Out of the past: Nov. 25

1999

Thanksgiving Day. The day is a little brighter for several hundred area residents, who enjoy a hearty meal at the Salvation Army in Cape Girardeau; volunteers serve around 600 meals, about half being delivered to homebound residents in Cape Girardeau, Jackson and Scott City.

With smoking computers, stock-piled food and a ticking millennium clock, the Y2K bug has hit Santa’s workshop in the window of Hutson’s Furniture; the annual Christmas window display at the downtown store at 43 S. Main St., which opens today, finds Santa in a dilemma; a clock is ticking down to the year 2000, and his Christmas deadline looms; elves sit at computers that are smoking with the overload; but not to fear; thinking ahead, Santa has stockpiled toys, food, even hay for the reindeer, and those items line the shelves of the workshop.

1974

No one is predicting how large the voter turnout will be tomorrow, when Jackson voters determine the fate of a one-cent city sales tax proposal; no one is predicting the outcome of the election either; the proposed tax would bring approximately $100,000 additional revenue a year; the Jackson City Council has tentatively earmarked the extra money for free residential refuse collection, a new municipal swimming pool and other improvements in local parks, street improvements and construction of police and fire facilities.

A workshop, one of five being conducted throughout the state by the Missouri Office of Administration and the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Revenue-Sharing, is held here to take a hard look at the five-year experimental funding program; it will have placed $30.2 billion in state and local government coffers before it expires in 1976; how that money should be spent is one of the topics of discussion at the day-long workshop for local government representatives and other interested residents.

1949

Santa Claus comes to Cape Girardeau aboard a special Frisco Railroad car and then transfers to a reindeer-propelled sleigh; he is gaily greeted by thousands of children who line a two-mile parade route that officially opens the Yuletide season here; crowds throng the streets long in advance of the start of the parade, and children, eager to see as much of Santa as possible, head for another section of town after he passes their first vantage point.

CHARLESTON – If the allotment for cotton acreage under the new law is allowed to stand, Mississippi County will lose nearly a million dollars in crop revenue in 1950, it is estimated by cotton experts; the state Producing and Marketing Administration committee has given the county a quota of 30,452 acres for next year; this will represent an actual reduction in cotton acreage in the county of 33 1/2 to 45%.

1924

JEFFERSON CITY – The State Supreme Court en banc decides against the City of Cape Girardeau in a suit to compel the Frisco Railway to maintain and operate repair shops there and to prevent construction of shops elsewhere; the city contended that an ordinance granting a franchise to the company which was absorbed by the Frisco provided for the shops to be maintained at Cape Girardeau; controversy since the city and the railway company over the shops has been ongoing since 1917.

The Cape Girardeau Ministerial Alliance held its monthly social meeting last night, at which a a bountiful meal was served by the women of Maple Avenue Methodist Church; those alliance members attending, after talking over the problem of dancing in Central High School, voted to petition the school board to ban dancing in the school.

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.