November 2009 Archives

When Chase was up at personal trainers school in Minneapolis, I went with Jim and Sue and Chessie to see him one weekend, not just to cheer him up and on but also to show them parts of what JaVee and I had seen when we went to court reporting school there.  Of course, the city has changed greatly since the early 1970s.  One of the iconic images for Minneapolis is this sculpture in the Walker Art Center sculpture garden, looking south toward the Walker.  To the south and slightly west is the Chain of Lakes with impressive homes around them the Rohrers enjoyed seeing, down to Lake Harriet, our favorite, the most human-sized for walking, with an outdoor amphitheater for free summer concerts and movies. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I taught at Minot State in North Dakota in the early Sixties, in the background, joined to the Walker, would have been the Guthrie Theatre in its early years under Sir Tyrone Guthrie with superb productions we went down to, when Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy and Zoe Caldwell starred in Richard III, The Oresteia, The Cherry Orchard, to name three of the more famous.  Today the old theater is razed, the Walker has enlarged its contemporary art center at the site, and the Guthrie has re-located to the south bank of the Mississippi River near Saint Anthony Falls, where the original settlement began and the grain mills located.  The new Guthrie is stunning and free in daytime when productions weren't on, for visitors to go up the very long escalators to the cantilevered deck on the river and the windows overlooking the downtown and the Humphrey Metrodome, now demolished since the baseball season for the new Target Field stadium on the west edge of downtown.  The area on the north bank of the river is undergoing gentrification (we went there afterwards).  I had told Chase about it, he had loved his visit, and that was one of our must-sees.  The Guthrie is the tall blue building with yellow in the center of this photo from the north bank.

Approaching it looks like this, the Mississippi a little more than a block north of the stop sign, those distant buildings on the north bank.  This new building has had raves about its many theaters and contemporary architecture.  That is Sir Tyrone [Guthrie] on the corner behind the street light, by the pole.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Some later views will be through those yellow windows at the top.  To the right is a tall, matching parking garage reached by the skywalk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the famous cantilevered deck overlooking the river.  Then I have two views from it, one northwest toward Saint Anthony's Falls and the trendy new area on the north bank, the other of the bridge that collapsed disastrously being rebuilt, with the University of Minnesota in the distance beyond it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This view looks back down at George Bernard Shaw, one of the famous playwrights on the building.  The plays performed in the theater's history are etched with their dates and casts along the building corridors.  And the view east is of the area gentrification.

About two-thirds of the way up, still in the blue zone, is this spectacular view of downtown.

And from the top yellow zone, the same view and one of the former Metrodome directly south. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the present St. Anthony's Falls, long tamed, with a canal along the southern bank for river traffic.  I have a splendid photo of an egret, too, for another entry.

We tried to visit Como Park with its Botanical Garden and old Zoo, but it was packed with people for some festival.  So we went over to St. Paul to see the Cathedral, the Capitol, in that very changed sister city.  The Rohrers had never seen such a large church, very like the ones in Europe I saw.  This one has the added attraction of an ambulatory behind the altar area with small ethnic chapels.  Mine is the Irish chapel with St. Patrick.  My interior shots didn't come out too well, but here are some.

Chessie and Chase in front:

Looking north from the front plaza, one sees the magnificent state capitol.  Looking east, the much rejuvenated downtown.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grandma Fern Koftan wasn't very consistent, spelling her daughter's name both ways, as I've tried to illustrate by keeping some of her writing on the following photos.  The first one is dated 1937, as shown, and is on the Bloomfield farm (not the Old Brick House, the one about two miles west of Bloomfield), looking north.

This was clearly taken at the same time with her brother, Larry Dale.

The following is also on the Bloomfield farm and, because she looks the same though it's not winter, is probably also in 1937 or so.  She's by the front gate, the view looking up the hill to the hen houses and storm cellar.

 This looks also to be in the Thirties, with her sister, Velma.

Here she is with the Braunsroth girls at very early ages, Muriel (left) and Bonnie.

This one is on the Mother's Day occasion, when Grandma was wearing her gardenia corsage, as noted.  Audree has Lindsay, with Grandma and Aunt Betty Hupp Koftan, in front of our house in Center.

You can date the above photo approximately by another one with Lindsay and Aunt Betty marked 1949 by Grandma from a different occasion (different clothes).

