As Told By C.S. Beaty

October 8th, 2024 Dear Mr. Fudd, I’m sorry to report that I’ve yet to make it out to the bonsai tree stand out on Dodge Street. I was in the process at one point, but was distracted at a stoplight when a black convertible pulled up in the lane next to mine. The driver wore a shirt that looked like he was headed to a meeting with his bowling team, and the make of the car was one of those middle-of-...

October 1st, 2024 Dear Mr. Fudd, I read your “Strange Letter,” how is Pepsi nowadays? It’s been a while since I’ve seen him, but we never really got along, at least not since the Ferris wheel incident. It’s funny how something so trivial can leave such a big impact on a relationship. I was excited to get your letter, but I had a false alarm earlier in the week. I received a handwritten letter in p...

Dear Mr. Fudd, I’ve always wanted a pen pal. My brother had one once, it was an old neighbor girl who moved to Minnesota. I heard stories of this family growing up and had to pretend that I knew them and cared about them when we visited on summer vacations, but no one ever wrote me a letter. I think it was my parents’ idea to have them write one another, maybe to help spark a romance or to allevia...

A few weeks ago I achieved a lifelong dream by publishing my first book. It’s a coming-of-age memoir about my awkward high school years—kind of like Sixteen Candles if that annoying kid who asked Molly Ringwald out on a date wrote a book about his life. As it turns out writing a book and selling a book are two different skillsets, and now that I’ve sort of figured out how to do the first one I’m n...

A few weeks ago I achieved a lifelong dream by publishing my first book. It’s a coming-of-age memoir about my awkward high school years—kind of like Sixteen Candles if that annoying kid who asked Molly Ringwald out on a date wrote a book about his life. As it turns out writing a book and selling a book are two different skillsets, and now that I’ve sort of figured out how to do the first one I’m n...

I always thought I had a normal childhood. At least normal enough. Normal enough to eat macaroni and cheese for lunch and get told by my mom to “stop yelling” after my older brother hit me in the head with a miniature baseball bat. But when my childhood stopped being present tense and moved into past tense, I received new lenses to look at the past. I became an uncle, so I knew what it was like to...

By Bob Copperstone Thanks for reading! Subscribe to read the first chapter of Loser* A Survival Guide to High School Popularity by C.S. Beaty, Wedding in the Sand I’ve had a chance to recover from my trip to California, and now I’ll share some reminiscences with my friends. The trip was a destination double wedding of my nieces, Janie’s girls, Kathy and Tina Matschiner, who both live in Lincoln. T...

By Bob Copperstone Thanks for reading! Subscribe here and get the first chapter of Loser*: A Survival Guide to High School Popularity by C.S. Beaty! Letter to Editor Nov. 16, 2024 Bargain-Basement Comics By Bob Copperstone All the daily newspapers serving our part of eastern Nebraska are owned by a single entity, and share a thrifty, barebones half-page comics section. Recently they announced anot...

By Bob Copperstone A wonderfully quaint wooden viaduct once spanned Wahoo’ s Second Street between Chestnut and Broadway. It was a formidable, three-stage bridge with an approach, level top, and descent. It carried traffic over a small ravine, while the Chicago & North Western Rail Road (that’s how they spelled the company name then) freight trains passed underneath. Thanks for reading! Subscribe...

As it turns out, the only real difference between stroking the head of our pet cat Bengals and the head of a live cheetah, is that the cheetah seems to enjoy it more. I had the Cango Wildlife Ranch in Oudtshoorn, South Africa to thank for this knowledge, where they let you go into the animal cages and pet the animals. Granted, it wasn’t all the animals. And the line was too long to pet a full-grow...

By Bob Copperstone Dumpster-Diving Into History: Citizens Rescue Nearly Century-Old Bound Newspapers Thanks for reading! Subscribe to get the first chapter of Loser*: A Survival Guide to High School Popularity by C.S. Beaty for FREE WAHOO -- If it weren’t for just plain luck -- aided by the city library director, a history-loving studio photographer and a museum curator -- a slice of Saunders Coun...

It was a Saturday night that bled into Sunday morning when Patrick Kane— the Chicago Blackhawk’s number one overall pick in the 2007 NHL draft—was arrested along with his cousin for charges of felony robbery, theft of services, and criminal mischief. The high-profile athlete was back in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. When the Kanes’s taxi arrived at their destination of Eastwood Place in South...

