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Gramma and I got along because she had zest, loved people, and enjoyed knowing about them and the way the world works as much as I did. I've spoken of her imagination before, how on any trips, long or short, she kept us entertained--and, as children, awed--by her biographical fictions. She simply knew everyone we met and could recite extemporaneously small family trees, usually funny ones filled with gossipy meringue. "Oh, that's Mrs. Bridgeburner. That woman is astonishing. She can fire a shotgun better than her husband--and did--at him. Poor man had 43 buckshot in his rear after she caught him kissing the hired girl." I'm doing a poor imitation, but that was the way she wove tales just as skillfully as Sheherazade, much shorter and more locally, of course. She enjoyed meeting people and could probably have made a milder, certainly politer version of Babwa Walwa, as Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In retitled Barbara Walters, because Gramma could extract information as deftly as any pro. This extended to her interest in family histories, which in turn was how she and I would end up traipsing through cemeteries without any silly horror show nonsense, simply enjoying the names, epitaphs, if there were any, the old-fashioned grave markers like lambs and angels for children, the geneaologies lying there to be knitted together.

This extended to traveling, which she dearly loved, and I attribute at least some of my lifelong quest to know everything about everything, that curiosity which teachers finally kill out of children by conformity, the irksome basis for manners and social behavior and being a good little brainless consumer who has to have the latest fashions and wants everything standardized and sterile. One can argue the pros and cons endlessly, but one of the worst insults I've ever been skewered by was a relative's sneer that I had more useless knowledge in my head than anyone that person knew, which probably means that that relative's acquaintances would be boringly, safely tedious to me. I'm firmly with Ethel Barrymore, whom I suspect would have gotten on well with Gramma: "You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about--the more you have left when anything happens." Likewise, Dorothy Parker: "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." From my viewpoint, curiosity is the most important motivation in human evolution, the fuel for science against stifling religion and politics, the dangerous trait that makes popes and kings shudder but got us out of Africa to the moon.

So, anyway, between my books and Gramma I was doomed to wonder why and how, and that has given me a good life whatever material wealth and social acquaintance I lack. I really should pour champagne over her grave.

That's why she insisted on certain stops and I was sent, for instance, crawling through ditches and fences into the fields or pastures to pluck, say, a Kansas sunflower or a Texas cotton boll to wonder at, and that worked for our trip to Montana too. She and Mom belonged to the American Red Cross--one took classes at the courthouse in Center and became, I guess, licensed--and that's how it happened that, like Lewis and Clark long before us, we filled the pages of a bright blue Red Cross magazine lying in the rear window with botanical specimens and also ended up with an pint ice cream container filled with betonite, another with some cave crystals from outside the entrance, found quartz, a shard of obsidian, pine cones, souvenirs for several years' reminiscence. Obviously, aside from an abiding passion for rocks--I really should have been a geologist--I gave up that kind of collecting as an adult, but wonder what would've happened had she been along as I took all my wildflower pictures. As it was, we had magic talismen to touch and wave the memory wand over. She saw to that.

I want to save this space for some pictures if I can find them and if Cousin Ryan can insert them, but I need to weekend, so watch this space!

I had every intention of daily entries for a big change, but I've been wrestling a horrific cold since Sunday, and it tag-teamed me with a body slam and threw me out of the ring yesterday. Anyway--

I have never figured out how Dad and [Great] Uncle Joe drove to Yellowstone and back in the Twenties when few highways existed and certainly not many filling stations. I do remember he said they carried spare tires and fuel. I don't recall the first long trip I had with Mom and Gramma and Grampa Koftan because I was only pre-school, but I know we went to Clarence, Missouri, to see Great Grandpa Koftan and I was very scared upon seeing my first blacks in a town that was very dark and in a house that was lit by only one or two kerosene lamps at a time, mustached Great Grandpa Koftan rocking in the darkness.

But the next big trip was after Gramma and Grampa bought a grey Kaiser Manhattan, and we went off to see [Great] Uncle Forrest in Deer Lodge, Montana. Uncle Forrest was the fifth Peters but considered the family black sheep, having left home young--I think like Dad's brothers later, he didn't get along with his father--and went out to Montana to work on the railroad. At least I have photo postcards of Libby and Kootenai Falls: "This is a picture of Mane (sic) St I marked X on the Depot roof" and "This is Kootenai falls 12 miles from Libby we were there twice last summer." He was also married to Celinda, called Linda, but I remember nothing of her. Gramma had kept in touch with him over the years, and he visited their Bloomfield farm (another picture).

In those days long before Ramada and Holiday Inns and Motel 6 and all the other franchises that help make the U.S. a generic whole, motels were tiny individual wooden huts, much like one I stayed at a decade ago while touring Minnesota's most beautiful route up the North Shore. The Minnesota cabin was a large room with bed(s), kitchenette with two-burner stove, sink, table and chairs, some dishes on shelves, bathroom walled off. The main room wasn't the size of my living room, with less walking space. That's what we stayed in on our trip when we didn't camp out.

For that was in 1948, after World War II, when Army surplus was the usual camping gear, certainly where Dad got all of ours, so that we had khaki green Army cots, a portable cylindrical aluminum stove that used white gas (I think), Army dinnerware, tarps. We added skillets, silverware, a large squat thermos for water, smaller ones for coffee and juice, a small cooler for foodstuffs. So part of the time we stayed in the separate little motel hut, and part of the time Mom or Grampa asked a farmer for permission, and we slept along their entry road or at the edge of their yard, Gramma and I on the car seats, Mom and Grampa on the Army cots. Part of the time we ate in roadside cafes, usually following the urban myth that truckers know where the best food is, and part of the time we fixed our own meals in the motel cabins or on the roadside. I'm probably wrong, but it seems like most of our breakfasts were somewhere along the road after we got an early start, coffee (not for me) perking, then the skillet frying eggs and bacon bought at the last local store. As far as Gramma and I were concerned, it was a grand adventure. We sat in the back always, and it became a kind of joke that I was always looking out the big back window where I had the best view of whatever attractions we passed. Mom and Grampa traded driving chores, mileage being kept and maps carefully followed so we could get from gas station to gas station.

