The Middlewesterner

REST IN PEACE CLIFFORD JOHNSON OF WEST POINT, NE

My friend Gwen Lindberg of West Point, Nebraska, has once again sent me some sad news. Clifford Johnson, a respected citizen of West Point, died on September 30th. Some of you may remember that I interviewed Cliff along with Bud and Mabel Heineman, and that I re-printed that interview when I announced Mabel's death on August 15th of this year, here.

In memory of Cliff, won't you go and re-read that interview? Also in Cliff's memory, I am publishing his obituary below, taken from the Stokley Funeral Home site.

Rest in peace, Cliff Johnson.

Clifford L. Johnson, 93, of West Point, died September 30, 2006 at St. Francis Memorial Hospital.

Services will be 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at Grace Lutheran Church with Reverend Steven Peeler of St. Peter’s Lutheran Church of Pilger officiating. Cremation will follow the services with burial at a later date at the Pioneer Cemetery near Oakland. Visitation will be 9:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. Monday at Stokely Funeral Home with family receiving friends 6:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. Memorials may be made to Pioneer Cemetery or Grace Lutheran Church. Those wishing to leave on line condolences may do so at www.stokelyfuneralhome.com

Cliff was born February 20, 1913 on a farm south west of Oakland in Burt County. His mother, Lydia Johnson died when Cliff was four. He was then raised by his grandparents C. Albert and Ida Johnson. He attended school at Rock School, rural Oakland. On August 12, 1931, he married Marion A. Hansen at Elk Point, South Dakota. Cliff operated West Point Rendering from 1939 until 1996. He was instrumental in the founding and operating of Grain States Feed in 1957 and Grain States Soya in 1958 until the late 1980’s.

Cliff was a member of Grace Lutheran Church.

Survivors include his son Donald L. (Carol) Johnson of West Point, grandchildren Scott (Erin) Johnson of Lincoln, Carrie (Randy Brock) Johnson of Ashby, NE and Danny (Genene Hansen) Johnson of West Point, great grandchildren Eric Johnson, Kylie Johnson, Trenten Dohmen, Kristy Johnson, Matthew Brock, Aleasha LaCroix, Amanda Brock, and Gregory Johnson, half brother Howard Larsen, half sister Shirley Anderson both of Albuquerque, NM, brother in law Milfred Hansen of St. Charles, MO, sister in law Bernice Hansen of Arlington. He is preceded in death by his wife, Marion in May of 2000, his parents and a half brother Ivan Johnson.

REST IN PEACE MABEL HEINEMAN WEST POINT, NEBRASKA

My friend Gwen Lindberg of West Point, Nebraska, e-mailed me that Mabel Heineman just died. She was 75. The funeral will be Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in West Point.

I interviewed Mabel, her husband Bud (Louis), and Bud's former boss, Cliff Johnson, in April, 2003, at the Heinemans' home on River Street in West Point. These are some of the nicest folks you'll meet. I am reprinting my notes of that visit with the Heinemans in full here, in memory of Mabel. This is the stuff of real life and a tribute to real people.

What more can one say? I will offer this: Rest in peace, Mabel Heineman. Go with God.

*

Louis and Mabel Heineman are modest folks

with a modest house on River Street, three blocks west of downtown West Point. I'd met both of them in October, 2002, during my brief stop at the Senior Center here. The couple is involved in the county historical society and Louis - whose nickname is "Bud" - had worked most of his adult life at the rendering plant in West Point.

My very pleasant surprise as I stepped into the house? Bud had invited to the interview Clifford L. ("Cliff") Johnson, the man who had co-owned the West Point rendering plant for so many years, the man who'd been Bud's boss. Cliff is ninety years old, he's not as strong as he used to be, but his mind is sharp and he can tell a good story. Bud is seventy-eight years old, and can tell a story too. Mabel is seventy-three.

I got two hours of wonderful talk on tape. After the tape recorder was turned off, all of us sat talking for another hour and a half and then - since suppertime was fast approaching - the only polite thing for me to do was get the hell out of their house so they could make themselves some supper.

*

Bud has worked hard all his life. He hired out on farms during his school years. In those days he worked for seventy-five cents a day, until one farmer thought he was doing a good enough job that the rate of pay was increased to a dollar a day. Those were tough years, the Depression, and people depended on each other, Bud said. His family always had food, Bud recalled, but he said he could probably have eaten another potato or two. The family kept a garden in those dry years, Bud said, watering it with buckets hand-pumped from the well.

Bud worked on farms, he drove truck for several months, he served in the Navy, and he worked at the rendering plant in Pendar, Nebraska, until he got a job offer from the rendering plant in West Point, Cliff's plant. Bud served in the Navy and he lived for months on one of those landing craft we know from all World War II footage - an open-topped, steel container eight feet wide, thirty six feet long, with two diesel engines on one end, the other end flopped down onto the beach so the dog-face soldiers could disembark, often into the teeth of the enemy's defense. Yes, Bud put the soldiers to shore on D-Day. Then soon enough he and his mates were ashore themselves, they had to trade their Navy uniforms for Army colors because the higher-ups didn't want everyone to know how far from water these Navy fellows were fighting. Bud survived the war, he made it home to marry Mabel, whom he'd met in Pendar where she waited tables at a restaurant.

Mabel was one of eight children born to a couple who lived on a farm that had been homesteaded by Mabel's grandparents or great-grandparents. Times were tough enough - Mabel was not allowed to go to high school; because her parents hadn't been able to send her four older sisters to high school, they couldn't send her. She regrets that she hadn't been able to get the schooling, she had wanted to be a teacher. Instead, she went to work as a hired girl for farm families in the area that needed an extra set of hands in the house. Someone told her about an opening for a waitress at the restaurant in Pendar, she applied for the job and got it. She had to get it, so she could meet Bud there, so she could marry him and have a family, a son and a daughter who still live in Pendar. Eventually she ran the restaurant in Pendar, even for several years after Bud started working in West Point some eighteen miles to the south. Eventually, as the children were getting older, Mabel realized she didn't have much time to spend with them. Restaurant work will consume your life. And the building that housed the restaurant was going to need an awful lot of work if it was to meet modern restaurant code. So Mabel gave up the restaurant, she and Bud and the family moved to West Point, they've been here ever since. She worked for many years at a drug store in West Point, she worked as a waitress for a while after she was injured and couldn't get her drug-store job back.

For the interview Bud dressed in bib overalls; you'd know that he had been a working man, a man who worked with his hands. Cliff Johnson was the boss, for the interview he dressed in slacks, not overalls; his shirt was of a little finer weave. But listening to Bud and Cliff talk, you recognize that Cliff is not the sort of fellow to ask his employees to do anything he would not do himself. Bud told me as much after Cliff had left. Cliff himself attributed ninety percent of his success in business to the fellows who worked for him; he credited Bud and two other men as keys to making his West Point rendering plant successful. Cliff made a success of himself despite having a hard beginning. He didn't know his father, who ran off. His mother died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. He was raised by his grandparents in Oakland, Nebraska.

Finally at his father's death, an uncle gave Cliff information about his father, that he had died in New Mexico. Cliff sent flowers to the funeral home and signed the card "Son, Clifford." The half-siblings in New Mexico that Cliff didn't know about, they didn't know about Cliff. "Son, Clifford - who's that?" they asked. Clifford was just as surprised as they were. Later, on a trip through New Mexico, Cliff stopped to visit a half-sister. He knew the woman's address. He rang the doorbell. A woman answered. She stepped backwards in shock. She said, "You don't have to tell me who you are. You look just like your father."

Later Cliff found out that he had a couple more half-siblings in California, and he heard he had a couple more in Nebraska whom he never met. His father was a rolling stone, a kind of Johnny Appleseed leaving a trail of children along the way.

Cliff learned to work hard. He married in 1931 during the fury of the Depression. In 1935 he bought a truck and started his own successful business hauling dead animals to a rendering plant. After a year he sold that truck and route, bought another truck, found another territory, and prospered at it. Eventually he found a partner and they established the West Point rendering plant, which prospered under Cliff's guidance, then his son took over the business and ran it until the plant was sold to a fellow from Omaha, who sold it to the conglomerate that shut it down recently.

Why, as a young fellow, would you choose the disagreeable work of operating a rendering truck? "In the Depression, you took what work you could get," Cliff told me. "You might be doing one thing today, tomorrow a fellow might call you to go pick up dead animals and haul them to a rendering plant. I learned from doing it that it was not such a bad line of work."

What does a rendering plant do? It takes dead animals that have been hauled off the farm in various states of ripeness and turns them into pet food or feed meal. The fellow who drove a rendering truck worked for himself. He picked up dead farm animals across his territory and took them to a rendering plant, he got paid per hundred weight of carcass he hauled in.

Who doesn't know what I'm talking about here? A cow dies on a hot July Saturday morning and "cooks" in the sun until Monday when the rendering truck arrives to pick it up and haul it away. The carcass cooks and bloats and gurgles and stinks, and the fellow with the rendering truck hooks a cable around the spongy cow and winches it up into the box of the truck. The dead cow farts and groans as it is moved and pulled into the truck, as liquid drips from its nose. Once the cow is up in the truck, the driver unhooks the cable, he'll need it again down the road, there's another farm, another dead cow or dead hog or dead horse that will have to be winched up into the truck.

This is tough work if you are not used to it. It is tough work even if you're used to it. The smell of death will gag you if you aren't accustomed to it, sometimes it gags you even when you're used to it. The sight of flies crawling in and out of nose holes. The baked glaze of the dead cow's unseeing eye. It is tough work, yet work that must be done. Honorable work that the rest of us would rather not think about.

The driver hauls his ripe cartage to the rendering plant where it gets unloaded. Dead cows and calves have to be skinned before the carcasses are turned into meal. Sheep have to be skinned.

Bud and Cliff were a team skinning cows at the West Point rendering plant. Cliff would always start at one end of the cow, skinning, and Bud would start at the other, and they could do the job start to finish in four minutes. Four minutes from the first slice into the skin til the carcass was naked as a steak in the meat counter. Nobody much liked skinning sheep because it was hard getting the knife blade down through the wool to make a cut, so Bud skinned most of the sheep that came into the plant. He could skin a sheep by himself in three minutes, a calf in two minutes. Cow and calf skins were salted and saved, to be tanned for leather.

The carcass gets cut into manageable chunks so it can be put into the cooker. A hog will get quartered, for instance, and tossed along with pieces of cow, horse, sheep, into a huge pressure cooker. The heat reduces the fat and much of the grease is siphoned off during cooking. Both grease and moisture get cooked out of the meat; as that happens, the meat becomes powdery. A good operator can tell by how the cooked meat feels when it is ready for pressing. Pressing squeezes the very last grease out of the meat. The result is a cake that can be put into the hammermill and turned to meal that is sold to manufacturers who make chicken feed and hog feed mainly. The protein content of the meal coming out of the West Point rendering plant was always about 50%, which was higher than competitors' meal; West Point paid attention to the mix of carcasses going into the cooker, and squeezed out more of the grease.

What happens to the grease? Most of the grease is sold to soap-makers and goes into soap like that you use to wash your face, Cliff and Bud told me.

Rather than being cooked down for meal, the fresher dead animals would be boned and cut up for pet food. After I'd turned off the tape recorder, Cliff told about the time he was called to Washington to testify about the proper labeling of meat scraps from rendering plants, scraps that were meant to be pet food but ended up being fed to humans. All across a swath of the middle part of the continent, from Canada down to Texas, Cliff had investigated what was happening to meat that was supposed to be dog food, and he had gathered signed affidavits from people who knew what was happening to the meat - some boned meat from some rendering plants was ending up on human tables, not in dog bowls, and Cliff was not happy about it. He could understand how people got away with it: take the labels off a can of stew meat and a can of dog food you might not be able to tell which is which. Cliff's evidence and his testimony helped get legislation for tougher labeling of such meat - "Not For Human Consumption."

So - how do you deal with the aspects of the work that most people consider disgusting?

"I know there are people who will tell you," Bud said, "that out at the rendering plant we'd sit on bloated carcasses to eat our lunch. That is not true. We never did that."

"The smell?" said Cliff. "You could smell it but it got so you didn't notice it."

"Cleanliness," Bud said. "Cliff insisted we keep a clean plant. When the day's work was done, we'd scrub down the floors with a tough soap. Cliff bought brooms twenty-four at a time. We'd clean everything off the floor, scrub it down with soap, we'd let the soap sit for a while, then we'd rinse it off with our hot water hoses, we'd run water and steam from the cookers together through our hoses to wash off the soap."

The state, too, was concerned about cleanliness and disease and at one point sent an inspector to check the plant. "What do you scrub up with?" the fellow wanted to know. Bud showed him the barrel of the caustic soap. "Open the barrel," the inspector said, and Bud did, and the fellow was going to put his hand down into the barrel. Bud stopped him. "You don't want to do that," he'd said. "If you put your hand in there you won't have a hand to pull back out." At that point, just the vapors rising from the barrel were enough to convince the inspector that the West Point rendering plant ran a clean ship.

It was not all grim reality at the rendering plant. The fellows enjoyed working with each other. Cliff had a sense of humor; Bud tells a story on him. A call came in from a farmer. He had a mule down that wouldn't get up. Would Cliff send a fellow out to shoot the mule and haul away the carcass? The fellow who went out for the mule came back without it. "When I send you out for a mule, I expect you to bring a mule back," Cliff berated the fellow. The driver tried to explain. He said sure enough the mule was down. He had backed his truck up to the mule, he'd dumped the end-gate of the truck down for loading, and the noise of the chain on metal spooked the mule which got up and ran away before the fellow could shoot it. "Next time," Cliff had said with mock sternness, "shoot the mule before you let the end-gate down."

That's probably good advice for life as well as for the rendering business: "Shoot the mule before you let the end-gate down."

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA MAY 3, 2004 - (30)

May 3, 2003
I've left West Point. I'm making my way towards Redfield, South Dakota, with a stay tonight in Sioux City along the way. I left West Point reluctantly. I have to say that the earnestness of my conversation with the people I've talked to has tired me. The full weight of this project, its seriousness, burdened me as I drove away.

I have been amazed and sometimes startled by the wisdom of the people I've interviewed - those in West Point and those elsewhere. These people have vision and understanding and earnestness and humor. One cannot spend much time talking with them without realizing the enormity of such an undertaking as this Vagabond Expedition. The question I've raised has no single answer, no simple answer, no easy answer. No doubt I'll get a book out of this effort, but it won't be an easy book to master. Perhaps there are as many explanations of why we're here and what we're made of as there are people to talk to.

I am astounded by the profundity and job and enthusiasm of a fellow like Steve Engelhart of Wisner Rendering, who spends his days loading and hauling dead animals. Such a job - distasteful at least, disgusting to some - could numb a lesser man, you think, could leave him sour and joyless, yet that's not the case at all with Steve. Somebody has got to do the job, he says; he can make a living at it, he does it without complaint, there doesn't seem to be a whiny bone in his body. How smug are those who think they are somehow superior to a fellow who hauls dead animals for a living. We could say: "Steve is happy. Are you?"

I like being able to meet people like Steve, like the Rocheleaus in Rugby, Jim the truck driver, Therese taking care of the motel. These people don't expect to win the lottery, they are not looking for a free ride, they don't waste any time complaining about what somebody else got and they didn't.

The enormity of my undertaking was underscored by the wealth of material I gathered this past week in West Point. It was as if they gave me a bolt of gold cloth and said, "Okay, see what you can make of it." What am I going to make of it?

I am pleased that I got to see a good Nebraska thunderstorm this past week. The grey sky didn't bother me too much, as the heat of the sun made its way through the cloud cover and temperatures were pleasant. I saw a good greening of the earth, that's always a joy.

The warmth of the people I met has been a joy. There may be cranky people in West Point and I just haven't met them. Perhaps I get steered away form the whiners and trouble-makers and towards the movers and shakers. Yet the choice to talk with Bud and Mabel Hanneman, with Steve Engelhart, was entirely my own.

I think the idea of spending time in various endeavors and doing a "day-in-the-life" look at those occupations - such as with Bob Flittie for a farm radio air shift or with Steve Engelhart on his rendering truck route - is probably something I should consider for other opportunities. I know already I want to spend a day at the auction barn in Rugby on sale day, but what else might be appropriate? Should I consider something like "Making Hot Dogs at Wimmers" or "Riding Pens" at a big cattle operation? For the time being, I'll stay open to possibilities, and opportunities will present themselves, without a doubt. It's enough for now that I simply stay with the project, push forward, take both the plain and the pretty as they come, don't make anything more of it than what it is. There is little chance that this book will be what I wish it to be; rather, it will be what it must be. Already I can see some of the directions I'm being pushed in.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA MAY 2, 2003 - (29)

May 2, 2003 cont'd
Irv's dealership designed and builds its own manure spreader. He used to sell Do-All spreaders, but that company went out of business. There wasn't another spreader being built that was heavy-duty enough to meet the needs of Irv's customers in the Cuming County. The livestock operations in the area needed a manure spreader that could stand up to heavy use. "We had worked with Do-All when they designed their spreader," Irv said. "When we went to design ours, we asked some seventeen customers what things they liked about their present spreader, and what things they didn't like. Then we tried to design a spreader around those likes and dislikes. We were able to incorporate a lot of their information into our design. We tried to make it extra heavy-duty. A portion of the composite material was made of ground up milk cartons, which worked well because it didn't rust or corrode. We used chisel-plow teeth for the distributor, they wear very well. We had good response from our customers, which allowed us to grow beyond Cuming County. We've got spreaders across the midwest, in California, in Washington."

