As Told By C.S. Beaty

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...

By Bob Coperstone Thanks for reading By C.S. Beaty! Subscribe for free to receive the first chapter of Chris’s book about being a loser in high school for free! A Corner to Pee In I am delighted to read in the Wahoo Newspaper that the Omaha Steel Castings Co. is planning to preserve the old circular cement corncrib at the entrance of its new factory at the northeast part of town. OSC President Phi...

By Bob Copperstone Empty Bird Nest Grief It’s taking the orphaned baby robins such a long time to die… It’s breaking my heart, and I feel helpless, but I don’t know how to save them. They seemed doomed to die, and to my horror and remorse, I’m partly, if not completely, to blame for their peril. In a grim ritual, I check the nest every couple of hours, hoping to see the mother robin feeding and wa...

By Bob Copperstone Having caught the bi-wheeled fever from Dad’s hill-climber Harley adventures, and as I stumbled into puberty, I chafed to dip my toe into solo motorized cycling. I got my chance when word got around in Wahoo that Lee Houfek was selling his Cushman scooter. I wanted it very badly. To my surprise, Dad bought it for me. I was only 13. I’m sure he had a tough time winning Mom over t...

By Bob Copperstone Some of my fondest Wahoo childhood recollections are cemented into my memory by three motorized two-wheeled vehicles. Thanks for reading By C.S. Beaty! Subscribe to read the first chapter of the book Chris is writing about being a loser in high school. They include a racing motorcycle, a docile motor scooter and, later in my adult life, a highway-hogging 750-cc Japanese cruiser....

You Can’t Bank On a Tree In July of 2019 people at the Wahoo State Bank, next door to the Wigwam, planted a tree out front. The city ordered it removed, sparking a minor squabble amongst Wahoovians. I put in my two cents: * * * July 13, 2019 A tree grows in Wahoo. Or does it? A newly planted young sapling juts out bravely from its nursery spot in the “bump-out” curb in front of the sleek new Wahoo...

By Bob Copperstone As a 10-year-old in 1948, I watched as the downtown Wigwam Café, run by my parents, Hank and Irma Copperstone waged an energetic but fripendly rivalry with the Fairview and Day & Nite cafés on the highway. The Wigwam’s competition was north of downtown along the combined U.S. Highways 77 and 30-Alternate route that cut through Wahoo, and included the Whirla-Whip and Dairy Queen...

By Bob Copperstone Since I was a kid playing on its rooftops 70-some years ago, Wahoo’s downtown skyline profile hasn’t changed all that much. The buildings, with a few exceptions, remain standing stoutly in place much as I remember them. But there are lots of changes to the contents of the (mostly) brick structures. The gradual transformation over fairly recent years may have escaped the notice o...

An episode of the animated version of the Garfield comic strip features the obese, anthropomorphic feline explaining his worldview in regards to nutrition and culinary criticism. The cartoon cat employs what he tags as "The Chair Test." His explanation is simple: You place a sample of the food in question on the seat of a chair and then ask someone to sit on it. Garfield hypothesizes that a food’s...

By Bob Copperstone The Wahoo Public Library in 1949 is an intimidating place, housed in an upper floor of the grim, 1891-vintage City Hall. I’m Bobby, a skinny 10-year-old town kid standing in front of the building just as the sun is going down. It is a gloomy and cold early-winter evening. Spooky shadows are beginning to fall, made even more ghostly by the low-wattage streetlights which were begi...

By Bob Copperstone My connections with dentists in Wahoo as a young boy had always been fraught by distrust on my part. I hated dental appointments, and a dentist was anything but happy to see me come trembling in with a well-founded fear of seemingly inevitable pain. There were three dentists practicing in downtown Wahoo in the 1950s – Drs. R.E. Sklenar, William L. Kling and William Houfek. Dr. K...