I had been responsible for the planning, which meant that I had gone to Dad's town rival, the Crosley brothers' Conoco station, and filled out one of their Touraide cards with our destinations so that we got a kind of tourist brochure of that time, with the page on one side a road map with the suggested route highlighted, the other page with notes on the attractions of that particular map section. I should add that the Touraide brochures of the 1930s-1940s and all road maps were free then. I also had looked up in the encyclopedias what major attractions we were going to see. While I'm at it, I'd recommend the Reader's Digest's Off the Beaten Path for the same Touraide purposes, as I found it a major resource for vacations in my working years, though I know most use computers now.

Our trip was in 1948, as I said, and we were headed first for the South Dakota Black Hills, partly for the scenery and partly because Grampa's sister, Ella, lived in Belle Fourche at the northern tip with her second husband and her sons, Raymond and Lloyd Adel, but not Lloyd's twin sister, Lorraine, who must have been married then. I don't think we got off the highway to see the surreally barren Badlands I did some hiking in decades later, but I know we went through Wall because Wall Drug Store advertised from coast to coast then and so was a necessary tourist destination.

Gramma Koftan was short and stout, meaning not fat but certainly not skinny, corseted solidly, thin-lipped, once red-haired, extremely industrious, argumentative from her family's side, wrote poetry of the Edgar Guest kind and had Guest and Service poems well memorized from her father's social literary gatherings. "A House by the Side of the Road" hung on her living room wall. The first verse was:

Let me live in a house by the side of the road where the race of men go by,/ The men who are good and the men who are bad, as good and as bad as I. / I would not sit in the scorner's seat or hurl the cynic's ban./ Let me live in a house by the road and be a friend to man.

She and Mom recited such verse as James Whitcomb Riley's "When the Frost Is on the Punkin" and "Little Orphant Annie," which the first verses for each are:

When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,/ And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,/ And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,/ And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;/ O, it's then's the times a feller is a-feelin' at his best,/ With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,/ As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,/ When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

Little Orphant Annie's come to our house to stay,/ An' wash the cups an' saucers up, an' brush the crumbs away,/ An' shoo the chickens off the porch, an' dust the hearth, an' sweep,/ An' make the fire, an' bake the bread, an' earn her board-an'-keep;/ An' all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,/ We set around the kitchen fire an' has the mostest fun,/ A-listenin' to the witch-tales 'at Annie tells about,/ An' the Gobble-uns 'at gits you Ef you don't watch out!

Cousin Linda had Gramma's poems printed and bound, which I can't find at the moment; but they follow this kind of versification that Aunt Audree and her granddaughter were/are most persistent in imitating. Gramma also played the piano passably well, undoubtedly a big help to Mom's singing, and it was her upright I learned on.

She'd begun teaching country school out of the eighth grade, as did her older and younger sisters, setting up the teaching tradition that Mom and I followed. Great Aunt Nellie married John Feddersen, who was superintendent at Stuart, Nebraska, I think; she also mimegraphed her own teacher's magazine for the area, the copies of which Mom had and I enjoyed for the playlets, the seasonal diagrams for coloring, as well as various hints for different courses of study. One of her two sons was later head of the Speech Department at Northwestern University. Great Aunt Myrtle taught at Stuart, and, after divorce, for a century or so at Randolph, where their brother was the town doctor (and Great Uncle Glenn had taught briefly at some point before he became a doctor). A very voluble quartet, I think of them as the Peters Debating Society, for they liked nothing better than to hone their minds and tongues, generally on politics, swarming a hapless Republican like army ants with their Democratic fervor.

Gramma was a hard-working farm wife who baked her own bread and cakes and pies and put out big meat-and-potato meals for Grampa, including breakfast, and ran the separator for milk, cream, and butter, always had hens for eggs and meat, took care of a large garden, canned enough to keep the dug-out cellar full of food for the winter from beef to peas and carrots, yet also belonged to various clubs, ultimately to become a Royal Neighbors of America deputy, meaning a regional insurance saleswomen, who had her first martini in San Francisco at a national meeting not many years before her death. I generally picture her in a bib apron with rickrack edging she'd made herself, though, of course, she dressed up in print jersey with a hat for Project Club, Bloomfield Womens Club, Royal Neighbors fraternal meetings, not quite so fancy for their farm couples' card club.

Mom said she was much more difficult to get along with in their youthful years when Gramma was a very strict, stern black-stockinged Methodist in the Twenties, though I always thought of her as affectionate if sharp-tongued. I do have some black-stockinged photos of her with her Harry Potter glasses. Linda said I was her favorite. Actually, I was simply the oldest grandchild, a very well-behaved one because of Mom, as well as very literate. She was sharp-tongued with me to insure I didn't become a snob, especially after I went to college, and skewered me accordingly, as she could anyone verbally. (Sorry, Gram, with my Forties and Fifties standards, I am just what you feared.) We got along mostly grandly because I was an avid reader and she liked to know about the world. This worked out especially well on our trips, when she depended upon me to know the background for what we saw. And that's where I'll go next.

According to the Kinsey Report/Ev'ry average man you know/Much prefers to play his favorite sport/When the temperature is low./ But when the thermometer goes way up/And the weather is sizzling hot,/Mister Adam/For his madam/Is not. Cause it's too, too,/Too darn hot,/It's too darn hot,/It's too darn hot.

So one way to stay cool or pretend you were in the good old summertime was to go to the park, a local watering hole literally, for a breezy summer's evening or Sunday afternoon drive to see who was there and to hold family gatherings far more often than we do now, picnics making the occasions special. We had not only our parents' families but grandparents' families so that I knew my great uncles and aunts and cousins to the second and third degree and saw them all regularly, especially in the summer. No longer true of my family, the two previous generations dead, paternal cousins and maternal distant cousins uninterested, but such family reunions are still held, according to the small town newspapers, as we pinball all over the nation constantly and most families are dispersed from sea to sea and border to border and even beyond. The usual American diaspora. Niobrara's town and park have fled to the hilltops to avoid flooding progress, and I sit in my top-floor aerie on one of Omaha's highest hills, comfortably musing about how much more social we were--or had to be--before television and all our other technological distractions that seem equally good and bad, like cell phones and video games.

And I have just lied, because a great aunt's granddaughter has just been in touch about our great-great grandparents and their children for her geneaological project so her family next week can locate and photograph graves in Keya Paha County and Tyndall, South Dakota. I may even meet them for an instant of time because they are stopping here on the way back to Missouri to show four-year-old Sophie our world class Doorly Zoo. But this happens about once every other decade, if that.

