I also got a lengthy response from Grandpa Koftan's youngest sister, Margaret "Babe" Koftan Langhammer, before she composed the booklet of memories handed out at a Koftan reunion. I was going to retype it but decided no, the family deserved to read her easy conversational style as she's remembering.  She is not a good speller.  Always spelled Grandpa's name Lawrence rather than the Laurence he used.  I make the same mistake with Micheal and Lindsay Ellingson's names sometimes.

Our state senator when I was growing up was John Forsyth of Niobrara, powerful enough in the Legislature to keep rebuilding and repaving Highway 14 between Niobrara and Verdigre, his pet project,which kept sliding into the Verdigris Creek and Niobrara River.  Notice whose name heads the list in the form letter.

The head of this deer hung on our front deck.

Above, in his 80s, I think, he pitches softball at a Koftan family reunion.  Jerry Steege, husband of Deloris Koftan Steege, is behind him.   Below is what gave him recognition far beyond Knox County.  As long as I can remember, some kind of card game went on at the station, Center's own little Las Vegas.  Or, I should say, Male Gossip Central, because Dad found out more scandal than Mom did in the courthouse and usually told me what I'd done at a dance in another town I'd gone to.  Grandpa George W. Luckert preferred cribbage while taking care of the pumps, windshields, oil checks, but he and his son also played rummy, pinochle, poker, euchre with anyone willing to lose some coins.  I can remember card games going on in the office part long after hours, the garage and pumps closed.  Later the game moved to the rear of the Quonset shop, the table usually a wooden spool, the kind that held cables. Dad's being busy didn't stop the regular players, the customers, the salesmen, strangers from playing straight through the day, Dad buying a coffee urn to supply the players.  (His son-in-law, Sue's husband, Jim, who took over the welding business, runs the same coffee-fueled game today, replacing urns as they wear out.)  Dad's father and brother were notorious gamblers in earlier years, which might have explained his fondness for gambling.  What it meant to us was that he'd come home with his coverall pockets sagging with coins and dollar bills.  He never lacked for change for his children.  And that's how Jim Javorsky happened by one day and took this prize-winning photo.  Dad was indignant because people wrongfully thought he was looking into Rex Risinger's hand (our neighbor) ) to cheat, which Jim's title certainly suggests, and he always protested that he'd already folded and was merely curious about Rex's hand.  But Dad was duly proud of ending up at Disney World.  (I should add that the area was a card-playing hotbed.  Mom belonged to the Center bridge club; Grandma and Grandpa had a card club hosted by its various farmer members.)

Dad was a very creative welder.  On his own, he made hay cages, big octagonal cages on old car wheels that proved handy to ranchers as far away as the Dakotas and Wyoming for moving haystacks.  The cages opened and could be narrowly collapsed when not in use or being towed.  He invented a snare-proof collapsible boat anchor he had me try to get patented, but someone had beat him to the same design.  He had worked it out on his own, trying various designs and testing them on his boat.  (I've failed to mention that we almost always had a boat, graduating from a wooden one when I was young to fancier plastic speedboats by the time of the girls.  Built his own boat trailer, naturally, and reworked a former family car to have a big, square, open back end with door, the Fish Wagon.)  He was the only welder I knew who would work on automobile gas tanks--that's how good he was--which had a tendency to blow up.  He could duplicate parts farmers mangled and make them all sorts of feeders.  Men simply told him what they needed, and he'd make it.  Here's the boat anchor.  The triangular part was hinged. 

     Mark Donley Feddersen sent me the photo of Dad in front of a feeder he'd welded from the time of a Feddersen family visit, 1963, I think.  Thank you, Mark.  [Good view behind Dad across the street to what had been Mary's Cafe (then Cassie's) and Freddie's Store with the awning, the Crosley brothers'  Center Garage the competition.  Only the garage exists today, the other two buildings razed.]

  

Because Joan Burney mentions how proud Dad was of his first grandchild, Justin John (for Dad) Rohrer, as a last sportsman note a paragraph from Mom's letter to her sister, Audree, for Audree's birthday. Dad had just given Mom a new Word Processor typewriter that gave Mom fits, so I'll simply type it out.

"Jack has been getting quite a kick out of going to grade-school games, first football and now basketball.  Justin plays every time, and it is a thrill for him to see his grandson play.  He always said he hoped he would live long enough to see him play. . . . Sue still bowls on Tues. nights, and he is always interested in that, too.  Of course, he still sponsors a Luckert's bowling team and goes once in a while to watch."  Of course.