The manure spreader is manufactured by a part of the business called West Point Design. Most of the spreader's success has been due to word-of-mouth. The company also does some national advertising. "We have one person doing sales throughout the midwest," Irv said, "but much of the business is call-in, marketing directly to the individual." The manufacturing work has added eleven or twelve employees to the business, full-time, year 'round. It provides some good solid jobs.

"You get feedback from farmers - we listened to what they said and designed the spreader accordingly. I grew up on a farm and I like to meddle with designs and different types of equipment, and with building things. I like that kind of thing."

The consolidation of farms is a challenge for an equipment dealer like Irv. "You have fewer people on the farms," he said. "It's harder for the rural community to keep its population. Our population has been stable, but it hasn't grown."

"If there are fewer farms," Irv said, "you have to grow your business geographically - to keep your volume up. You have to have a certain volume to run one of these places efficiently. As farms consolidate, you have to keep looking for new customers. There are very few new farmers starting up; in fact, I couldn't tell you of a single one in the past five years."

"Does that scare you?"

"It does if that's all you think about." Irv said. "With West Point Design, with the manure spreader, we've broken the geographic barrier and that's effective - going national with the spreader. Our implement business isn't so easy to expand like that but we're making efforts to do that."

"It's hard to look fifty years into the future," he said. "Looking five or ten years in the future, I think there will be fewer farms, they will be larger. There may be fewer equipment dealers. The equipment today is much more productive than the equipment it is replacing. It isn't just that the guy is getting a new combine; the new combine probably does twice the work the old one did."

"Case and IH merged in 1985," Irv said. "They were two well-established companies over the years. Here's an example of manufacturers consolidating, leaving fewer manufacturers. This is probably as good an example as there is - two companies that had been in business for a hundred years, but had to merge to survive and compete."

Characteristics of the people in West Point? "Visionary," Irv said. "Innovative. Hard-working, a good work ethic and that in itself will generate a flurry of business - if you're working, you're using fuel, you're using feed, you're buying groceries, you're doing things that consume goods and services. That creates a good business climate in the area."

West Point, Irv thinks, is striking for a community of its size because of the ingenuity of the people here. "We have a chance of survival that other communities don't have, because the people are able to adapt and adjust to the different businesses, and they adapt and adjust to the needs of agriculture."

"If communities are going to survive in the future," he said, "they've got to make it easy for people to find jobs and make a living in the area."

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA MAY 2, 2003 - (28)

May 2, 2003
I have been so far behind on my notes, I don't know if I will ever catch up. I worked all last night on them and rose before 4:00 a.m. to start back at it. I have made some progress. Because I have been so far behind, I have scheduled only one interview for today, with Irv Eisenmenger, the Case-IH dealer in West Point.

I went down to the radio station to tape a program with Bob Flittie. Bob does a program on arts in the region. It seems like I took only two breaths, but the board showed that Bob had taped twenty-three minutes worth of material. Perhaps I am a little obsessive about all this - that I can speak for twenty-three minutes without needing to catch my breath. Bob said he would fashion two programs out of the interview, one focusing on my West Point experience, the other on other aspects of the project.

*

I arrived at my interview with Irv Eisenmenger a few minutes early. If I am not always early, it's nearly so. I am embarrassed to be late. I think I get this from my mother. My wife tells this story on me: Once, going to bowling league, I realized in the parking lot of the bowling alley that I had forgotten my ball. I turned around, drove home, drove back to the bowling alley, and I was still on time to roll my first ball right on schedule. Now - is that obsession or is it simply an instance of good, middle western promptness?

Irv Eisenmenger looks like the manager of a Case-IH dealership should look, grey-haired enough to be trusted, not so severe that he'd scare you.

He invited me to his office; "Manager" it says as you go in. I explained a little more fully than I had on the phone who I was and what I was doing and what I was after. You could tell that Irv has seen a lot, but maybe not a poet on a fishing expedition such as mine. Perhaps it helped that we both spent some time in the seminary, perhaps it didn't.

Irv came to West Point in 1973 to run the dealership he still manages. The business then was in downtown West Point, in a building that had been a dance hall, not an ideal location. In 1979 the business moved south of town to a piece of land purchased for building structures meant specifically for an equipment dealership. The business has grown quite a bit since Irv's early years here. There were seven or eight employees then, there are twenty-four today.

Irv grew up on a farm at Humphrey, Nebraska, fifty miles west of West Point. He was in the seminary for four years after high school; he left the seminary and finished his degree at Creighton University in Omaha, in education. Then he taught school for three years, he was assistant principal for two years. And then he got into the equipment business.

How does one make the leap from teaching school and being assistant principal to being an equipment dealer? "Actually, there are more similarities than you might think," Irv said. "There is a teaching role in being a manager and owner, you are always teaching your employees, trying to stay up with the times and the changes. With either teaching or being an equipment dealer, you have to put your heart into it."

The agricultural economy in the 1980s was tough, and it is in a downturn again. How do you grow an ag equipment business in those circumstances?

"You have to really pay attention" Irv said. "You have to be able to adapt and start doing some things maybe you thought weren't necessary. You have to add services for your customer. Instead of selling new tractors, maybe you're re-building the farmer's existing tractors."

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 30, 2003 - (27)

April 30, 2003 cont'd
Christy said "We need to find a way to help new people feel at home enough that they'll get involved in the community, so we don't have a constant inflow and outflow of people. The longer you've been here, the more you feel a part of the community, the more you give the community. If you're here and you feel like a stranger in town, you are a stranger in town."

"A fellow like Tom Kelly at the newspaper," Dan said, "is an outgoing person. He's the type of person who can make friends and get involved. Someone who's not very good at that, someone who needs somebody to come get them, that's tougher. We need to make an effort to help those people."

The characteristics of the people of West Point? "Generally, they're pretty hard-working people," Dan said. "They take a lot of pride in the community, in the schools. They give a lot of time and money to keep things going. They take pride in the hospital."

"Stubborn," Christy said, "did we mention stubborn?"

"Stubborn - that's good and bad," Dan said, "because they get things done but are resistant to change. Sometimes a little leery of new people coming into town."

"Very family-oriented," Christy added.

"Anything else you should tell me?" I asked.

"The whole Fire Department thing, you should tell about that," Christy said to Dan.

"My dad had been on the Fire Department here for thirty years," Dan said. "That's one of the things I used to say - 'Man, if we moved to West Point, I could be on the Fire Department.' I love it. We burned a house down last night for practice. That's one reason I looked to come back here and I knew a lot of the guys on the department."

"When we moved to Hastings, we saw the situation from the other side," Dan said. "It was a town of about 50,000. We didn't know anybody there. We had to work to feel a part of the community. It was tough to get involved in the things we like to do."

Dan laughed. "There are days where we wish we were kind of anonymous again. You just have to quit worrying about everyone knowing what you are doing. Because around here, they do."

Regardless of where they live, Dan and Christy agree it has to be close enough for both of them to visit family.

"I told Dan," Christy said, "that I'm finally somewhere that feels as much like home as when I was at home. In fact, you know if you decide you don't want me around, I'm not leaving town, this is my home now. It was his hometown when we got here, now it feels like home to me. If something happened to Dan, I like it well enough here that I'd stay here by myself."

***

May 1, 2003

An excerpt from "Riding With the Local Used Cow Dealer", my interview with Steve Engelhart. You can read the complete essay here.

I arrived at Steve and Cindy Engelharts' home right on time for breakfast this morning, May 1, Feast of St. Joseph the Workman, 8:00 a.m., in a grey rain. It would be a cool day, which is always good in the rendering business. Dead animals can get awfully ripe in the heat of full sun by the time Steve gets to the farm to pick them up. A dull, grey day helps hold down the stink.

Cindy was making pancakes when I arrived, and "fresh-squeezed eggs," bacon. After we all got introduced, Steve fed the cat, Cindy went on making breakfast, I found a chair at the kitchen table, we talked. Steve is a big bear of a man, you wouldn't want to have to tackle him, or break his tackle. He wears a fierce mustache on a jagged face, he's got enough muscle he could swat me down any time he wished. You could tell he wouldn't, though; he has interesting and interested eyes, this look of curiosity that comes across his face now and again. He likes to talk and has something to say. Cindy runs "Cindy's Sewing" out of the home - there's a sign for her business out by the road. Steve said she drives truck for him, too, when she has to, in the busiest times. The Engelharts rent the place they live on, they have some horses, the landlord feeds cattle across the yard from the house, Steve keeps his rendering trucks parked in front of the garage. After we'd eaten, Steve suited up - coveralls, his tall rubber boots, gloves. It was 8:50 a.m. when we climbed in the truck. The door of the truck is painted with the company's name, Wisner Rendering; and I saw that I'd be riding with "Your Local Used Cow Dealer."

"First, we pick up some pigs," Steve said.

To be continued....

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....

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April 30, 2003 cont'd
"I don't know how it was perceived on the other end [at the bank]," Christy said, "I don't know if it was as awkward for them as it was for me, I had to say, basically, that Dan had an offer from Wimmers, is my job there or isn't it? I didn't say it like that, but that's what I had to know. We hadn't negotiated anything at that point. The fellow at the bank said 'Well, can you come in yet today?' I'm thinking, 'No, I can't, I don't have my power suit, I don't look like a banker, we're just ready to leave town.' But I went in for a casual interview, and it was probably more comfortable for everybody. They brought in the chairman of the board at that point, we were throwing numbers back and forth - I didn't want to come too cheap, maybe they're thinking 'well, she's coming to West Point anyway,' There was a little negotiation but then it was a blessing all the way around, both of us getting jobs we're pretty happy with."

Christy's offer was contingent on successfully com-pleting a kind of personality profile that would establish she was in fact the kind of person suited for the job she was being offered. She went to Texas, she had the job/she didn't have the job, when she got back from vacation she'd have to do the personality profile, what if it found she wasn't suitable for the position?

Before they left town, Dan accepted the job at Wimmers. Dan and Christy were going to take a chance. They had to make the assumption that Christy's personality would match that required for the bank job; or she would find and accept a job in Fremont or Omaha that suited her and drive from West Point. She could have continued doing what she was doing from the office in Omaha, traveling a lot and working out of her home, but she wanted to get away from the travel.

When Christy got back from vacation, she did a two-hour session on the telephone, answering question after question for the personality profile bam, bam, bam for two hours, "questions about your relationships with people, your attitudes towards accuracy," Christy said. "They were trying to determine whether you were suitable for sales, for marketing, for accounting, what your integrity level was. I don't remember how much time elapsed afterwards, I do remember being sick to my stomach for a long period of time waiting to hear, that feeling of being up in the air. I knew I was moving but I didn't know whether I would be working or not."

"We came back up to West Point to look for a house and Christy called the bank about her test results and they offered her a job," Dan said.

"So - were you an 'accounting person?'" I asked.

"Yeah," said Christy, "I was not at all cut out for sales. I had what they were looking for, a black and white person - is it ever okay to lie? No. That's the kind of person you want doing the financial end of it so you can rely on your numbers."

"We found a house in West Point fairly easily," Dan said. "We had the house in Norfolk for eight or nine months before we sold it. We were here, with a house there for sale. We said we weren't going to worry about when the house would sell, we'd made our decision. It was just an expensive summer. But it all worked out well. It was amazing."

To be continued....

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April 30, 2003 cont'd
The first phone call to Christy came "right after the Super Bowl, so I'm guessing it was early February," Christy said. It was the end of March when Dan was inquiring at Wimmers about the opening for a controller.

"All this started when we were sitting around with friends here talking about moving to West Point, as Dan told you," Christy said. "I told them, 'You know, I had a call from the bank. But what would Dan do? He'd really like to be the controller at Wimmers.'"

That's when it all started to happen, the perfect return to West Point. "I look back and can't believe how it happened," Christy said.

"I called Wimmers' HR person," Dan said. "She said to send a resume. I sent off a resume the next day. I didn't hear anything for a week and a half. I knew they had been interviewing. I thought maybe they already had someone picked out. Then I got a call from Dave Wimmer. He said "How are you, how have you been doing?' We got a little re-acquainted then. He said they'd like to talk to me so we came up that weekend. They were interested to know why we were looking to come back to West Point. They didn't want someone who would be here a couple years and leave."

"When I left that Saturday, Dave said 'We've got a couple other people to talk to, I'll probably call you in a couple weeks.' Two days later, on Monday, he called and said, 'I want you to go to Omaha and meet with one of our board members who is a retired CPA.' This fellow was a West Point native, he was looking at me professionally. Wimmers' board of directors relied on him for accounting expertise. I met him in Omaha and had a very professional interview - he wanted to know my background, what type of work I had done, did I deal with taxes, etc. This was on the Thursday after the Monday that Dave Wimmer told me to meet with him. After the interview the fellow said I'd probably hear from Wimmers in two weeks. The next morning Dave Wimmer called me and wanted me to come up for another interview."

"About this time," Christy said, "I had to call up the bank and say 'Hey, remember me, you talked to me in February, my husband is interviewing at Wimmers, do you still have an opportunity available?' So about that time I went in for an interview also."

When Dan had his first interview at Wimmers, Christy had her first interview at the bank. When Dan came up to West Point on Friday to meet the management group and tour the plant after his interview with the CPA in Omaha, he was offered the job he'd always wanted. What would they do? Christy hadn't been offered the job at the bank yet, Dan and Christy were leaving for a week in Texas that afternoon, Wimmers would want to know one way or the other whether Dan would accept the job, what would they do?"

"I'm dressed ready to leave on vacation," Christy said. "Dan's telling me, 'Call the bank.'"

To be continued....

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April 30, 2003 cont'd
Christy is a small-town girl herself - her hometown of Osceola is about 1,000 people. She recognized when she graduated from college that small towns have limited career opportunities for women. "I didn't think it would be likely I could go back to a small town and find the kind of work I wanted," she said. "At the same time, I'm not sure I could ever be comfortable in big metropolitan areas. Even in a town the size of Hastings where we knew some people, sometimes you feel like a nobody because you can go for days without seeing somebody you know. What I like about West Point is that when people drive by your house they'll wave because they know who you are, they'll wave when they see you on the street."

"By the time we moved back here," Christy said, "We'd both spent ten years in towns of 50,000 people. There are definitely advantages in that kind of city in terms of things to do, places to go, the availability of services, that kind of thing. About the time we were coming back is about when the hospital in West Point was kicking off a huge improvement project and fund drive, stressing the quality of the hospital. You couldn't do open-heart surgery here, but you feel comfortable knowing you're four blocks away from good care. And the schools are decent here. You don't want to get too far from the things you've become accustomed to - Walmart, a 24-hour grocery store - things you take for granted until you don't have them."

"People ask me," she said, "whether it's uncomfortable coming to a place that used to be his old stomping ground, and he knew everybody. That hasn't been a problem because I have a job where I'm working with the public and get to know people. Sometimes I'm telling him who someone is. For the first couple of years I had to say - 'Well, you know who Jerome Steffen is, I'm his daughter-in-law.' You have to explain yourself in terms of people they know. Maybe as a result I've had an easier time blending into the community, it was like 'Jerome Steffen's daughter-in-law, oh, okay, I know who you are.' It is harder for people without that kind of connection when they come into a community, I suppose."

"A difference between my family and Dan's family - we would sit around the table and talk about how people were related to one another. I have an instinct for connecting families together. Sometimes Dan doesn't know who his great uncles are, his family didn't keep track of each other in quite the same way. So I have a tendency to want to know how families fit together."

"The bank that hired me had come to the point where they needed to hire someone. I wasn't a replacement for anybody, my position was a new one. I was coming in to relieve pressure on other staff. They realized they needed to bring someone in to take workload off other people but it wasn't a defined position that had existed previously."

When Christy responded to the survey in Dan's alumni newsletter giving her qualifications and saying she might be interested in coming to West Point, the Chamber of Commerce passed that information on to the banks just at the time Charter West was talking about adding a person. People at the bank thought, "It might be a long shot, but let's call her."

To be continued....

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April 30, 2003 cont'd
The story of the "perfect return" to West Point might be told by West Point native Dan Steffen and his wife Christy (who was born in Osceola, Nebraska). Dan grew up in West Point, he graduated and went off to college in Kearney, Nebraska, where he met Christy; he majored in accounting and took a job as an accountant in Kansas City. It took about eight months for the big city to lose its attractiveness for Dan.

Both of Dan's parents had been born in the West Point area - his dad's father had been a farmer, his mother's father and three or four of his father's brothers had owned service stations in the area. "I have a German background all the way through, I'm stubborn as hell my wife says," Dan reported.