Back to Cousin Kay's heat complaint. And mine. First, I should mention that, prior to drop ceilings with flaky ceiling blocks, high ceilings helped, as did opening the inside door to the basement, which was always damply cool. Otherwise, in the Forties and Fifties B.A.C. (before air conditioning), unless there were cooling breezes, we shut the house up in the morning to trap the cooler night air against the heat, waiting for cooler evening before raising the shades, opening the windows and doors. We used big floor fans, moving smaller fans around as needed, as when Mom was cooking. Mom insisted on fans. My parents were Jack Sprat and his wife, truly: he was thin and accustomed to working outside in the heat, while she was fat and puddled sweat without even moving. She hated the heat; he hated the air conditioning when we finally got window units after I was in college. I've always agreed with her that you can put more clothes on against the cold, but you can't take them off, not without scaring the horses and neighbors.

I can't remember sleeping outside, as Kay mentioned, unless it was on the front porch, unlikely because, as I said, biting insects find me a gourmet meal, and Off and other repellents were decades away. The dining room linoleum was cool and a good place to lay down wet bath towels to sleep on, a tactic I used many years later in summer school at Hastings College in a stifling dorm room. When the towels dried out, you soaked them again. You could also put them over you in bed, especially if you had a fan blowing on you, the same evaporation principle as window fan cooling units later used. I don't think it was until high school, after a trip to my uncle's in Dallas where we saw one of the latter, that Dad built us a window box filled with excelsior--does anyone even know what that is now that we have Styrofoam peanuts and bubble wrap?--around a big fan, with a small water pipe running from the basement to drip water on the excelsior, the whole device stuck in the west living room window. Anyone in the living room was cooled by the breezy evaporation while the humidity rose accordingly. I even used the principle when I went to Greece--in August, 1969--where I wet a silk handkerchief and tied it dripping around my head, which, along with my Caesar haircut and mentioning Chicago as the closest big city to me (Illinois teaching years), miscued the Greeks into thinking me Italian, maybe even Mafia.

We also sat in bathtubs of cool water, and I played in a wash tub of water with my boats. Some of my favorite toys were a little pump that had to sit in water and a sky blue wooden aircraft carrier Mom brought home from summer school at Wayne. Wetness. Summer requires wetness but not sweatness. Luckily, Dad was a lawn fanatic, and sprinklers were wonderful toys to jump over, actually chilly and wet with prismatic rainbows to run through.

Of course, we had electric fans as my grandparents on the farm did not in the days before the REA strung its lines to make the farm finally no different from the town. Fans were mandatory in July and August. We had the swiveling kind that swung back and forth in a trapped arc, but I remember best the big floor fans, like hassocks of wind. Mom would set one of those on its side in a chair at night directed into their bedroom and another into mine. But at church we had only small folding cardboard fans stuck in the hymnal holders, usually supplied by funeral homes, printed with Christ in Gethsemane or flowers or such, requiring a distracting amount of motion for the illusion of cooling off.

We also sat out on our porches, watching the traffic and having people stroll or drive by and come up to sit and chat. Significantly, these front porches have become rear decks and patios away from the street side, often fenced in now. Our porch was the width of the house, big and deep, usually with a trellis for morning glories or sweet peas, later the weedy woodbine/Virginia creeper, to shade the southwest and west sides from the hot afternoon sun. We spent many hours out there when the house was too stuffy or when the air was balmy like a soothing lotion or when we simply wanted to watch and listen to our town and gossip with our neighbors. That's where I played with my three-ring paper circus courtesy of some cereal or my cars or a board game or read. That's where we peeled ears of corn or snapped beans. We even hauled up the wringer washing machine out of the basement and tried shelling peas on the porch, supposed to pop easily after parboiling, a sheet draped over the machine and whoever fed the pods into the wringers--me, actually--as peas did as advertised, zinging all over, the silliest food processing I ever got mixed up with. Because my parents were very gregarious so that we knew everything going on in town, mostly the folks chatted, Mom and Gramma laughing, Aunt Lizzie trading tall tales with Dad, some farmer wanting Dad to do some welding, somebody stopping to show Dad the fish he caught. Porches were summer virtues like picnics to goodwill us through the heat.

Another wetness we had were the cricks--I say "creek" now, but it was "crick" then--the wide, shallow (inches!) Coulee fed by spring water coming from the east, the deeper Bazile curving around the west side of town, flooding after heavy rains. The deeper Bazile could be up to my shoulders in holes scoured out at curves, though it generally rose just to our knees, meaning few spots deep enough to pretend swimming but overall good for floating, simply lying back, relaxed, bumping along. Just as the park lagoon didn't have chlorine and children undoubtedly peed in it and there were fish and frogs, we didn't worry about what livestock or wild animals did to the water, and we didn't yet have pesticide or fertilizer run-off to worry about, though the creek did get blamed for Teedle's (Milton Ballard's) polio during the national epidemic from the late Forties into the Fifties, a useful reason for Mom to deny me creek privileges. The other boys went fishing, which generally bored me, but I liked splashing and floating, just our usual horsing around on the way to agonizing sunburns, when I could wangle permission. With only a couple of exceptions, the rest of us weren't allowed to go alone, so we went in threes or fours. Skinny dipping was indecent, frowned upon in an era when Alpha Crosley gave me grief constantly merely because I had the audacity to wear shorts beyond my own yard around town. (You can't imagine the silent, secret pleasure I have now with shorts on everyone everywhere. I was a pioneer!) Also, the Bazile ran along the highway with few hidden places, and anyone growing up in a small town knows there is no place to hide, period. It may take some time, but you are going to be found out. Count on it. I can remember only one memorable time when, of all things, two girls were along with about five or six boys and Kent Stewart dared us all into going in the creek--beyond sight from the highway-- in our underwear, scary and brief for everyone but him and Teedle, both brazen by Center standards.

When the sultriness became unbearable, day after day of solar oven, one of the best wetness reliefs was a huge crashing thunderstorm when we would race around slamming the windows shut against the sudden wind bending trees and sailing anything loose. I have always loved cumulonimbus, gorgeous anvilheads boiling up into the sky dramatically here in Nebraska, the cracking lightning and rumbling thunder I later told my little sisters was Zeus stomping around overhead. Torrents would fill the ditches, even sometimes floating away our plank bridge out front, turning the big lot in front of the town hall into a shallow lake, great for playing (Mom fatalistically expected me to get thoroughly soaked). Sometimes, when the storm was too much too fast, the Coulee would break over its low banks and surge in through town, turning Main Street into a swirling lake also, too much for the drains. The cold front followed with cool breezes for good sleeping, and the tumult of the frogs along the Coulee after a rainstorm remains one of my strongest, fondest sound memories. Those times were meant for bare feet, and I spent most of my summers barefooted.

