30 - My Newspaper Life

By Ramon D. "Ray" Hansen

Ray Hansen grew up in Depression Nebraska. At the age of seventeen during World War II, he enlisted in the Navy and served with the Seabees on Guam. Immediately after returning home, he entered the University of Nebraska, studied journalism while working nights on the Lincoln Star. He graduated in three years, on D-Day 1949. His career took him promptly to Washington, DC, where he worked ten years and saved $10,000. With that money, he went to Wisconsin, bought his first newspaper, and learned to print it with hot metal via Linotype and a flatbed press. He paid off the mortgage in five years and sold the paper for more than twice what he paid for it. Then came the offset revolution, publishing cold type via new expensive web presses. During those years, he married, raised a family, and bought and sold three more newspapers in Kansas and Arkansas. He concluded his career in upstate New York on the cusp of the twenty-first century. He witnessed the growth and skirmishes of community newspapers over seven decades. Now in his ninety-second year, he has many interesting tales to tell and relates them with flair and honesty in 30—My Newspaper Life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644242247

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30—My Newspaper Life

Ramon D. Ray Hansen

Copyright © 2019 Ramon D. Ray Hansen

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

ISBN 978-1-64424-223-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64424-225-4 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64424-224-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

A man who works with his hands is a laborer.

A man who

works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

A man who works with his hands, his head, and his heart is an artist.

—John Ruskin

When an old man dies,

An entire library burns down.

—African proverb

Introduction

If this is to be my autobiography, I owe it to the reader to describe the time span I will be writing about. I go a long way back, and I remember a lot of what had happened. Calvin Coolidge was president when I was born. For those short on history, that was before Herbert Hoover and FDR’s four terms. I was here before indoor plumbing and air-conditioning, before sliced bread and frozen foods. If you wanted a drink of water, you had to pump the well. That was a time when Amazon was a river, not a crocodile.

That was before Mickey Mouse, before Superman and Batman, and Donald Duck. Before Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. That was before the treachery of Pearl Harbor and the horror of Bataan. And well before the stock market crash, Social Security, Elvis, James Bond, Jeopardy, Dolly the sheep, seat belts, steroids, plastics, and Playboy.

My ride on the crazy carousel of life was before school busing, interstate highways, credit cards, ATMs, millennials, McMansions, bottled water, and like, cool, and awesome became the only adjectives in young people’s vocabularies. I was before computers and the Internet; before spreadsheets, websites, hashtags, pagers, passwords, and wannabes. I was before PCs, PCBs, LPs, IPs, DPs, ITs, DSLs, Skype, and cybersecurity.

I was not only before reality TV, I was before any TV. I was before uploading, downloading, freeloading, and file sharing. All of which were well before Google, Facebook, Wi-Fi, Yahoo, Twitter, texting, sexting, friending, email, voice mail, and junk mail. My mail came from a US Post Office, and it was truly first-class. A postcard could be mailed for a penny, and nobody sneered at it as snail mail.

I was before CEOs, UFOs, NGOs, IPOs, NASA, NAFTA, bar codes, factory farms, landfills, storage units, casinos, and shopping online. I was before Rolex, Timex, the $1,500 smart watch, laptops, and tablet with a capital T. My tablet was a pad of lined paper, which my mother bought at our variety store for a nickel. On it, I learned to write, spell, and diagram a sentence. On it, I also learned to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and the enduring art of penmanship. But most of all, I developed the lifelong habit of taking notes. I estimate that I have gone through a thousand tablets in my lifetime. They have been as valuable to me as my first wallet and wristwatch, each of which I bought for $1.

I was before Polaroid cameras, the instant and disposable camera, camcorders, webcams, and body cameras. I was before video games and all the devices and gadgets that have come down the pike since. I learned to take photographs with a $2 Kodak box camera. Today, young people celebrate selfies as a slick trick of the twenty-first century. I was only thirteen years old when I took a photograph of myself with my $2 Kodak. I merely placed the camera on a dresser, posed in front of a mirror, and snapped a time exposure. I carried that picture around in my wallet until the wallet collapsed.