Dan and Christy became engaged while he was living in Kansas City and she was living in Grand Island. "We decided that when we married, we didn't want to live in Kansas City. We lived in Grand Island for a year. We moved to Hastings, Nebraska, and lived there from 1992 to 1997. I worked for a CPA in Hastings for a while, and then as assistant controller for a highway contractor. Christy had a job as a bank examiner for the government and traveled a lot. Our last three or four years in Hastings we talked about the possibility of moving to West Point - she had gotten to know a lot of my friends back here. We'd be back here four or five times a year. If the chance ever came up, we thought about moving. The question was - could we both land good jobs in West Point? We'd talked about it - if I could get the job as controller at Wimmers, that would be ideal. I've known that family forever, they're one of the top employers in town."

"We were back here about six years ago," he continued, "we were chatting with some friends about the possibility of moving back here. We went home, our friends were talking to some other friends about us, the wife worked at Wimmers. She said, 'The controller at Wimmers is retiring.' That was on Sunday night, and they called me right away. The next day I called Wimmers and was asking about it. About a week later, the president - whom I knew - called me up and kind of got the ball rolling."

"Two or three months prior to that," Dan said, "my alumni newsletter sent out a survey asking whether we'd ever be interested in moving back to West Point, and what were our job qualifications and history and so forth. We had filled it out and sent it back. A month later, Christy got a call from Charter West Bank, they were looking for someone with her type of background. So she had a bit of a job lead before I did. She didn't pursue it very hard at that point because we figured I probably couldn't find something here that I'd like. When the Wimmers position opened up, she called the bank back. Everything fell into place from there - all of a sudden we had job offers and had to decide how serious we were about moving to West Point."

Why come back to West Point? "As you get a little older," Dan said, "you might start to appreciate a closer-knit community, having family and friends close, the safety of a small community, being able to help out some on the farm once in a while. West Point is close to Omaha, about an hour away. I doubt that we'd move to a town this small that was six hours away from a large city - we do like to go into Omaha quite a bit."

To be continued....

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April 30, 2003 cont'd
Characteristics of the people of the West Point area? I asked.

"I think they're a real friendly bunch," Mary Jo said. "It used to be pre-dominantly a German community. Now we see that changing. Hispanics are moving into the area." As a result, she says, the library has ordered a lot of bi-lingual books, which helps the Hispanics trying to learn English and those of German background trying to learn Spanish. "I've had many people comment that this is a good way to go, with the bi-lingual books, in preference to Spanish-only."

The people of West Point are a hard-working group, Mary Jo said. "The work ethic in this area is very strong."

One advantage for Mary Jo of working in a small library: "I'm not stuffed back in the office all the time. I can be out at the front desk, I can get to know our patrons, get to know what they are interested in, and I can use that information when ordering books for the library."

And when the school kids come in to do reports and they are looking for references," she said, "I find out real fast what we don't have. A lot of teachers will let us know ahead of time what will be needed, especially for big projects."

"Our circulation goes up every month," Mary Jo said. "The circulation numbers for this year will be bigger than for last year. Last month we checked out 6,000 books, videos, audio books, magazines, etc."

To what can she attribute this increasing patronage of the library? "I don't know," she said. "It would be nice to say it's because we've ordered all the right things, but I don't know that that's the reason."

The library has a genealogy department. Much of the initiative for developing that department and much of the funding for it comes from Warren Buffett's sister, Doris, "the Sunshine Lady," in honor of her mother who lived for a while in West Point. "For this size community," Mary Jo said, "we probably have one of the better genealogy departments. A lot of people come from out-of-town and out-of-state. Our primary focus is on Cuming County materials." The Sunshine Lady underwrites the cost of having someone available on Tuesdays and Thursdays to help people with genealogical searches.

"I personally don't do genealogy," Mary Jo said, "but the people who do are hooked, they're addicted. It used to be people were simply interested in tracing their genealogy back. Now they are getting interested in family stories, too. If they find that their great-great-grandfather was a horse-thief or something, they're so excited, that makes such an interesting genealogical story."

What is the most surprising thing someone has asked the library? "Someone called the library and asked if we'd check some old papers to see if there was any record of insanity in the family. They needed to know for medical reasons. They pointed us in a direction to look, a date to look. By gosh, someone in the family did hang himself, they attributed it to 'family insanity.' We gave the person this information. You sort of wonder how that story turned out."

"We do have all the West Point newspapers on microfilm, as much as is available, even a German paper. People can't read German, but when they locate a name they print out the article and then go have someone translate it for them."

"It's harder to staff a small library than a large library," Mary Jo said. "Evenings and weekends, we have only one person working in the library. I think people recognize that we can do only so much."

To be continued [after my return from Montana]....

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April 30, 2003 cont'd
"A lot of issues that face the small library are the same as those that face any library," Mary Jo said. "How much technology has grown is a factor. A lot of people don't have computers at home; if they couldn't come to the library and use a computer they wouldn't have access to one. More and more in grade school and high school, they want reports done on computer. A lot of these kids don't have computers."

The library has seven computers available for use in the public area of the library, another eight computers in its computer lab. The library has been given a private donation to set up a computer lab and provide basic instruction in computer use. "We're fortunate," Mary Jo acknowledged. "I don't know of any other library in a community of our size that has a computer lab."

The Patriots Act is an issue the library faces. The government can come in and take computers to check their usage, she explained. "If we had any records on computer usage, they could take those as well. We have to be prepared for the fact that if the government comes in, we have to cooperate."

Another issue the library faces because of new technology: should libraries put filters on computers to restrict children's access to inappropriate sites? Technically, children have the same first amendment rights that adults do – for a long time that has been the American Library Association's stance," Mary Jo said. "This is what we have in our policy - if a parent is concerned about the sites his or her child might be accessing, it's the parent's responsibility to oversee the child's computer use, not the library's responsibility. We have parents sign a slip giving their child permission to use the computer and they acknowledged when they sign that it's their responsibility to monitor their children's internet use." The library's policy in this regard hasn't been challenged by anyone in the community.

There may be some self-censorship involved, Mary Jo acknowledges. Because the "public access" computers are located in an open area where it is relatively easy for someone to see the computer screens and what is on them, patrons may be reluctant to access inappropriate sites. "It wasn't designed that way, that's simply the way it ended up," Mary Jo said, "but it may act as a built-in monitor. Maybe it's a problem that is resolving itself."

"I think kids take computers for granted," Mary Jo said. "It's part of their lives. They've always had access to computers, they've grown up with them."

What issues does the small community face? "Well," Mary Jo said, "there's the tough economic times. The farmers are having a harder and harder time making a go of it, and that affects the whole community."

Education is strong in West Point, Mary Jo believes. "Kids are guided to go onto school. It's the exception that graduates don't go for additional education at a two-year or four-year college or technical school."

To be continued....

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April 30, 2003, cont'd
The challenges his business faces? "I've had to be very resourceful," he said. "When I interview people, that's the quality I like to check. I give the job candidate a video camera and a light and I tell him to go interview some-body. He brings it back, we watch the footage, and I go over it with him. I don't plan that they'll have problems, but sometimes it'll be windy, they'll have to do something different. They have to take what I give them and make it work. I think in a town this size, you've got to be resourceful. I think a lot of people in this town are resourceful, more resourceful than we know, people doing all kinds of stuff we don't even know about."

"These people are resourceful, and they're entrepreneurial" Brian said.

"This maybe isn't a good thing about West Point, you're a newcomer here for a long time," Brian said. "If you're not born here, you're not from here. Sometimes we don't go out of our way to welcome people. If they are not outgoing and already involved in the community, they might get left out. That's not good. Getting involved in projects will accelerate people fitting into the community – especially church and school."

Issues facing the community? "Labor. You can't bring a business to the community if you won't be able to find employees in the community."

"The changing population. We have a larger Hispanic population and we haven't adapted to include them. We're slow to change."

"Sometimes in a small town there are old grudges that don't go away and you can't get away from," Brian said. "Fortunately we don't have much of that.

*

I had met the tall, soft-spoken director of West Point's John Stahl Library last October when she stopped at the senior center to introduce herself to me. Mary Jo Mack conveys a warmth that makes you feel welcome at the library, yet a seriousness that lets you think the rambunctious school-boy will behave himself for her.

Mary Jo's father was a Nebraska state patrolman assigned to West Point, that's what brought her to the community. She went away to college, she got married, and she returned to West Point. Her husband wasn't from West Point but was attracted to the community because there was an auto body shop for sale here, that was his line of work, and he bought the business. He came to West Point for the business opportunity, Mary Jo returned to her hometown.

How did she become the director of the library? "For once in my life," she said, "I was in the right place at the right time. They were looking for someone and I was in the right place."

Her background is in education with a minor in English; she has a love of reading, not a degree in library science. "They were willing to take someone with my qualifications, it's just like it was fate, it was meant to be," Mary Jo said.

The library serves a population from pre-school up through senior citizens, she said; "it's probably the only institution that deals with that span of ages. The library's role in the community is changing - it's not just books any more, there are computers, audio books, magazines, newspapers, and in our case genealogy. We have a strong genealogy department. The library is information, entertainment, - I'm at a loss for other adjectives...."

The West Point community is very supportive of its library, Mary Jo said. "We have some great supporters and so far all of our needs have been met. We've had some great private donations to help supplement the city budget."

It's the John Stahl Library. I asked who John Stahl is. "Have you heard this story?" Mary Jo asked in response. "Do you know who Warren Buffett is? John Stahl was his grandfather. This library was built entirely with private funds, with the agreement that it would be maintained by the city. One of the primary donors to the library building fund was the Buffett family. Because of that donation, I think, it's called the John A. Stahl Library." Stahl had been a newspaper publisher with connections to West Point and Bancroft, Nebraska.

To be continued....

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April 30, 2003 cont'd
As a newsman for the radio station Brian Kreikemeier met a politician who needed someone to provide sound for a county fair. That got Brian started in audio production part-time, in addition to his radio job. "All of a sudden B&B Productions was born," he said. "My brother, Bruce, was the other B."

"I used to do photography, too," Brian recalled. "I credit a lot of this to 4-H. 4-H lets you explore careers - it got me started in the sound part with the band. Photography was another one of my favorite projects. So I bought a video camera in 1987. It was West Point High School's one hundredth graduating class, there was a big to-do about it. I pre-sold tapes of that for $20 apiece. The event was on Saturday. On Friday I went to Nebraska Furniture Mart, I used the credit-thing and bought a video camera. I practiced Friday night and Saturday morning, then I went and shot the hundredth graduation. I knew how to use a still camera, I thought: 'How tough can it be?' I think I still have that tape. Wow, it's rough."

"I still kept the same name, B&B Productions," Brian said, "but my brother didn't help me with the video production."

"I left the radio station in 1992," he continued. "The guy who owned the station was very nice. He asked me to breakfast one morning. That was a cue that he wanted to talk to you about something, he'd asked you to breakfast. He asked me, 'Is the radio station getting in the way of your B&B Productions?' That was a weird way to put it. Usually you'd say, Is your other job getting in the way of the radio station. I thought, 'Well, it is, kind of.' He was so gracious he let me go off salary to hourly and start scaling back to part-time. As I did more and more B&B stuff, pretty soon I was down to two or three days a week. All along, I've had good people to steer me in the right direction."

"A few years ago," Brian said, "I decided the sound part of the business had to go, so now I just do video production."

"I have to be diversified in what I do," he said. "I still tape school plays. I do about 25 weddings a year. You don't know when the commercial jobs are going to come, and they depend on the state of the economy. Weddings are pretty steady. We have a pretty good reputation, it's mostly word of mouth. We do a lot of Omaha and Lincoln weddings. It usually starts with a West Point connection - it just keeps branching out. The farthest one has been six and a half hours away, at Mason City."

"The same with commercial work," he added. "We do things for companies all over, but there is usually some tie to West Point. We do a lot of stuff for a company in Spokane, Washington. They do a lot of stuff with the University of Nebraska and we've done stuff with the University; they referred me to that company. So whenever they need something they call me."

"And the internet has brought some work," Brian said. "We have a web page, we're on some internet lists of video production companies. The other day I got a call from Studio City, California, for a video that was called Business World News. They wanted a little piece on a guy in Omaha. I don't know why they didn't call someone in Omaha. It's just weird."

"You taught yourself to use all the equipment and software?" I wondered.

"I've taken a couple classes," Brian said, "I read a lot of magazines. I learn best by doing, I think. Our whole family is that way, as far as figuring stuff out. I can take apart anything I choose, and my brothers can put it back together - one's an electronics engineer, one's an electrical engineer, one's a farmer/airplane mechanic. If you've ever seen 'Junkyard Wars,' they'd be a perfect team for that. I can usually figure stuff out."

B&B produces training videos and consumer spots and political ads. When he filmed a hunting/fishing TV show for a fellow in Hardington, Nebraska, he got paid to go fishing.

Brian has also taped local interviews at Harry Knobbe's prodding. For instance, he has taped interviews with Harold and George Wimmer, who founded Wimmers Meat Products. A hundred year old woman. People who remember when the highway got paved. "I keep saying I'm going to do this with my mom and dad," Brian said, "but I haven't yet. I just thought of it again this morning - I have to do that."

"I think what kept me in this area," Brian said, "is we both have pretty strong families. Obviously you have to make a living. It's great to have the support of family."

It's difficult for Brian to find employees to help him in his work. Brian credits his wife, Mary, for a large part of his success, and he's been able to attract video professionals for short periods; but by and large he thinks people in video production are in it for something other than what West Point has to offer. He believes people who want to be video producers won't want to work in West Point for him, they want to work for ABC, ESPN - something somewhere with more flash.

To be continued....

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April 30, 2003 cont'd
My 11:00 a.m. interview was with Brian Kreikemeier of B&B Video on Main Street. You might say Brian is a local boy who graduated from high school and stayed in the area. In the face of what seems to be a flight from rural America and its small towns by high school graduates, we might wonder why Brian stayed; in the face of the economic challenges in the small community, we might wonder, too, how he managed it.

Brian is bright-eyed, an expressive fellow, his hands and face, his smile, the flicker of light in his eyes saying almost as much as his words. Often the interview wanted to slip into discussion, I ended up wanting to talk with Brian rather than staying to question-and-answer. I find that happens when you find a kindred spirit.

"Kreikemeiers, there's a lot of us here, German ancestry," Brian told me when I asked about his background. "I live south of West Point, closer to Snyder. I think we all came from three brothers. It goes so far back we're no longer sure how closely we're related even though we have the same name. My grandpa's dad was one of those three brothers."

"On my mom's side," Brian said, "her dad came over when he was about twelve years old, from Czechoslovakia. He remembers having potato fights with his brothers on the ship coming over to America. He could see Communism coming to Czechoslovakia. Before he died in the late seventies or early eighties, he said he could see the same thing happening here."

Brian lives on the family farm in one house, his parents live there in the main house, and the farmland is rented out to a farmer who is also a cousin, another Kreikemeier. Neither Brian nor any of his siblings ended up in farming. Brian is not sure why. "I guess the reason I don't farm is that I wasn't raised farming," he said. "My dad already worked at IBP (Iowa Beef Packers) when I was growing up."

Brian's joke about farmers: "You know what 4x4 means on a farmer's pick-up, don't you? That means he works four weeks in spring planting crops and four weeks in the fall for harvesting, and takes the other 44 weeks off." I promised to mention what else Brian said: "I'm just kidding."

How has Brian managed to stay in West Point when others leave? Well, he had started working at Wimmers Meat Products while he was still in high school, and he continued there when he married some eight months after graduation from high school. When the radio station came to town in 1985, Brian applied for a part-time job there. He didn't have any schooling in radio, but he knew his way around a sound-board. He and his brother and some others had formed a band in 4-H when Brian was thirteen years old. That was in 1977, and the band stayed together until 1989, playing mostly "country-variety" at wedding dances.

"I enjoyed the technical/audio part of it, not just the singing," Brian said. Being in the band taught him how to run a sound-board, and how to run a business.

"I'd sing all night on Saturday," Brian said, "and then I'd get up and sign on Sunday mornings, raspy-throated. For a while he was working at Wimmers, doing the band, and working at the radio station. "That's how I made enough money, you might say, to support a growing family in West Point."

"The next step," Brian said, "was going full-time at the radio station. It was a tough decision - I had a lot of benefits at Wimmers. It was a tough decision for me and my wife. I remember when I went to the radio station full-time, I took a one-third cut in pay. But it felt like the right thing to do." He became news director and program director and an on-air personality.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 30, 2003 - (16)

April 30, 2003, cont'd
From what I've seen, West Point has a few empty storefronts, only a few. Will Staci get nervous if I talk about empty storefronts in town? "I get nervous when I see empty storefronts," she said. "Right now we do have one building - two storefronts - that's open. We're trying to figure out what would fit the community that the community will support. We don't want to bring in something that would be here six months or twelve months, we want something stable."