The next three seem to be taken at the same time on the west side of our house, judging from clothing clues.  First is L.J. and Fern's family.  L-R:  a very tan Larry Dale,  Audree, Velma, Fern, Laurence.

Next are the grandchildren to that time, minus Dennis Jon.  Front are Linda Jean Koftan and Lindsay Craig Ellingson; second row are Penny Jean Ellingson and David Larry Koftan, and I'm at the rear holding my sister Sue Ellyn on my shoulders.

Then it's all of them, either Mom or I the one to take the photo.  We're both missing.  Back, L-R:  Larry holding Sue, Fern, Betty, Audree, Laurence.  Front, L-R: Penny, Linda, Lindsay.

Finally one from Up West at the Peters homestead.  The photo is dated JAN 57, but I don't remember when Earl and Audree lived there instead of Grandma and Grandpa Koftan.  Lindsay thinks it was the spring of 1955; his turtle hat cued him.  If I had to guess, Micheal Laurence Ellingson is missing because he's with Grandma and Grandpa Koftan down in Arizona, but I don't know.  Anyway, L-R: Dennis Jon, Lindsay Craig, Audree and Earl Ellingson.  Penny Jean Ellingson is standing in front of Velma Luckert at the right.  In the front are my sisters in dresses I bought them, red dotted swiss, Sue Ellyn turned, JaVee Ann holding on to Mom's hand.

 

And I love this picture of Jack (Dad) and Larry in our front living room.  For those of you who don't know us well enough to tell the difference, Dad is the barefoot one.  Dad won the Philco radio-phonograph combination in the corner for a dollar lottery ticket.

In the adult photo, Grandma Fern is in the second row, fourth from the right, next to her best friend, Lillian Braunsroth, also in a dark dress.  Velma, Mom, is in the center of the second row with her dark bangs, fifth to the left from Gram.  At the right end of the second row is Lizzie Clausen, long the camp treasurer to whom I sent my yearly dues on my policies.  Many of the members were also members of Gram's extension group, the Crystal Club, including Lillian and Lizzie.

This is the Nebraska delegation at the San Antonio convention, June 19-25, 1950.  We are all in the standing back row.  Mom is second from the left, often confused with Edith Evans, sixth from the left (seen in subsequent photos because she was the daughter of Alma Snyder, one of our chief state officers).  I am at the right end.  Gram is seventh from the right, in the center behind the State Supreme Oracle Florence Torkelsen with the rose bouquet (whose later memorial will be a few pictures on).

To the left is the Nebraska delegation at breakfast, but I don't see either Mom or Gram.  I am next to the empty chair, very tan from all my walking under the Texan sun.  Following that are a photo of Gram in our hotel room and one with her two best friends there, though I have only Rosewood Bennett at the left identified, with Gram turned toward her.  Both friends were very funny, and we laughed a lot.  I remember that.

 

This one was in Omaha, 1957, Gram at the left end of the front row, the aforementioned Edith Evans, Mom's lookalike, fourth from the right.  I'd guess it to be of the Nebraska deputies.  Grandma's chief rival/enemy selling insurance in northeastern Nebraska was Emma Richling, who lived in Neligh, third from the right in the front row, who actually had written up our family policies long before Grandma was deputized, helped by her daughter, Vera, the tall brunette second from the right in the back.  They appear in other state photos here.

This is a state convention photograph from North Platte, 1958.  Fern is second from the left in the front row, Emma Richling in the center.  Edith Evans is fourth from the left in the rear, Vera Richling third from the right.

The last is the memorial drill for Florence Torkelsen (the State Supreme Oracle in the San Antonio photo) at Los Angeles, 1958, the martini convention.  Fern Koftan is at the left, the front of the row behind the two standing women.  Edith Evans is to her right in the back, and Emma Richling is at the front right.

     I resented it, because he preferred his sports to social events with Mom and me, and I definitely grew tired of the dark, greasy meat of ducks and geese before the winter was over, when he'd get up around 4:30 or 5:00 on weekends to go get sandblasted and windburned sitting on a sandbar from sunrise till sunset.  Likewise with fish in the summertime, which I didn't like anyway, certainly not the smelly kind with all those bones.  (Mrs. Beran next door always begged for the fish heads to make soup with.)  But we had little money, and all that hunting and fishing got us free meat, whether I liked the gamy taste of pheasant or stringy rabbit or not.  Venison actually makes me nauseous, no matter how it's disguised.  But hunting and fishing equipment is where all his spare money went, and we were safe for once in buying him a present if it was a new rod and/or reel.  I have a letter specified just to Mom because we were buying him a bow and arrow set he had talked about.  Later after Bloomfield got a new bowling lanes, naturally he filled shelves in our big living room with trophies, individually and for the team he sponsored.  Nothing for Jack Luckert to roll a 300.  He was a supremely gifted natural athlete.

