By Bob Copperstone
Today is any school day afternoon in the 1940s. I’m a pupil at West Ward Elementary School in Wahoo.
Mr. Meduna, the janitor, rings the final “school’s out – go home” bell. (A t my age, anyone to whom I stand belt-high must never be called by their first names; that would be rude. His first name was Lloyd).
An explosion of kids, finally freed from disciplined movement and mandatory soft voices, erupt shouting and screaming out of the heavy wooden double front doors to head for home.
I don’t go home, though. My house would be empty, anyway. Instead, I strike out southeast on a schoolboy’s typically erratic path.
On the way, I investigate lots of ant-hills; I watch a city work crew digging a ditch; I kick a can down the road; or I play in a mud puddle or stream, if I can find one. There is a weeping willow tree on a hill across from the Lutheran Church whose elastic young branches yield perfect buggy whips.
Thus armed with my whip to fight off imagined wild dog packs and vicious comic book-style enemies, I forge ahead.
Destination: Downtown, and the Wigwam Café, owned by my parents, Hank and Irma Copperstone.
These are my magic places.
These are where the lights are shining, where the crowds gather, where the action is.
Downtown is where people know me, love me, and pay attention to me.
These are my people.
I walk the busy sidewalks, making sure to greet everyone with a polite “hi”, even if I don’t know who they are. They know me, of course; I’m Hank and Irma’s young son.
“Hi, Bobby” or, “Hey there, Little Hank!”
I didn’t ignore a friendly downtown greeting. That would be rude.
Bustling Downtown Wahoo
When I show up downtown after school, I usually am on-call to run errands for supplies. We need wieners (the Beranek’s original-recipe weenie, now called the Wahoo Weiner), so I rush out the Wigwam’s door, go east in the alley and cross Linden Street to the OK Meat Market.
I can almost smell my way to the store. The tangy aroma of cold-cuts, sausages and spiced pork permeate a big part of downtown, especially if the owners, the Beranek brothers, are firing up their brick and wooden smokehouse out back in the alley.
While Jerry Beranek or his brother fills my white butcher-paper-wrapped order, I play on the huge metal weight-scale standing tall in front of the counter for customers’ use. I am a skinny little rascal, and don’t really care what I weigh; I just want to see the arrow pointer move. If I play there too long, a white-aproned butcher barks at me to stop jumping on it before I break it.
(The scales are still in that locked-up vacant building today, but the Beraneks and their business are gone).
I don’t have to pay there for my order. The butcher identifies the contents of the in the white butcher-paper package with a black crayon marker, and gives me a cash register receipt that I was supposed to put in the Wigwam’s cash register so Dad could balance our books. I usually remembered to do that.
Next, I usually need to go to the Wahoo Bakery next door north of the meat market for loaves of white or rye bread, dinner rolls and hamburger buns.
I can follow my nose there, too, inhaling the warm, sweet, yeasty fresh-baked scents of the goods within.
There are no weight scales at the bakery to play on, but the racks of scrumptious pastries tempt me while they fill my order. Besides, if I want my weight and fortune printed on a little white card, I’d go to the penny scale at the entrance of the senior Fred Kolterman’s Ben Franklin dime store a few doors west of the Wigwam.
I peer over the bakery counter and see Gordon (Rocky) Rockwell working in the kitchen amid the flour dust cloud, ovens, giant food mixers, appliances and chopping blocks. Rocky is the father of Brenda, my sister Rochelle’s late good friend, and is the husband of Twila, my mom’s pinochle club friend (more about the card club on another day).
I am often sent to Trautt’s Hardware store across Fifth Street from the Wigwam. I balk at this chore, because Dad usually wants me to buy a cheap little screw or some penny-ante object. Tom Trautt, one of the town’s friendliest people, runs the store with his parents. He’ll busily hunt down my paltry items and drop them into a tiny paper bag. I hand him some coins and apologize for such a pitifully small sale.
“No, no, no,” Tom chides, beaming even more brightly, assuring me that he is glad to see me and be of help.
It is for this reason I always try to give Trautt’s my bigger transactions, too, although I could have patronized Coast to Coast, Gamble’s, Svoboda’s Hardware, or the local Farmer’s Co-Op store.
Imagine today having seven hardware outlets (according to Don Berns, of the family’s Gambles store) in this small town, each of them employing people who, unlike today, are paid decent wages so they don’t have to take second or third jobs to support their lifestyles.
Big-City Sidewalk Etiquette
I scrupulously follow small-town greeting protocols in Wahoo, but learned the hard way that our street courtesy rules might not apply in the Big Three cities – Omaha, Lincoln and Fremont.
One day when I am old enough at maybe 11 or 12, I solo to Lincoln on one of the smoke-belching, ancient independently-owned diesel buses that make daily round trips to and from those big cities.
I can’t remember if I bought a ticket at the City Café or, more likely, gave my coins – probably a dollar and change – directly to the bus driver.
The City Café served as kind of a depot, and the buses parked at the Broadway and Fifth curb alongside the Lindley Clothing store. Later, the bus stop, sign and all, was moved to the Cerney auto service garage catty-corner northeast of the Court House. (I can’t remember if the sign read “Bus Stop” or “Bus Depot”). Scooter’s coffee drive-through sits on the Cerny site now.
After a swaying, lurching bus ride, I am deposited at Lincoln’s huge (to me) bus depot, where I begin my odyssey by walking the few blocks toward the broad sidewalks of Lincoln’s O Street, and the big department stores and wonderful small shops within.
I am particularly fascinated by the two tiny “magic tricks” shops -- one on O and the other alongside the Stuart movie theater. I buy my exploding cigarette loads there, and my itching powder, car engine “bombs” and assorted gimmicks that sealed my reputation around downtown Wahoo, and the Wigwam, as a nasty little practical joker. But I now realize that I got away with that and a lot of other shenanigans solely because I was Hank and Irma’s’s kid.
Lincoln’s bustling crowds overwhelm me and make this small-town boy even more wide-eyed and shy.
Walking down the city’s broad sidewalks with my chin tucked down and my eyes shyly darting up and down, I mutter “Hi” to everyone who looks my way, or even if they don’t see at me at all. I feel compelled to recite the polite “Hi” that I never have to show in Wahoo.
Some startled Lincoln pedestrians smile at me and respond, but others are taken by surprise and blurt out a tardy “hi” after they had already passed me.
Eventually, I realize that Lincoln isn’t Wahoo. No one seems to care if I say “hi.” I know they can’t tattle my rudeness to my mom and dad, so I eventually adopt the big city eye-averting mode, bustling purposefully through the crowd and not looking directly at anyone at all. In other words, I am big-town rude.
I learn one of life’s little lessons in Lincoln, and I secretly enjoy being adult-grade rude. Unavoidably, though, I believe I lost of little bit of my boyhood innocence.
(To be continued)
Share this post