Kodaks were invented in this country, and the company provided good jobs for thousands of people before Japanese film found its way into stores here. That was in the years that cheap Japanese stuff also destroyed many American electronic companies. Kids in school were aware of the damnation. I remember my sons and their friends, then in junior high, called it all Jap crap. It was only a few years later that Japanese automobiles came on the market. That was the end of more great American factories. Now young people coming out of top-tier educational institutions bearing impressive degrees can’t understand why they have trouble finding good jobs.

I date back to the hand-crank telephone on the kitchen wall. That was before the rotary phone, the pay phone, the touch-tone phone, the cell phone, the smartphone, the speakerphone, the headphone, the answering machine, caller ID, and telephone scams. I was before checkout scanners, UPS, FedEx, Uber, Bitcoins, and Y2K. I was before CDs, EMTs, LSD, HIV, AIDS, ADHD, Legionnaires’ disease, Ebola, and the Zika virus. That was well before lap dancing, binge drinking, pit bulls, assault weapons, hormones, testosterone, sex reassignment, and transgender dolls. I came of age before men wore earrings, nose rings, tongue rings, and body piercing and tattooing became art forms. Now, tattoo removal may be one of the few enduring trades in America.

I am so old I can remember when grapes had seeds and lawns had weeds. I was before ATVs, UTVs, Humvees, Jet Skis, snowmobiles, riding lawn mowers, driverless cars, disposable diapers, health insurance, wearable apps, and nude selfies. It may be hard for some people to admit, but their fascination with gadgets and easy outs has turned my civilization into a nightmare of robocalls and junk mail.

I was before Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco started punching out democracies like the Saturday night fights. That was well before Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. And long before Sputnik, ballistic missiles, jet planes, the DMZ, the Bay of Pigs, NATO, WMDs, RPGs, monster trucks, drones, and women suicide bombers. That also was before the Castros, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Benghazi, and well before the USA began waging wars wherever it pleased without a declaration from Congress.

I was before Gunsmoke, Dragnet, JR, ER, TMZ, nightly horror films, and TV/Internet pornography. That was before penicillin, antibiotics, autism, chemotherapy, DNA, Medicare, Medicaid, and medical marijuana. I was before shopping malls, big-box stores, K-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Hooters, and home-delivered pizza. I was before Enron, Exxon, oil spills, box-cutters, and scorched-earth politics.

I was before user-friendly, window of opportunity, state of the art, multitasking, real time, and 24-7. That was long before Walmart and the gig economy when we had Main Street stores run by neighbors, and the owner was behind the counter to provide prompt service at a fair price. And if you really wanted low prices, you merely had to step down to Mr. Woolworth’s Five and Dime.

I go back to a day that knew the sweet taste of free-range fried chicken, even before Lucky Lindy flew the pond. That was before NASCAR, ESPN, the NBA, MLB, the Super Bowl, Secretariat, Howard Cosell, OJ, Title Nine, and the three-point shot. We had six hockey teams, a dozen baseball teams, and every kid knew the names of all the players. If you didn’t, you risked your life if caught in no-man’s-land and couldn’t name the shortstop for the New York Yankees.

I was before Apple, Amazon, MacIntosh, Microsoft, and soft ice cream. I was before Gloria Steinem, Ms., women’s lib, the pill, Viagra, Valium, life partner, opioids, and significant other. That was eons before same-sex marriage, gays, lesbians, serve-yourself transgenders, test-tube babies, and the hook-up culture. Boys were boys, and girls were clean, neat, and you considered yourself lucky to share a nickel Coke with one of them at the corner drugstore. When we spoke of the rich, we used the phrase how the other half lives. Now the other half has become the one percent.