     He was also supremely a baseball player, a pitcher, and that did stick, though he was such a demanding coach to me that I nervously flubbed and then hated the time he took with other boys.  (He had to wait for my tomboy sister, Sue, who played softball, and her sons, Dad happily going to every football game of theirs he could, even if he froze.  I must insert here that, also an avid sports fan, Sue took him to Big Red Cornhusker games, and he would be totally proud of her being Bloomfield High School's official scorer for volleyball and basketball for many years now.)   Anyway, to this day I prefer baseball to other American sports, and some of my happiest times with him were when I got to take him to the College World Series here until he didn't like coping with the crowds and felt TV offered a better view, as it did.  Aside from his playing on Morrillville teams, he came to Omaha to try out for a farm team here and was injured working in the stockyards, which ended his pitching career--but led to his marrying Mom and working for his in-laws, Fern and Laurence Koftan, before becoming a mechanic-welder . He managed the Center town team when I was growing up, Mom acting as the scorekeeper, so we had family togetherness for every game they played, besides which we went to other towns' games, like Bloomfield's.  Much later he would umpire for those games after Center no longer competed, and much, much later he coached sister Sue's softball teams and umpired for softball leagues in his old age.  All that meant that the radio and TV were monopolized by sports, from the Friday night boxing that Grandpa Luckert had to hear  (the Gillette Blue Blades song still rings in my ears)--Grandpa had taught all his sons to box--to the Saturday afternoon Cornhusker football radio broadcasts that conflicted with my Metropolitan Opera to the excess of games at holidays in later TV years.  After Mom died and he lived there alone, in the summer I knew I could walk in and find him in his chair watching a ball game on TV.  The Boston Red Sox were his team, always, and he was buried with a baseball autographed by that team at the time obtained by cousin Penny Mindemann.  (Mine has always been the New York Yankees, maybe because they swept the World Series in my birth year in four straight games or maybe because my superintendent, Robert Pease, also a baseball nut, insisted we listen to the World Series annually in high school assembly, and the Yankees usually won--of course, or there wouldn't be the musical, Damn Yankees.  Or maybe to spite Dad, who hated the Yankees as every Red Sox fan does, and vice versa .  I don't honestly know.)  I do consider his love of baseball one of his greatest gifts to me.  This photo of him in his Morrillville uniform at the Old Brick House sits on my shelf by my desk.

More proof and photos in Part 2.

    Fern became very successful in Nebraska and in the South, traveling around, so that it was a good source of income, and she went to all the national conventions.  Shortly before her fatal stroke at 67, she had been to one at Los Angeles in 1958 where she had tasted her first martini, having come that far from the black-stockinged severely puritanical Methodist in the family's first decades.  In an earlier entry were the grey photos we took in 1950 of our trip to the national convention at San Antonio, held in The Plaza Hotel right on the famous River Walk not far from La Villita and an outdoor theater.  (I got such blisters from walking along that scenic way clear down to the Alamo that I could not wear shoes the last few days of our trip.)

In her deputy capacity, she's awarding someone not identified an RNA pin, probably for number of years as a member.  

      The Royal Neighbor magazine had its own obituary for her.  I apologize for Mom's glue job.

Uncle Chet's first wife, Sarah/Sally Clements Luckert, sister to Uncle Rich's first wife, Ella, and     

Darlene LuRee, in front of their South Omaha house, south of the then huge stockyards.

Uncle Joe and Aunt Evelyn Luckert Bruhn with their first grandchild, Barbara Kramer (Walter and Joyce Bruhn Kramer), outside their Newman Grove, NE, farm house.

Phyllis and Stanley Luckert (Rich and

Sylvia ) with Grandfather

George W. Luckert 

outside the West Hotel in Denver.

Uncle Rich Luckert and his son, Alton, by his first wife, Ella (see first photo for note about her sister, Aunt Sally),  

"up near Pikes Peak on the Stage road."

Leah North and Cousin Elizabeth Evelyn "Bubbs" Stocking Davids at one of Velma Luckert's school picnics.  Bubbs is, of course, in the checked dress at the right.