Prospects for the future - what will the rural community of the future look like? "In the community of the future, we're going to need the telecommunications infrastructure in place, it has to be, for us to survive and thrive. We've determined that if we can get what is needed for business, what the residential areas need will follow." The Chamber has arranged for classes in web page development for area businesses. "Some businesses have come out of it with some good tangible results from that," Staci said. "Again, this goes beyond the city limits."

"We keep hearing from the community they want light manufacturing. We just heard it again from the city council and the county supervisors - light manufacturing that mothers could do while their children are at school, that students could do in the summer when the mothers might want to be home with their kids."

Are there other issues facing rural communities, beyond the aging population, the declining population, the downturn in the agricultural economy along with the general decline of the economy?

"For smaller communities to be successful, they have to have certain cores," Staci said. "There has to be a good educational system. For young families to consider moving, there has to be good schools. Health care has to be there. Employment, there has to be employment in the community. Those would be core. I'm a prime example. When we were looking at communities, I told my husband we were not going to be forty-five minutes from health care. I grew up fifteen minutes from the nearest hospital. Once these core needs are met, people want to be able to have other needs met - their spiritual needs, a feeling of community."

"We had a meeting," Staci said. "There were third, fourth, and fifth generation people in the room, and some of the newcomers, people who have been here less than a lifetime. It was interesting - the long-time residents said, 'Oh, we welcome everybody.' But there wasn't one of the new people who said 'You know, we felt comfortable the first day we came.' The people who have always been here didn't even realize anybody felt that way. One fellow's chin just dropped and he said - 'What do you mean?' Now, that wasn't why we were meeting, it just came up. People gave examples and the fellow said 'You know, I didn't realize, I had no idea.' For a couple people in the room, their attitude didn't change but what they do to go out of the way to welcome people has changed as a result. Now they are more aware."

"We do 'newcomer packets,' we've talked about creating a 'new people' group, but at the time we were so busy we saw that as something someone else should focus on," Staci said. "At one point we welcomed new people, we encourage them to come to things. There are plenty of organizations and projects they can get involved in.

The characteristics of West Point people? "First is visionary," Staci said. "Most see beyond their life, their business, their church. They see a much larger picture. And they put their money where their mouth is. For the new community building, for the schools, for the Dinklage Medical Clinic that opened debt-free - a brand new clinic - because people wanted it and they put their money where their mouth is."

They're visionary. They're generous. Anything else? "Their concern for each other. Sometimes it may be someone they didn't even know but something has come up - and they're concerned for that person."

"As far as doing business," Staci said, "the mentality here is 'check local.' For everyone in the community - if it's something you can purchase locally, you buy it here."

"One time the West Point News got a new machine, and a piece of it had broken," Staci recalled. "The fellow was coming to do training on the machine for them the next day, but they needed that piece. They contacted one of the local manufacturers who designed it and got it installed so they could run the machine the next morning. People will put in the extra time to get something done."

"Our movers and shakers are enthusiastic," Staci said. "They get people to come along with the vision."

"They are decisive," Staci said. "If we need to make something happen, the people here figure out what is needed and then martial the resources to make it happen. We needed a building for the workforce development, the old clinic building was available, I don't think Ron Briggs of the hospital thought about it more than five minutes before he said 'Let's do it.'"

"This is an easy sell - the West Point community," Staci said. "It's a very good community. Everyone is connected in some way. They connect with each other, they communicate with each other. If there is a vision, a good vision, there's support."

"It know it's one of Harry Knobbe's principles - 'The world is run by those who show up; belong to something bigger than yourself.' He's very quoted on that. We've gotten a lot of awards in the past three years, I get a lot of phone calls from other places that have heard something is going on here, but if I see something interesting in another Chamber's newsletter, I'll phone them to see if it's something we can adapt and use here. Being connected and using the networks you develop is key."

To be continued....

FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 30, 2003 - (15)

April 30, 2003, cont'd
Workforce development was an issue because, when companies were hired, they were just stealing employees from other companies in town, there weren't new employees coming into the community. "The question became - how can we deal with this, because it was an issue for large and small employers, whatever type of business they were in," Staci said.

West Point has become the "hub" for workforce development in the area, for doing recruiting and providing training. New employees may not come to live in West Point, but once they work here, the thinking is, maybe they'll shop here, fill their prescriptions here, buy their groceries, leave some money in the community.

The Chamber has done a labor study for an area out to twenty-five miles beyond the city limits. The results have been shared with all the communities of the area, even those in other counties. "Because what happens in Wisner affects West Point," Staci said. "What happens in Snyder affects West Point. We're not the big sister or big brother to those communities, we are one of their partners when they need something."

Working as director of the Chamber, it's as if Staci has 184 bosses - she works for every Chamber member. How does a common plan get forged, how does the direction of Staci's efforts get set in the face of potentially conflicting needs and priorities?

"I realized long ago, way back when I was a social worker in the hospital, that you can't please all the people all the time," Staci said. "If I can please the majority of the people the majority of the time, then I'm doing my job. And the group that is pleased won't always be the same people, eventually we'll be doing something that pleases everybody."

"Once I went through a community, I don't even remember where it was," Staci said. "I saw a sign that said - 'The Chamber: Doing Things People Think Just Happen..' That's true, we are doing the things that people think just happen."

The brick main street in West Point? "That's a city decision," Staci said. "Brick streets are part of the West Point identity. They take very good care of them. As soon as bricks start to break up, someone is there to make repairs. The brick streets are just part of who we are and the city chooses to retain that."

When agriculture is suffering economically, Staci indicated, the retail businesses in West Point feel it. If the money is not there for agriculture, it's not there for anyone who depends on agriculture in one way or another - not just the equipment dealers, but the clothing stores, the restaurants. Fortunately, Staci said, the data suggests that overall the economy in West Point has stayed at least stable. "When the livestock economy is strong," she said, "the merchandise on Main Street turns a lot faster. You can tell because store windows will change every four or five days, because they are selling merchandise right out of the windows. When it's slower, maybe it's every two weeks the windows change. We do rely on agriculture. We're working on becoming a little more diversified, we want to keep the ag base, but the question is: when times are slow, what can we do to help the producers so we can keep those farmers farming, keep the same number of children coming into the educational system, what can we do so we remain viable."

The average age of Cuming County residents is rising, as elsewhere in rural America, but Staci says one of the school's alumni associations is working hard to bring graduates back to West Point, telling them "There are opportunities here, come back." You'd be amazed, she said, how many people who said when they graduated they would never come back to West Point, once they get a little older and are ready to settle, how many of those folks want to come back.

"So we work on making the alumni aware of the opportunities in this area," Staci said. "Hopefully then the average age will come down, hopefully we'll have young families so we have enough kids going through the schools in a steady stream."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 30, 2003 - (14)

April 30, 2003
I was treated to a real Nebraska thunderstorm last evening. When I went out to get a sandwich about 8:00 p.m., the parking lots and streets were running with thick sheets of water, the sky was constantly being lit by bright spiderwebs of lightning, yeah, I got a little wet. The farmers could use the rain, they have been about two inches short, so it was worth the little inconvenience.

*

At 9:00 a.m. today, as scheduled, I met Staci Jensen at her Chamber of Commerce office for an interview. Staci is originally from northeastern South Dakota, up in the Redfield area, from a small town called Groton east of Aberdeen. "We competed with Redfield in everything so we know the Redfield Pheasants real well," she said.

Staci attended the University of South Dakota in Vermillion and got married. Her husband farmed but gave that up about ten years ago, having concluded that the prospects in farming were dim. He was recruited to work for Cenex in the West Point area.

"We came down to check out the community," Staci remembered. "Was this the place we wanted to move to? We came through on Highway 275 and I thought 'You know, this is pretty good business for a community this size," but it was a little odd there didn't seem to be a whole lot of retail. Then we found Main Street. Good Lord - it was unbelievable. In Groton we'd never had a business district like this. That pretty much sold us."

In South Dakota, Staci had worked as a social-worker in health care. Here, she started working as a social worker again, at Norfolk, Nebraska, which is thirty-eight miles northwest of West Point. "Then I wanted a change," Staci said, "but I wanted to stay with the company so I got into sales and marketing. And then I was tapped to be a Norfolk Ambassador for their Chamber of Commerce. And I thought, you know, it would be neat to get paid to do this.... And then the position in West Point opened up."

Getting into her position with West Point's Chamber of Commerce, she said, "was a case of being in the right place at the right time for once."

"My son came to work with me one day here at the Chamber," Staci remembered. "He was nine. He said 'Mom, you're still a social worker. You're just doing it for businesses now instead of for people.' I looked at him - 'Yeah, you're right. I'm listening, I'm finding out what it is that the businesses need, and I'm hooking them up with the right resources.' How is that different from what I used to do?"

The mission of the Chamber of Commerce in West Point? "The overall mission is to create a strong economy, a strong community for the betterment of the whole area," Staci said.

"Before I started with the Chamber," Staci said, "the position had been a part-time one, for a secretary who followed the instructions of the board after every monthly meeting. When I came on board, they'd decided they wanted a full-time position for someone who would lead the effort. And they wanted my efforts to include economic development."

Admittedly it took Staci a few days to find her sea legs in the new position - to start creating her job. "And create it we did," Staci said. "I went out to each Chamber member, I had three questions I wanted to ask each of them. Why did they belong and what did they expect from the Chamber? What did they expect of me as the new Director? What did they expect from the Chamber in the way of economic development?"

"This was very good experience for me," Staci said. "People will tell you what the issues are. They'll give you what they think. I went to one business, the manager I was talking to was very cordial, he was writing at his desk, he didn't look up much, finally he looked at me and said 'I'll be honest with you, Staci. We'll always write a check to the Chamber, we'll always be a member, but the Chamber really doesn't do anything for our business.' 'Oh, my,' I thought. But I had one more question, I wasn't leaving til I asked all three. Like I say, he was very cordial. So a month later, we're going to start 'Leadership Cuming County,' which was new to this area, for Business and Industry Day. He was the only person I'd met from industry to that point, so I called him to ask whom he'd recommend to handle the Industry portion of it. That's all I was asking, but he said, 'Oh, I'll do it.' I shudder when people do that because you don't know if they have a passion for it. Well, he did have a passion for it. He took over the day for Industry on leadership, he did the whole day, it was great. And actually he has become the champion for workforce development here. That was one of his primary issues, because he could not hire enough people to keep the plant working fast enough to fill the orders...."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 29, 2003 - (13)

April 29, 2003, cont'd
The news was reporting on the case of a missing four-year-old Omaha boy. The boy had been missing since January. The boy's father was in court for sentencing on a couple misdemeanor charges unrelated to his son's disappearance. After sentence was pronounced, he turned in court to his wife and shouted: "I killed him because he was the anti-Christ. He had 666 across his forehead."

"I don't feel right going straight to weather after that," Bob said, and he punched up a commercial.

4:11 p.m. After the weather, Bob said "Well, it's rare they don't have the new forecast for me...."

4:12 p.m. The market update was going out over the airwaves. "Now my voice is really feeling dry," Bob said. "I'm going to get rid of this coffee and go get my tea."

I asked Bob about the binders that provided advertising copy and cues for what he read over the air. One specific person at the radio station has the responsibility of keeping the binders up-to-date. There is one binder for each day of the week. There is copy provided for each advertising slot every hour of the day. Much of it stays the same from day-to-day or week to week, but all changes are promptly inserted. It seems to be a slick communication system.

"And in case I need an extra six seconds, I'll have that ready...." I heard Bob say.

Then, moments later, ".... How about that, I didn't even have to open my mouth."

4:21 p.m. "Paul Harvey joins us with the Rest of the Story in four minutes," Bob told his listeners. He punched a button and Alabama's "Southern Star" went out over the airwaves. Bob was checking the radar again, for the tornado watch area. He wants to see for himself what is developing.

4:23 p.m. "Well, a partial forecast is better than none at all...."

4:29 p.m. Paul Harvey was on the air. Bob was looking at the weather. "Interesting," he said. "Snow in the Black Hills." No matter that it was nearly May 1st. Snow.

4:30 p.m. Bob was reading the news straight off documents on the computer screen. Well - reading is never the right word to use when Bob does the news. He's always reforming and refreshing his newscasts and weather reports with new sentences fashioned from the key elements he highlights ahead of time. Off the air he told me: "Usually I don't read off the monitor for the news, but those two stories are so new and my printer is still busy printing my weather map." After the commercial, he was back "reading" from printed pages he'd already edited. You couldn't tell but what he was talking with a friend about the weather, he was that personal in his presentation, it felt that comfortable listening to it.

4:39 p.m. "Weather... we still don't have the new forecast... Oh, there it is now, a new one has just come in...."

4:41 p.m. "One other note for you," Bob said over the airwaves. "Did you hear - A Winter Storm Warning for western South Dakota. I say, Winter Storm. They're expecting a foot of snow by Thursday...."

4:45 p.m. We talked about the desire of some area residents to keep people's names off the air. For instance, seven people had been charged with selling liquor to minors and someone called the station and said: "You're not going to use their names on the air, are you?"

"A woman who hit a deer while driving called me very distraught because I'd given her name," Bob recalled. "'My kids had to take a lot of flak because of that,' she'd said."

"Why is it okay for the newspaper to print the names," Bob mused, "but they don't want to hear it on the air? What's the difference?"

4:54 p.m. Bob was clearing the desk in the studio, throwing away outdated news and other information he no longer needed.

4:55 p.m. The Dow Jones market report was playing. Bob was still throwing stuff away.

4:58:30 p.m. "Oh," Bob said, "that song's too long!" He punches up another one, Tammy Wynette singing "I Stayed Long Enough."

5:01 p.m. "ABC News...."

"Bingo. We're done." Bob said.

5:03 p.m. Bob was in the FM studio now, recording the evening's weather. He finished it with about a minute to air, then the information he'd just recorded was automatically on the air on the FM side. A Creighton Blue-jays-Nebraska Cornhusker baseball game was going to be simulcast live during the evening, otherwise both the AM and FM stations would run automatically after 5:00 p.m. As it was, I was standing there in the FM studio for the moment, watching the computer monitor as the computer ran the show - played the weather, played the ads, played the music, played the station IDs and promos. "The music and programs that go out in the evening have already been structured because of the instructions we put into the computer," Bob said. "We try to keep the music we selected pretty well-balanced. We keep updating the file for each scheduled program so the current one plays."

"If the weather is bad, I'll come back down in the middle of the night," Bob said. "I want them to know that when the weather is bad, I'll be here. It is rare to find younger broadcasters who understand that kind of commitment."

Bob Flittie understands that kind of commitment. Nebraska's farmer-owned radio network understands that kind of commitment. Information the farmers need. Now. Nobody else is going to do it.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 29, 2003 - (12)

April 29, 2003 cont'd
When he returned, Bob checked some readings on equipment to my left. "Every three hours we have to take readings over here, to see what the transmitter is doing," he said. "If the numbers are out of whack, we have to do some-thing about it. All of us pray that there's nothing the matter."

3:04 p.m. Bob checked radar at the Underground Weather site again. It was still not working.

3:05 p.m. Bob presented the weather again, from the same sheets he'd used before, the same information, but it wasn't a re-hash, it sounded fresh as he presented it. He casually read temperatures while scrolling down through a document on one of the computer monitors.

3:10 p.m. "That's the weather update," Bob said. "I'd do the Emergency Broadcast test from here. I'll have to pay attention to what the FM side is doing. I'll want to do the test while they're playing music. It takes over the FM station. In essence, we simulcast during the test."

"That's my call to Lexington...." Beep, beep, beep. Here's our call to the USDA "even though Lexington makes it."

3:20 p.m. During a song, Bob told me "It bothers me that the radar is not working."

3:22 p.m. On the air: "Did you know - Tanya Tucker is making new music." Bob punched up a new Tanya Tucker song.

3:26 p.m. Announcements and news. Bob reported that Alex Spanos, owner of the San Diego Chargers, would be speaking at Wayne State University over in Wayne, Nebraska, twenty-eight miles to the northwest. Spanos attended Wayne State some sixty years ago, in 1943.

3:28 p.m. Bob sent a version of "America the Beautiful" out over the airwaves. "Who else would get away playing the Gaithers?" he asked.

America's Dairyline. It's produced as a ten minute program with a break in the middle. KTIC plays the first half of the program in the morning, the second five minutes in the afternoon. "A lot of stations do that," Bob said. "Very few can actually give ten minutes over to the same thing all at once."

3:36 p.m. More weather. Bob provided an update on the severe weather threat developing in far southern, south central, and southeastern Nebraska.

3:40 p.m. Bob said: "What a name for a dairy program - Lee Mielke." It sounds like "milky." "He goes on for four minutes. That'll give me time to go to the bathroom." Lee is talking about bedding for dairy cows, and bacteria count in the bedding, and handling manure.

3:44 p.m. "Oh - they are doing it, you can almost count on it, they are calling a tornado watch." Bob edited the forecast on the screen of one of his monitors. "Sometimes," he said, "when the watch is for us, we'll set off the emergency warning tone."