I have other zoo photos I want to show off but got some good ones the last time I was there.  I am always fond of the scarlet ibises, above, and liked this swan one for the intersecting ripples.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The llama seemed to protest my photographing him, though the prairie dogs, familiar from childhood days Up West north of Newport, paid not the slightest attention.  (And I still haven't figured out how the zoo manages to keep them confined to one small area when ranchers complain about sprawling prairie dog towns   Those cement walls aren't that high.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some other branches of our primate family, the first two in the Hubbard Gorilla Valley, the next two in the Hubbard Orangutan Forest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The aptly named Ursus arctos horribilis, with its distinctive shoulder hump, stalked off on its deadly claws (up to 5-6" long) to its cave, but its cousin had a surprise for me.

 The brown bear, which group includes the grizzly above and the giant Kodiak, gets the most attention for its ferocity, though the Inuit and other aborigines revered the polar bear,  Nanook of the North.  On a recent National Geographic documentary about winter, I was fascinated at a polar bear shorn of its excellent fur, showing its dark black sun-absorbing skin under the prismatic hollow transparent cylinders of its long outer fur, the shorter, plush undercoat not hollow but also transparent.  The prismatic air spaces scatter all the colors, leaving our deceived eyes seeing white.

The Doorly polar bears ordinarily swim lazy ovals in their rectangular tank, casually pushing off the supports of the glass front with a paw and backstroking. 

 However, this day I stood very close to the windows to get some good pictures.  Unfortunately, I haven't taught myself yet the rapid-fire camera sequence, for when the bear came to me, he suddenly reared and flattened himself against the glass as if to attack.  Everybody else exclaimed, while I was too busy trying to get another photo.  Some woman shouted, "You're lucky he didn't come through the window!"  The results aren't as good as I hoped for but are definitely close-ups.

 

Besides the Knox County Courthouse, the visible reason why the town had been created in the first place, Center's dominant institution was not the Congregational Church, though certainly the church wielded its influence and was a major social center.  Schools generate important business from parents at athletic events and other activities so that schools are community focal points.  Our two-story stuccoed school, two elementary rooms on the first floor, high school and then junior-senior high school on the second, also had a dominant location overlooking the town.  The photo at the right of the south view is from the 1950s because the new gymn sits north of the school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The photo at the left is from in front of our house; the photo at the right is from almost to the church, looking back east.  The school is often in the background of photos because of its hill, as in the photo of the new post office a few entries back.  The hill may not look it but was steep enough for the driver's license examiners to use it for their driving tests, making beginners stop halfway and then start again, either going up or coming down the hill.  I can vouch for that.

 The bell rang twice in the morning, twice at noon, warning and final, measuring the town's time along with the noon whistle.  The superintendent's office was on the second floor over the main door.  At the left on the first floor was the intermediate room, fifth through eighth (later fourth through sixth), the elementary room on the south.  The three second-story windows at the left are on the large high school assembly room used as a study hall and for classes.  The south side of the second floor was classrooms, later subdivided so that the narrow typing room became the junior high when I hit the seventh grade.  The basement was full sized but had a coal storage room (between the two outdoor ramps seen in the first photo at the southeast corner), storage, the huge boiler, and room enough for a ping pong table by the late 1940s.

My cousin, Dennis Ellingson, apparently was visiting on the day these two photos were taken.  I was in the second-third grade that year--that's right, both at the same time--so it must have been 1945.  I started in 1944 in first, kindergarten instituted the following year, and graduated in 1954.  I use this photo to show the large play space at the north, where the swings and teeter-totters were, an area big enough to play baseball/softball or, because we had a choice between a new gymn or six-man football equipment and Superintendent Pease was a basketball fanatic, touch football my high school years.  (We used the town baseball diamond a block north of the church for baseball.)  I mention that because he told the folks I wasn't aggressive enough--after all, I was brought up a very polite, reserved little boy--but our heads accidentally hit when I bowled him over once during those high school touch football games and he had to have several stitches above his eye.  (He dumped me hard the next play.)  Obvious from the first photo of the south side, there was plenty of ball-playing space there too, but we mainly played tag, fox and geese, drop the handkerchief, and other such games on the large flat space.  When I first started school, a stable was along the southwestern edge there--nearby farm children still rode horses to school sometimes--good for playing anti-i-over, as we called it.

