DIALOGUES SHOWS RIVALRY HAS EASED

In the early 1970s, on the night the Cape Central Tigers were to play the annual grudge football game against the Jackson Indians in Jackson, people driving to the game from Cape Girardeau saw a surprising sight when they reached the Jackson city limits.

The sign that normally reads "Jackson" had been covered with a piece of cardboard with the words "North Cape Girardeau" scrawled on it.

Those are the kind of fighting words that have passed often enough between neighbors Cape Girardeau and Jackson in a rivalry some trace to 1815, the year the county seat was established in Jackson instead of in Cape Girardeau.

But Monday's meeting between the two city councils was an indication of the extent to which the old rivalry has been replaced by an attitude of cooperation.

The widening of Highway 61 between the two cities to four lanes and the increasing number of Cape Girardeau County residents who live in one city and work in the other have helped blur the lines between Jacksonians and Cape Giradeans.

"We're all Cape Girardeau County," says Bernard Schaper, a retired businessman who has lived in Jackson most of his 81 years. The other ones were spent in Cape Girardeau.

Schaper, a retired supermarket owner and member of the Jackson Heritage Association, says the rivalry always has existed between the cities' sports teams.

For many years, the two high schools played their annual football game on Thanksgiving Day.

But the competition also extended beyond the athletic fields.

From time to time, serious talk even has arisen about moving the county seat to Cape Girardeau.

The issue most people remember splitting the two cities was over the location of the new county jail in the late 1970s. Jackson prevailed.

But J. Ronald Fischer, who is a former Cape Girardeau councilman, mayor and city manager, says the location of the jail was a county decision and wasn't really an issue for Cape Girardeau city government.

"The issue was that it should be left in Jackson," he said. "Certain people were concerned that it not be taken out of Jackson."

Fischer was on the Cape Girardeau County Court at the time. The county court was the governing body until the county commission was adopted.

"Twenty to 40 years ago there were diehards in both communities," Fischer said. "I think it has changed considerably today."

At that, Fischer recalls that he and then Jackson City Administrator Carl Talley discussed many common issues and that a committee of the two councils discussed annexation issues.

Those issues even in the recent past have been divisive.

"I remember when many years ago you and I were on different sides of the fence," longtime Jackson Alderman David Ludwig good-naturedly said to Cape Girardeau Mayor Al Spradling III at Monday night's meeting.

Because it was smaller, Jackson has always had to stand up for itself, Schaper said. Cape Girardeau got the college, the hospitals, Interstate 55 and West Park Mall.

Jackson fought for its own identity.

"Jackson had some people who were very proud of their community and really worked, principally through the Chamber of Commerce," Schaper said.

No group hug occurred at the end of Monday's joint council meeting, and no quarter will be given when Jackson and Cape Central play in the fall. But city officials on both sides of I-55 says a new era of cooperation is upon us.

"This is something whose time has come," Jackson Alderman Jack Piepenbrok said Monday night. "We no longer have the luxury of fighting among ourselves."