1987

Aircraft auctions, popular here in the 1970s, are returning to the Cape Girardeau Municipal Airport; Ella Dowd, who clerks for Auction-Air, says the first auction will be held here Oct. 20.

The Cape Girardeau Chapter of Mended Hearts Inc. holds a reunion at Southeast Missouri Hospital, with about 100 people attending.

1962

The County Court, taking no position as a unit for or against countywide zoning, won't bring the proposition to a county vote in the absence of an initiative petition, says presiding judge R.S. Cunningham; a need for such zoning would also need to be demonstrated.

Don Godwin, son of Mr. and Mrs. John E. Godwin Jr. of Cape Girardeau, solos on his 16th birthday; not only does he fly a Cessna 150 alone, he goes on to fly six other airplanes in the course of the day; in addition, Godwin passes his driver's examination for an automobile license.

1937

Three people -- a locomotive engineer, a fireman and a railway mail clerk -- were injured, the engineer seriously, early yesterday when a fast southbound Cotton Belt passenger train crashed into a northbound Missouri Pacific freight train at a switch on the track 1 1/2 miles north of Gale, Ill.; the locomotive and mail car of the passenger train and two loaded ore cars of the freight were derailed and demolished.

CHARLESTON, Mo. -- Eight months ago, the 131,000-acre Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway was a desolate, watery waste; today, farmers in the rich basin are gathering a bounteous harvest; fields there are snow white with cotton; corn has yielded as much as 101 bushels to the acre.

1912

Norman Wyatt, 5-year-old son of Mrs. Floy Norman Wyatt and grandson of W.W. Norman, recently died at Hunterville, Mo.; his remains are brought here for interment, six of his little playmates serving as tearful pallbearers.

The big Southeast Missouri enterprise has been launched, the actual work beginning on the Little River Drainage District; chief engineer W.A. O'Brien of Cape Girardeau sends out four parties of engineers to begin the work of running lines for the thousand miles of ditches to be made through the 500,000 acres of lands in the district.

__-- Sharon K. Sanders__