Cedar Creek

Ken’s Story
My step-father, Arthur Logsden, died in October 1970 at age 72 in Omaha. He was a retired Union Pacific demurrage clerk.

Grandpa Art had worked for the UP for 40 years and lived in Omaha all his life. He loved flowers and the out-of-doors but had little chance to enjoy them in the metropolitan surroundings. Consequently when he retired, he and Mother bought a cabin at Cedar Creek on the Platte River south of Omaha. Mother said she had worked forty years to get out of a place like that (the cabin was rustic, to say the least) but went along with it and just returned to their Omaha residence when she got bored. Art would stay and try to get flowers to grow in the sandy soil and putter around.

We went into Omaha one time during the week when Art was working and on the way to see Mother we stopped at the rail yards. We wanted to show Sam and Kay where their grandpa worked. In his last year before retirement he had volunteered to go out into the yards as a utility worker tagging cars just to get outdoors. We drove around the yards not knowing for sure where he worked but we saw a variety of small shacks, apparently to shelter workers in cold weather. It was the fall of the year and leaves had already fallen from the scraggly trees growing randomly in the area. As we drove by, one of the shelters had artificial flowers attached to all the limbs of a tree nearby and we knew immediately that had to be Grandpa Art’s shack.

Art loved to play pinochle and was very competitive. If he was winning, the evening usually wasn’t too late but if his luck was running bad we had to stay up until he won.

He also liked to think of himself as handyman around the house but his skills left something to be desired. For example, during a visit to Auburn, he noticed a lamp cord with a broken electrical connection and volunteered to fix it. I tried to talk him out of it but finally agreed to bring home the parts after work that night. As he began to work, I showed him that it was a new-style plug; he simply had to insert the new plug, press down, and contact would be made. Instead Art started to bare the wires with a pen knife. I told him that was not necessary and explained the new style to him again. He insisted he do it his way and completed the job. When he plugged it into the outlet, there was a big flash and the wall was covered with black soot.

Sam’s Version
Cedar Creek’s business district consisted of one general store and two taverns. The general store was for real, with a pot-belly stove and ancient proprietors as old and dusty as the fixtures. We always assumed that the couple had opened the store to trade with the Indians and were still trying to get rid of the original merchandise. The store’s great glory was a large, old-fashioned candy counter with every kind of licorice, hard stick candy and box of brand name treats.

It was the most fantastic retail experience I have ever encountered.