Without wetness B.A.C. how did we get along in the heat? We didn't. Crankiness. Misery. Chafed crotches and underarms. Smelly clothes, smellier bodies. Bad tempers. Weepiness. Whining. Exhaustion from lack of sleep and clumsy errors. Nodding off. Listlessness. Lack of appetite. Decades later I learned those were all symptoms that spelled business for the court system. Contrary to Cole Porter's song of drooping desire (but the entry title is Irving Berlin's), we dreaded hot spells in summer because we knew we'd have a spike in violence, family brawls, assaults, more murders than usual. We could count on it. No wonder we associate the tropics with wild passion. July and August certainly work us over up here in the temperate zone with or without air conditioning. Maybe that's why I hide in my cool lair.

As any crossword puzzler will tell you, that's a tricky clue. It's not "nice," as in "Be nice now," but the French city, pronounced "Nees," and the answer is "ete," with right-leaning accents over the two e's, meaning it's pronounced "ay-tay," the French word for "summer."
Summer is my season for hibernation in my old age, more of my contrariness. I'd reform the calendar, going back to the Romans' original ten months by taking out the two imperial ones, miserable saunas that they are. I've long known they were named for the two most illustrious emperors, but only recently I discovered they were originally number names, in a superior book about numbers, Georges Ifrah's The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer (everything you need to know and didn't even know you needed to know). From the fifth on, Romans threw away the baby names list and called their sons Quintus, Sixtus, Septimus, that is, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, etc. Likewise, in their calendar, which began originally with March/Martius, their fifth and sixth months were Quintilis and Sixtilis until renamed for Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus, though the rest of the year retained the number names. Those numbers went wrong when the Romans added January and February before March, making Seventh/Septembris/September #9 instead of its original #7. (October most clearly reflects its original number name, connected to "octagon," "octet," other eights, though it's now #10 in sequence.)
Anyway, a cousin in Missouri, who moved from a California beachfront--well, a few blocks from the Pacific--to a small northwest Missouri town and probably regrets it, wrote about "this miserable heat wave, 106 [degrees] on the bank therm . . . I am so-so grateful for A.C. I do remember when we had no fans, no power and slept outside for heat relief."
That sent me down--certainly not Nostalgia Lane, given how I feel about heat and humidity now. When the humidity and the dew point rise above 50 and the heat climbs into the upper 80s, I hunker down behind drawn blinds in the shadows cooled by my hard-working air conditioner. Yet once upon a time I went to church camp--as a high school sophomore or junior (?)--for a week when we stayed in dorms that were merely wood shells with no inside finishing and the temperature hit 114 one day so that Mom had to bring a whole new set of clothes up to me after I made seven changes, as I recall. That was at old Niobrara State Park, now demolished and flooded over since the Niobrara River decided to make its main channel the old Mormon Canal (1846) that ran around the west and north sides of the park, the main river channel in my time the eastern boundary with its big bridge.
That park was a central summer feature back in the Forties and Fifties, no town having a swimming pool then. With a waterway through the park for boating and fishing, the park had a large lagoon for swimming with a high diving tower at the northeast end, an underground fence of wooden posts strung with a heavy cable on the north side for the nonswimmers' and children's area. Near the lagoon, besides the bathhouses for changing, a big pop stand with raised window boards on all four sides was my favorite destination, where I relished trading a nickel or a dime for a dark brown ribbed bottle of Orange Crush or, second choice, the patterned Nehi bottles of grape or root beer. West of the swimming area were the best picnic shelters because they sat near a large lily pond with lotus and gold fish (long before koi became fashionable on H & G T V). Such pools would be a public menace today generating lawsuits, and the pop comes in cans from brightly lit machines, progress, of course.
Across the highway from the south entrance sat the park superintendent's house. Behind it, as a special attraction, was a row of cages of mostly exotic birds I liked, such as the peacock and golden pheasant, plus a few animals like some deer. Featured on a popular postcard, a swinging bridge was close to the entrance. A set of buildings not far from the entrance was specifically for group outings, 4H and church camps, with a big mess hall, an assembly hall, the rough dorms, some other buildings. The park had small minimalist white cabins, one of which my Omahan Uncle Chet and his family rented for a week every summer. The park also had some larger, more deluxe cabins built of logs stained dark brown like the big open shelter houses. The park furniture was a kind of Adirondack, rough wooden furniture of small peeled tree trunks, like small posts, nailed together for outdoor benches and chairs built in the Adirondack style and painted white. I did not like the water from the little pumps because of its high mineral content, artesian well water.
We had many, many picnics there, and I'm not just talking about the Center High School closing day picnics when I had my first clandestine cigarette. That's where we held many family reunions and took several of the snapshots in my scrapbook. That's where we went on the Fouth of July or any other special occasion. Summer was fried chicken and potato salad and apple pie for picnics generally up at the park. For all the fuss over food poisoning, the food was left out on the tables, ice mainly in the fat, squat coolers of Kool Aid (a Hastings NE invention), iced tea, or lemonade, or--if we were lucky--an ice-cream churn to be cranked or a canvas-covered insulated ice cream container. The park had low grills, outdoor stone fire pits with charred grills where we could have small fires for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows and keeping speckled enamel coffee pots warm; the shelter houses had big stone fireplaces. We didn't have aluminum cans then, much less all the other modern camping paraphernalia. I think we may have gotten ice cream cones or bars at the hugely popular pop stand, but it seems we had to go into the old town to the drug store or cafes. Picnics in those decades and earlier were also held in outdoor groves, town parks where they existed, country school yards on the last day for pupils and their families, or Up West, north of Newport, at a small dam pond with a merry-go-round, a see-saw, and some picnic tables for the Old Settlers' Picnic in a grassy meadow and no shade.
Picnic days always meant busy mornings as Mom had frying pans sizzling with chicken and made pies from scratch (no Betty Crocker pie crust then), generally with apples from Gramma and Grampa's farm orchard. I was delegated to help by boiling and peeling the eggs and potatoes for the potato salad, dumping cans of peas for pea salad, gathering potato chips and other snacks, mixing the Kool Aid (grape and cherry were best, though the new lemon-lime and black cherry grew popular fast) or squeezing the lemons. I think Gramma generally baked a chocolate cake as well as pies. Just to recall it is to realize how much time we took and how much was not store bought, not convenience foods but made from the real produce. We had to be healthier accordingly, and I don't remember much cancer then, though my home area is rife with it now with no explainable cause. Store stuff cost too much, which is why we often baked our own bread, the soft Old Home white bread an expensive treat when I was little. Ironically, of course, now store bread is cheap, whereas Panera's and the Great American Harvest charge healthy prices for their breads, though baking my own, as I often do, is still cheapest. Definitely not the days when Rachel Ray could whip up 30-minute meals from expensive prepared ingredients. Gramma supplied us with much of our cream, eggs, and chickens, which Mom taught me how to wring their heads off and clean them, easier than chopping their heads off as I discovered, dunking them in boiling water and plucking the feathers, very labor-intensive as opposed to the Colonel's KFC assembly lines. I'm talking about my childhood of the Forties and Fifties, before Mom could buy already cleaned chickens from farm wives and put them in the freezer and long before the watery supermarket freezer fiction.
I loved picnics then whereas, oddly, today I hate picnics, convenience food out of cardboard buckets in unpleasant weather with too many allergies and insects. I am a major attraction to insects from chiggers to mosquitoes. And the rest has disappeared like so much else. The lowest of the Missouri River dams backed that river up, slowing the Niobrara's entrance into it, silting up both channels and drowning the 1856 Niobrara town site so that the new version had to move to the river bluff tops with its historic French-named cemetery, L'eau qui court ("Running Water," for the Niobrara), the original name of Knox County. The old park is drowned, the new one high up on the hilltops where Dad said there was a Ponca burial ground and too many rattlesnakes for hunting (creating the new park required much snake killing, unknown to city visitors). The state has a good-sized swimming pool and several modern cabins with air conditioning and microwaves, flocks of wild turkies, some deer, and the view is terrific across the confluence of the two rivers into South Dakota, past the spot where Lewis and Clark camped. I guess that's progress too.
About "Gramma" and "Grampa": the comic strip Pickles is the only one I've ever seen using those spellings, but that's actually how we pronounced those words, the -nd lost like the final -g in -ing words, so I thank Brian Crane for those and shall stick with them.

