Out of the past: Nov. 27

1992

The annual Festival of Lights that marks the start of the Christmas season in Jackson is held in the evening in front of the Cape Girardeau County Courthouse; the event is sponsored each year by the Jackson Girl Scouts, in cooperation with Jackson merchants.

The Southeast Missouri State University Foundation has surpassed its local goal of $2.4 million set for a new College of Business Administration building, thanks to a major gift received in the will of a late Cape Girardeau resident; Leota Schmitz, who died earlier this year, has bequeathed $100,000 to help build a new business building at Southeast.

1967

Jackson police are trying to find a person with a key that fits certain locks to railroad switches in town before another switch is thrown and a train is possibly derailed; Jackson policeman John Clifton reports on Nov. 20 and 25, switches were thrown, putting a Missouri Pacific train onto a spur line; in both cases, the train was moving slowly enough to stop.

A stray cow that led Cape Girardeau police on a three-hour chase last night turns up missing this morning from the Town Plaza Shopping Center, where she had been tied; officers report when they went to the center at 8 a.m. to check on the animal, she was gone; consequently, police don't know whether the cow was stolen, reclaimed by her owner or strayed once again.

1942

The new South Main Street surfacing, south from the concrete paving near the Frisco Railroad freight depot to South Sprigg Street, at Boundary Street in the Smelterville suburb, was opened yesterday to traffic; the street now furnishes another north-south thoroughfare for the downtown portion of the city.

Oscar T. Honey, former mayor of Chaffee, Missouri, has been promoted by the Army from captain to major; Honey is a civilian personnel officer stationed at the Army Air Depot at Spokane, Washington; he was inducted into the service with the 140th Infantry Band from Chaffee on Dec. 23, 1940, as commanding officer of that unit.

1917

In spite of the wintry rain and slush yesterday afternoon, a number of patriotic Girardeans gathered at St. Vincent's Parochial School to dedicate the shaft of red granite that now marks the Kings Highway in Cape Girardeau and also marks the site of the home of Louis Lorimier, founder of Cape Girardeau and Spanish commandant of the post; the exercises were under the auspices of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who furnished the monument.

The Kaess Bakery on Good Hope Street, which was closed in September when Charles Kaess left Cape Girardeau for Akron, Ohio, to take a job in a rubber factory, will be re-opened in the near future by Valentine Fisher and M. Fletcher.

-- Sharon K. Sanders