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Editor’s notebook December 2, 2021 A question from a reader of this newspaper and wife of a Superior High School classmate reminded me of the day more than 60 years ago when Mankato’s Texaco gasoline station was robbed. It was a pleasant January afternoon and I was working at my father’s Champlin station located on the hill south of Superior. Winter days were usually pretty slow and my father often said business was so slow in February, grass would have grown in the drive if it wasn’t so cold. I liked those days for they often provided reading...
My father and grandfather were constantly on the lookout for business opportunities. Grandfather found many diverse opportunities. In his lifetime, he was an owner of dray lines, at least one cafe and hotel, three or more gasoline stations, a barber shop, a furniture and undertaking business, shoe repair shop and... I probably have forgotten some of his ventures. My father primarily looked for ways to diversify his gasoline business. We didn’t know it at the time but his station included many of goods and services now found in what we call f...
Ocassionally we publish columns written by, award-winning, syndicated columnist, playwright, and author named Daris Howard. He sends us two columns a week with the hope our readers will enjoy them so much they will decide to order one of the books he had for sale on his website. Most weeks we get an email late Monday night or early Tuesday morning with his offerings for the week. Usually, but not always I open the email to see what his topic is for that week. Ones I find well suited for this area are processed and put into what we call the...
What a spider web of interconnected events we do travel. In the newspaper business one story leads to another and another with unexpected connections along the way. While reading a daily newspaper story about the unfortunate incidents that happened last month at the Agrex elevator, an Omaha resident learned of my long association with the local news business and wrote asking if I knew anything about a murder which happened at the new Superior cement plant in 1914. I’ll admit to being old but I’m not old enough to have reported that story. But...
I’m responsible for monitoring a number of email accounts. At work I have one computer on my desk used exclusively for internet related tasks including monitoring email. During the work day, at least four email accounts are open, sometimes more. I haven’t counted but I suspect most days, hundreds of email messages are received. This morning one prolific sender sent the same message to four accounts. I responded to one and threw the other three away. In my haste to skim through the messages, I sometimes regretfully overlook an important one...
Friday morning a crew gathered in a supermarket parking lot at Plattsmouth to assemble what they hoped would be a record breaking ice cream sandwich which would weigh as much as a small automobile. The completed dessert weighed in at 2,960 pounds and broke the Guinness World Record for the biggest ice cream sandwich. The previous record was set in 1998 when an Iowa supermarket assembled a 2,460 pound dessert. The Nebraska sandwich took a crew of 30 people five hours to complete. Built in a...
In my early years at The Express, I wrote a story telling our readers about a Kansas businessman’s plans to open a Pizza Hut at the north edge of Superior. For me the story had special meaning as the location he picked for the new business was where a house my grandfather built in the 1920s had been located for about 30 years. My grandparents house was originally located on the Kansas state line, just east of where Highway 14 entered Kansas and turned west. My father was about 10 years old when the family moved to that Kansas farm. I r...
1-14-21 Over the weekend I heard a man, who finds the current time challenging, comment he would prefer the quieter, less stressful time of the 1960s. I suspect his statement reveals his age. With the Great Depression, Dust Bowl and WWII in their past, I never knew anyone who longed for the less stressful 1930s and 1940s if they were adults during those two decades. I could long for the quieter, less stressful 1950s of but I must acknowledge I was a child in the 1950s and my parents provided a stable home with all the necessities. The 1960s...
After learning two high school mates of mine observed their 54th wedding anniversary last week, I have been wondering where the years went. It shouldn’t been a shock for I walked across the Superior Auditorium stage and received my diploma 57 years ago. But the couples I took wedding photos of have remained forever young in my mind. I was the hired photographer when Tim and Lana Shotzman were married at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in the fall of 1967. They were young then and I still think of them as a newly married couple. After taking two...
The woman who lives in this editor’s house is trying to tame a stray cat. When I first moved into town, a number of feral cats lived in and around a vacant and dilapidated house that was across the street and down the alley. With those cats on the prowl, a rodent didn’t have a chance in our neighborhood, but that house was removed to make way for the construction of the Superior Public Library. Since then, neighborhood changes have increased the rodent food supply. Consequently, Rita decided to befriend a stray cat with the expectation it wil...
I occasionally answer questions about Bob’s Popcorn Palace as people recall buying big bags of popcorn from the stand operated by the late Bob Oglevie. After his stand closed Bob rode his bicycle from his quarters in the Good Samaritan home at the north edge of Superior down to The Superior Express, a distance of about a mile. Here he helped with janitorial duties. He felt sorry for this editor and one day came in carrying a front basket for my bicycle. He thought a basket would help me carry things. He didn’t realize my long legs often col...
Monday morning’s mail brought to the newspaper office a subscription renewal from Margaret Houtz of Wray, Colo. Her renewal card reminded me of a nice old gentleman who I had the privilege of serving while working for my father at Blauvelt’s Station. The gentleman was Bill Houtz. My parents said he had operated a truck line bringing merchandise from the city wholesalers to stores in Superior and the surrounding area. I was surprised to learn he had operated a truck line for he didn’t fit this li...