3:46 p.m. "The big office in Norman has issued the tornado watch - south of McCook, Nebraska, to about an hour east of Concordia, Kansas. Conditions very favorable for development of super-cells in the next hour or two. Moving east to the southeast. Thunderheads as high as 55,000 feet. Likely to incorporate the southern two tiers of Nebraska in that watch...."

"I'm surprised they have not sent the list of counties covered by the watch," Bob said. "I usually include that information, so there's no question about what area is included in the watch."

Moments later: "Now here they've done it, here's the list of counties included in the tornado watch. Eight counties in south-central and southwest Nebraska."

3:56 p.m. Bob did a promo for the "Spring Break" lunch, he said "the number is 840 on your cell phone." He identified which counties he wanted to hear from in Nebraska and Iowa, then indicated "We'll take Caller Two."

3:58 p.m. "Usually they have a new forecast issued by now...."

"If it weren't for the fact that you do it every day," Bob said, "the information you deal with in a four-hour shift would overwhelm you."

4:03 p.m. "That's ready," Bob said, "and that's ready. But I still don't have a new forecast."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 29, 2003 - (11)

April 29, 2003 cont'd
Bob returned to the studio. "Let's see what somebody sent me." He opened the package he'd brought with him, there was a CD in it. "Once I called a Christian music record company to see if I could get a CD I was interested in, now they must think we're a Christian music station...."

2:01 p.m. "ABC News...."

2:05 p.m. Bob was doing the weather again.

2:10 p.m. A commercial, then more weather.

Then "Here's Kenny Rogers...."

"Did I forget to give the current temperatures? I guess I'll give the temperatures after Kenny. Look here - 'Some of the worst dust storms of the '30s were occurring during this time in spring.'"

"If the weather looks like it's going to get bad, I'll turn on the TV to see what's on the Weather Channel." The TV is within easy reach in the studio.

2:17 p.m. The station sponsors what it calls "Spring Break" for the farmers working their fields. "KTIC will bring you lunch in the field," Bob told his listeners. "Be the third caller from Burt or Cuming County...."

"And the winner is Shirley H-------- from Wisner...."

"We started this program about two years ago," Bob told me. "We'll get sub sandwiches and take them out to whoever wins the drawing, they can eat in the field or in the house or wherever. They may live as much as an hour from here."

2:25 p.m. The Market Report was airing. "Interesting," Bob said, looking at a monitor, "my radar here has not updated for almost half an hour. Somebody's got a glitch...."

"For the past few weeks we've been experimenting with the 2:30 news," Bob said. "We're taking this news now from KTVI in Lexington, they try to cover the regional news in this newscast."

"Oh, there's a weather update," Bob noticed. "I'll look at that while the 2:30 news is running.

The news comes in via phone line.

"Each Weather Service around the country issues its own forecasts," Bob said, "but only the big office in Norman, Oklahoma, can issue a tornado watch."

"I try to keep the weather at the bottom of the hour from going too long," Bob said, "but that's kind of tough given that I like to talk."

On air he said: "There's potential for a severe weather watch. Super-cells are likely to develop."

2:38 p.m. Bob went to commercial, then he put a song on to play. He checked the Weather Underground radar again and it remained unchanged. The last update had been at 1:56 p.m. "They've got a glitch...." Bob said.

"Now I've got to find Michael Josephson," he said. He clicked to the website "Character Counts."

2:42 p.m. Bob was on the air again, offering another chance to win the "Spring Break" meal from the radio station: "We'll give you a chance to qualify, but you have to be out in the cab in the field. I'll take the first caller...."

"The winner is Matt B------- from Bancroft. Matt qualifies. There will be more opportunities. When you do win that lunch in the field, it's for you and seven of your family, friends, neighbors."

2:48 p.m. News of a poisoning at a Lutheran Church in Maine. Arsenic was put in the coffee. Bob hammed it off the air: "It does taste kind of funny but we're Lutheran so we drink it...."

2:51 p.m. He played "Sleeping Single in a Double-Bed."

"Let's see," he said, "I've got to get my funeral line."

2:52 p.m. The station manager popped his head into the studio to talk to Bob.

"Two things," the station manager said. "Is it going to rain between 5:00-6:30 p.m.? Do we need to cancel soccer?"

"No," said Bob, "it probably won't rain til after 10:00 p.m."

"Number Two," said the station manager, "last night there was a mandated state test of the emergency broadcast system. Did that come through?"

"I don't see it," Bob said. "That bothers me."

2:58 p.m. Bob read obituaries for Mildred Wickman and Daniel J. Kluthe.

3:00 p.m. "ABC News...."

"Now, Coffee Update," Bob said, and went to get himself more coffee.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 29, 2003 - (10)

April 29, 2003 cont'd
You don't notice it til you see him in the studio - Bob Flittie has four hands, four arms. He looks normal until you see him doing four things at once - cueing up a song, getting the audio file for a program off a web page, editing the weather and checking it against what he sees on radar, and - oh yeah - reading the news in his relaxed, personal, personable style. That's when you notice all four of his hands and arms at work. Or so it seems.

Bob had started editing the weather in the minutes before his shift started at 1:00 p.m. He wants it to fit his style and his listeners' expectations of him. He'd picked the forecasts out of e-mail and moved them to Microsoft Word to edit them and print his revisions. "I'm cutting this awfully close," he'd said as his 1:00 p.m. shift edged closer. While news was being broadcast, Bob stepped into the studio, and I went in with him.

"It's Tuesday," he said, explaining "that means I have a Farm Bureau program coming up shortly." He found the Farm Bureau web page and cued up the MP3 file.

"Now, I'll see what my radar is doing...."

"It's six minutes after one," Bob said on the air, "from KTIC, I'm Bob Flittie. What can I tell you about the weather? Potential of hail, damaging winds tomorrow afternoon, possibly even tornadoes...." He gave specific forecasts for western Iowa, Nebraska, northern Kansas, South Dakota.

After a few words from our sponsor, Bob was reading current temperatures for Nebraska, South Dakota, and Iowa, pulling them out of an e-mail as he scanned through it.

While on-air, Bob watches three computer monitors. One displays the afternoon's programming; one provides e-mails with up-to-the-minute weather information; one shows radar of the eastern half of Nebraska, the western half of Iowa, and parts of southeastern South Dakota. He also has the day's book, actually a big three-ring binder full of pages which provide text of all the commercials he has to read live.

At 1:15:50 p.m., at the end of a recorded report, Bob said to me "That takes care of Tina. Now we close the grains. I get that by phone line from Lexington."

It all sounds so seamless. Bob is a wizard at stitching all sorts of sources together, and making it look easy. Sometimes I don't have the faintest clue what he'd done to get something on the air.

Oh, he makes it look easy. "If I have nothing to do," he said (and I thought "Yeah, right"), "I read the news stories coming in via the Internet."

"You have to be a voracious reader and have a tremendous understanding of what's important out here, and then be able to impart the information farmers need," he said.

Then it was 1:21:37 p.m. We talked behind the on-air report. "I remember your trowel from last time," I said. Bob believes a cement-finisher's trowel is "great for rip-ping paper," for tearing out stories he's not interested in."

"Ohhh," he said. "I forgot one page of my news. While the market report was running on the air, Bob went to his office to find the story. Back in the studio a moment later, he continued to edit news stories, he highlighted his "anchor words" in pink, the pieces he'd use to tell the news in his own, personal style.

Looking at the pile of pages before him, Bob said, "Little doubt I have more than enough news today." It was 1:29:22 p.m.

"Oops," he said. "I hit my news theme. But I recovered, I read them a news headline."

1:31 p.m. "This is Bob Flittie with KTIC News. We'll talk weather after the news...." Then he presented the Nebraska and Iowa news. I couldn't write as fast as Bob dispensed his information, I couldn't even record complete headlines: an Iowa manure spill; talk about wind power generation along the Nebraska-Wyoming border, about locations for tapping the wind; oversight of the nation's "assisted living" centers; about South Carolina being able to see abortion clinic records.

It was exactly 1:36:50 p.m. when Bob started reading the weather.

"It looks so easy to do," he said in the fact of my dumb-founded amazement of his weather report, "it's all preparation. I'll print it just as it comes from the Weather Service, then I'll edit it and print that, and you'll be able to see how I handle something that comes to us fairly technical."

1:45 p.m. "We'll have four to ten minutes of material -

auction information, etc. - to get in before 2:00 p.m. so we may have time for a song or two before the hour. The songs have to be hits or have been hits; they are 'fill' in this format, not the feature."

"Toby Keith's 'Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue' - Army private Patrick Miller says he passed part of his time in captivity as a POW in Iraq singing the song...." Bob showed me how quickly he can find the song in the computerized music library. He brought it up for airplay while he read the story out of the news about Miller.

1:55 p.m. - "Inside Agriculture with Mike LaPorte."

"That'll run for about five minutes," Bob said, "which will give me time to heat my coffee and go to the bathroom." Today's story was about a government grant program to assist development of renewable energy in rural areas.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 29, 2003 - (9)

April 29, 2003 cont'd
Other issues facing farm radio? The consolidation of independent radio stations by such corporate giants as Clear Channel Communications means there is less local ownership and less investment back in the communities being served. All twelve hundred of Clear Channel's stations have the same format, they all report the same news. "The format used to allow five or ten minute newscasts," Bob said. "Today they're lucky to get two minutes for the news." Bob believes farmers in other areas are less well-served when station owners say to the farm director, "You have sixty seconds to get the markets in, and that's it."

The issues that agriculture faces today?

With the declining economy, Bob said, there is a decline in the number of farmers and ranchers on the land. "The cost of fuel is a problem," he said, "taxes, the uncertainty of the market - farmers bale out - they're looking for farm jobs, they're looking for a way to pay health insurance."

"Just west of here Beemer lost its high school a year ago," Bob said. "It's tough when a community loses a school, when the community doesn't have enough farm kids to keep the school going, to keep the community a vibrant community. If the numbers aren't there, if the taxes are too high, something has got to give, and it's giving."

"The population is aging," Bob said, "the kids are fewer. Part of the issue is livestock confinement operations. The size of feedlot operations here is amazing. Combine the number of hogs and cattle in the county, this is the most livestock-intensive county in Nebraska. The big confinement operations create some problems that are very, very political in nature - the environment, water, odor, flies, and employment. The question is still there and the jury's not there yet - what's the long-term health effect. I think most owners are trying both to make a living and to do what's right for the environment."

"There are times we do have to be careful on the air how we treat stories about the topic," Bob indicated. "Our own audience is very split on this. Some are very, very in favor of the larger operations, that it is the way to go, that they are doing everything scientifically that we know how to do to protect the environment. And the other side is equally adamant - that seven hundred and fifty yards away is nowhere near enough distance from the confinement operation. Here because they are relatively smaller compared to the huge lots, the problems aren't always as noticeable. It's tough. You just don't see an operation anymore where you have a few livestock you can take to the local market. A guy can't run just a few head of hogs - you can't do it, no one's going to buy them. The number of packers has gotten fewer and they're farther away and the cost to get animals to market goes up. You've got to have a contract."

"Now Tyson announced last week they are closing their chicken plants in Maryland," Bob said. "They're not going to honor any of those contracts. Where do those producers go with their chickens? There is no one else in Maryland. There's a lawsuit over it, can they just say 'sorry, we're not going to honor those contracts?' With fewer major players, each time a major player makes a move like that, it hurts a lot of people. You've got wives and children and schools that are going to suffer as a result."

"In one sense," he said, "what's happening in agriculture is happening in the radio business - there's Clear Channel with twelve hundred stations and they do it all the same with fewer people. Our number of listeners in the future will be fewer. Financially, how will we be able to serve those who remain? I don't think anybody's got the answer today."

"Some people see government involvement as an issue for agriculture," Bob said. "When twenty percent of a county's income comes from subsidies, that's a problem."

"Some people think there's no future in farming," Bob said. "What is there to bring the kids back after they go off to college? The farming isn't there."

"And," he added, "I see there might be a problem with trade agreements like NAFTA, where goods can cross the border more easily. Eventually we'll have a world where goods will flow easily and all the good and the bad will come with them - bugs will cross borders and we'll spend millions fighting ones we've never had before, and Mexico will get new bugs from us. It's folly, when we're concerned about terrorism, to allow such easy access. And now the SARS virus - something's coming and it gets here before anybody knows it's happening."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 29, 2003 - (8)

April 29, 2003 cont'd
I met Bob Flittie at the radio station about 10:30 a.m. intending to turn the tables on him. Last October he had interviewed me for his program on the arts in northeast Nebraska, now I would be interviewing him about how he ended up in West Point, about regional differences between West Point and the area of South Dakota he had previously worked, about "farmer-owned radio," the issues facing rural radio, the issues facing farmers today.

Bob started in broadcasting as a high school student in 1959 and 1960 in Brookings and Sioux Falls, South Dakota; it became a career. Later he worked also in Rapid City, South Dakota, and then in Yankton. When the station in Yankton had a change in ownership, Bob thought he'd get out of broadcasting and teach school. He went back to get the credits he'd need and he did some substitute teaching; but he discovered that his hearing loss - more severe than he had known - prevented him from hearing the commotion going on behind him. Perhaps teaching wasn't the best choice for him. Just at this point he saw an ad for a news director and afternoon host at the radio station in West Point. He's been news director and operations director for WTIC/WPNE for about six years. "It's a 24/7 job," he told me. "You have to be aware of all the issues that might affect Nebraska farmers." Every morning he spends an hour editing the day's news for a fifteen minute newscast, and then continuously updates the stories all day. Bob's style on the air is very personal, comfortable, he treats the microphone as if it were the person he's talking with - "I don't talk over that person, I don't talk at that person, I talk with, with the specific intent to share information. A farmer from up around Bancroft said to me when he met me - 'You're Flittie? How do you do that? When I'm out on the tractor, it's like you're talking to me.'"

God gave Bob a good voice to start with, and he practiced to improve his delivery. He recalled that when he was in college he'd practice reading biology and chemistry texts aloud as if he were Walter Cronkite delivering the news. "That taught me to sight-read smoothly," he said. "I wanted to be able to read unfamiliar material smoothly, so I practiced by reading textbooks." The people he admires - Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Charles Karault, Charles Osgood, and Michael Josephson - have a command of the language, the right inflection, right diction, the loudness and softness; they use their voices to really tell a story.

The first time I was in West Point Bob had told me that there were cultural differences between West Point and the places he'd worked in South Dakota. For one thing, the pronunciation of names is a little different here, he said. "I still have to ask how to pronounce some names." For another, the heritage here is different. He told about an incident with the men's singing group he belongs to. During an intermission, the fellows on stage got to tell the audience some stories informally. Bob told a Norwegian joke that depended on knowing what lefse is. Dead silence. "You could have heard a pin drop," Bob said. "I asked, How many of you are Norwegian? In the group of one hundred fifty or two hundred people, not a single hand went up."

On fitting into a new community, Bob said it's probably true in all regions that it is difficult. "If you remain stand-off-ish," he thinks, "you won't fit in. You have to involve yourself in the life of the community. Get involved in something and you will be welcomed." There is some responsibility on the part of new people coming into the community to work at fitting in, he thinks.

KTIC/KWPN is part of Nebraska's "farmer-owned" radio network of stations, which includes the flagship station in Lexington, Nebraska, the station here in West Point, and a third station in Scott's Bluff. How and why did the network develop? "In 1949 and 1950 there were two God-awful blizzards," Bob said. "They ravaged the midwest, both with the number of livestock lost and the number of human deaths. The movers and shakers in agriculture said 'Nobody is doing anything for us - they don't tell us when bad weather is coming, they don't tell us what the markets are.' So the people who could get things done from Farm Bureau, Farmers' Union, the state Grange, and the Cooperative Council sat down and said 'Let's do it ourselves.' They hired Max Brown to be their general manager and get the job done. In February of 1951 they put KRVN on the air from Lexington, powerful enough to serve much of Nebraska, but they couldn't quite get into the panhandle nor into eastern Nebraska. So about twenty years ago they purchased the station in Scott's Bluff, then six years ago they acquired the station here in West Point. The mission is - we serve agriculture, period. Our mission and goal is to serve Nebraska agriculture. Information farmers need has to be incorporated into every newscast we do, not relegated to the 'farm show.' What farmers need to know is the news."

"We have no individual owner," Bob said of the network. "We're owned by 5,000 farmers and ranchers who have bought memberships." For major expenses, the network borrows money from large farmers and agricultural organizations and pays it back over time with interest. Profits are all turned back into development of the network." There is a nine-member board of directors that oversees the network.

The issues facing farm radio? "We recognized about a year ago what was happening to the farm economy," Bob said. "It was in decline, much as it had been during the 1980s." The decline, Bob thinks, is partly related to 9/11 and terrorism, but also the sour national economy and the ripple effect in Nebraska. "If the dollars aren't there to buy the product, you can't afford to have as many people producing the product." Accordingly, the station has had to reduce its staff by two full-time positions and two part-time positions.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 29, 2003 - (7)

April 29, 2003, cont'd
Harry knows the complaints about large livestock operations - some people say that the operations stink, that they degrade the environment, that beef cattle use too much water. And he admits there is a certain percentage of operators who take more from the land than they give back. But Harry is committed to stewardship, he wants to leave his land better than he found it when he started. He says it, and I believe him.