In 1964 the nation was scandalized as Kitty Genovese was murdered in stages, screaming for help, in the NYC borough of Queens while 38 people watched from their windows and did nothing. Not likely to happen here. On our state capitol is"The salvation of the state is the watchfulness of the citizen," a motto Nebraskans frequently quote, use on websites, and certainly act by.
Nebraskan neighbors caught the Dundee rapist for us, thankfully for Omaha's frightened women. (Actually, that mid city section, once a village by that name, was where Thomas Freeman committed a number of rapes but not the only area he stalked women.) These neighbors helped eight women, sobbing on the witness stand, get justice, as well as several unknown victims. As last Sunday's Parade magazine cited, only 36% of rape victims report the assaults, and the Omaha Police Department, hereafter OPD, estimated that Freeman raped somewhere around 20 or more.
First, our serial rapist. Freeman had been convicted of second-degree murder for stabbing his girlfriend. Don't ask me why, but, despite a life sentence, he was paroled--not once but twice. He began his spree shortly after the second parole. He apparently had a black father and a white mother. A very muscular, athletic 6'2", TF had converted one of his girlfriend's bedrooms into a weight room, just so you understand what women had attacking them usually from behind in the dark. (He had a job moving furniture when he was finally caught.) He was very particular about his victims not seeing his face, using their clothing or handy items like pillowcases or towels while ordering them not to look at him, in one instance even using a Halloween mask. The mask didn't prevent that victim's noting his neck and hands were black, and another victim got a vague glimpse of him as he rushed into her bedroom. He usually had a knife placed to their throats to threaten the women--the victim in her bedroom got a defense wound when she threw her hand up to fend him off--but once claimed to have a gun, which the teenager said she felt but never clearly saw, the only (weapons) charge he wasn't convicted of. He had trouble initially achieving an erection, often asked for tongue, i.e., French kissing, and occasionally became rough when angry. He demanded money "to go to Kansas City," rifled drawers and stole jewelry, in one instance a coin collection and a VCR. Twice he insisted upon raping the women in her child's bedroom (the daughter and the son were fortunately gone in those two instances). After the rapes he demanded the women wash themselves thoroughly and often stood by to insure they did in bathwater or shower. The strong suggestion is that he trawled for victims, perhaps stalking them, for most of the rapes occurred in early morning hours, women coming home alone from work or socializing. Many of the rapes were on his day off, another pattern. I list these characteristics, called his modus operandi, the Latin favored by attorneys translated into Standard Operating Procedure, because their repetition certainly helped a jury decide in our big second trial for the eight victims willing to testify. TV addicts familiar with the forensic series so popular now, such as CSI and its spinoffs, know that serial criminals have such signature behaviors.
The key to identifying our serial rapist was the best eyewitness I ever had the pleasure of reporting, and I'm using his name, because I've always thought he deserved a medal of some kind, for enduring the police and legal proceedings for so long that he went from living in a southwest Omaha apartment with his girlfriend and baby daughter to being a married man with two children and a new job in Council Bluffs, which is how long justice took in this case. Terry Michael Bock was angry because his car had been broken into and parts stolen several times, so one remarkable night he was sitting up all night by his patio doors on a cooler, shotgun at hand, watching his car in the parking lot. A particular car drove up and down the lot a few times, alerting his interest, and, when it finally parked, he headed toward it. He actually nearly collided with Freeman at a corner near a bush so that both exclaimed, "You scared the shit out of me!" simultaneously. Not only did Terry get a close-up view of Thomas in his all-black clothes but also noted a boning knife sticking out of Freeman's back pocket. Our rapist claimed to be coming home from work.
The victim that early morning--this is around 4:00, 4:30 a.m.--had been talking out an argument with her boyfriend, then was walking alone back to her apartment after the boyfriend drove off. She was suddenly flattened from behind, with a knife to her throat, the usual threat, but managed to scream. Besides Bock, another neighbor, sleeping very close by, was extremely irritated by the noise at that hour and rushed out yelling. Having returned to his apartment, Bock also ran out of his apartment with the shotgun, and both men came upon Freeman on top of the girl. Bock yelled for him to get off, which Freeman did with speed neither man could match, though the other man ran after him. Knowing where Freeman had come from, Bock took a shortcut and beat Freeman back to his car. Our bold rapist ignored Bock's demand to stay put and got in his car and took off, nearly backing over Bock, who was loath to shoot him, understandably. But Terry had an excellent view of the car: that and his face-to-face encounter would be the key for the detectives, who had no such identification from any of the victims and merely some fingerprints and a partial palm print from another, earlier attempted rape.
Given the number of times Terry Bock had to repeat his testimony and the usual obnoxious, repetitious defense efforts to discredit him--he did get a bit testy by the final trial--I have to say I had wonderful satisfaction when the defense attorney tried to attack his identification of the automobile by year, make, and color. How did he know it was a 1987 Pontiac Grand Am, metallic gold flake paint, honeycomb hub caps (with no license plate)? Well, besides seeing the rear emblem when Freeman almost backed over him, he'd worked in a body shop for two years previously. Uh-huh. With the help of an FBI agent, the OPD detectives traced the car back to Freeman's then girlfriend, found out TF also used the car, had his name--and, after visiting his job, a photo--and then could match the fingerprints. Today I think OPD links to IAFIS, Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a computerized database maintained by the FBI; but at that time it had to have a name before it could go to its own files of fingerprint cards to try to match unknown prints found at crime scenes.
To detour briefly, as mentioned, in another attempted rape some fingerprints and a partial palm print had been found, but OPD had no way then of matching them to any known files. In that attempt a young woman whose husband had left for Minneapolis that morning was out shopping late, pulled into a relatively dark garage area, and was attacked from behind when she had begun getting her groceries from the passenger's side. She had been shoved into the car, clothes pushed up and down to leave her nude from shoulders to knees, threatened, but screamed anyway. (Freeman's prints were on the door post.) An apartment neighbor and his dogs, who'd seen her earlier, were in the nearby laundry room and ran out to see what was going on, the door slamming behind him and apparently scaring off our unfriendly Dundee rapist (this was one of the Dundee events). At the same time, undoubtedly more cause for Freeman's fleeing, a young woman at a neighboring complex was taking a bath, heard the screams, ran to the window, and was shouting down, asking if she should call 911. Again, great neighbors to have!
So the puzzle pieces began forming a clear mosaic: car leads to name leads to fingerprint identification. Freeman fled to Colorado Springs, having been alerted by a police visit, from where he was extradited by the FBI and OPD. And Bock again won my utter admiration. Naturally, the resultant lineup was for him, the guy who almost collided with Freeman and saw him not once but three times, including under a floodlight. He identified TF before the lineup even got started: "Right away I said, "That's him right there, that one right there,' and I picked him out. . . . There was no question in my mind. I knew for a fact it was him." The detectives had to insist upon the formality of going through the whole lineup procedure, but Bock never budged from his absolutely positive identification. You understand now why I think Terry Michael Bock deserves a medal?
"The salvation of the state is the watchfulness of the citizen."