Editor’s Notebook A dear friend of this newspaper, Bob Oldham, was laid to rest this week in Hastings. Though he left the newspaper’s full-time employ on Dec. 31, 1971, he never stopped looking out for us. Bob began his employment with The Superior Express as a high school student and eventually became a competent Linotype operator. Few people today know what a Linotype is but Thomas Edison classified it as one of man’s seven greatest mechanical inventions. The machine was used to transform molten lead into words used in the letterpress print...
As summer draws to a close, a co-worker is checking things off her Summer of 2021 to do list. After vising 18 Nebraska Passport sites this past weekend, she has only 9 more to go to reach her goal of visiting all the sites on this year’s list. But those nine sites will have to wait at least a week, for this week she has reservations for a hot-air baloon ride. In my student days, I read a Life magazine story about a hurricane which struck the United States and added experiencing a hurricane to my list of things I wanted to do. I had seen f...
Over the years, the Superior Chamber of Commerce has coordinated a number of late summer, early fall activities. There have been parades, car shows, watermelon feeds, barbecues, free movies, both professional and amateur entertainment, dunk tanks, water fights and at least once a magician’s show, This year the chamber hit it over the top with the portable water park. I didn’t know such existed but it was the kind of activity the late summer event has long needed. For the youngsters returning to school it was a fitting way to end the summer and...
In my first weeks with The Express, Howard Crilly, the retired editor and publisher, graciously accompanied me on my rounds throughout the paper’s circulation area. He introduced me to the people I needed to know and filled me on their likes and dislikes. Frequently, I heard favorable comments about the editorials previously published in The Express. After each of those comments, Howard would say he expected the editorials to be much the same under the new editor. And many were for they were written by a syndicated editorial writer. From a c...
The quick passage of the Union Pacific’s Big Boy Locomotive through Nuckolls County illustrated how times have changed. Big Boy is one of the 25 largest steam locomotives ever built and the last one in operating condition. Built to haul loads over the western mountains during World War II, the locomotive pulled a token few cars this week when it clipped the northeastern corner of Nuckolls County as part of a goodwill tour. For those of us who like steam locomotives, we consider ourselves privileged when we have opportunities to see the r...
It took 21 years but Friday I finally made it to Deshler and the Spring Creek Model Trains store. I had planned to attend their spring toy show but a family conflict took me south to Osborne on show day. As a youngster, I enjoyed playing with a Lionel model train and dreamed of expanding the train layout to circle the basement of my family's home on Blauvelt's Hill. I studied the toy catalogs and designed the layout I wanted to build when I got sufficient money together. Of course, there had to...
Earlier this week, while visiting with a home owner, I learned of a problem at his home he was still dealing with. A couple days before he had attempted to replace the water control parts serving a porccelain commode’s water closet. ( Since Superior is the Victorian Capital of Nebraksa, I want to be correct and use proper Victorian descriptions here and not use what the Victorian’s would consider gutter language to describe what happened.) The repair job took longer than expected and my friend ran out of time before the refill valve was adj...
I’ve been told history repeats itself and this newspaper is filled with old news. At least part of the time, both are true. History does tend to repeat and this newspaper tries to report on both what is happening and what has happened. In this space last week, I wrote about a photography project of more than 50 years ago that included taking pictures of the late George Higher’s home located about seven miles southwest of Superior along what is now known as Diamond Road. Last week I reported on his great-grandchildren’s memories of the house. La...
As a college junior, I took an advanced photojournalism course offered at Kansas State University. I made friends with a fellow photography student who apparently kept close tabs on the weekly surplus sales held at Ft. Riley. Thanks to his updates on what was being offered, I made several Tuesday afternoon road trips over to the post in search of irresistible deals. Once I found 100 foot rolls of Ansco film selling at a fraction of what I was paying for a comparable Kodak film. I bought several...
While looking through the archives, I found a copy of the Manhattan Mercury newspaper in which a story I wrote in November of 1965 was published. For my first college level reporting class, I wrote about a college stunt I was involved with. Unlike some student stunts which are filled with danger, ours was pretty harmless, if you don’t take into consideration college students losing a few hours of pre-Thanksgiving break sleep. While I didn’t have a hand in organizing the stunt, the organizers expected me to use my connections and get them the...
A longtime subscriber to this newspaper, Ken Torring, drove over from Deshler on Friday. He stopped at the newspaper office to ask if I might be related to Charles Blauvelt, the former editor of the Arapahoe Public Mirror. One of grandfather's older brothers was named Charles but he was a harness maker not a newspaper editor. Prior to suffering a stroke and retiring to Colorado, he was employed by the Dutton-Lainson Company at Hastings. Harness was one of many things the company has made and...
With Father’s Day observed on Sunday, I’ve listened as a number of friends shared stories about what they learned from their fathers and what they did with their fathers. Their stories got me to thinking about the many things I did with my father and the many skills he taught me. As a youngster, I learned my father could do things I would never be able to do. I’ve have less than perfect vision and am waiting for an opportunity for cataract surgery. For much of his life, my father had keen vision and was very observant. If we went for a ride,...
Sunday afternoon, while returning from a visit with Rita’s mother at Osborne, we encountered a fireman stopping traffic on the highway south of Lebanon. Sheriff’s officers were stationed on Highway 36. Not seeing any smoke which would have indicated the presence of a fire, I thought there must be a horrific accident over the next hill and we would have to take county roads and detour around the accident scene. A fireman walked our way and we rolled down our vehicle’s window. He apparently read our vehicle’s license tag as he approached for he...