I was before four-dollar lattes, five-dollar frappes, miniskirts, hot pants, the pant skirt, pantyhose, cloud-siting, and crowdfunding. I was before Velcro, disco, Blockbuster, 3-D movies, Post-it notes, smiley faces, and sushi bars; before sperm banks, in vitro fertilization, DNA, and cloning. I was before supersized servings and downsized jobs. I preceded rappers, hackers, hip-hop, spell-check, jeans, blogs, political correctness, MLK, and even before Monopoly was a game. I date back to the penny postcard, the two-cent stamp, the nickel candy bar, the dime movie, and the two-bit haircut.

I am so old, I remember when this country’s highways were a pleasure to travel. We had public transportation that worked so well we ended World War II in four years. Today, we wage war in tiny principalities for ten or fifteen years and still can’t bring the troops home. I rode streetcars, buses, and passenger trains that were a pleasure and affordable. And when we traveled by auto on two-lane highways at fifty-five miles per hour, there was no gridlock, road rage, or angry waves of index fingers. Teenagers had not yet invented the thrilling sport of carjacking.

I came before beatniks, hippies, and yippies, before outsourcing, downsizing, subprime mortgages, hedge funds, junk bonds, CAT scans, and ethanol. I was before OEDs, DVDs, DVRs, PACs, LLCs, YouTube, the Big Dig, and the 3-D printer. I was even before one size fits all and the Unabomber.

I was before red states and blue states, hanging chads, and voting machines. I voted on paper ballots where we could readily see who we were voting for. If there was a problem, we simply recounted the ballots. I date back to an era when an undocumented illegal would have been promptly dispatched to where he came from. When I went to school, teachers not only taught children how to count, but what counts.

In this coarse and obscene twenty-first century, I consider myself blessed to have known the pleasure of the most enjoyable music made by mortal man. This group of true musicians included but is not limited to Cole Porter, Judy Garland, Paul Robeson, Ethel Merman, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Johnny Mercer, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Barbra Streisand, Bobby Darin, Matt Dennis, Chet Baker, and a host of others whose mastery of their art kept me skipping into a new day even when clouds were darkening and my pockets were empty.

I don’t know what it was like in your home, but in the house I grew up in, we learned to respect our government and our leaders. They didn’t lie to us on a daily basis. Democracy was a simple and workable system because billionaires, their lobbyists, and talk radio blowhards were not rewarded for lying to the country day in and day out.

Our town had no sewage system, so the government helped us install sewers. In doing so, it provided an essential service to the town, made work for men who needed jobs, and got food to hungry people. It wasn’t rocket science; it solved problems, and it got the economy clicking again. That was the country I grew up in, but the world I see today is something vastly different.

I have lived through a half-dozen revolutions in modern medicine, known the thrill of open-heart surgery, cancer radiation, laser treatment to the eyes, ischemic stroke, sciatica, bronchitis, rhinitis, and uncountable lesser maladies. I still have excellent hearing, a full head of hair very near its natural color, my tonsils, my appendix, my adenoids, and all the original endowments with which I was launched on this nine-decade journey, still with the blood pressure and appetite of an eighteen-year-old. I weigh 143 pounds, the same as I weighed seventy years ago.

My shoulder bones are still connected to my arm bones, my hip bones are connected to the knee bones, the knee bones to the shin bones, the shin bones to the ankle bones, the ankle bones to the foot bones, and the foot bones to the toe bones without a single one broken along the way. It is my hope that I still have the marbles to juggle a few paragraphs that will make these pages an accurate record of my life and interesting enough to maintain your attention.

I caution the reader that this is not a novel. This is no figment of imagination. This is the unvarnished chronicle of my more than thirty-three thousand days as I work my way into my ninth decade on this planet. This is life as I lived it.

For those who may be puzzled by the number 30 as the title for this book, that was the designation for the end of a reporter’s story when I came into the trade. It dates back to the old telegrapher’s code. The number 30 was used to indicate the end of a telegram. Reporters adopted the practice. The American Journalism Review noted that 30 was once so prevalent that it made its way into Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. There are purists who believe that it derives from roman numerals because many writers used XXX to signal the end of stories. Newspapermen, always striving for brevity, simply reduced it to 30. For the same reason, the book is limited to thirty chapters. Be my guest.

