Out of the past: Sept. 7

1999

Crystal City considers Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley its hometown hero; but Bradley also has ties to Cape Girardeau; growing up, he regularly visited relatives living here; Dr. David Crowe, a local dentist, is a first cousin of Bradley, and Cape Girardeau County Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle is a step-first cousin.

Barge traffic is moving smoothly again down the upper Mississippi River; barges are passing through the Melvin Price Locks and Dam again; repair work was completed on the 1,200-foot locks at Alton, Illinois, last week; for the past month tows have had to use a 600-foot auxiliary lock, which took up to two hours for a full-sized tow to pass through.

1974

The fate of the new 1,000-gallon pumper ordered by the Cape Girardeau Fire Department and damaged in shipment from American-La France Fire Truck Co. in New York remains uncertain; the truck was unloaded from the Frisco railroad car in which it was shipped after Bill Jernagin, special agent for Frisco, inspected the car and the truck Thursday; during shipment, the truck was damaged on the underside, along with some minor damage to the side of the truck and to a power generator.

A Lutheran minister who spent his retirement years visiting Cape Girardeau shut-ins for Trinity Lutheran Church, the Rev. E.H. Koerber, dies in the morning at his home at 745 Normal Ave; Koerber, 74, observed 50 years in the ministry this summer; he moved here from Springfield after retiring in 1966.

1949

Appearing before the Cape Girardeau City Council yesterday, M.S. Gwinn of Sikeston, district state highway engineer, reminds councilmen the city must now assume maintenance of old Highway 74 past the cement plant; Gwinn recalled that the city’s contract provided that, when the new route was accepted, the highway department would be relieved of care of the old route; the engineer said the department has accepted the new road.

Arena Park, site of the 1949 SEMO District Fair, begins humming with activity as 30 workers start putting up tents, grading roads and the race track, installing water lines and doing other tasks preparatory to the Monday opening; livestock tents are going to be more uniform this year, and there will be 600 more feet of tent space.

1924

John W. “Blind” Boone, piano player and entertainer, will present a musical program at Centenary Methodist Church Thursday night, and an admission charge of 20 and 35 cents will be made; Boone, who lives at Columbia, is known as an exceptional performer on the piano and plays popular as well as more difficult compositions.

The Rev. H.E. Roos, pastor of Grace Methodist Church, has returned from a conference of his church at Mascoutah, Illinois, where he was ordered to return to the church here for another year, his third in charge of Grace Church; during the conference, a committee was appointed to confer with other conferences in this district relative to the merger of all under one head; reasons which made a German division of the church imperative a number of years ago, when many of the members understood no other language, are thought by many to exit no longer.

Southeast Missourian librarian Sharon Sanders compiles the information for the daily Out of the Past column. She also writes a weekend column called “From the Morgue” that showcases interesting historical stories from the newspaper.