I did this entry elsewhere and then copied it into my formatted area here and got all sorts of little glitches, so I'm redoing it in the hopes of avoiding those, though, as I explain, the computer and I have a very troubled romance. I love it for its electronic global reach forward and backward in time across the politicial and geographical borders, able to give me all sorts of data and pictures instantly--when it's working. Using it for transcripts, however, is game-playing of a very high--or low-- order.
The ten volumes of re-created courtroom proceedings in 2507 pages by the Kinko count, which included some partial pages, title pages, and the lengthy index, occupied most of my three months from January through March. Much of the ordeal was role-playing Don Quixote , my new computer's windmill whacking away at me. Not referring to the 1984 and 1990 movies, during World War II in comic strips we had gremlins, "the little men who aren't there," doing mischievous sabotage; and I sometimes wonder if they haven't been hiding these decades until computers invaded our lives. At other times I think I'm dealing with a mechanical brat squalling, "No! No! I don't want to!" throwing itself down in a childish fit.
One of the first signs my new computer was ready for a brand-new assault on my sensibilities was the punctuation matter of a colon followed by a closing parenthesis. This happens steadily in our transcripts when we start a new section with time, date, parties, ending with "the following occurred:)" Movable Type is keeping a tight rein over my HP here, but what happens otherwise is an automatic Smiley Face lacking only its bright sunny yellow. The same sort of problem occurred when I did dates like the 21st or 22nd, for my HP automatically miniaturized and lofted the "st" and "nd," along with the Smiley Face way too casual for our sternly censorious state supreme court. So I had the nuisance solution of spacing between the colon and the paren or the numbers and the letters, then backspacing and deleting the spaces.
At the tops of our pages are witness lines and page numbers, the former identifying different witnesses in the Q&A sections and what the examination is. The first examination of a witness is Direct; the opposing attorney then questions in Cross; further examination is then Redirect and Recross until the attorneys are tired of badgering. There can be two examinations on a page of rapid-fire clean-up questions or even two witnesses when one ends and a new one begins. That means that the header, which is where the witness line goes in computerization, must change. However, my Hal was inflexible: whatever name and examination I typed in, he insisted would go on all the pages. And change also fouled up the page numbers. I spent most of a day trying to override this dictatorial rigidity, but the computer would actually shut down after a certain regular number of tries, seven, as I recall. That's true obstinacy.
Actually, the problem was much more complicated, for my computer didn't like the format I was copying from my old IBM typing days and the state manual instructions. To the left side of a court reporter's transcript page runs a vertical column of double-spaced numbers, a sacred 25 to every page. This is for ease of citation, of course: "line 18, page 23." With my margins set for the body of the text, my computer sullenly warned that the header-witness line and the line number column were outside the printable areas and then proceeded to mangle everything, like squeezing someone obese like me into a bikini. I can be stubborn too, but the compromise between us involved a three-part process for every page. I had to print off batches of pages with the line-number columns separately from that template, then run them through again to print off the text body, and finally type on the witness line and page numbers on my old IBM. Are you still wondering why it took me a few months for 2500 pages?
I don't think I can explain two further complications with that column of line numbers, but I'll try. My sister's software manages all this handily enough for her specialized computer, and she doesn't single-space any blurbs. Blurbs are little parenthetical explanations and belong, according to the manual I was accustomed to, single-spaced to the far right of the page. MovableType won't let me illustrate it here, but one of those would be like "(Thus made part of this Bill of Exceptions, Exhibit #345 is found in Volume VI of Exhibits.)" or "(Off-the-record discussion between The Court and counsel.)" Naturally, when I was still trying to put the double-spaced line numbers on my text pages, the computer gave each single-spaced line of the blurb a number, so the sacred 25 might turn into 31 or 19 or whatever. At one later point, the printer inexplicably got drunk and began having double vision for the pages with the line numbers, doubling them ever so slightly and then worse and worse, so that looking at them was like that movie effect when drunks see two objects instead of one. This double vision was vertical and grew so bad as to fill in all the space lines. I had to stop--not even creating a new template helped at first--and just work on text for a while.
And I had various scares and disasters with the electronic Black Hole where pages disappear into Space Time forever lost. One Sunday evening I was too fatiqued and apparently didn't hit the holy Save, for Monday morning turned bleakly black with nothing there. I learned that, if I rested my little fingers on the Shift keys too long, a strange black highlighting spread like mercury and refused my efforts to banish it, suddenly going poof with all my work. Glaring and grinning meanly, the computer would zap away. 28 pages here, 57 there. Whee!
Most strangely the Spell Check grew tired and cranky after an unknown number of pages usually between 65 and 100 and simply quit working, with bizarre exceptions. I could make blatant mistakes, but it was off resting. Since this is one of the computer's most brilliant talents, I frazzled constantly from discovering, after printing, that I had missed something in on-screen proofreading--at which I'm pretty good after 15,000 students' worth of themes way back when--and had to make the correction and then repeat the tripartite printing-typing process. It didn't help that my aggravated arthritis conflicted with my manual speed, and I developed tics like typing "no" for "on," the latter a popular courtroom word. As we all know, as long as the word is standard, Spell Check won't red squiggle it, even if it's clearly wrong in context, as in the case of homophones, i.e., typing "hear" for "here" or "fore a wile."
As usual, I found a way around the hurdle instead of stumbling along. When I noticed that Spell Check had gone off for a nap, I usually quit; and so the transcript was done in various batches of less than 100 pages. Subtract the 643 pages my sister thoughtfully did for me in her TLC and guess how many batches I had to later put together, which explains why ultimately I ended up with some missing pages and doubled page numbers and not just when incorporating her portions. Three hard-labor months wrestling this quirky HP wizard to make sure our worst serial rapist would not get his mistrial motion because the original court transcripts had been lost by some irresponsible lout. I need a WWF belt with a big buckle.

