Out of the past: March 19

2000

​Maple United Methodist Church adds a contemporary worship service at 8:30 a.m. each Sunday; the service is led with guitar and includes Christian songs written in the last 20 to 30 years; the church also has a traditional worship service at 10:45 a.m. Sunday.

A man who brought opera with a Polish accent to Cape Girardeau died Thursday, March 16; Czeslaw Zielinski, 65, died in Poland while visiting his ailing father, says his wife, Shirley; Czeslaw Zielinski moved to Cape Girardeau in 1972 with his wife after living in her native Nashville, Tennessee; they had met in Germany in 1960 as music students at the Stuttgart Conservatory.

1975

​Incumbent Paul W. Stehr and Brenda J. Green were winners in yesterday’s city primary election in Cape Girardeau, when only 6.66% of the 19,397 registered voters cast ballots on a rainy day; coming in third in the balloting was Wilburn Allen Lee.

A traffic study at 33 different locations in Cape Girardeau has been launched by the police department, which will recommend possible changes in traffic regulations, including posted speed limits; the police, using new, portable radar equipment, plan to check the average speed and number of vehicles passing a given point within one hour.

1950

​A lone gunman, driving a new gray Packard car holds up the Trackside gasoline station at Jackson in the morning, fleeing with $37 in cash; the gunman, a well-dressed youth, speeds south on Highway 25 with his small loot, after forcing the attendant, Bob Morrison, 30, and another man, Percy Kutscher of Jackson, to lie on the floor of the gas station office.

A cabin for the Boy Scouts of Troop 1, sponsored by St. Mary’s Parish, is being planned by troop leaders and others; it is expected that construction will get underway in the next few weeks, and the Scouts will have use of the cabin this summer; a site was provided by Charles Nenninger on his farm, 4 1/2 miles north of the city on Perryville Road; the location is near a spring-fed, gravel-bottom creek, in which an adequate swimming hole can be developed.

1925

​Five persons are known to have been killed, 14 others were seriously injured, dozens were slightly hurt and property damage of several hundred thousand dollars is the the toll of the tornado that swept through the northern end of Cape Girardeau County and the southern section of Perry County yesterday afternoon; striking near the village of Biehle, near the Cape County line, 25 northwest of Cape Girardeau, the tornado cut a path several hundred yards in width across the two counties, demolishing farm houses, uprooting trees and causing heavy damage to crops and farm property.

The death toll in storm-rocked Southern Illinois increases when reports reach here that between 400 and 800 lives were lost at Murphysboro, where the storm reached its greatest intensity; half the town is a charred ruins as a result of the terrific wind and subsequent fire; the town of Gorham, Illinois, 36 miles north of Cape Girardeau, was literally wiped out by the storm, only six houses remaining.

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.