Saturday, January 06, 2007

Go Big Red

Many interesting things happened while we were in Stanton and I don’t recall them all well enough to tell. One that does stick in my mind is the four-inch rain that fell in a very short time. Stanton was built in a valley and this “gully washer” came down the hills with such force that mud came down like lava out of a volcano. The streets were full and stores had to actually sweep the mud out of their places of business.

I was elected vice president of the Northeast Press Association in 1957 and president the following year. Organizing and conducting the winter meeting was not difficult but was time consuming.

With two small children at home we didn’t have much time for vacations, even if we would have had money for it. A couple days at press conventions, our Northeast Nebraska event in the winter and the state convention in the spring, were about it.

As publishers we got free tickets to Nebraska football games and we took in a number of those. That would give us a chance to see Janice’s parents and other relatives in Wahoo on the way to and from Lincoln. The free tickets were discontinued later, of course, when the Cornhuskers developed into a national power.

In 1955-60 they needed the support of both daily and weekly newspapers because it was difficult to fill the stadium, even though it seated only 30,000. It also became apparent that newspapers could not criticize politicians and others for accepting freebies when they were doing it themselves. The university then changed their policy and made a couple tickets a year available but required payment for them.

The football games remind me of an incident when I was working in Stanton just before I got drafted. We were having coffee in a local cafe with our regular group plus a traveling paper supply house salesman called Gil Reynolds. The guys were discussing Nebraska football (yes, it was a topic even then) and particularly Bobby Reynolds. He was one of the most famous Cornhuskers at the time, having been dubbed “Mr. Touchdown, USA” after leading the nation in scoring. None of the locals knew our salesman, of course, but were polite enough to include him in the conversation and asked him what he thought of the star.

“Well, I’ll let others be the judge of that since I’m probably biased. He’s my son,” replied Gil.

Even though I knew this man reasonably well through newspaper circles, I was not aware of his relationship to the famous Bobby Reynolds. He obviously was not one to brag.

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