Some family reunion of the George W. Luckert family minus only one, Bessie/Betty Liberty.

L-R:  Chester/Chet, John/Jack, Evelyn, their father George, Elizabeth/Lizzie (she loved to stick her tongue out when she was tickled), and Richard/Rich.  Below is George W. in front of son Rich's Sinclair station in Shenandoah, IA, in the early Twenties.

Besides my 1993 Christmas card photo, I thank Deloris for her family tree, as I thank Janet Presson, Phyllis' daughter-in-law, for the following photo and identifications and the bracketed additions about wives' birthdates.

"Top Row:  Amy & Shelby, Amy Ruth & Ryan, Ashley & Justin, Jennifer & Stephen.  Middle Row:  Johnnie & Janet, Taylor.  Bottom Row:  Si, Morgan, Savanna & Lane.

Johnnie Lee Presson Oct 2 1955; Janet Frances (Ricker) Presson July 28th 1957

Stephen Lewis Hill Aug 20th 1975

   Jennifer Hill Dec 10th [Jennifer Baril Hill, 10 Dec 1975]

   Morgan Hill Nov 8th 1995

   Taylor Hill Aug 13th 2003

Shelby Gene Presson Sept 1 1976

   Amy Presson Sept 8 [Amy Sue Christine Presson, 8 Sept 1974]

   Savanna Marie Presson June 12 1996

  Silas Gene Presson Jan 15th 2003

Ryan Lee Presson Sept 9 1980

   Amy Ruth Presson May 7th [Amy Ruth Collins Presson, 9 May 1984]

   Lane Ryan Presson Nov 14 2002"

And I may as well append two photos I just found, one of Phyllis Koftan Flemming Presson dressed up for some special occasion (high school prom?) and one of her son Gene Presson at 16.

 

In this 1906 Souvenir with presumably the teacher's portrait on the cover, I think Director of the School Board meant that Great Grandfather Peters was the Chairman.  Several of the pupils have familiar names, like the Peacocks and Andersons, in the pupil list besides E.L. and Mary's two youngest daughters, Myrtle and Fern.  (We went to Gardie Peacock's Golden Wedding Anniversary in Long Pine; David Peacock had a Saint Bernard I and the Ellingson boys played with while the adults went to a funeral when we were very young; Chester Anderson lived across the road a bit south from the Peters homestead where Grandpa and Grandma Koftan lived--and Audree and Earl.)  I did not scan the back heavy cardboard cover matching the front.  Fern Peters wrote her name on the back of the pupil page.

I may well have used this photo before but don't think so.  It is actually a postcard with a fancy-edge photo that includes Fern Effie Adelaide Peters in the second row, the one with the bow tie.  On the post card side is written "Mattie [Mattie Brown], Fern, Amberette [Flaherty], Ralph Jeffreys [Jefferis]."  My bracket additions are from the pupil list above. 

Note that Fern's first teaching contract was when she was 15, the second her next year at 16.

  

The following is another at Aunt Lizzie's outside her house:  Grandpa George W. Luckert, Rich and Billie, Phyllis and Stan.

I don't know when she sent me these two or if Kay Vanness Sanger did.  Above Aunt Billie is with her brother.  At left she's laughing at a Duane Hansen sculpture that I've seen (and I know how deceptively realistic his people were, starting to ask one a question at the Joslyn show here).  As she mentioned in one of her letters to me, this is Aunt Billie and her son, George,  "Where we lived just up from Monterey Bay in Pacific Grove."

I want to type in one of her letters, a long one with family history and Nebraska anecdotes.  I did scan in a short letter to prove that her legibility was just fine in her late 70s and type the other only because her pages are too long for the scanner and also would require much more space.  This short scanned letter refers to her birthplace, Nehawka, NE, a village northwest of Nebraska City, almost straight west of Shenandoah, IA, where coincidentally Rich had met Sylvia and run a Sinclair station.  I had sent her one of those fancier state maps put out for tourists, and then she goes on amusingly about the 1919 Volstead (National Prohibition) Act, famous for creating bootlegging and such criminals as Al Capone.  Sheldon would be a fairly familiar name to Nebraskans besides the governorship, at least is to me, for the Sheldon Memorial Art Museum (a Philip Johnson building) and Sculpture Garden on the UNL campus in Lincoln.  The next time I visit it, I shall think of Aunt Billie, named for Gertrude Sheldon Wolf.  And she did indeed include a Sheldon family incident about Nebraska's Rose Bowl appearance, as you will read.

