce Dispatch; in 1887, he started the Scott County Newsboy, operating it for two years before selling it; in 1902, he started the Kicker, a socialist paper of the firebrand sort.

Martin Meiner, a jeweler at Kennett, Missouri, is in Cape Girardeau conferring with an architect on plans for a building he soon will erect in that city; besides being in the jewelry business, Meiner is a building contractor.

-- Sharon K. Sanders