NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 30, 2003 - (26)

April 30, 2003 cont'd
The issues small towns face? "In our jobs, we both traveled western Nebraska and saw the problems small towns face," Dan said. "Empty store fronts. Young people moving out and never coming back. You don't see that in West Point. The small towns have to have a pretty active business community, agriculture has to be healthy. You have to have people who will dig in and make things work, who will take initiative and be leaders, who work to get people to move back to the community. You can look at it as 'there are limited things to do here,' but when I lived in Kansas City, I didn't go out every night. You have to overcome people's perception of the small town. There is a challenge in attracting employers - you have to make jobs available that will pay the bills. You've got to get people to shop in town. We've got some nice stores here but they compete with Omaha and Fremont and Norfolk. It's a challenge for our merchants to get people to come into the store and spend maybe a little more money than they'd have to spend in the city. But they do a pretty good job. The ag economy affects the banks and everything in town. The town has a pretty good group - I think of the hospital administrator, of my boss who is pretty active, of some cattle feeders who do a pretty good job of making this look like a pretty good town. It takes people who can go out and get others excited about projects."

"Someone you know and respect will be involved, you'll see that and think 'That's something I ought to do,'" Christy said. "Then someone will see you doing it and think they should do it too. It's infectious. That's one of the key differences I see between West Point and my hometown."

"We laughed about it early, me calling him a stubborn German," Christy said. "This town is full of them. This is a stubborn German town and if someone says the town is dying, but God, it is not, because they are going to make sure it doesn't."

"Someday," Dan said, "maybe it'll be five or seven years, the highway is going to go around town. You know it's going to have to. It's not safe with this amount of traffic coming through town. We've got accidents all the time on this highway. It's going to happen, the highway will go around town, it will take traffic away from town, the gas stations will suffer, the motels, it'll hurt those businesses somewhat. We saw it happen in little towns near Hastings. This town is having a meeting in two weeks trying to decide how to deal with this, that highway isn't going to be built for six or seven or eight years, but they are thinking about the problem. It's tough to come up with answers but there is a core group of people in town putting a meeting together to come up with answers, how to keep the town alive when it does happen. How are we going to get people off the highway into town? I'm going to go to that meeting, we want this community to be healthy for the next forty years or longer. The two businesses we're in will be unaffected by the highway going around the town, but we really need the whole town to be healthy. I think a lot of people in West Point realize that and want to do some-thing."

The availability of health care is important to Christy. If there had not been a hospital in West Point, would she have moved here? "Yes," she said, "that wouldn't have been a deal-breaker. But it is definitely a worry that we don't have."

How far from Omaha could West Point be before it was too far away? "If the town were more than two hours away from some place like Omaha, I don't know if we'd have moved here. We like to hop in our car and go to the city."

To be continued....