This photo from straight on is better for identifying almost everyone and shows the teacher, Mildred "Poody" Erion Greckel, who had gone to summer school at Wayne State Normal (then) with Mom for their elementary teaching certificates.  (I'm presuming Mom took the picture.) Poody stayed at our house, awkward for me that year, but she only taught at Center the one year, and it was at her insistence that I take both grades at once because she couldn't keep me busy enough otherwise. The superintendent then was Edna Lake.

This photo disproves my "well-behaved little boy," for I'm the one with my arms raised, hiding Marilynn Peterson's face.  Anyway, Front, L-R:  Jim McGill, Beverly Foster, (Reynolds?), Sharon Danaher, Sharon Ballard, Stan Eisenbeiss.  Middle, L-R:  Gary Don Luckert, Daniel (?) Pulse, Milton Ballard, Dennis Jon Ellingson, Glenn Konapasek, Marlin Kumm.  Rear, L-R:  Marilynn Peterson, Jack Brockman, Raymond Pulse, Marlene Koenig, Tom Clark, Milford Weaver, Claribel/Polly Cook.

I think the following is from the next year, under Superintendent Joe Knibbs.  The teacher was Joan Truman (who married Dwight McGill either during the year or shortly after).

 First Row:  Shirley Konapasek, Barbara Ballard, Barbara Brockman.  Second Row:  Gary Olson, Stanley Eisenbeiss, (Reynolds?), Beverly Foster, Sharon Danaher, Sharon Ballard.  Third Row:  Miss Truman, Milton Ballard, Marlin Kumm, Daniel(?) Pulse, Glenn Konapasek, (?) Hirsch.  Fourth Row:  Miss Truman, Gary Don Luckert, Janice Sedivy, Helen Rothenberger, Milford Weaver, Marilynn Peterson, Darlene Hirsch.

I have many, many school memories, as in summer sneaking up the rear fire escape and, risking wasp stings, opening a window into the assembly to get in (not alone--with Marilynn, Jack, Milford--and we never vandalized anything, just snooped) or playing cowboys and indians in the oak woods at the southwest and northwest corners or games around the flagpole in front.  The hill was especially important, not just because I often had to race up the steps on the north side to avoid being late or because we tested bicycle prowess on it (few could pedal all the way up) but supremely because of the sledding.  I threw myself in a belly flop on my sled or held my dog sitting up and spent hours into days there.  Dad would block off the first cross street for us often, usually in the evenings after the business day, so we could go safely all the way to Main Street without watching out for cars.  Prone to erosion, the hill was usually heavily gravelled, so it took good snows to let us whizz down, and we groused when they put on new gravel for bus traction.  (The hills behind the school were too precipitous, and there was an apocryphal story about a boy who started at the very top and got his head cut off sliding under the barbed wire fence that ran around the edge of the school property.)  It does not look so glorious today, except in memory.

We were very proud of our new gymn, with its big stage, kitchen, and locker room space (one doubled as a shop class area for a few years).  In 1953 it was the biggest and best in the county, and we got many basketball tournaments afterwards, besides which it took over many social functions from the old town hall.

 For some reason I didn't get the photo I took, but today the gymn is a peculiar sight, cut in half, the north half sitting open to the elements, the south half largely gone.  And where the school stood looks like this.

   Of course, we were doomed because of our small size, along with the 93 one-room rural school houses in Knox County.  Betrayed into a big school fight, we lost the high school and junior high, which killed the town, though the hemorrhaging took a few more years, during which time we also lost the elementary K-6 school, with three different school buses--Bloomfield, Creighton, and Verdigre--coming into town to pick up our children.  That's why my sisters and Sue's four graduated from Bloomfield, where Mom and her family had.  That's why I bleed for all the small towns with whining farmers and old people carping about taxes who wreck the school and thereby kill the town, supported by the bureaucratic state favoring the easily managed, more centralized consolidation.     

 

Mom did not make this chart, so I'm assuming Grandma Fern Peters Koftan or one of her family did, on the inside cover of a Record book.  It seems very succinct and complete for its time.

 Mom's note explains Dad's drawing when he was Grandpa Koftan's hired man on the farm at the Old Brick House, before he had ever gone to automotive school in Kansas City.  This cherished relic, drawn at the table one night after supper, represented why Jack was cheated with only an eighth grade education and where I might also have gained some artistic genes besides from the Peters side (Aunt Audree was extremely creative).