 Always stylish, as I mentioned earlier, she included two photos with a very short letter, "Taken 10-20-94 My 80th," which I shall split.  Her ashes were spilled into the Pacific by George, who wrote me after her death. 

I am not bothering with proper use of quotation marks, for I'm copying this 1-29-94 letter verbatim, including my bracketed explanations, and correcting her infrequent misspellings:

Dear Gary,

     Forgive the lined paper--I am too old to slide down hill or for that matter to climb.  So much for the aging process, enough to have to admit the spotty memory.

     Thanks for the letter.  Will try to give it a line by line answer.  To begin--I made copies of the calendar and, true to form--left the calendar [I had sent her] in the copy machine at Mail Boxes.  They said it was not here.  Some one must have found it & recognizing the true spirit of the subject matter, decided to add it to his collection of interesting photography.

     Speaking of which--glad for the picture you sent.  I feel more like I'm writing to some one I can see.  And in return here is one of George and me--taken in 91.

     Don't hurt yourself with the walking.  You'd be surprised at what 20 or 30 min. of good 2.5 or 3 mph will do if done on a regular basis and the speed sustained.  Gets the heart going & will burn up 80 to 100 calories--but must be sustained.  Sorry to get repetitive (not really)! 

     Where is the "Old Market" [our most popular tourist destination besides the Doorly Zoo].  Remember I once lived in Omaha.  2922 Decatur, 1020 So. 29th, 817 Park Ave., 605 So. 29th.  I went to Hanscom Park grade school off & on until I got through the 8th grade. [President Gerald Ford was born across the street from Hanscom Park.] 

     Glad for you that you can take such great trips, the best road is the one to sanity.  I could not handle your job [court stenographer].  Now that I live in single blessedness I do not have to contend with stress.  I do worry that I may wear out the remote as I browse.  I prefer most of the old movies even though I can't believe how innocent we all were to buy into the "messages"?

     Back to your vacation--You took me to some of my old country.  I went to 13 schools before I got out of high school--plus all the moving we did keeping up with Rich's jobs.  I did my freshman & Jr. years in Kemmerer Wyo. [hometown of J.C. Penney].  I lived off & on on the Wind River Reservation at Ethete (pronounced EEthaTEE)--means "good" in Arapahoe--during that time I spent 2 summers on working cattle ranches as nanny-house keeper and/or kitchen help in DuBois.  [My trip I had written her about was to western Wyoming, and I had stayed in Dubois at the edge of that reservation.]  Also during that time I had a couple of passes at Denver--the second of which brought me in touch with Rich.  He was on the same job as my brother, Joe, at Fort Francis E. Warren in Cheyenne--and they came down to spend an interesting weekend in Denver & there I was!  You don't want to hear about the rest, and like the old Yogi Berra wisdom I have no desire to do "deja vu all over again"!  We lived in Salt Lake City, Idaho Falls, Gillette Wyo., Virginia Minn (George born there '48), Bowman ND, Rapid City-Edgemont-Burke-Stickney & Aberdeen SD.  We lived in Kearney NE--where Rel was born in '43--Grand Island and Shelby NE.  We lived in Colo. Springs twice.  The second time proved to be the last that we traveled in "double harness."

     I was born in Nehawka NE & spent some school time in Cozad.  My soph. yr. was in St. Joe MO.  After the WY jr. yr. we moved back to Raytown & then Independence MO.  We lived one block up from the Trumans.  He was then an official "appointed" something to do with highways, which was how Dad knew him (they were not friends).  

      Well at this time my pen is getting tired--Better give it a rest.

     In 1936 I took a vacation in Wis.; it was a summer when they had some interesting fires.  It had been pretty dry so finding worms for fishing was difficult.  We went up to Madison and on to Fond du Lac which was as far as we went.  Don't know just where they are but know we did go through the Dells which were at that time quite a tourist attraction.  Then returned to Lewiston [Illinois] where I was living then.  I had quit school just 2 1/2 credits from graduation and went back 1/2 days for the last semester to earn them and graduate in the 50th anniversary of Edgar Lee Master's graduation.  He did not come that year as he is not too well liked in that area.  Too many people were still living who had relatives or were themselves referred to in his "Spoon River Anthology."

