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.
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