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Twelve million years ago an Idaho volcano erupted with such force that its deadly ash cloud blew into northeastern Nebraska, killing several hundred animals around a watering hole on the then savannah, leaving them for UNL vertebrate paleontologist, Michael Voorhees, to discover in 1971 near Royal (he was from Orchard).  It's about 35 miles southwest of Center.   Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park is now a National Landmark and has been in the National Geographic and on TV documentaries as the Pompeii of the Prairies.  As we well know now, the pyroclastic cloud from volcanic eruptions is the most fatal feature, hot ash of microscopic glass needles--lava is molten glass--to lacerate breathing structures, roiling in a dark cloud traveling 200 mph or faster,  Victims at Pompeii and elsewhere die of that hemorrhaging suffocation before molten lava ever reaches them.   Ashfall is especially noted for its many rhinos, including mothers with calves, camels, several early species of horses, elephants, and other animals.  Earlier this year the new Hubbard Rhino Barn opened, a gift from an Omaha surgeon's family, eight times as large as the previous open shed, where people can watch the lengthy, careful excavations. 

The area looks like this:

 

 

  The glorious new Hubbard Rhino Barn south of the Visitors Center is huge.  It is now closed for the winter until 1 May 2010.  The deadly grey-white ash layer is clearly visible in various photos. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This shows the area of the original little barn for visitors, now just the east end.

 Though not very clear, the photo below shows water ripples in the ash, indicating shallow water.  The photo after it of one of the summer excavation projects has a live web cam stationed on it, with screens near the visitor railings so people can have close-up views.

 

 

#1 in this photo is a "Young Adult Male Rhino 'Tusker,' " with "wisdom teeth just coming in . . . . The highly polished tooth at the front of the jaw is a tusk.  The thigh bone across its face was probably pulled . . . from [another] carcass . . . by a large predator."  #2 is a "Three-Toed Horse. . . one of the larger of the several kinds of horses living in this area 10 million years ago."

   #3 below is an "Adult Female Rhino 'Sandy' with Baby Rhino 'Justin'; This close association suggests that 'Justin," who is about one month old, may be 'Sandy's' calf."  The calf is at the left.  Picture it as nursing, and you'll spot it nestled at the rear of the female.

   The walls have excellent explanatory plaques, as with the ones for the early three- or four-toed horses, usually around three or four feet high.  These are not the horses we ride today, obviously, though horses originated apparently in North America before they spread elsewhere, evolved, and were domesticated. 

 

  Running into an old friend from high school days, Art Anderson originally of Bloomfield, for the third time that weekend up at Center with Jim and Sue, I was totally thrilled and honored when he introduced me to Dr. Voorhies, the one who started all this and still is in charge, who was busy digging around in his straw hat and red kerchief.

 Of course, I had grown up with fossils from all the glacial gravel beds around Center, and we also discussed the rare Jurassic plesiosaur skeleton discovered in 2003 immediately north of Center.  (Jim and Sue watched its uncovering.)  It looks roughly like the Loch Ness monster but is 70 million years old--and lost its head in excavation.  (The central part of North America then was a vast sea, of course.)   In sections it is being displayed at the Ashfall Visitors Center, as seen here.  Dr. Voorhies said they were about finished with the next section of vertebrae at UNL and would be bringing it up.  The display case signs cite the find as on the Santee Sioux Reservation, technically correct because the native Americans retain control over ancient artifacts on their one-time reservation area and actually tried to claim this fossil, a bit before their time.  It was, however, not even a half mile north of Center, just around the first highway curve, and discovered by Michael Baldwin, originally from Center, now a Texan science teacher.  In the bottom/last photo, the head would have been at the bottom, the end toward the viewer, parts of the long neck beyond it. 

  

Heraclitus made change the main feature of the universe:  "You cannot step into the same river twice."  That went on in Center all through my life there, of course.  Here are some more photos in proof.