Monday I did not think of how the communist world and the Stater response would turn the first day of May into a distress signal ("May Day, May Day") of macho military preening, the militarist as dangerous as the religionist, especially if "super" is stomped at the front of either word. I didn't think of all that until I later saw the newsphotos to remind me, for what I was thinking of was another innocent childhood charm gone missing. Old people tend to do that to bore the young trying to ignore them with their Ipods and video games and other distracting hyper urban noise.
I can't remember dancing around a May pole except once or twice at school. May Day to us was May baskets. May baskets weren't baskets either except in requiring containers with handles, usually constructed of nutcups adorned with crepe paper, ribbbon, construction paper cut-outs, lacy paper doilies, tissue paper, even lilac sprigs, with some kind of handles, fuzzy pipecleaners, satin ribbons, colored cords, construction-paper strips. These May tokens were filled with salted peanuts, pastel mints, jelly beans, gumdrops, homemade fudge, Necco wafers, candy corn, and the like in very small amounts, given the tiny size of the baskets, not like today's, say, Easter candy binges. I'm going to guess the custom dates way back to ancient English spring (fertility) celebrations, though certainly we knew none of that, simply growing up with a tradition nearing its end. This was what you prepared for and what you did. The practice was to try to sneak a small basket up to someone's door despite a barking dog or a window watcher, hang the little basket of favors on the doorknob or set it in front of the door, knock, and then race off before the recipient could rush out, chase you down, and kiss you. If you got kissed, you lost. Good exercise. And genderless. Consider it lip tag with footraces. The winner was the fastest, period.
Strategy entered into it because May 1 usually is a weekday, meaning we had a small window between school and early evening. (Town mothers policed all our activities and agreed remarkably on start-ups and shut-downs.) If I went to the other end of town, that meant those there could hit my house while I was gone, and so we stalemated. After the production-line filling and lining up the May baskets in a cut-down cardboard box, I'd be driven around by Mom to the farther parts--two or three blocks away, that is--and had only to get back to the car and slam the door to be home ollie-oxen free. In my part of town, I had to make it all the way back to my house.
I hope I'm not dating myself by mentioning items like nutcups, little crimped paper cups, or crepe paper, cheap in its huge assortment of colors from bright dyes that ran and stained skin or anything else if wet, crepe paper the main decorative device then, easily cut but hard to tear because it stretched, ideal for twisted streamers and fake flowers. The town bridge club and periodic banquet organizers used nutcups regularly. Dime stores back then carried May baskets, but most of us created our own with nutcups and crepe paper, mindful of reputation depending on how fancy or full these little trophies were. (Someone made unwieldy construction-paper cones once, which spilled and broke. The easiest, no prizes, were cellophane-wrapped popcorn balls or colored cellophane squares tied with a bit of curling ribbon.) The preparation was just as important as the delivery, like making Easter eggs, so we spent creative time stapling and pasting to turn those plain little nutcups into Cinderella favors with pink crimped crepe paper or yellow bows or colored stars like the gold ones we got at school. The wealthier mothers might use fabrics, the poorer mothers construction paper, the middle mothers crepe paper.
I don't know how the politically correct would alter small-town mores, but I do know there was a caste system, even with May baskets. What I don't know is how recipients were chosen or why some adults were included. Mom was an elementary teacher at times, so I think I had every child in town roughly my age on my list--we did have lists--including separate baskets--oh, pain, to do it twice--for brothers (the McGill boys) or sisters (the Brockman girls). What I can't explain is how Mrs. Sandoz, the little white-haired lady across the street, and Mary Ellingson, who ran the town cafe, got on my list, but they were, much to my distress, for Mrs. Sandoz scampered like a rabbit and Mary was persistent in chasing me around and around my dad's gas pumps until both caught and kissed me, hugely embarrassing. They were "old ladies," after all. I also can't explain what fatal age ended participation, though older children clearly weren't involved, nor can I remember when it all disappeared. Unlike Halloween, when farm children came in to trick or treat, this was strictly a townie tradition. Not easy to sneak up on a farmhouse.
And that's what I was happily thinking of last Monday. May baskets.

