Editors Notebook

While gathering information for this week’s installment of the First National Bank failure series an advertisement placed in the Nuckolls County Herald in 1904 caught my attention.

I don’t know about you but I am tired of winter and having to deal with ice underfoot. With a headline of California, the advertisement placed by the Rock Island Railroad seemed to describe the winter of 2024. It read:

“Pick up any paper you please and items like these greet your eyes:

“Bitter cold and high wind”

“Mercury near zero mark”

“Cold wave covers country”

“Three men and women perish and may persons are frost bitten”

And yet winter has only begun!

What are you going to do about it?

Will you fight through three months of Arctic weather or will you join the army that is now headed for the sunny valley of Southern California?

If you are wise, you will go to California. It is less than three days distant: a round-trip ticket costs only $90. And your ticket is good to return any time within nine months of date of purchase.

In California, in mid-winter, you can live just about as you do at home in midsummer—bathe, play golf, pick fruits and flowers, drive or bask lazily in the sun while you watch the surf break along the shore.

And it’s less than three days away—LESS THAN THREE DAYS.

Best way to get there is via the Rock Island System. Two routes, Southern via El Paso, Scenic via Colorado. Take your choice. Golden State Limited runs daily, Dec. 20 to April 14.

The ad appeared about the same time my Grandfather Blauvelt worked as a brakeman for the Rock Island. I don’t expect he ever got to see California at the railroad’s expense but I do remember him talking about working trains between Fairbury and Nelson and Fairbury and Phillipsburg. On one of those trips to Nelson, he met a young woman enroute to Ruskin to visit an older married sister. In a few days, she became Mrs. Blauvelt and Grandfather quit his job because he didn’t believe the life of a railroader made for a good husband.

But advertising gets results and he may have harbored a dream to visit California especially, since he experienced some of this area’s worst winters. He was a youngster attending school in Hardy when the Blizzard of 1888 hit. He told me the weather leading up to the blizzard had been nice and he went to school that morning wearing only a light wrap. He was able to get home after school by stopping in houses along the way to warm up. Youngsters attending country schools were not so fortunate and many lost their lives.

Later he was farming north of Abdal and had taken a team and wagon with a load of corn to Superior to trade for coal when a storm blew in and stranded him in Superior while Grandmother was back on the farm and had to care for three youngsters and their farm animals.

In 1920, my grandparents and another couple farming nearby, the A. V. Noels, decided they had had enough cold winters. They held farm sales and struck out for California. My father was only two years old and consequently didn’t remember much about the trip.

However, my grandfather told me about it.

Instead of riding the Rock Island, he purchased tickets from my Grandfather Wrench and they took the Burlington Route west to California. Once in California, they purchased a Model T Ford and for six months toured the state looking for opportunities.

Not finding anything that looked more promising than Nuckolls County, they returned home. Four years later, his itchy foot took the Blauvelt family to Colorado. My father said they had a great time camping in the mountains and bathing in the mountain streams but as winter approached life in the mountans didn’t look so good and they returned to Nuckolls County.

The first winter after he retired from the gasoline station, my grandparents went to Texas for an extended stay. From their reports, I concluded they had a good time but they only went once. There is something about home that is hard to escape.