My parents had their 50th anniversary this year, and during their party, I pulled them aside to ask them a series of questions about their relationship. My six -year-old son and eight-year-old daughter came up with the initial questions, but since those were all pretty stupid, we asked AI to write the rest of the interview for us. This is that interview. Thanks for reading By C.S. Beaty! Subscribe...

By Bob Copperstone When I was growing up in Wahoo in the 1940s and early ‘50s, carnivals made my summer vacations even more golden. That’s right, carnivals PLURAL, three of them. (Four, counting Ashland’s, but I couldn’t walk that far.) First off, there was the downtown Wahoo street carnival (today barely remembered by most people), second was the Saunders County Fair carnival, and third, of cours...

By Bob Copperstone Root Beer Recollections Pulling memories out of one's childhood is often a risky, hit-and-miss effort, and the results may sometimes (most of the times?) fall short of absolute historical accuracy. Often, I will pluck a plum from my memory, only to have friends or relatives who were there with me pluck altogether different fruits from their own remembering. Which are the correct...

By Bob Copperstone I Was a Teen-Age Soda Jerk Beginning at age 10 in 1949, and lasting through my teen years, I found myself rather unwillingly behind the soda fountain, feeding and refreshing the sugar-rushed customers at downtown Wahoo’s Wigwam Café. My parents, Hank and Irma Copperstone, had purchased the Wigwam, along with partners Clair (Muzzy) and Dorothy (Dodo) Miller. My sisters Rochelle a...

By Bob Copperstone Hi, folks: I'll share with you some fond memories of harvest time on the farm. I know that most of you were never farmers. Me, neither. But thanks to my Aunt Clara and Uncle Jerry Bartusek, the seeds of farm memories were planted deeply into my young mind, and I am gleefully reaping their harvest today. Here is my take on the memories, written for the upcoming newsletter of the...

By Bob Copperstone The placement of the city of Wahoo on Nebraska road maps quite handily positions Wahoo almost equidistant from each of three of the largest cities in the state. Omaha: (approximately) 45 miles; Lincoln: 40; Fremont: 35. Wahoo had its share of good doctors, optometrists, dentists, general practitioners and such, but for more specialized cases, we relied on a creaky-old bus system...

I’ve never liked being called the “baby of the family,” even if it is accurate. My sister, Denise, is 12 years older than me, so naturally our adolescent life experiences didn't have a lot of overlap. By the time I finished kindergarten, Denise was already out of the house. After she moved away for college, it didn’t take long before I noticed her spending a lot of time with a "friend" of hers nam...

I'm using a mint green Hermes Rocket typewriter to write this. It resides underneath my computer monitor when not in use since its low profile was designed to be so compact it could be toted around war zones for correspondences in Vietnam. Or something like that. It was the coolest looking typewriter when I typed “typewriter” into an eBay search bar after being infatuated by the documentary Califo...

By Bob Copperstone Coins of the Realm, and Where to Find Them While I was “Growing Up Wigwam” in the 1950s, I treated downtown Wahoo as if it were my own little kingdom. Thanks for reading By C.S. Beaty! Subscribe to read the first chapter of Chris’s upcoming book about being a loser in high school. My kingdom’s capital city, of course, was the Copperstone family-owned Wigwam Café, where my very s...

Warning: This story contains depictions of the deaths and tribulations of cute, fuzzy and feathered little creatures. Children, non-farmers and other super-sensitive individuals may be offended by exposure to the real world. By Bob Copperstone Thanks for reading By C.S. Beaty! Subscribe and receive the first chapter of Chris’s book about being a loser in high school. Chickens -- the raising of the...

By Bob Copperstone Throughout its active existence, The Nebraska Ordnance Plant near Mead was an early part of my life in Wahoo. Some of my school-yard friends had bomb-maker parents, I guess you could say. We children weren’t particularly aware of the bomber plant’s (That’s what we always called it, always adding the “er”) deadly but necessary wartime mission. I do remember somber snatches of gos...

By Bob Copperstone Having grown up in Wahoo in the early 1940s, it was inevitable that World War II would cast a somber shadow over my childhood. The Nebraska Ordnance Plant (“bomber plant” as it is still called) was near the village of Mead, a mere nine miles east of Wahoo. It wasn’t talked about too much, but for years it festered in the back of our minds that our little dot on the map was certa...

My wife arranged an early check-in time at our New Orleans Air BnB, we wanted to get rid of our bags before wandering through the city. An Uber abandoned us at our residence for the next several nights, Paige had found a signature New Orleans shotgun house so we could get the signature New Orleans experience. We carefully followed the check-in instructions, decided we were in the right place, and...