Elsewhere in this newspaper is a story written by Kerma Crouse about the Webber Community Picnic held in the Frank Herrmann Memorial Park.
I wish we had a dozen freelance reporters like Kerma. She roams the area on her own schedule, finding and exploring topics which interest her and then writing a story about her discovery. We have shared a number of her stories with Kansas Positive Press and were told they are among that publication’s most popular stories apparently because the stir the readers’ memories.
This week’s story stirred my memories of Webber.
About 120 years ago, my grandfather was operating a barber shop in Webber and using a bicycle to commute between his home in Hardy and Webber. I wish he had saved his bicycle for I can’t imagine what it was like to regularly ride that route on roads that were not much more than trails.
However, I do see advantages he had that we don’t have today. The unsurfaced route would not have had loose gravel to contend with. The worst bicycle spill I have had was on a gravel surfaced road that connected Superior and Webber.
The bicycle he probably had rode rough but he wouldn’t have had to worry about flat tires for it would have had solid tires. If he had had inflated tires, he wouldn’t have had to worry about Mexican sandburs for that pest had not yet arrived in these parts.
Instead of saving the bicycle, Grandfather saved his hair clippers and used them to cut my hair. I fussed so much about those clippers pulling my hair that my father went to the Mullet’s Store and purchased electric clippers and decided to learn how to cut my hair. The new clippers weren’t much better because neither my father or grandfather had used electric clippers before. I was their first prototype and I believed the stories a friend of my father’s told about barbers eating fried ears for lunch.
Fortunately, with practice their skills improved and both of my ears are still attached to my head.
The Herrmann family arrived in Webber after Grandfather closed his barber shop and changed occupations. Their blacksmith business became one of the community’s mainstays. Work flowed into Webber and their shop like water now flows into Lovewell Lake.
Kerma did a fine job of briefly sharing some of the Herrmann family history. If we were to repeat all the stories we have heard about the Herrmanns, we would have the add extra pages. I will just share a couple this week.
In 1975, I asked Chuck Mertens, the operator of a West Superior welding shop and salvage yard, for help in removing a large press once used to print The Superior Express. For its first half century of use, the press was used in Chicago to print books. It was moved to Superior in 1949 and used to print Superior High School yearbooks and newspapers. It produced quality work but it was slow and labor intensive. It took an entire day to just change from newspaper ink to book ink. It printed on one side of a sheet of paper hand fed by a pressman sitting on a perch near the pressroom ceiling. Feeding the press was a particularly nasty job on 100 degree days in a pressroom that lacked air conditioning. After four newspaper pages were printed on one side of the sheet, the sheets were collected, carried back to the feeding station, flipped over and fed back through the machine so the second side could be printed.
The press only printed, it didn’t fold. The printed sheets had to be carried into an adjoining room and fed through a separate machine for folding and cutting.
When Chuck disassembled the press, he offered some of the bolts to his friend Frank Herrmann. Frank was eager for high quality bolts and got 10 to 15 gallons of them.
Not long after that, I saw an old back hoe parked near the Herrmann shop and stopped to ask about the machine. I thought it would be useful for cleaning the three mud pits associated with the car wash I was operating along Superior’s West Third Street.
Frank discouraged my interest in the backhoe. Instead he offered to design a simple extension bucket I could use with the Ferguson tractor I had for clearing snow from the carwash drive. After buying a used loader on a farm sale near Concordia, the tractor and loader were driven to Webber. In a few days a call came saying the rig was ready for testing.
It was probably the only one of its kind but it worked well. When I offered to pay for the work, Frank said he wanted to use bill collecting as an excuse for visiting the newspaper office.
When Lovewell Lake was built, Frank had his own private camp and park area on private land located east of Montana Cemetery. He called it Herrmann Cove and the Webber news items frequently reported on gatherings held at Herrmann’s Cove. Today the cove is silted in but that wasn’t always the case. I didn’t stop to investigate but I remember seeing a homebuilt, self-propelled raft tied at the cove’s boatdock and wished I had one like it.
I suspect it was probably built in the Herrmann shop. I have another story about his role in moving a big dragline used to construct the Courtland Canal that I will save for another time.
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