Out of the past: May 31

1991

May has been great for ducks, but lousy for farmers and building contractors needing dry weather; it has rained 17 of the past 30 days in the Cape Girardeau area, making it difficult for farmers to get into fields and contractors to pour footings or install utility lines.

The Missouri Attorney General's office is investigating the billing of unsolicited services by the parent company of the cable television service in Cape Girardeau and Jackson; Attorney General William Webster said his office is investigating the billing tactics for Encore by Telecommunications Inc., parent company of TCI Cablevision of Missouri Inc.

1966

In a special election, voters in the Marquette School District No. 64 defeat a proposal to annex the district, southwest of the city, to the Cape Girardeau School District; 58 people vote against the measure and 22 vote for it; the school will continue next year as in former years; the district has 60 pupils and two teachers, Mrs. Theodore Probst and Robert Caldwell.

Several artifacts of the Delaware and Shawnee Indian tribes, friendly inhabitants of the Trail of Tears State Park area prior to the Louisiana Purchase, recently were submitted to the University of Missouri Museum of Anthropology by Mrs. Wilson G. Wagner of Cape Girardeau Route 4; her late husband was an avid Indian artifacts collector.

1941

American flags were used to decorate the streets and homes of Cape Girardeau yesterday, in observance of Memorial Day; hundreds of graves, particularly those of the war dead, were adorned with flags and flowers.

Although efforts have been made to repair the drive from Broadway to the two main cemeteries in Cape Girardeau, Fairmount and New Lorimier, it remains in a poor state; the drive, part of Caruthers Avenue, is graveled, but most of the surface has been washed away; it remains a narrow country road.

1916

W.A. Rau, for several years a school teacher and a graduate of the Normal School, has purchased the hardware store of Krueger Brothers on Upper Broadway; Rau had experience in the hardware business at St. Louis.

Henry Wright, a landscape architect of St. Louis, spends the day in Cape Girardeau looking over the college farm north of the city and over the several school grounds with a view of getting an idea of the lay of the land and its natural embellishments; Wright is tasked with the job of carving country club grounds and golf links out of the college farm; the grounds will be subdivided from the farm and will lay just north of Cape Rock; on all sides of the links, private residential tracts will be laid out and landscaped.

-- Sharon K. Sanders