Here I am in our yard west of the house with my first dog I can truly remember as a pet, Zippy, an Oriental terrier we bought at the Knox County Fair.  (The female dog when I was about two was pictured earlier in a set of station photos.)  Some trees newly planted in the yard, and Dad has just been putting in the privet hedge, not done yet.  Left to right are the Crosley Brothers Garage (the only building still there), Joe Ballard's smelly, noisy blacksmith shop over my head, the Ballard residence, and at the right the one-time two-story hotel transformed into our big crackerbox town hall where we played basketball until our new gymn was built in the 1950s, watched movies in the winter, saw plays, had dances and other social activities.  I enlarged the picture so that the tethered dark cattle grazing in the big lot south of the hall can be seen, two near my head, another to the left.  Summer thunderstorms flooded that lot, turning it into a shallow lake where we splashed and sailed homemade boats.  That lot also served as a parking area for summertime outdoor movies either on a screen hung on the hall or, later, a wooden screen raised on two telephone poles.  Dad sometimes flooded it in winter for an ice-skating rink.  We also played fox and geese and ball games there.  Today there is no emptiness.  It is filled in, with overflow from McManigal's and two residences where the hall stood.  Joe's son, Ora, a county judge, built a new home where his dad's blacksmith shop had stood.

But before that, notice the changes around Grandma Fern Koftan below, measurable by the tree and hedge.  The Pulse farm house from north of town had been moved in next door, thoroughly cleaned and renovated by the townspeople, and it became the superintendent's house, Peases the first and longest occupants.  It's early spring; Grandma's strong-scented gardenia corsage was for Mother's Day, according to another set of photos.  

Already it should be obvious we were only a half block east off Main Street and had a clear view of the busiest part of downtown (besides the post office, courthouse, and bank), as shown here, some occasion when I did not want my picture taken with my Ellingson cousins, Mike, Penny, and Denny.  Dad's shop and filling station are left of me, the outhouse by my ear, his Texaco sign by the telephone pole.  On Main Street are Becker's Pool Hall, Mary's Cafe, and Freddie's Store, all now gone.  Joe Ellingson held court on the bench in front of his wife's popular cafe with its jukebox and piano as added attractions.   I was usually not allowed to go into the pool hall except to get Dad or ask him for a nickel or dime.  He was as good at billiards as other sports, but he also spent time at Mary's for pop, her excellent pies, or a root beer soda.  I was hit on my bike by a speeding car in front of Freddie's, luckily getting only road burns as I bounced off the side of it after it struck my front wheel.  The corner water fountain was popular for water fights until adults yelled at us.  And we balanced ourselves on the pipe railing over the ditch (coming out of Denny's head).  The plank over the ditch left of Denny's head attests to the high waters of thunderstorms; we had a set of planks out front too (hard to shovel snow off).  Like the big hall lot when it flooded, the ditches were prime playground running full of summer rain and sometimes the flooding Coolee Creek from the southeast.

Where the old hall stood now looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The superintendent's house has become one of the most decorated, neatly kept places in town by Vern and Charlotte McManigal, who have a garage and an open shed for boat storage at the south end of the big former hall lot.  I don't have a picture of their place or ours next door because our house has stood derelict, unoccupied for several years now.

 

Not far from where I live, one of the city's oldest and most popular parks with its own golf course lies along the southern side of UNO's campus.  It has glorious trees and so is one of my favorite walks, a well-protected flat between two ridges.  It's the playground I once took my nephews and nieces to, babysitting while my sisters did as they pleased, shopping and such.  Shakespeare in the Park is on its north side in the hot summer, when the east-end swimming pool is also open.  The flat has people practicing medieval warfare, dogs catching frisbees, softball games, picnickers, students parking or running, a constantly changing group within the huge U of the golf course that lies mostly on the hills.  Wild ducks hide in the wooded area of a little polluted stream, along with a marmot (woodchuck) and, from recent evidence, some beavers, and it is a good birding site.  Despite its name--most of our elms disappeared with the elm disease several decades ago--most of the trees are a variety of oaks, with several other species thrown in:  cottonwood, sycamore, pine, cottonwood, larch, and such.  And they ravish the eye in autumn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the only photo I've found which shows the Ole Ellingson general store, later run by the Clyde Holmes family in the Fifties.  It held the southeast corner of the main intersection.    Obviously, this is in the very early Forties, as cousin  Dennis Jon Ellingson (Ole was his grandfather) and I sat on the steps of the drinking fountain at the corner of the courthouse block.  The view is east across  Main Street.  The photo's important to me because it shows a kind of Southern influence in the store's front arcade with wooden sun baffles lowered.  The door was at the left corner out of sight, on the main intersection, and then huge windows took up the front.  I looked forward to the annual Christmas village displays in them.  A large drygoods area with patterns and bolts of cloth was on the south side (to the right here).  Eggs were candled and cream tested in a kind of glassed-in office in an eastern corner.  The long counters angled along the north side, from west to east.  By an attached shed there was an outdoor pump outside the east/back door.  (Boys like the old-fashioned outdoor pumps, even to freezing their tongues to the iron handles in wintertime.)