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

—Boethius

Chapter 1

chapJazz

Today is April 28, 2014. I am now eighty-eight years old. On previous birthdays, I could honestly say that I didn’t feel eighty-five years old or eighty-six or eighty-seven. But on this date this year, as I begin this reconstruction of my life, I have no qualms about stating it for a fact. I now feel the weight of eighty-eight years. This past winter has been a particularly brutal one. We had more than 200 inches of snow. For people who have never known the joy of shoveling, that adds up to more than seventeen feet of frozen moisture. I am not a meteorologist, but I have traveled through most of the USA, and I think that the lake-effect snows that come off Lake Ontario and Lake Erie are unlike any other this side of the Arctic ice shelf.

Then, when a man gets zapped by a certified A-Number-One case of sciatica and has to take to his bed in excruciating pain, the world suddenly becomes much more difficult to navigate. So I feel the need to tell my story now, while the marbles are still rolling into the old familiar slots. I am trying to avoid being in the same pickle as my father, who died on Labor Day twenty-two years ago. He had buried his eight brothers and sisters and served as pallbearer and church usher at funerals for all his fishing partners and most of the town’s old card players. For those occasions, the churches were full. But because he outlived all his contemporaries, when it came time for his trip to Boot Hill, the only people present were his children and grandchildren.

Because he never found time to put his story down on paper, the younger generations know nothing of the extraordinarily long and interesting life to which they were saying goodbye. A man’s real possession is his memory, wrote the old Scottish essayist Alexander Smith. In nothing else is he rich; in nothing else is he poor. I have a tankful of memories, and they have been bottled up in this brain for so long the cream has risen to the top.

During all the years I was living my life, it seemed to be rather ordinary, prosaic, not much different from the barbers, bakers, butchers, and bankers who were walking the same streets. In fact, it did not seem all that interesting at the time because work demanded all my attention and energy. Although I received a diploma on graduation from high school, discharge papers on severance from the Navy, a handsome degree on graduation from college, I kept expecting some kind of instruction manual for guidance on this voyage that was ahead of me. None came my way. So there were lots of mistakes and pratfalls along the way. I made my share and then some.

Now that I am approaching the end zone, I find myself reading the obituary pages more closely. Now that I can look back from the mountaintop and view the life I lived, I see that it contained moments of drama, random occasions of high excitement, multiple periods of genuine stress, and a few instances of unabashed daring. Also, a number of cases of blatantly poor judgment, bitter disappointment, and joy unbridled.

An admitted old-school newspaperman, I worked at the profession for which I trained in seven different decades. It all began in college back in 1947, when I got my first newspaper job on the night beat of the Lincoln Star in Lincoln, Nebraska. That adds up to newspaper work in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and the twenty-first century. I began my career as a newspaper publisher in 1959 on the bank of the White River at Wautoma, Wisconsin, and finished it on the bank of the Black River in Carthage, New York, in 2001.

Now, from the summit, I undertake this opus as a record for my time on this earth primarily for my family. I am tempted to call it the Loneliness of the Long-Distance Newshound, but that would be corny as well as a bit of plagiarism. At times, I thought of calling it Mein Kampf, for indeed it was a struggle, but a creep named Adolf got there first and gave it a rather bad rap. I am very glad that I chose journalism as a career and doubly glad that it straddled the years that it did, for I believe I hit the best of the good times for newspapers, from the days of hot lead and flatbed presses to pagination and the new media of the twenty-first century.