Before the two-faced Janus backs out of his door for this year, I should explain what happened to disrupt my newfound blogging interest. My court reporting Nemesis again. I quite agree with my sisters that I should be let alone in my retirement, but the Douglas County Attorney's office lost eight volumes of transcript, 2500 pages worth, and six of eight volumes of bound exhibits, plus most of the separate exhibits like seven of the eight rape kits and all the fingerprint comparison charts and such out of 166 exhibits, including DNA autoradiograms. Even though the case has gone up to the Nebraska Supreme Court twice, on both trials, and been affirmed, the defendant has nothing better to do with his life sentences than prove an unwarranted and expensive nuisance. He is charging his public defender counsel with negligence at this stage for trials and proceedings in 1994-1995 and, because the two bills of exceptions--as the appeal documents with all their exhibits are legally named--are missing, is demanding a new trial. So my former judge has correctly ordered that I re-create the missing transcript from my Stenograph notes, which I am now laboriously doing.
I skipped over some of the famous stages of grief, my first reaction being rage that all my meticulous labors had been thoughtlessly, irresponsibly lost, with no explanation how that many big fat volumes can disappear; that no one would be reprimanded, much less punished, much less forced to pay for the costly replacement. Having become reclusive out of my courtroom experience, I'm like any other animal prodded out of his hole unwillingly, snarling and snapping.
Then, after the court-appointed attorney told me what was left, one photo-lineup scrapbook exhibit, one rape kit exhibit, and Volumes VI and XVII of bound exhibits, in disbelief I had to check for myself and went into a deep depression finding these meager remains and the index card with the name of the deputy county attorney who had last checked out the whole several years back.
But my judge has given me what time I need for my arthritic hands to type it all out again, aided occasonally by my thoughtfully compassionate sister, who is a computerized court reporter, a merit writer (the highest level of the profession) who can do real time, the process of providing instant readback to court and counsel (and others) by screens displaying immediate shorthand transcriptions. She has helped with 250 pages or so, my dictating to her and then her making some proofreading and format corrections to match my style (I do the proofreading; she makes the corrections I wish). But she is also a partner in a very busy firm and a very popular court reporter in high demand for her skills, nor do I want to bother her.
Anyway, while I am boring myself through the second voir dire of the second, two-week trial with 41 witnesses, I'm making this explanatory entry, deciding I need to do at least some occasional blogging to keep my hand in--or, rather, my head. Voir dire, by the way, is what attorneys and judges translate loosely as "to speak the truth" and refers to the jury selection at the beginning of a trial. From my college French, I know that the two words are infinitives, the basic verb forms, for "to see" and "to speak, to say, to tell." Out of a much larger number, names are picked out of a tumbler--just like Bingo--and these prospective jurors are subjected to various questions and lecturing by the judge and the two counsel, beginning with the simple questions that drive court reporters crazy with a plethora of proper names, the jurors' names and the places they and their spouses work. That's important, because, as happened in the second trial, two of those called were a policeman and a crime lab technician, both very familiar with the case and so immediately excused.
Since this series of cases involved a notorious serial rapist nicknamed the "Dundee rapist" for one of the areas where he committed a number of rapes and one attempted rape, one of Omaha's oldest and best-known, we began the process of questioning with individual voir dire based upon whether anyone had been raped or had a family member or friend sexually assaulted or been involved otherwise in felonies or having crimes committed against them, some immediate issues that have to be dealt with privately one by one in the jury room rather than out in the courtroom before 150 or so people. For instance, by such private questioning for the first trial on two attempted rapes, we discovered three women had been raped or sexually assaulted (one in Mexico) and two men had rape connections, one a landlord with a tenant who claimed rape, another with an ex-brother-in-law convicted of rape. In the second trial we had a couple of women who had friends raped, including one of the alleged victims of the defendant, an ex-Air Force man passionately affected by an experience of two blacks raping a woman he knew (the defendant had interracial parentage but was perceived as black), and another man whose sister had been badly abused and refused to even try to be fair against any man accused of abusing a woman. Interesting commentary on our culture, I suppose, or on human failings?
After the individual voir dire, we went back out into the courtroom where the attorneys hammered away at key concepts and phrases such as "burden of proof" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "presumption of innocence," all crucial to our judicial system. Based upon roots in the Magna Carta and later English law, we demand proof of guilt by the governmental prosecution rather than proof of innocence on the defendant's part, his automatic "presumption of innocence" considered inviolable evidence until proven otherwise by convincing, credible evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt." That latter is opposed to the civil lawsuit standard of "preponderance of the evidence" or the like, as one attorney called it, 51% for the winner, 49% for the loser. The criminal standard is higher, naturally, because the stakes are higher, often long prison terms, life, even the death penalty. It does not mean absolute, mathematical certainty, because circumstantial evidence is sometimes all that can be proven.
Anyway, while the attorneys are hectoring about these terms, they also ask, for example, where jurors were born (more proper names), where they went to school, whether they had children and, if so, how many and what ages, where they get their news. (It should be no surprise that most get their news from the worst possible source, television. Marilyn vos Savant, whose column runs weekly in Parade magazine and who has the highest IQ ever tested, is my best support for what I learned when I taught Mass Media: she won't even watch TV news, the worst; anything written is far preferable.) With a great deal of publicity in the serial rape cases, the news questions were highly important, naturally, especially for the defense counsel, who would make motions to excuse anyone who knew too much about the case or the defendant from the news coverage, presumably biased by that knowledge. For that matter, we actually had a juror who was fairly well acquainted with the defendant's girlfriend and had met him.
This process lasts ludicrous weeks and months in California, but my judge at the time was firmly in control, and Nebraska does not suffer the kind of expensive shenenigans of the Coasts. For the court reporter it is always way too long, however, especially because the conditions are bad for hearing, with people scattered about the courtroom and dropping their voices to speak conversationally with the attorneys, who usually are standing near or in front of them. Add in all the proper nouns and American abuse of "Uhm-hmm" for "Yes" and very familiar term territory, and this is the part that is the trial for the court reporter. And I have to re-create it twice over.
Now I must return to actually doing it, saving the next entry for explaining more about the case.