Today the Center Post Office, the busiest in Knox County because of the courthouse business, occupies that same site.  Of course, I'd rather have the huge old, shadowy store back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While I'm at it, I included a photo from the same day, obviously, of us playing around the War Memorial in front of the courthouse.  My tan tells how I always spent most of my time outdoors. 

Across the street north from Ole's general store, on the northeast corner of the main intersection, was the Knox Hotel, for which I have two photos.  (Well, there's another of the corner entrance door and me on my tricycle, but it's a very poor picture.)  L-R, Sharon Ballard, Marlene Koenig, and Judy Danaher are at the entrance steps to the old post office, the view looking east, of course.  The old highway to Bloomfield is at the right of the photo.  Every Christmas season Dad all by himself decorated this main intersection (where Highway 84 between Verdigre and Bloomfield crossed Highway 13 between Creighton and Niobrara) with two crossed strings of colored light bulbs, forlorn in the wind.  Some of today's pole decorations were bought with his memorial money.

The annex at the left was, in Center's earliest years, a doctor's office and a milliner's (hat maker's) shop, though an apartment when I was growing up.  Mom had an old glass prescription bottle of the doctor's, which I have passed on to sister Sue.  All the unheated [bed]rooms were on the second floor of the hotel, with no individual bathrooms.  Each room had a fancy painted china basin and ewer on a bureau for washing, a chamber pot under the bed.  I was thrilled to stay there overnight once at the end of my scarlet fever quarantine.  Dad and Grandpa Luckert had had to stay there while Mom and I were quarantined behind the front-door notice of no entry into our house, and Dad then stayed with me overnight so I could have my first experience in commercial lodgings.

The west front downstairs was a large, mostly empty lobby with easy chairs, a set of toilets on one side, and a barber chair with its necessities on the other corner.  Martha (Ma) and Jim Cain ran the hotel then:  she was the industrious cook and cleaner, with the dining room in the middle of the ground floor having round tables and heavy white tablecloths, the kitchen at the east end.  She was a good cook and had a courthouse and salesman trade and also supplied the jail meals.  She also had an emerald thumb (more than merely green), and the large front windows were filled with thriving ferns (Boston and asparagus), huge begonias and geraniums, sansavieria/snake plant/mother-in-law's tongue, and Christmas cactus on the low counter.   Also the Justice of the Peace when I was little, Jim sat with in a rocker with his cane, spitting tobacco into one of the shiny brass spitoons around the lobby.  I went there to Ed Huigens, the barber for a time, and liked to read the magazines, the old large lurid detective magazines (Aunt Audree had interested me in detective fiction), pulp magazines like the National Police Gazette or the Official Detective Stories, that had racy pictures and bloody bodies much like the supermarket tabloids now such as the National Enquirer.   

For some reason Pete Mefford and Pauline Ellingson (Grandt), Joe and Mary's youngest daughter, are standing in the middle of Main Street near Ole's store.  (Pauline graduated from Center High School in 1939.)  In this view northward, the hotel is at the right, with its shade trees and corrugated tin awning over the bench, its corner door.  (Most of the businesses had benches out front--used regularly, too.)  The main businesses are dimly at the left.  

Though the old bank is now gone along with the hotel, the new bank is where the hotel stood.  I have always wished I had my town back entirely from the Forties and Fifties.  It would have made a marvelous movie set with all its false-front buildings.  Most are razed now, and it has not been my Center for decades.

Here is Mae Danaher with her grandson, Tommy Burke, on the busy main sidewalk in front of what I'll call the Brockman Gravel building (a cafe in Center's earliest years), where Boyd/Pat Foster had briefly a clothing store when I was in high school and one of two Wausa barbers drove up to their shop in a front corner twice a week, even when it became the headquarters for Brockman Sand & Gravel with fossils in the front window.  The gabled store with the dark canvas awning left of Mae is Weaver's smaller grocery store, not a general store like Freddie's or Ole's.  Danahers ran the hardware store, which also had a big mazazine rack and the Chicago Sunday papers, just beyond Weaver's, one of the few original buildings left.