Harry does a lot of traveling to promote beef on behalf of the NCBA, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. He was in New York City. When one of the fellows he met there told him "You know, we think of your country out there as belonging to all of us, it's a shared national resource, and we want you to take good care of it," Harry responded, "You know, the federal building right over there, with graffiti all over it, we like to think that belongs to us, and we wish you'd take better care of it." "We're working on it," the fellow replied, a little mortified, what else could he say, "we're working on it."

Two of Harry's rules: "The work gets done by those who show up; you've got to be involved in something bigger than yourself." Harry missed helping to re-roof the rectory at St. Mary's Catholic Church in West Point this past weekend, the first re-roofing job for the Catholic congregation he thinks he's missed in forty years. He has done well in his business dealings overall, so he is able to make monetary donations to various community causes. Yet giving money is not enough, he said. You have also got to roll up your sleeves and work to help projects succeed. You have got to give of your time and your energy. First, sharing work in this fashion helps to create lasting bonds of community. Second, having been involved in doing the work creates a different kind of satisfaction - "Look what we've accomplished." Third, the investment of time and energy helps to guarantee continued success because, while one might see a monetary donation come to nothing and say "Oh, well, it's only money," it's much more difficult to brush off the investment of one's time and energy, sweat and hard work. The more you sweat for the success of a community project, the more you'll want to see its continued success. In addition, Harry said, working with others on such projects is the way new residents get incorporated into the life of the community. If you come into a community and you don't get involved in projects, if you stay cacooned in your house, you will remain an outsider. Community by its definition involves shared work of the type found in community projects in towns all across the middle west.

Looking around the office of Harry's enterprise, you see the wall charts showing the performance of the commodities Harry's business buys and sells, you hear Harry take a phone call for a buy order from one of his clients, then Harry is talking about the need to preserve the history of the area. In 1979 he financed production of a film about West Point and the area; more recently he has interviewed, on video, a number of area residents to ensure their stories won't be lost. I think Harry understands that who we were is who we are, and that if we forget our past we lose our way. Yet at the same time, he is clearly an entrepreneur, he has an entrepreneur's mind and an impatience with those who fail to take responsibility for themselves. If you slide off an icy road and wreck your car, it's not the weather you should be cursing, Harry thinks - you put yourself into that situation by going out when it was icy, accept responsibility for your own success or failure.

Clearly Harry accepts responsibility for his failures, he learns from his setbacks, he learns from his successes.

He thinks I ought to talk to the Case dealer in West Point while I'm in town, so he tracks down Irv Eisenmenger to let him know I'll be calling him to arrange an interview; he tells Irv he's spent an hour, an hour and a half talking with me - that's a recommendation from Harry Knobbe, you'd say, something he didn't have to do but he did.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 28-29, 2003 - (6)

April 28, 2003, cont'd
"The smell?" said Cliff. "You could smell it but it got so you didn't notice it."

"Cleanliness," Bud said. "Cliff insisted we keep a clean plant. When the day's work was done, we'd scrub down the floors with a tough soap. Cliff bought brooms twenty-four at a time. We'd clean everything off the floor, scrub it down with soap, we'd let the soap sit for a while, then we'd rinse it off with our hot water hoses, we'd run water and steam from the cookers together through our hoses to wash off the soap."

The state, too, was concerned about cleanliness and disease and at one point sent an inspector to check the plant. "What do you scrub up with?" the fellow wanted to know. Bud showed him the barrel of the caustic soap. "Open the barrel," the inspector said, and Bud did, and the fellow was going to put his hand down into the barrel. Bud stopped him. "You don't want to do that," he'd said. "If you put your hand in there you won't have a hand to pull back out." At that point, just the vapors rising from the barrel were enough to convince the inspector that the West Point rendering plant ran a clean ship.

It was not all grim reality at the rendering plant. The fellows enjoyed working with each other. Cliff had a sense of humor; Bud tells a story on him. A call came in from a farmer. He had a mule down that wouldn't get up. Would Cliff send a fellow out to shoot the mule and haul away the carcass? The fellow who went out for the mule came back without it. "When I send you out for a mule, I expect you to bring a mule back," Cliff berated the fellow. The driver tried to explain. He said sure enough the mule was down. He had backed his truck up to the mule, he'd dumped the end-gate of the truck down for loading, and the noise of the chain on metal spooked the mule which got up and ran away before the fellow could shoot it. "Next time," Cliff had said with mock sternness, "shoot the mule before you let the end-gate down."

That's probably good advice for life as well as for the rendering business: "Shoot the mule before you let the end-gate down."

*

In the evening I confirmed with Wisner Rendering that I'll be riding in a rendering truck on Thursday. We'll see just how much stink of this honorable work I can stand.

***

April 29, 2003
Harry Knobbe is sixty-three years old, he's the youngest of the third generation of a Cuming County farm family. His older brother farms the place his grandfather established. In 1939, Harry's father bought a farm a few miles west of West Point, and a mile south - that's the place that Harry farms. It's likely Harry's father wouldn't recognize the place.

Harry runs a large beef feedlot, he runs an office that buys and sells livestock, he is licensed to trade in commodities and he does just that like the big boys in the big city, except he has lower overhead.

I mean, the office for the Harry Knobbe Feed Yards and Knobbe Livestock and Knobbe Commodities looks like an office. There are - what did Harry tell me - nine people who work in the office, including two sons. Harry was in a meeting when I arrived ten minutes early for my 8:30 a.m. interview. It was a stand-up meeting, I could see that because the walls of the office are mostly glass, and I could view Harry and the others standing in a room at the far end of the lobby. They were deep in discussion. Right as scheduled, the meeting broke up and the tall, assured man in cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a dress shirt stepped out, nodded in my direction, and waved me into his office.

You don't usually expect a fellow who runs a large feedlot and who trades commodities to talk to you about stewardship of the land, about stewardship in all your business dealings, about faith and community and the need to lend a hand in the community for projects as well as donating money. But Harry Knobbe is such a man. He believes in raising beef in preference to raising crops or feeding other kinds of animals. He believes livestock operations provide on-going, continuous employment throughout the year, rather than just in season as is the case with field crops like corn. He thinks a beef operation like his provides more employment for rural America than does crop farming. He believes it is better to be working than not working. He is fortunate that his work is what he loves, his hobby as well as his job.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 28, 2003 - (5)

April 28, 2003 cont'd
What does a rendering plant do? It takes dead animals that have been hauled off the farm in various states of ripeness and turns them into pet food or feed meal. The fellow who drove a rendering truck worked for himself. He picked up dead farm animals across his territory and took them to a rendering plant, he got paid per hundred weight of carcass he hauled in.

Who doesn't know what I'm talking about here? A cow dies on a hot July Saturday morning and "cooks" in the sun until Monday when the rendering truck arrives to pick it up and haul it away. The carcass cooks and bloats and gurgles and stinks, and the fellow with the rendering truck hooks a cable around the spongy cow and winches it up into the box of the truck. The dead cow farts and groans as it is moved and pulled into the truck, as liquid drips from its nose. Once the cow is up in the truck, the driver unhooks the cable, he'll need it again down the road, there's another farm, another dead cow or dead hog or dead horse that will have to be winched up into the truck.

This is tough work if you are not used to it. It is tough work even if you're used to it. The smell of death will gag you if you aren't accustomed to it, sometimes it gags you even when you're used to it. The sight of flies crawling in and out of nose holes. The baked glaze of the dead cow's unseeing eye. It is tough work, yet work that must be done. Honorable work that the rest of us would rather not think about.

The driver hauls his ripe cartage to the rendering plant where it gets unloaded. Dead cows and calves have to be skinned before the carcasses are turned into meal. Sheep have to be skinned.

Bud and Cliff were a team skinning cows at the West Point rendering plant. Cliff would always start at one end of the cow, skinning, and Bud would start at the other, and they could do the job start to finish in four minutes. Four minutes from the first slice into the skin til the carcass was naked as a steak in the meat counter. Nobody much liked skinning sheep because it was hard getting the knife blade down through the wool to make a cut, so Bud skinned most of the sheep that came into the plant. He could skin a sheep by himself in three minutes, a calf in two minutes. Cow and calf skins were salted and saved, to be tanned for leather.

The carcass gets cut into manageable chunks so it can be put into the cooker. A hog will get quartered, for instance, and tossed along with pieces of cow, horse, sheep, into a huge pressure cooker. The heat reduces the fat and much of the grease is siphoned off during cooking. Both grease and moisture get cooked out of the meat; as that happens, the meat becomes powdery. A good operator can tell by how the cooked meat feels when it is ready for pressing. Pressing squeezes the very last grease out of the meat. The result is a cake that can be put into the hammermill and turned to meal that is sold to manufacturers who make chicken feed and hog feed mainly. The protein content of the meal coming out of the West Point rendering plant was always about 50%, which was higher than competitors' meal; West Point paid attention to the mix of carcasses going into the cooker, and squeezed out more of the grease.

What happens to the grease? Most of the grease is sold to soap-makers and goes into soap like that you use to wash your face, Cliff and Bud told me.

Rather than being cooked down for meal, the fresher dead animals would be boned and cut up for pet food. After I'd turned off the tape recorder, Cliff told about the time he was called to Washington to testify about the proper labeling of meat scraps from rendering plants, scraps that were meant to be pet food but ended up being fed to humans. All across a swath of the middle part of the continent, from Canada down to Texas, Cliff had investigated what was happening to meat that was supposed to be dog food, and he had gathered signed affidavits from people who knew what was happening to the meat - some boned meat from some rendering plants was ending up on human tables, not in dog bowls, and Cliff was not happy about it. He could understand how people got away with it: take the labels off a can of stew meat and a can of dog food you might not be able to tell which is which. Cliff's evidence and his testimony helped get legislation for tougher labeling of such meat - "Not For Human Consumption."

So - how do you deal with the aspects of the work that most people consider disgusting?

"I know there are people who will tell you," Bud said, "that out at the rendering plant we'd sit on bloated carcasses to eat our lunch. That is not true. We never did that."

[Note added later: Indeed, I had someone from West Point tell me, as if he'd seen it himself, that the men at the rendering plant would sit around on the dead animals eating their lunch.]

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 28, 2003 - (4)

April 28, 2003, cont'd
Bud has worked hard all his life. He hired out on farms during his school years. In those days he worked for seventy-five cents a day, until one farmer thought he was doing a good enough job that the rate of pay was increased to a dollar a day. Those were tough years, the Depression, and people depended on each other, Bud said. His family always had food, Bud recalled, but he said he could probably have eaten another potato or two. The family kept a garden in those dry years, Bud said, watering it with buckets hand-pumped from the well.

Bud worked on farms, he drove truck for several months, he served in the Navy, and he worked at the rendering plant in Pendar, Nebraska, until he got a job offer from the rendering plant in West Point, Cliff's plant. Bud served in the Navy and he lived for months on one of those landing craft we know from all World War II footage - an open-topped, steel container eight feet wide, thirty six feet long, with two diesel engines on one end, the other end flopped down onto the beach so the dog-face soldiers could disembark, often into the teeth of the enemy's defense. Yes, Bud put the soldiers to shore on D-Day. Then soon enough he and his mates were ashore themselves, they had to trade their Navy uniforms for Army colors because the higher-ups didn't want everyone to know how far from water these Navy fellows were fighting. Bud survived the war, he made it home to marry Mabel, whom he'd met in Pendar where she waited tables at a restaurant.

Mabel was one of eight children born to a couple who lived on a farm that had been homesteaded by Mabel's grandparents or great-grandparents. Times were tough enough - Mabel was not allowed to go to high school; because her parents hadn't been able to send her four older sisters to high school, they couldn't send her. She regrets that she hadn't been able to get the schooling, she had wanted to be a teacher. Instead, she went to work as a hired girl for farm families in the area that needed an extra set of hands in the house. Someone told her about an opening for a waitress at the restaurant in Pendar, she applied for the job and got it. She had to get it, so she could meet Bud there, so she could marry him and have a family, a son and a daughter who still live in Pendar. Eventually she ran the restaurant in Pendar, even for several years after Bud started working in West Point some eighteen miles to the south. Eventually, as the children were getting older, Mabel realized she didn't have much time to spend with them. Restaurant work will consume your life. And the building that housed the restaurant was going to need an awful lot of work if it was to meet modern restaurant code. So Mabel gave up the restaurant, she and Bud and the family moved to West Point, they've been here ever since. She worked for many years at a drug store in West Point, she worked as a waitress for a while after she was injured and couldn't get her drug-store job back.

For the interview Bud dressed in bib overalls; you'd know that he had been a working man, a man who worked with his hands. Cliff Johnson was the boss, for the interview he dressed in slacks, not overalls; his shirt was of a little finer weave. But listening to Bud and Cliff talk, you recognize that Cliff is not the sort of fellow to ask his employees to do anything he would not do himself. Bud told me as much after Cliff had left. Cliff himself attributed ninety percent of his success in business to the fellows who worked for him; he credited Bud and two other men as keys to making his West Point rendering plant successful. Cliff made a success of himself despite having a hard beginning. He didn't know his father, who ran off. His mother died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. He was raised by his grandparents in Oakland, Nebraska.

Finally at his father's death, an uncle gave Cliff information about his father, that he had died in New Mexico. Cliff sent flowers to the funeral home and signed the card "Son, Clifford." The half-siblings in New Mexico that Cliff didn't know about, they didn't know about Cliff. "Son, Clifford - who's that?" they asked. Clifford was just as surprised as they were. Later, on a trip through New Mexico, Cliff stopped to visit a half-sister. He knew the woman's address. He rang the doorbell. A woman answered. She stepped backwards in shock. She said, "You don't have to tell me who you are. You look just like your father."

Later Cliff found out that he had a couple more half-siblings in California, and he heard he had a couple more in Nebraska whom he never met. His father was a rolling stone, a kind of Johnny Appleseed leaving a trail of children along the way.

Cliff learned to work hard. He married in 1931 during the fury of the Depression. In 1935 he bought a truck and started his own successful business hauling dead animals to a rendering plant. After a year he sold that truck and route, bought another truck, found another territory, and prospered at it. Eventually he found a partner and they established the West Point rendering plant, which prospered under Cliff's guidance, then his son took over the business and ran it until the plant was sold to a fellow from Omaha, who sold it to the conglomerate that shut it down recently.

Why, as a young fellow, would you choose the disagreeable work of operating a rendering truck? "In the Depression, you took what work you could get," Cliff told me. "You might be doing one thing today, tomorrow a fellow might call you to go pick up dead animals and haul them to a rendering plant. I learned from doing it that it was not such a bad line of work."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 27-28, 2003 - (2)

April 27, 2003, cont'd
I'm standing at my brother's grave. His gravestone soaks up heat. The bare fields surrounding the cemetery warm beneath full sun today. The story of the Resurrection must arise in an agricultural context.

I stand at my brother's grave. If you don't know wind, you don't know Iowa, you don't know this place where I would be with my brother if I could believe my brother could be here with me. Far off, a pheasant calls. I hear some creature snapping or chattering at me, my presence disturbing its afternoon. "MONTAG" says my parents' gravestone, "Oma M." and "Philip J." The earth is patient, waiting to accept them in their turn. They will some day be buried here amongst the Kacmarynskis and Schullers and Dramans and Ditches. Plantz and Graff and Leuer. Wilson, Joe B., my friend's father. Wilson, Bryan Lee, my friend, killed in Vietnam. The land keeps soaking up sun. We keep coming back to places like this.

My mother said again this morning how disappointed she always is when she stops to visit Randy's grave - "There's nothing there." Worms and soil. Grass and wind and sky. The lonesome song the pines know, the only song they ever sing. The sounds of all the birds, as if this story is about life, not death, about going on, not giving up. We learn to carry a lot of sadness. Every disturbed patch of cemetery soil is another sadness laid on someone.

I drive past the place where the old homestead used to stand. I slow but I don't stop. Every year there is less and less here, too. The evergreen that stood at the driveway is gone now. The big old cottonwoods we used to play beneath, gone. When I visited here a few years ago, I found then that house and barn and cribs and sheds had all been torn out. Where the house had stood, only the green ghostly shape of a house in the grass. Now even that has been plowed up for a few more bushels of corn. Only a line of windbreak remains, so much less than my memory of it. One wonders how long it will be til the windbreak gets torn out for the sake of a few more bushels of corn. We cannot contain how much we've lost, we cannot carry it, yet we must go on. Sometimes the sadness is as palpable as rain.

Yeah, yeah, Tom, sing them blues....

The farmers are out working their fields today, whatever I say. They'll tell you it doesn't matter what we say, it's what we do that counts. You can talk all day but that doesn't plant any corn.