     I did touch into Wis. once before in 1928.  Dad was supervising the building of a connecting road between Green Bay Hiway & Seredan [?] Rd., the 2 main roads between Chicago and Milwaukee.  During that time we lived in Zion City, Il., a cult settlement.  They manufactured lace & fine filled candies & the best fig newtons I ever ate.  But then we were lucky enough to be able to get them when they were still warm.  I still have a lace curtain panel that was made there and of the type that was displayed at the Worlds Fair in Chicago.  The man who started the cult was put aside by a man named Volina, who knew a good thing when he saw it and of course drove it into the ground.  The fact that he needed a bodyguard and used a limousine with bullet-proof windows may have had some negative effect on the "followers."  Chicago got a little upset also because his broadcasting station was stronger than theirs.  Anyway, so no smoking, card playing or popular music or any other "Sin" was allowed.  We went into Wis. to see movies or dance.  The town was Kenosha and easy to make it in time for shows so they were on daylight saving.  The reason I went to Wyo. with my sister & brother-in-law was because school was due to start before the job was finished & my parents would have been required to sign a paper stating that they believed the world was flat, which was one of the Zionites' tenets.

     I haven't decided just where this letter is going.  I know my penmanship is really losing ground and legibility and spelling "ain't too hot"!

     So take heart and take care.  This may be the last of this that you will need to endure.

     I got a nice card with note from Sis (Anne Stocking Alexander?)--just seems like too many of those young people are gone.

     Give my love to Jack and your sisters--Billie.

The Sheldon family anecdote involving the 1941 Nebraska Rose Bowl appearance was in a letter to Kay Vanness Sanger:

The Sheldon Art Museum was of interest as it was named for one-time Gov. of Nebr. whose sister was Gertrude Wolf, hence my name.  They lived in Nehawka where I was born.  My father worked for the Wolfs for a time when he & Mother were first getting started.  The Sheldons & Wolfs & Pollards were the "great" families of Nehawka.  Sounds impressive till you learn that the town had a population of 300.  But, seriously, lots of good people there--The Shafers among them (mine).  I believe I heard that there is an Ag college in Lincoln named for Evelyn Wolf, who was always very active there.  She was a maiden lady school teacher.

     . . . . Of course I must go on with the Sheldon Saga.  Of course they all went to Ne. U.!  Some, however, were not very athletic.  One especially was but only in his heart. After a while his mother began to wonder why this child was costing so much to educate.  Don't know what he told her, but the fact is he was totally supporting a very poor but very promising player.  Sometime in the 40s (I think) when Nebr. was entered in the Rose Bowl, it was announced, after Ne. made an important point and went ahead, that someone in the stands had collapsed.  Sheldon had of course gone to the greatest game of his life & tho they lost the game--he died there thinking they had won--Great story and true.

     . . . . Couple of wks ago we had a style show put on by one of the stores.  I modeled.  That's OK.  Surprised me too. Really had fun . . . .

    

     For readers who need to know the references beyond the power of the compact descriptions:  Sam Key was the County Treasurer; his wife, Kay, worked in the County Assessor's Office with Mom (who was Deputy County Assessor), and they were friends accordingly, so that we visited Sam and Kay sometimes when in Bloomfield.  Grandpa Koftan lived behind us in Center.  Of course, he, like everyone else there and elsewhere, knew everyone in the courthouse.

     Ethel Clark was the Center Congregational Church--later Church of Christ through merger--pianist and choir director for 50-some years, Mom an alto in the choir for nearly that long (53?).  Ethel was my piano teacher, and I was in junior choir and then senior choir under her direction.  Sue and JaVee worked for her when they were little, helping clean (she was rather bitchy with them).  Charlie, her husband, had an abstract office on Main Street.  Their son, Tom, was a year ahead of me in school. Charlie's mother, the little steel-corseted Rose Clark, was my Sunday School Superintendent.

     JoAnn Davison Eisenbeiss, Stan's wife, married into an old Center family after her 1957 Center High graduation.  Joyce was their daughter, Kelly their then new son, with Rodney to come as a later third and final.  I don't know who was in the hospital but assume she means JoAnn and the baby boy.  

     Peases had lived next door to us in the Superintendent's house, which Robert/Bob was for my junior high and high school (and longer).  Maxine was one of Mom's best friends. Their first three boys played with my sisters, next-door neighbors, after all.  I think this visit was because, by this time, Bob was Creighton's superintendent, where the family naturally then lived, and so a stop after the Creighton hospital's maternity ward (Lundberg Memorial, where Sue has now worked for 30 years or so).

     And I found one from me to her, from the Minot days.