Out of the past: Jan. 11

2000

​The Cape Girardeau Board of Education votes to hire Wm. B. Ittner Inc. of St. Louis to plan, design and manage construction of a high school; board members elect to allow Ittner to manage the entire project rather than hire a program or construction manager to oversee construction of the school on land west of Kingshighway and Southern Expressway.

A glitch in a new IBM operating system at Southeast Missouri State University knocked out the university’s phone registration system early last week, and for part of yesterday it forced students to rent books for the spring semester the old fashioned way: by filling out a card; the university purchased the new mainframe computer last year and waited until Christmas break to install it because some disruption was anticipated; the system went live Jan. 3 and ran well for two or three hours before one of the online systems began crashing.

1975

​A bill to give the 32nd Judicial Circuit — comprised of Cape Girardeau and Bollinger counties — a second judge has been introduced in the Missouri Legislature by Sen. Albert M. Spradling Jr., D-Cape Girardeau; Spradling says the addition would alleviate a “gross situation in Cape and Bollinger counties in the legal field”; he calls Circuit Judge Stanley Grimm “one of the hardest worked judges in the state.”

The controversial question of site selection and cost of a proposed new county jail should have been submitted to county voters at the Nov. 5 general election, says County Auditor H. Weldon Macke; although a decision by voters isn’t required by law, Macke believes it would have prevented the situation the county finds itself in and the loss of $75,000 for earthwork on the County Farm site that apparently will never be used for the jail.

1950

​While en route to a fire in the morning on West Independence Street, one of the three fire engines being used to answer the alarm loses a wheel; the vehicle is only about 75 yards from the doors of the fire department building, when a spindle breaks and the right front wheel comes loose and is then run over by a rear wheel; no one is injured, although one fireman is to be examined by a physician; the three men on the disabled truck climb onto another truck and continue to the blaze at Kimbel Lines in the 1500 block of Independence.

The architectural firms of William B. Ittner of St. Louis and Fred Dormeyer Jr. of Cape Girardeau, the latter in an associate capacity, are selected by the Board of Education to design and supervise construction of the proposed new high school building; Ittner’s firm has experience in Cape Girardeau, having been architect for Franklin and Lorimier schools and later the gymnasium at Franklin and for the addition at Washington School.

1925

​Emil Drusch and Erwin Merle have been elected members of the church boards of Christ Evangelical Church; they succeed William Vedder and Louis Ecklemann, both of whom have served on the board for three years.

Police, in a weekend drive against violators of the liquor laws in Cape Girardeau, arrest 13 persons; eight men, charged with passing intoxicating liquor, were arrested by police and city detectives late Saturday night, while the others are charged with public drunkenness; they’ll face the magistrate in police court Monday.

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.