*

7:00 p.m. It's Nebraska. The sun is in front of me. I'm on a detour where Highway 9 into West Point has been closed and I have to go eight miles out of my way. I see an old farmer walking towards a big rig at the end of a field. You can tell he's an old farmer by the way he leans towards his work as he walks. It's 7:00 p.m. on a Sunday in Nebraska, the western sky is orange with evening, and this farmer is going out to work a field. His wife is in the van in the driveway to the field, she has the car in reverse, she drove the farmer out to the field, now she is going back to the house. The image of all this moves me very deeply. I cannot swallow what's choking me. This salt-of-the-earth image? The man and his wife and the land and the late day sun on everything?

I feel as if I've fallen into a great chasm of belonging. I feel as if this image is an emblem of my task. I feel perhaps that this old farmer and his wife are the folks of whom I will speak when I talk of the middle west. He is Any-man, she is Every-woman, I am the obedient servant of this soil.

***

April 28, 2003
Well, she laughed hard, then she laughed again. I didn't even know her name yet. She said, "This is some kind of joke, right?" She said, "We can't even get people to ride along with him to see if they'd like to work for him. This is some kind of joke, right?" She laughed again. "This is a new one on me."

I had called Wisner Rendering, I'd simply asked whether I could ride along with her husband on his route some day this week as he picked up dead animals to take to the rendering plant. "No one has ever asked us before," she said. "Well, if you grew up on a farm, I suppose you know what you are getting into. I'll talk to my husband and have him call you."

I'd already been down to the Chamber of Commerce and met Staci Jensen, the Chamber director. She'd given me the phone number for Wisner Rendering. Maybe she looked at me a little funny when I asked? She'd given me names and phone numbers for a whole lot of other people I should talk to in the area as well.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO WEST POINT, NEBRASKA APRIL 26-27, 2003

April 26, 2003
This is the time in spring when it's lovely to drive across the northern part of the middle west. I am headed west for a week in West Point, Nebraska; and then for another week in Redfield, South Dakota. I will be staying at my parents' house in Hampton, Iowa, tonight. Here in Wisconsin, now, moving west, there is a faint green gauze in the trees where I cross the Wisconsin River on Highway 82. There is a green thatch of grass. The bare fields soak up sun. The smell is of earth turning toward life beneath a blue pulsing sky.

We know spring is coming, we've already seen it in Smith Center, Kansas, in Columbus, Ohio. We who live farther to the north know that our clock runs a little behind time, but spring is coming.

When spring arrives, it's like we've opened a box, a present for another year. We don't know what we've got but we know we've got something, and today it's lovely here in the middle west.

Perhaps the middle west is a river, perhaps I dip my cup again and again into the changing river, in this place and that place, sunlight off the water brightening my understanding - what it is we've come to, in this place, in these times.

In my memoir, Curlew:Home, I have already spoken of the qualities of my parents; they are not unlike the rest of middle westerners. In their dignity and determination, their hard work and humility, they are like a lot of rural men and women in this part of the country. I will spend the night with them and enjoy their hospitality again.

I cross that rise on I-90 in western Wisconsin as I'm heading west. Who says we don't have mountains? All the bluffs revealed in one suddenness, they push towards the Mississippi, shrouded in the haze of distance and disappearance. Perhaps middle western beauty is quiet, not flashy; perhaps it comes in modest portions, not in large gulps; perhaps it is quaintly spiced, though not blazing. Perhaps it comes and goes, comes and goes, and so we appreciate our glimpses of it.

In Minnesota, sunlight on trees in a draw along the Interstate: the branches shine as if they have been dusted with snow, though of course they haven't been. It's as if there is a skein of light along the creek.

On this Vagabond expedition, I may have to examine the need I've had to go to Canada, to the end of its roads, to the edge of its extremes. Yet now I'm happy to set my vision on the most ordinary of the middlewest. What has changed that I now feel the need to know this common place? Is the journey, perhaps, as much about me as it is about the middlewest itself?

***

April 27, 2003
In our strength is our weakness. Each vice is the other side of its virtue. Too much of a good thing is not a good thing. The center is the extreme of something. The middle of the middle is someone's margin.

Now I've left my parents' house late on a Sunday morning. We shared a breakfast of biscuits and gravy at the local restaurant. Humble food. Extremely modest prices. Where else can you get half an order of biscuits and gravy for $1.25. Coffee for 65 cents.

I am headed west on Highway 3, towards Sioux City and supper with the poet Phil Hey and his wife Terry. Along the way, I may go out of my way and stop at my brother's grave a few miles from where I grew up.

I suppose we know a little more of life and death out here in this country because we see more of life and death. Not only is family close and important, but we raise livestock for slaughter, we see the rise and fall of the seasons, we see everything going back to soil, we see soil being turned for another year. Such knowledge can make a man sober and tight-lipped, humble, calm in the face of uncertainty. We are not surprised by much because we know everything goes 'round in its great circle. What we have seen we know we will see again. What we would run from, we know we take it with us. Tomorrow is yesterday made new. Yesterday is an old tomorrow.

We know patience because we know pace - the march of the seasons teaches us patience, the planting and cultivating and harvesting of corn and beans teaches us that, the baling of hay in the heat of summer for cows that will need it in the dead of winter. Sunrise. Sunset. The moon's waltz across the sky. The slow turn of everything. All these teach us patience.

In addition, we have learned that we are not in charge of the cosmos, and we accept that. If the corn is going to grow, we need rain; we can pray for rain, we can work hard, we can even curse the sky, yet in the end our fate is out of our hands. This, and the very wideness of the sky itself, helps us to stay humble. We control what we can, we accept the rest.

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 11

Then Steve drove among the buildings

at the rendering plant in Norfolk, back to the place he'd unload. He backed his truck into a shed with a door big enough to drive a semi through. He got down out of the truck and waited near the back of it while the load was pulled off. I sat in the cab of the truck, breathing through my mouth. That helped a little, helped me stand the stink of it. I kept swallowing back everything that wanted to come out of me. The concrete floor looked greasy. Rancidness came up in waves from it. I kept breathing through my mouth.

"Only had nine beef today," Steve said when he got back into the truck. "Yesterday, I had sixteen. That's nothing compared to what I haul off the feedlots when I'm busy."

Steve drove the truck back into the sunlight, into the fresh air, you might think it was fresh air after you'd been in the shed. He waved at the big yard in front of us. "One winter they had over ten thousand dead beef laying out here," he said. "The pile went clear up to the top of that light pole. When a semi drove around the other side of the pile, you couldn't see it. That was such a bad winter."

Steve went back into the shed to talk to another trucker. I was sitting in the truck out in the yard. There's a common, dirty starling out in the yard, short-tailed and ugly; yet it looks brilliant in its surroundings, a green irridescence about its head and neck, almost a fiery redness to the brown of its body. I was starting to think it looked pretty. "Come on, Tom," I had to say to myself, "it's just a damn starling." When he got back to the truck, Steve said the other driver hauled in hogs from off to the west of Norfolk. "I haul the most dead beef into this plant," Steve said. "He hauls the most hogs."

Barn swallows darted and cut the air above the yard. It had been a grey day, there was a momentary brightness on the belly of the swallow, an orangeness that was brilliant in the greasy drabness.

"All of us dead stock drivers get along," Steve said. "We have a comradery. We're competitors, but we're all in the same boat."

When he was just out of high school, Steve said, he had worked quite a few years as assistant manager at a big hog confinement operation. "We had to do everything there," he said. "You had to be a vet and a mechanic and everything else. That was good - needing to be able to do everything. I grew up on a farm, you learn how to do everything. You learn to be resourceful."

The day done, we were headed for home. Done early. "This is all the truck I ever desire to drive," Steve said. "I wouldn't want to drive an eighteen-wheeler. That's a lonely job."

"But we can never plan what's gonna happen," he added, as if he were knocking on wood.

"There's still a forty mile drive home after I've dumped the load," he noted. "I'm the guy closest to Norfolk. Some of these fellows have an hour and a half, two hours to drive home after they get done. One of them has to drive three hours home after he unloads."

The truck tires roared, tearing off miles of pavement. The engine wound up and smoothed out, wound up and smoothed out as Steve went through the gears. The road curved one way, curved back the other. A left turn, a long, slow bend. Then we were a mile, a mile and a half from Steve and Cindy's house, a smooth road, an easy glide from here, we were headed home like a horse running for the barn.

We've gotten done early, and Steve's going to get some fence mended, do some clean-up around the farmyard, make some repairs in the house. The truck tires roar and sing. An airplane comes into view, loud and close to the ground.

"That guy sprays crops," Steve says to me. "You have to be half nuts to do that. He comes pretty low over the horizon."

It's all perspective, I suppose. What you see depends on where you sit. It's obvious Steve likes where he's sitting.

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 10

"Pen riding is a dangerous job,"

Steve said. "Every year somebody gets killed. Last year, two guys were killed."

"I caught double-pneumonia when I was riding pens," Steve said. "The doctor wanted to put me in the hospital. I said, 'No, you're not, I'm going back to work.' I got my pills and went back to work. Kinda stupid, really."

"The better the feedlot," Steve said, "the less they see me. Those guys riding pens don't get paid much. They make a living but they do it because they love it. If they did it for the money, they wouldn't be doing it."

"If a steer gets mad," Steve said, "it can go right under the horse, flip the horse over. It can ram the horse and knock it over, with you on it."

"When I was riding pens," he said, "I had one horse I'd take with me up to the office when I went to get a donut or something. I didn't have to tie him up, he knew when I came out he'd get a piece of donut. He'd wag his head if I didn't give him something right away. I still think about that horse. I liked him a lot. He's probably dead now."

11:50 a.m. "One more stop," Steve said, "then we're done. I'm current with what I need to pick-up today. Anything called in today, I'll pick up tomorrow."

"Boy," Steve said, shifting gears in the truck, "I like this power divider. It's like having four wheel drive back there." We were pulling into an awfully gooey farmyard. "In this mud, I'd never get back in there with my other trucks."

"Some farmers like to hide the dead stock," Steve said, to explain why he had to back in so far and away. "They'll put them clear back where it's difficult to get at them after a heavy rain. That's why I didn't come for this one yesterday. I knew it would be a mess."

12:03 p.m. "That's it," Steve said. We'd just picked up the last dead steer for the day. Then we headed down the lane towards the gravel road. There were feedlots off to our right. Steve pointed to a steer. "That one has hoof rot," he said. "See how he's favoring his right front. They better get him out or I'll get him. They better get him out and treat him."

12:15 p.m. We were on the highway, headed towards the rendering plant in Norfolk, Nebraska, to the northwest of us, to deliver the load. The phone rang. It was Steve's employee, who wasn't driving that day. "I'm done for the day," I heard Steve say. "I'm going through Stanton right now. I saved some for pick up tomorrow. I don't have a lot of them, but I saved some for tomorrow."

"It's probably going to get a little quieter now, with summer coming on," Steve said when he'd finished on the phone. "Along about August, it will get very busy again."

12:25 p.m. We've turned in the driveway at Darling International. "This is just about the biggest rendering company in the world," Steve said. A sign was posted right at the gate: "5 m.p.h."

We weighed on the long scale in the yard, then Steve jumped down out of the cab and walked to the office to deal with the paperwork. He lumbered off like a fellow not quite comfortable on the ground, like a guy who more comfortable up on a horse, or the cab of a truck. When he got back to the truck, he told me what he made on the load. "You have to deduct the cost of fuel and depreciation on the truck from that," he added. If someone else had been driving for him, he'd have to deduct the cost of wages, too.

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 9

"It makes me sad

when I see something like that," Steve said, and he nodded at a knot of landscape. "You know there used to be a farm there."

"To me, this is all home."

"Pretty, how it's all starting to get green."

"You're a pretty courteous driver," I observed.

"I'm in no hurry," Steve said. "My wife says I'm a pretty courteous dancer, too. There's no sense risking somebody's life just to save a minute."

"The only thing that has changed in my business in the last fifty years," Steve said, "is the size of the truck. The trucks have gotten bigger. Otherwise, it's the same."

We stopped at a "farrow-to-finish" hog operation belonging to a big corporation. The dead hogs had been pulled down to the end of the driveway, right out by the road. A sign was posted with big letters: "No entrance without appointment." "They don't want a truck driving into their yard for fear it will bring in disease," Steve said. "I don't think it would. My landlord was worried about me being in the rendering business - he has cows on the place where we live. I've been doing it for five years and he hasn't lost a single animal from disease due to my being in this business."

"When we get to the rendering plant," Steve warned me, "you can't get out of the truck. And you don't want to get out - you'll never get the stink off your shoes."

"On my dad's side, I'm related to Schindler," Steve informed me. "On my mother's side, I'm part Jewish. One of my relatives was on Schindler's list. I have that movie. Watched it many times."

"You notice we've been driving for a few hours and we haven't run into many towns," Steve said.

I saw little metal bridges regularly spaced crossing a creek, I wondered at that. "Irrigation," Steve said. "The irrigation rig crosses the creek on those bridges."

"My wife and I bought a buckboard," Steve told me. "We're going to train a horse to pull it. I'll put a stuffed dead animal in the back, put a big Wisner Rendering sign on it, with our motto - 'Your Local Used Cow Dealer.' The motto was my wife's idea. I get a lot of compliments on it. So, of course, when I got this truck, I had to have it painted on the door."

"A lot of cattle feeders haven't even seen this new truck yet," Steve said. "That's why I have big signs on the side of the truck, so they know who I am."

We pass a big feedlot operation. "Four brothers own this one," Steve said. "All their kids work on the place. The only guy they've hired is a fellow who rides pens. He goes into the pens and looks for sick cattle. He doesn't ride a horse, he rides a mule."

"Boy, is this a swamp," he said, looking out across the operation. All the rain had turned the surface of the feedlots into a heavy gumbo of mud and cow shit. "When you are riding pens and it is so muddy, so much clay sticks to the feet of your horse you have to take a power-washer to get it off."

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 8

"This is a dirty job,

especially when it's muddy," Steve said of his work. "I don't think I could work in a hospital. I don't like the smell. Sometimes my wife's family comes from Illinois to visit, they'll come out and ride with me. They can't understand how anybody can do this job."

"We'll be done by 1:00 p.m. at the rate we're going," Steve predicted. "That's good. I've been so busy, but I've got some stuff to do around the house, I'll be able to do some of it this afternoon."

"My wife and I like to go trail-riding for entertainment," Steve said. "We like to go country-western dancing. My wife is an excellent dancer - two-steps, waltzes. My wife does some line dancing. I say 'What do I want to dance by myself for? I came to dance with somebody.'"

"I tell people," Steve said, "I like it that I'm from Nowhere, Nebraska. It's the peace and serenity. You see the pictures of people in the city, shoulder to shoulder - I don't have any idea how someone can live like that. I just can't comprehend it."

We made another stop. It was a white-face steer this time, legs splayed, belly full of bloat. We were right outside Wisner now. Yeah, out here you can drive for miles and miles and not go anywhere. That's part of its charm.

Leather made from the dead animals Steve picks up is used for wallets, shoes, belts, boots. "Most people don't know that," Steve said. "It's Grade B leather, they use it for cheaper grade shoes. When they render an animal, they get a grease used for cosmetics. You kiss your wife or girl friend, you might be kissing grease rendered from a dead animal I picked up."

"I talk a lot," Steve said. "I like to talk." One imagines he spends a lot of time driving these back roads alone; maybe when he has the chance, he has to talk. Maybe a lot of words build up behind the silence and wait to be said.

"You can see how few people I actually see," he continued. "We've been out here this morning and have seen only four people."

"This is my office," he said.

11:00 a.m. "Three left," Steve said. "We get about forty calls a day. That has dropped off now with the rain. Then when it gets nice out, the cattle will get sick because of all the moisture. They'll start dying and I'll be busy again."

"It goes in cycles," he explained. "The southern part of my area has been busy, now it'll slow down. The northern part is starting to get busy. I can tell from the kind of calls I've been getting where the calls will be coming from."

"We don't do this job to get rich," Steve said. "We do it for a living. Maybe we'd like to get rich, but define 'rich.' I think I'm rich being able to live where I live. I wouldn't change this for the best office job in the city. My philosophy is: you've got to be happy doing what you do. And I am. Millionaires kill themselves - they've got all that money, and it doesn't make them happy."

Of the grader operator we'd seen earlier, Steve commented: "Now that's a lonely job. He probably likes the peace and quiet as much as I do."

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 7

"I like this job because

it depends on you," Steve said. "How hard you want to work, that's how much money you'll make. I want a decent income for me and my wife, and I help people out when they need it, if I have the money."

"One thing they can count on in this area," Steve said, "if they call, I'll come. Sometimes they get spoiled - if they call and I haven't shown up within two hours, they might call again, wondering what's the matter."

We made another stop. Another dead steer. "This is quite a loss for a little guy who's only got a few cattle," Steve said. "Now he might not make a dime on this bunch he's feeding. He'll feed them for eight or nine months and not make a dime. Farming is the biggest gamble."

"Most of the farmers don't do it for the money," he ventured. "They do it for the life we lead out here." The stubble in the fields shows that the farmers here raise corn and beans, and alfalfa for the cattle.