This is a record as I remember it, but it is supplemented by a few thousand archival gems from all the newspapers for which I worked, bound volumes of the five newspapers I edited and published, more than a dozen personal diaries and journals spanning fifty-odd years, daily appointment books, uncounted boxes of family records stashed away over the ages, manila envelopes bursting with hundreds of old letters, twenty or more punched-out bankbooks recording the deposits of all the pennies I saved since graduating from college, a baker’s dozen of large family photograph albums, more scrapbooks than are found in the average library, three giant accordion files crammed with correspondence, two sixty-year-old lockboxes full of what once were Important Documents, shoeboxes full of unfiled photographs, a thousand-book library stuffed with authors’ obituaries and stories of their celebrated lives, plus a few folders full of keepsakes, mementos, and memorabilia tucked away in drawers of socks and handkerchiefs. I even have six boxes containing the programs for all the theatrical plays I have attended over my lifetime. They date back to May 30, 1946, when I saw my first Broadway show starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne on my overnight stay in NYC upon returning from the Pacific. This collection comes in handy when my wife challenges a remark about who played the lead role in Mr. Roberts or whether we saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Madison or Milwaukee. In short, the complete record of a long and sometimes very lucky life.

While this means that I have a mountain of material to work with, it also means an imposing task of culling and organization. I will do my best to tell the story chronologically, to make it simple for the reader to follow. I don’t pretend to possess any special wisdom or insight that might justify such an audacious undertaking, but after having read a house full of books and realized what wondrous things I have learned from literature, I want to try my own hand in this lofty field. After all, my brain is the repository of the history of my life; I should be the writer of my story.

However, after doing all the research, writing and rewriting of my first literary efforts, I learned that publishers have neither the time nor the patience to read manuscripts submitted by unknown authors. They won’t even respond to inquiries. Ditto for literary agents. They want a guarantee that a book will not only sell but also sell big before they will even deign to look at a manuscript.

But when one becomes an octogenarian, you can’t be certain of too many bright tomorrows. So I decided to publish my own works. I wrote, rewrote, edited, and proofread my own manuscripts, designed my own book covers, layouts, typestyles, supervised the printing and binding, and published my three earlier books myself. Then I wrapped the finished products and lugged the tomes to the post office.

That is what I must do with this work. It does not fulfill the first commandment of capitalism, that all such efforts must keep the cash registers churning. But I proudly plead guilty to the charge. At least it will not add to the mountains of trash that pour out of the mouths of our so-called celebrities of television, Hollywood, and high-tech social media. I have no doubt that when superscumbag OJ steps out of prison, he will be greeted by a host of publishers ready with contracts and a fistful of dollars to tell his bloody, sordid story. Yet I, who never knowingly ran a stoplight or exceeded a speed limit, must tap hard-earned savings to tell my tale.

I warn the reader that this is the work of a writer who holds a strong rope to yesteryear. I still wake up each morning to the same old alarm clock that has been jarring me from slumber for over sixty years. The numbers on the face are so faded, I am never certain of the exact time, and the frame is cracked from occasions when it was knocked from the nightstand by a sleep-deprived hand groping for the silencer.

Likewise, I still get by with an old-fashioned percolator coffeepot, wash it by hand along with the other dishes, and mix the grounds into the compost pile for fresh fertilizer. Now, in my ninth decade, I still manage to get by without a credit card, cell phone, microwave, ATM key, and all the other gadgetry that the younger generations consider so essential.

I maintain a volume of correspondence that keeps the mailman marching to my door with letters from coast to coast. My missives are all written neatly on a sixty-year-old Royal manual typewriter. With ribbons no longer available from the manufacturer, I find other brands wherever I can scrounge them up and rewind them on the original Royal spools. And when my pencils need sharpening, I do that via an old-fashioned, hand-cranked sharpener. I admit I am not Henry David Thoreau, but I try to live my life as simply as possible in this twenty-first century.

These blue eyes first saw the prairie sunrise from the home of my grandfather in Bloomfield, Nebraska, on the 28th day of April 1926. My arrival was duly recorded in that week’s issue of the Bloomfield Monitor in six lines:

Mr. and Mrs. R. E. Hansen are the happy parents of a six-pound baby boy, born to them on Wednesday. All concerned are reported to be getting along very nicely and the Monitor congratulates.

April 28, 1926, is a birth date I share with the late great Harper Lee.

The house where I was born, the Needham home.

