Out of the past: March 22

1997

About 500 area teachers attended the 121st district meeting of the Missouri State Teachers Association yesterday at the Show Me Center; the meeting usually brings out several thousand, but numbers were down because school districts were making up snow days; keynote speaker for the event was astronaut Linda Godwin.

The rate of growth in sales tax revenue for Cape Girardeau city and county declined sharply in 1996, and the amount generated so far in 1997 is less than for the same period last year; Jackson, however, experienced its highest rate of sales tax revenue in 1996; so far this year growth has been minimal, but unlike the county and city of Cape Girardeau, Jackson is taking in more revenue than last year.

1972

The State Highway Department's plan to relocate Highway 72 met little opposition at last night's public hearing in Jackson, but the majority of participants urged that Highway 61 be extended to four lanes before the department begins the project.

Charging that those young men who left the United States for refuge in Canada to avoid military service in Vietnam "'bugged out' when they came face-to-face with the first real crisis of their life," Cape Girardeau's Lloyd Dale Clippard Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars is protesting the amnesty proposed for them; in identical letters to Missouri Senators Stuart Symington and Thomas Eagleton and Rep. Bill Burlison, the VFW Post protests a bill introduced by Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio to grant amnesty and asks the Missouri members of Congress to announce their stands on the issue.

1947

The $2,000,000 public housing authority proposed for Cape Girardeau in prewar days, postponed throughout the war, but still carried on the active list in Washington, is apparently a dead issue; those who have followed it through see little chance that the proposal, which would create low-cost housing for 300 white and 50 Black families in the city, will ever be brought to fruition.

OLIVE BRANCH, Ill. -- Speculation is rife in these parts following a visit by a group of representatives of the Illinois Department of Conservation to Horseshoe Lake area, who, paying scant attention to the wild Canada geese which have made the spot famous, worked over the lake and its environs with cameras and measuring tapes; much of their attention was centered on the immediate locality of the spillway at the south end of the lake; one engineer dropped the remark that plans for raising the normal level of the lake at least two feet are under consideration.

1922

The barn of Jesse Dunn, near Leemon, is destroyed by fire early in the morning; the building and all its contents, except the livestock, are lost; Dunn, while tending to his chores, returns to the barn after feeding the pigs and finds it afire; he believes the lantern he left burning in the barn exploded and ignited the blaze.

Cape Girardeau and district get several thrills late in the day, when Mother Earth jazzes things up, rattling windows and tall men's knees with earthquake shocks that are declared the most pronounced ever observed in the region; the first tremor occurs at 4:30 p.m., followed by three more, the last one being felt at 9 p.m.; chimneys wobble with the first shock, roofs and rafters creak, and thousands of people rush for the open.

-- Sharon K. Sanders