Tommy Burke, by the way, is one of the rare few born in Center, with Wes Eisenbeiss and me.  While his dad was in the military, his mother, Kay Danaher Burke, a former babysitter of mine, visited her parents, Jim and Mae, delivering her baby on the living room couch by telephone instructions from Dr. Kohtz in Bloomfield during a winter storm.

I should have put this up above by the photo of Denny and me, but this is the Knox County Courthouse with its War Memorial in front around which we played many games like tag and roller skated and bicycled, the circular sidewalk a magnetic attraction to children.

 

On a sunny Friday, 7 October, I was in my favorite season in just about my favorite Omaha spot.  That night into the next day we would get 5" of snow, and most of the rest of October would be windy, chilly, rainy.  So I had special reason to enjoy the dazzling color effects.

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

  Here is the Eiffel Tower in its full autumnal glory--the exhibit of world architecture left forever 1 November--as Cadence recognized it.

 I have to include my favorite tree, the katsura, because of its heart-shaped leaves that change in different ways.

     One fine sunny September Saturday I took Justin and Michelle Rohrer's two oldest, Cadence Marie, since turned six, and Aiden John, since turned four, to favored children's sites/sights, starting early in the morning--hence the odd light--at Fontenelle Forest's boardwalk dinosaur display.  Brysen James, one and a half, had to stay home, and we have since learned that #4 should be here in June 2010.  I am in the curious position of being to them what [Great] Uncle Glenn and [Great] Aunt Myrtle were to me, since children do not understand the "great" generation gap.  I am currently picking Aiden up at his pre-school and taking him to his babysitter's at noontime on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and not only do the teachers think I'm "Grandpa," but Aiden constantly questions me about how I know family history and how I'm Grandma Sue's brother.

     Fontenelle Forest is in Bellevue, on the Missouri.  I once was a member and hiked all its hilly trails and the marshland.  It has ancient Native American sites as well as plenty of wildlife and plants (I startled deer more than once), including the Constitution Tree named for its age (c. 1787).  Because another group were taking photos of this special tree, I read the inscription and explained, to which Cadence said, "Gosh, Uncle Bubba, it's even older than you are."   

    Actually, I think they enjoyed the small play area as much as the various life-sized replicas, not so much the learning area downstairs in the Visitors Center.  But luckily we had been there almost at the opening hour, and they had the boardwalk to run as much as they wanted.  By the time we left, the parking lot was full with more coming. 

     Our next stop was the Childrens Museum on the southwest edge of downtown, which was a favorite of my nieces and nephews in their childhood--now all adults--though these two didn't like the mad science part but preferred the shopping mart and some of the other features.  Aiden demonstrated very quickly he could pull himself up on the pulley display, and Cadence got to play in the water, as she did all day when she could.  She's either going to be a swimmer or a hydraulic engineer.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After lunch at Burger King's, their manners impeccable and their food all eaten, we went to Lauritzen Gardens for the model train display.  Aiden got to spank the bunny, and Cadence saw a real lemon tree (she had said her favorite drink was lemonade).

Cadence totally surprised me when she immediately recognized the Eiffel Tower, probably from one of her favorite movies, Ratatouille, though none of the rest of the world architectural wonders (Japan's Hemedji Castle here). [I'll have a picture of the Parisian landmark in another entry.]   Aiden was hypnotized by the bronze statue of a little boy holding a frog.  Both loved the goldfish in the ponds and streams and large koi in the Visitors Center.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By this time, mid afternoon, Aiden plaintively asked if we could go home now.  He and I were both dragging, though Cadence was still running ahead.  But we did manage to climb the steps to Kenefick Park on the bluff overlooking I-80 and the Missouri into Council Bluffs for the Union Pacific's two biggest engines ever built, though you can tell from the next to last photo both were ready for naps.  Cadence had lain down in the shadow of the great diesel, and always mechanically fascinated Aiden sat and watched the work done below on the Interstate's new bridge and added lanes.  However, after we stopped for big lemonades--Cadence's favorite, of course--they laughed hysterically in the back all the way home.  As the Bloomfield Monitor used to end items, "A good time was had by all."   But it took me the rest of the weekend to recover.