According to the birth certificate issued by the Nebraska Bureau of Health and certified by Dr. M. N. Newquist, a then recent graduate of the University of Nebraska School of Medicine, I was the child of Ray and Marie Hansen. He was twenty-four, and she, nineteen, white male and female respectively. The document confirms that I was born alive and legitimate at 11:20 pm. My father’s birthplace was recorded as Dixon, Nebraska, and my mother’s as Colorado Springs, Colorado. I obtained a copy of my birth certificate when I needed it to verify my age at the time I enlisted in the US Navy at the age of seventeen in 1944. I have kept the document all these years, and the old white-on-black, negative-style printing used on official records at that time is now sorely faded.

However, it is still possible to make out most of the citations. The most revealing is the occupation of my father. He was identified as a printer. That came as a shock to me because all the time I had lived at home, my father told me of the many jobs he had held, but the word printer was never mentioned. I know that my grandfather published the weekly newspaper in my hometown at the time of my birth. So that informs me that my grandfather gave my father his first job after he married my mother.

The Needham family history has been traced back to the twelfth century and is documented in thirteen volumes written by Thomas Ashley Needham. Christopher Needham was knighted by William the Conqueror. Descendants came to America as sea captains about the same time as the Adams family was settling Massachusetts. The small city of Needham, a suburb of Boston, is evidence of their prominence in Massachusetts at the time. The name derives from an old Saxon word meaning neat town. For our knowledge of the family’s proud history, I am everlastingly indebted to cousin Melva Kinch Breffielh, who left us her precious 300-page genealogical record, OUR NEEDHAM AND BAGLEY KIN.

My father was from Creighton, Nebraska, a small town like Bloomfield, twenty-two miles to the southwest, but still in Knox County. My father moved to Bloomfield after he and my mother were married. The fact that my father was working as a printer indicates that he tried to follow the printing trade. What is unusual about this is that my father had only one hand, the result of a farm mishap as a very small child. In my entire life as a newspaperman, I have never met a one-armed printer. What would have made that doubly difficult is that in 1926, most type was set by hand, each tiny letter—all smaller than a pea—had to be lined up precisely in a small handheld frame to spell out the words for each line of type. A person with one hand could not have been proficient at such work. This shows that my grandfather provided employment for my father the first year he lived in Bloomfield.

Obviously, my father had to seek other employment. The only other work available in our town was manual labor, which was difficult for him. But that is what he did. The earliest memories of my childhood are of my parents rising early in the morning and my father leaving our tiny bungalow with a paper sack containing a sandwich in his one hand. He walked a mile to the Bill Engle farm, where he pitched hay and did similar chores for a threshing crew for the ten-hour day common at that time. His pay: one dollar.

I was the firstborn in our family. It swelled to eight children over a span of sixteen years. The first three children were born in the Needham home. As the family grew, we were forced to move to a very small house a block north of Bloomfield’s Masonic lodge the year I began kindergarten. A few years later, the janitor of our high school died in an automobile accident. My father got that job, with the pay still one dollar a day. But it would be steady work, and it would be indoors.

With the Great Depression weighing down all across America, we never owned our own home. We moved seven times before I finished high school, always, my father said, because the landlord raised the rent. But we were not alone. That was the lifestyle for many other families in Bloomfield at that time. My mother kept trying to lift our spirits by telling us that our little friends’ families were much worse off than we were. There were two men in town who owned small trucks and operated what were called Dray Lines. A good share of their business was derived from constantly moving families from one house to another.

Those were the years when farmers still farmed with horses, and there was one blacksmith shop in town. Indoor plumbing was the new thing at that time, and outhouses were standard for most homes. When automobiles came to town, their owners had to crank the engines to get them started. Sometimes the engines backfired, and the car owner got a broken arm. Later, telephones became the hot ticket for families that could afford them. In all the years I lived in Bloomfield, our family never had a telephone or a bathtub.

This was the America into which I was cast. At that time, our nation’s population was 120 million. In 1967, it reached 200 million. Today it is 323 million. When I was a child, the world population was slightly over two billion. Today it is seven billion. All this growth within my life span makes it clear that population control is running neck and neck with climate change as the most serious problem facing mankind.