Animals are dying all the time, calls come in all day long to Steve for pick-up. I wondered how he knows when he's done for the day. "When the legs are sticking out the top of the truck," he said, "that's a load."

"These dirt roads - I know them just as well as people know their streets in the city," Steve said. "I can tell where I am just by the groves of trees out here."

"I've had plenty of practice driving these trucks," he said. "I've never had an accident and I don't plan on it. I pray a lot. I've had close calls, but it hasn't been my fault."

"One thing I like about the job," Steve said, "it's so unpredictable. It's not always the same, it's always different. I never know one day to the next where I'm going."

"I don't know if you've been paying attention," he said. "Only about a quarter of the places we've driven past are actually lived on."

"Wow, that's a sick-looking horse," Steve said, pointing. "If they don't do something with him, I'll get him. I can tell when I'm driving, I see certain cattle, I can tell they'll be calling me, I'll be getting them."

We picked up another dead steer. "I should call my answering machine," Steve said, and he did. There were messages for three more pick-ups, but all of them were in the northern part of Steve's area. "I'll pick those up tomorrow," he said. "I can only drive so many miles. Odds are by tomorrow I'll have some more to pick up in that direction, and I'll start the day up there."

"I like the smell of cattle and horses," Steve said. "Some people like to smell flowers. I like cattle and horses."

"There's nothing I admire more than a horse that works hard," he continued. "A horse has a heart and a life and a brain, a horse has a personality just like a human."

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 6

We stopped at another feedlot.

Another bloated steer. Steve stuck it. It sounded like air going out of a tire, but wet and gurgling. It didn't smell like air going out of a tire. "A lot of money is lost right here," Steve said. "This is a $700-800 loss, this one wasn't far from going to market." The steer caught on the end-gate of the truck as the winch pulled on it. Steve had to work at it to get the carcass up into the truck. When we got back into the truck cab, Steve filled out a slip, then jumped down to leave it in the barn. "Everybody's different about where they want it put."

The smell of this work? You have to talk about it, you can't ignore it. The stink accumulates. Imagine a pan of bacon grease left sitting out for a week or two, the house closed up, a mustiness already risen from the basement where clothes have mildewed, mixing with the greasy rancidness. Now add the sickly sweetness that comes up your throat when you've eaten way, way too much candy. Underneath, there's always the smell you smell when you stick a finger to the back of your throat, just before you puke. You might think it helps to rest your forearm on your belly when you're about to gag, but it doesn't help much.

"You breathe out of your mouth a lot," Steve said. "You make sure you know which way the wind is blowing. I always warn everybody what I'm doing before I do it." Steve has seen even old, grizzled farmers vomit at the smell when he stuck an animal before loading it.

"I have to say one thing," Steve told me, "we have good roads around here. The county does a good job. They keep a lot of gravel on the roads." Wisner Rendering picks up in Cuming, Stanton, Burt, Thurston, Wayne, and Dodge Counties of eastern Nebraska. I wasn't certain which county we were in, exactly - Cuming, perhaps. As evidence of the good job the county does, we saw a fellow out with a road grader working the gravel surface of the road we'd turned onto.

"You might want to stay in the truck," Steve said at our next stop. "This dog is a little growly. He came after me and I smacked him with the chain, so he knows I'm not going to take his crap. But you might want to stay in the truck. He's guarding the property - I'm doing my job, he's just doing his. That dog and I have an agreement - as long as I stay near the truck, I'm okay, but I can guarantee you he wouldn't let me get near that shed."

"One time a dog chased me right up into the truck," Steve said. "I always look at the farmyards to see if there's a dog, I didn't see any. I was hooking up the chain, all of a sudden the dog is five feet from me, snarling. That's not a good place to be. I went right up into the truck."

"Dogs and breaking your fingers working with the chain are the two biggest hazards in this work," he continued. "On my birthday I broke this finger in three places." He holds up a pinkie. "I got it wrapped with tape and then went right back to hauling."

"A few years ago I was training a young horse and he threw me off," Steve said. "I broke a couple of ribs. I had to keep hauling. That horse is now my favorite older horse, we've come to an agreement."

"I've been driving in 60-below wind chill, with a mask on," Steve said. "It freezes to your face. We face tremendously adverse weather conditions, sometimes. Winter, when it's cold, is the busiest time of the year for me. In summer, the feedlot owners are usually selling their cattle, cleaning out."

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 5

"I was born and raised

with a gun in my hand," Steve volunteered. "I don't know what it would be like to live without guns and hunting."

We pass some empty hog lots along a back-road. "Big guys are squeezing the little guys out," he said.

"Eighty percent of farmers around here are at retirement age," he said, "but they can't afford to stop farming."

We pulled into the yard at a feedlot. "A few dead beef here," he said.

"When it dries up, I'll really get busy," he said. After all the moisture, he thinks, livestock will be dying of pneumonia.

"I have to make out some slips here," he said. "Some feed yards want to keep track of the 'deads' that are hauled out.

Two dead black beef cattle have been pulled out of the feedlots for Steve to pick up. One of them is bloated more than the other one, its legs poking out like the legs of a balloon cow, its bung-hole bulging hugely, its belly bloated in an arc. "I don't know how your stomach is," Steve said by way of warning. "I let the air out of them." He poked the dead animal's great belly with his butcher knife, you could hear the air coming out, a stream of liquid squirted out like a lazy geyser, you could smell it. "That's the smell you don't get used to," Steve said. He lets the air out of most of the bloated animals, he said, "that way I can get more of them in the truck."

"I have to keep a record of what I pick up - for the rendering plant," Steve said. He showed me his chart. There were columns for Beef/Calf/Hog/Horse/Other/Name of farmer he picked up from/Number picked up."

"There's one thing you see a lot of in these feed yards," Steve said, "cattle dogs. A lot of yards use them to move cattle. They'll have men on horses and a good dog to control the cattle."

Steve had worked at a feed yard himself, working with 16,000 head of cattle. He would get up at 5:00 a.m., he'd get done work about 9:00 p.m., he got one Sunday a month off. "We took our work seriously," he said, "We had less than one percent death loss that one year, that low a rate is almost unheard of. Of course, you don't get paid extra for that. We'd ride horse forty or fifty miles a day, each of us would wear out four horses a day. In the winter we had to walk the lots."

"I like driving out through this country," Steve said. He told me about a cousin who works as an "integration manager" for Gateway Computers and likes to get out in the country too. "He's a wildlife control fellow," Steve said. "He'll trap two hundred coyotes and foxes a year. He makes almost no money doing it, he does it to help out the ranchers."

In years past Steve and Cindy raised calves. He'd get the calves for nothing from some of the feedlots, they'd be new-born. "For a while, it was twenty-two bottles in the morning, twenty-two bottles at night," Steve recalled. He has a friend, a carpenter, who needs the income now, so Steve has been giving the calves to that fellow. "He has it worse than I do," Steve said. "It would be a better world if we all did things like this. These values are what I like about living here."

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 4

Picking up one dead brood sow

was a favor for a new customer of Steve's. "Picking up one hog like this isn't profitable for me," he said, "but I haul 'deads' from the beef feedlot across the road. This one is a small feed yard - only ten or twelve thousand head. The big ones will have forty thousand head." He drove out of the way to show me the feedlot. "I'm just driving by to see if there are any dead cattle laying there. As I'm driving by, I'll just check."

"Feedlot workers have it tough," Steve said, "wallowing through the mud, long hours. They do it not so much for the money as for the love of doing it. Most people don't know how tough it is to raise that steak they're eating."

The truck Steve was driving he'd bought used, but it has a new motor, he said, a new fifteen-speed transmission, a new back-end, a new box for the meat wagon. A rendering truck is essentially a truck for hauling grain silage, with a different end-gate and with a winch put in for pulling dead animals up into the box.

"Seeing those farm places bull-dozed in always bothers me," Steve said. "I imagine the families that lived there. There are people who would want to live there now. The corporations would be better off selling those places for a dollar than bull-dozing them in."

We came up to a T-intersection at the Harry Knobbe Feedlot. I've interviewed Harry, I told Steve. "That's not one of my customers yet," Steve said of the operation, "maybe someday down the road." Ninety-eight percent of his new business comes by word of mouth, Steve thinks. "Good service snowballs," he said. "I take my job seriously. I like it. This is a pretty good truck to ride in."

We looked off at low spots in the fields, which were obviously wet. "Yeah," Steve said, "they got four inches of rain down here yesterday. It was a real blessing. Last year a lot of corn around here didn't make it, they just chopped it for silage. The problem was, there wasn't much corn in the silage, the silage wasn't much good."

Steve's eyes were constantly scanning here and there, from feedlot to feedlot. He was looking for dead animals set out in customary places for pick-up. "I know where they put them," Steve said. "Most of the places we've been driving by are my customers. Normally I don't have to drive so far between stops, it's kind of a quiet day. Mostly I'm doing clean-up for people who called late yesterday."

The phone in the truck rang again. "My wife has to run to Sioux City for parts to repair my truck," Steve said. "She has a hard time doing her sewing business because she has to run for me, I can't when I'm out driving truck."

"One thing about the rendering business," Steve said, "very few people have any idea what we do."

What would he say to people who think it's disgusting work? "Somebody has got to do it. You can't leave dead animals lay out there."

"Farmers, some take it real personal when they lose an animal," Steve said.

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 3

Steve knows the shortest, best routes

from farm to farm in this area of Nebraska. "I know every dirt road, back road, abandoned farm place in a fifty mile radius," he said. "I hunt and trap this area. It's like the back of my hand."

"Thank the Lord we actually got some rain yesterday," Steve said. "That was the most rain we've had in three years. People were panicking."

"There are over 500,000 head of cattle in Cuming County," he said. "It is the heaviest cattle-producing area in Nebraska. Outside of Omaha, it is probably the richest county in the state."

The truck was pounding the gravel road, the gravel road was pounding back. It was a good truck I was riding in, with good shocks, it was a good seat I was sitting on, but I was getting a headache from the bouncing. I was not used to such work. We went on down the road.

Steve traps coyote, he said, about sixty per year on average, sixty-two last year. He traps raccoons, too, about four hundred per year. "It helps with the income," he told me. "It's hard when you're working ten hours a day already, then go trapping half the night." But he wasn't asking for sympathy, don't make that mistake.

"I trap coyotes so they don't go in and kill the baby calves," Steve said. "They'll surround the baby calf and kill it. I'll never eliminate the coyotes, there are way too many. There is no way you'd ever get rid of all of them."

The mobile phone in the truck rang. Steve answered it, talked. Then he explained: "They are working on my other truck." Steve has three trucks. He drives one, an employee drives one, and at the busiest times Cindy drives one.

"My dad, Leroy, is a rendering truck operator and he's a preacher," Steve told me. "He always says, 'Even in picking up dead animals, there is life.' He finds great fear among farmers about uncertainty with prices and everything. He's a comfort to them. He's got a rendering truck ministry."

We crossed Highway 32 southwest of West Point. "We've just entered my new area," Steve said. "I'm still developing it. One thing they like about me is my speed of service."

"One thing around here," Steve said, "a man's word is still good. You give your word, you keep it. A handshake is still as good as a signed contract."

In meeting his commitment to farmers, he said he has driven with "busted fingers" and high fevers, sometimes with Cindy riding next to him to be sure he didn't fall asleep.

We made our second stop of the morning. It was a big brood sow. The engine of the truck barely changed pitch as the winch pulled the sow up into the steel box on the truck.

"It's the saddest thing," Steve said, "when big corporations buy up farms for feedlots and bull-doze down the farm houses. There should be a law against that. There have been hundreds of farmsteads bull-dozed out of existence in the past few years. One of the reasons they want to do it, they want to push the little guy off the farm, into town."

Most of the bigger feedlots we've seen along the gravel back-roads are owned by corporations, Steve told me.

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 2

Steve might look like a bear

of a man, yes, and you wonder how interested he might be in things beyond the job. Well, you'd be surprised. Certainly he is interested in history; his great-grandfather homesteaded some miles the north of where Steve and Cindy now live.

"I really like the people," Steve said as he swept a view of all the Wisner and West Point area with a turn of his head. "They are friendly, godly, they are always willing to help. I can guarantee, if you stop your car along the highway, someone will pull up in five minutes to see if they can help you. It can be an out-of-state car, people will stop. People here are hard-working, they have to work for everything they've got. Life is not easy out here."

We made our first stop. Two dead hogs, a mighty big truck. That's how it starts, that's how you start to fill the truck with dead animals. Steve grabbed the dead sow by an ear, slid the chain beneath it, looped and latched it behind the sow's front legs, and used the truck's power-winch to wind up cable and drag the dead animal up into the big steel box back-end that looks like a rendering truck should. He yanked on the cable, and the pin Steve put in the loop pulled out; the whole loop freed itself from the carcass and Steve was able to unwind cable off the winch, then he looped the chain around the other hog. If he pins his loop just right, the chain will always come loose from the dead animal, and Steve won't have to climb up into the truck to untangle things. You want to spend as little time as possible in the back of a rendering truck.

"I've been around livestock all my life," Steve said. "This smell - it's just another smell."

We pulled out of the lane. There was a car coming the other direction down the road toward us. "That's my landlord," Steve said. "He's as much my friend as my landlord." His landlord actually rents the land, too, from the people who own it, and subleases the house and yard to the Engelharts.

"We're the guys they hate to see but they're happy when we come," Steve said of the farmers he hauls for. "It means they've lost an animal, but they're glad we're picking it up."

"That's a air-ride seat," he told me, motioning. "You can raise it if you want."

"There--," Steve said, pointing. "A pheasant sitting on a rock."

"The closer you get to the river, the flatter it is," Steve noted. "We're right next to the Elkhorn River here."

Wisner Rendering has been in service for eighty-nine years, Steve told me. He bought the business five years ago, after having driven truck a year and a half for the previous owner.

"I am one of the last here who went to a one-room school," Steve said. I'd guess he's barely in his forties. "We had kindergarten through eighth grade. There were nine kids in the school - District 32. When I went from there to high school in Bancroft, I thought I'd gone to the campus of UCLA - there were twenty-seven kids in my class alone. I didn't know that many kids existed."

"I'm sad," he said, "that the little country school went under."

To be continued....

RIDING WITH THE LOCAL USED COW DEALER - 1

He says he's the last guy

you want to see but the first guy you call when you've got a dead steer or a hog has gone down. Nobody wants the job, but everybody needs it done. He can make a living at it, but he gets little respect. He's the fellow who picks up dead animals off the farms and hauls them to the rendering plant. He drives the "meat wagon," the "used animal mobile," the rendering truck. It's god-awful work, but it's honorable and it has got to be done.

Cindy Engelhart of Wisner Rendering laughed when I called and told her I wanted to spend a day riding in the truck while her husband went about his business of picking up dead animals in the West Point/Wisner area of eastern Nebraska. She laughed and said, "This is a joke, right?" Like it was a prank call, Candid Camera, or I was making fun of her. "This is a joke, right?" she said again. "We can't even get people who might want to work for us to spend a day riding in the truck."

"No," I said, "it's not a joke. Your husband does honorable and necessary work, and I'd like to spend a day riding with him."

Well, she'd have Steve call me back in the evening when he got home. When Steve and I talked, I arranged to be at the Engelharts' place in the country northwest of West Point by 8:00 a.m. on Thursday.

On Wednesday night, Cindy called me at my motel. She said, "We're having breakfast at 8:00 a.m." Okay, I thought, change of plans. "So - that means you want me to come out there closer to eight-thirty or quarter-to-nine?" I ventured. "No," she said, "it means I'm inviting you for breakfast."

I arrived on time for breakfast Thursday morning, May 1, Feast of St. Joseph the Workman, 8:00 a.m., in a grey rain. It would be a cool day, which is always good in the rendering business. Dead animals can get awfully ripe in the heat of full sun by the time Steve gets to the farm to pick them up. A dull, grey day helps hold down the stink.

Cindy was making pancakes when I arrived, and "fresh-squeezed eggs," bacon. After we all got introduced, Steve fed the cat, Cindy went on making breakfast, I found a chair at the kitchen table, we talked. Steve is a big bear of a man, you wouldn't want to have to tackle him, or break his tackle. He wears a fierce mustache on a jagged face, he's got enough muscle he could swat me down any time he wished. You could tell he wouldn't, though; he has interesting and interested eyes, this look of curiosity that comes across his face now and again. He likes to talk and has something to say. Cindy runs "Cindy's Sewing" out of the home - there's a sign for her business out by the road. Steve said she drives truck for him, too, when she has to, in the busiest times. The Engelharts rent the place they live on, they have some horses, the landlord feeds cattle across the yard from the house, Steve keeps his rendering trucks parked in front of the garage. After we'd eaten, Steve suited up - coveralls, his tall rubber boots, gloves. It was 8:50 a.m. when we climbed in the truck. The door of the truck is painted with the company's name; and I saw that I'd be riding with "Your Local Used Cow Dealer."

"First, we pick up some pigs," Steve said.

To be continued....