Of course, there was nothing resembling health care or residential facilities for the elderly when I was growing up. If a person was so lucky as to live to age sixty-five, they regularly moved in with one of their children, usually just a few blocks down the street.

Grandpa Needham was born at Breckenridge, Ohio, in 1853. When he was six years old, the family rode a barge down the Ohio River to St. Louis. Then they rode a riverboat, where possible, and walked the rest of the way to Randolph, Iowa, where in-laws provided shelter and sustenance. After five years in Iowa, the Civil War began, and Whitfield’s father joined the First Iowa Volunteers when Whit was eleven, and there were three younger girls also in the home. His father did not return for five years. On March 1, 1867, the first day of Nebraska statehood, when my grandmother was not yet a month old, the family walked across ice on the Missouri River to file a claim for free land. They homesteaded in Lancaster County, just a few blocks from the site where the state capitol building was later erected. When Whit was fifteen years old, he drove a team of oxen to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and hauled back a load of lumber so Lincoln could build one of its very first schoolhouses.

In 1890, my grandfather founded our hometown newspaper, the Bloomfield Monitor, and published it for forty-one years. The people loved Papa, my mother often said. I think that may have been the first inducement for me to want to be a newspaperman. I dearly wanted to be loved. His full name was Whitfield Horatio Needham. With his pioneer newspaper, he beat the railroad to town and managed to keep it afloat against competition of two other newspapers in a hamlet of only a thousand people. One of those competing papers was published in the German language, the dominant nationality of Bloomfield at the time.

My father’s father, Chris Hansen, was born in Dolland, Denmark, in 1858. He came to America alone at the age of twenty. He went to Cherokee, Iowa, where he worked on the farm of a sister and brother-in-law. In 1883, when northeast Nebraska was being settled, he moved to Cedar County and worked at building the railroad line from Hartington to Wakefield. In 1884, he moved to Coleridge, where he worked on a farm. This was at the same time that Whit Needham was farming in Coleridge with Uncle Al Bagley.

My father’s mother was born in Hjorning, Denmark, in 1871 and came to America as a young girl. The family settled in Dixon County, Nebraska. It was there that she met Chris, and they were married at Wayne in 1886. She was then only fifteen years old. My father was born at Dixon, Nebraska, on March 23, 1902, the seventh of eight children.

Although the early Needham family and the Hansen family never met, research has confirmed the presence of both families in Dixon County in 1889. A document recently discovered shows that William A. Needham, younger brother of Whitfield, was serving as postmaster for the prairie outpost of Dixon on July 29, 1889. His name appears on an affidavit for the office of the US Topographer in Washington, DC, verifying the precise location of the Dixon Post Office. This document was published in the DIXON CENTENNIAL BOOK, 1890–1990. The following year, William (called Will by the family) joined brother Whit in Bloomfield, and together they founded the Monitor.

Like most immigrant families, my father’s family farmed. His father’s given name was Christian Hansen, and his mother’s maiden name was Antomina Larsen. Christian and Antomina sought cheaper land and moved west to Knox County in 1908 and farmed west of Creighton. Following the rule of primogeniture, when Chris was no longer able to work the farm, it was turned over to the eldest son Lewis, and the parents moved to town. In his later years, Chris became sexton of Greenwood Cemetery in Creighton, where he and his wife are buried. There are more Hansens in Greenwood Cemetery than any other family name. That testifies to the dominance of Danish immigrants at that time.

My research has revealed that Chris became blind in his old age. Because my father did not talk much about his family, I was not informed of this by my parents. My father also had glaucoma in his final years. This is significant to me because I believe that may be the origin of the eyesight problem I developed in my seventies. It is important for parents to tell their children of their health problems so the children may track their own conditions and take proper precautions.

My father graduated from Creighton High School in 1920 and attended Wayne State College for one year and Boyles Business College in Omaha for a short time. Obviously, this was to prepare him for some type of office work because of his one hand.

My mother was no scholar, but she knew Bloomfield’s history thoroughly because that was the only place she ever lived. Often, I encounter books—best sellers that make handsome profits for their authors and publishers—regaling readers with stories of infidelity on a cosmic scale. Thinking back to my hometown, I believe that the families of Bloomfield may have led the dullest, most humdrum sex lives in the entire country. In our town, there was no question of marital infidelity. Every child was the purest reproduction of his or her parents. For all the town to see, children were carbon copies of their parents, or as my mother always phrased it, the spitting image. If there had been the slightest hint of a bugger in the woodpile, she would have spotted it, and so would have all the other mothers in town.

This was in the days before birth control. I think the practices of our two family physicians were based largely on the frequency of pregnancies of the women in town. The schools never lacked for pupils. Every year’s kindergarten class was larger than the previous class; mothers no sooner moved one baby out of the crib than a new one took its place. This went on despite the fact that many fathers were unable to supply the food required for the growing broods. In addition to supporting their families, the men had to contend with an endless round of accidents caused by the threshing machines and other intractable farm machinery, as well as the horses and mules that provided the power to operate them.

In that age before modern medicine endowed us with freedom from serious childhood illness, I grew up despite bouts of smallpox, chicken pox, diphtheria, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, and what seemed like winter-long torment of the common cold in all its vindictive maledictions. My mother told me I was lucky and said I should be thankful. After all, she pointed out, I had escaped trench mouth, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, influenza, yellow jaundice, cancer, polio, and rheumatic fever, which claimed the life of a schoolmate/neighbor when I was twelve. Although I managed to come through my early years without a broken arm, leg, toe, or cranium, I have been forever harassed by the early-autumn affliction of hay fever. Nebraska ragweed was the culprit because of the way the everlasting winds blow pollen into the atmosphere and disperse it into every crevice and cranny across the dry prairie between the fifteenth day of August and the first frost.

Superstition flourished in those days. It was impossible for a child to know what was fable and what was fact. My grandmother swore by goose grease, herbs, and weird potions of bark and roots as cures for all types of ailments. She even made her own soap. She saved certain animal by-products when the family butchered, then mixed the ingredients with tree-bark ashes, tallow, and a liberal dose of lye. And she always read her tea leaves after every evening meal.

One summer, when my mother was having one of her eight babies, I was sent to the home of a nearby cousin for a week. I came down with a bad earache. Nobody in our families had money to go to a doctor, so my aged uncle administered the family’s understood version of the cure for earache: he smoked a pipe, so he blew smoke into my ear and sent me to bed. The next morning, I awoke with a dreadful case of mumps.

The supreme terror of my childhood was polio. My mother never fretted about her own health, but she was a world-class worrier when it came to her children. She had read stories of children being forced into iron lungs by polio, and I doubt that she slept serenely through an entire night in all the 1930s. There was no immunity. Children of the wealthy and the wretched alike succumbed in frightful numbers. Our own president was the prime specimen of its indiscriminate insidiousness. Thankfully, his March of Dimes campaigns provided us with the funds that eventually led Dr. Jonas Salk to discover the vaccine that kayoed the scourge following WWII. In this day of wonder drugs, it is impossible to conceive of the dread every cough or wheeze prompted in the minds of mothers in the 1930s.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

—Richard Ford

Chapter 2

chapJazz

As a skinny runt in a hardscrabble town with no older brothers, I learned guerrilla warfare on the most rudimentary level. George W. Bush thinks he discovered terrorism on 9/11, but in his cushy life, he never knew Dust Bowl Nebraska and the Smackard boys. For that generation of undernourished Bloomfield lads of the 1930s, the Smackards were al-Qaida in America. They ruled our backstreets. Truly the poorest of our poor, they lived in the saddest of shacks along a bank of Bazile Creek, which flooded at the slightest provocation. With a father who dug the graves and did all the backbreaking jobs in town that other men shunned, we kids looked down on them. The many boys in the family understood this and naturally hated our privileged guts. They got even with their fists.

Smackard was not the family’s real