Introducing retired newspaper reporter, Wahoo, Nebraska historian, and not my real uncle: Uncle Bob Copperstone.
Today’s guest is retired journalist,
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Wahoo,
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Nebraska historian,
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and not my real uncle,
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Uncle Bob Copperstone.
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All right, you ready for this?
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Ready as I’ll ever be.
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Okay, so the idea behind this podcast is to convince people that they’re interesting.
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Do you need to be convinced that you’re interesting?
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I feel like you probably already know that.
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What makes you interesting?
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Oh, hell, I earned it.
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How’d you earn it?
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By being interesting for so long.
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Okay.
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When did you first start being interesting?
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I never stopped.
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You were born that way?
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I was born that way.
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All right.
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So you’re born in Wahoo, right?
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Isn’t everybody?
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Oh, I guess I was wrong.
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Everybody that matters, huh?
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That’s true.
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All right.
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So here’s the list.
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I made a list of things that I knew about you.
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So you’re born in Wahoo.
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You helped run the family-owned Wigwam Cafe as a kid.
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At some point, you moved to California, and you became a newspaper reporter.
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You’re married at some point, I think.
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You don’t really talk about it to me.
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And then at some point you drove a truck cross-country picking up antiques.
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You told me that once.
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And then you moved back to Wahoo to retire.
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Was that about right?
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That’s about right.
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Okay.
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Why did you decide to become a reporter then?
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Ever since I was in high school, I was a bad student.
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Mediocre Ds and Cs.
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And I thought,
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well,
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at one of the classes,
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a civics class,
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the teacher asked us what we want to do when we get elderly.
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And I thought, well, I want to be a reporter.
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Well, that goes back quite a way.
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Did you know any reporters?
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Why did you tell her you wanted to be one?
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Well, wasn’t Clark Kent a reporter?
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So you saw a little Superman in yourself?
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Probably.
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At least a close friend.
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Anyhow,
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I started,
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when I went to California,
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or before I went to California,
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I worked at the Bellevue Press.
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right after graduation and I had that in front of me and I worked in a print shop,
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a newspaper print shop here in Wahoo and in Bellevue.
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And in Bellevue they let me work,
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they let me interview a guy who lived in a trailer court and had a thousand
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Tropical Fish in it and then their name was Trout.
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And so I made a little story out of that and they printed it on the front page.
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Since I was working on the press,
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the big cylinder press that printed the paper,
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I was able to print my own first,
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my first byline.
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I both wrote it and printed it.
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And I still have that.
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Anyhow,
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I started with the newspapers there,
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then I went to California after a year in Bellevue.
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I had gotten a Triumph TR3 sports car, an English sports car, and I drove that to California.
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I mailed the passenger seat ahead of time and put all my belongings on that spot.
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I drove to California.
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Got a job at a print shop there.
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While I was looking for work, I didn’t know how to type.
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And I asked the managing editor of the paper that I wanted to work at.
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He says, fill this out.
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And I said, can I use, can I write?
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Can I fill it out with a written one?
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And he says, yeah.
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But, of course, I didn’t get that job.
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What made you want to go to California?
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Why didn’t you just get a job closer to Nebraska?
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Well,
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I did work as a printer’s devil at the Wahoo newspaper in the print shop when I was
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still in high school.
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When I worked in Bellevue, I lived in a flop house on 13th Street in Omaha.
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And I had my time off tier 3 then.
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And I spent one winter in Omaha driving through that little sports car,
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trying to drive that through the snow.
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This ain’t for me.
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California calls.
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Took off between snowstorms.
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I drove as far south as I could to get out of that blizzard and carried it all the
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way to California.
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In your sports car?
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Yeah.
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Did you have a job then or you just decided to get out of the winter?
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I stayed with my aunt and uncle.
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They lived there since the 40s and that was my shelter.
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Did you get a job after you moved or did you have a job lined up already?
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No, I went job searching.
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I ended up at a print shop in San Gabriel that printed wedding invitations and so
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forth and that carried me through for about a year.
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And I decided to, I wasn’t making it at that print shop.
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I wasn’t making enough money.
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So I quit there and decided, my cousins were fuller brushmen.
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And I became a fuller brushman.
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Of the door-to-door salesman?
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Selling brushes?
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Selling brushes.
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Were you good at it?
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Well, I went from door to door.
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I didn’t, I was too shy to meet people.
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I’d go door to door.
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I’d say, nobody home, I hope, I hope.
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You’d mutter that to yourself?
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I’d mutter that and then plow it on through.
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And if I got somebody’s attention,
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I just held them there with,
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practically grabbed them by the collar and told them to listen to what I have to
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say.
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And I didn’t do well at all.
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I drove back to Wahoo.
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What was your pitch to sell fuller brushes?
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They last for a good long time.
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Did they?
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Whatever they’re looking at, that’ll last for a good long time.
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Somehow I thought that would be magic, but it didn’t work.
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It’s, uh...
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So I went back to Wahoo.
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So you went to, you’re a fuller brush salesman in California, you went back to Wahoo after that?
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Mm-hmm.
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Okay.
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Yeah, I was kind of discouraged.
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Oh, I was going to go to school.
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Okay.
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And I did.
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Okay.
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I went to the University of Nebraska.
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Back to Lincoln, went to school.
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Oh, when I came back from California, oh, I took, taking classes by mail.
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From California?
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No, from Wahoo.
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Did you ever actually go to class in Lincoln?
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Or was it all by mail?
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Yeah, I did.
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I took French class about a semester.
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There was a print shop course.
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Okay.
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It was in the basement of one of the buildings there.
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And I really took to the print shop work, type of work.
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I did that real well.
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So I thought well I’ll quit my job here but my grades were falling real bad at the university.
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That’s when I went to Bellevue.
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I was doing real well at the print shop there at the university that I thought I’d
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get a job doing the same thing and get paid for it.
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So I worked for the Bellevue Press for about a year and decided I’d go back to
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California and look for a job.
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All right.
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So you grew up in Wahoo.
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You went to California, became a fuller brush salesman, came back.
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Went to school,
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got a job,
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took a bunch of classes and got a job in Bellevue,
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and then you decided to go back to California in order to get a reporting job,
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a newspaper job.
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And I did.
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I told the editor there, I’ll work for a dollar an hour.
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Yeah.
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And they hired me and liked it.
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As a reporter?
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As a reporter, yeah.
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I had my own paper, a little weekly paper.
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I went to a city council meeting, my first one.
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That was part of the job.
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You keep track of what the city is doing.
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And Covina is a town of about $50,000, something like that.
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That’s small in Los Angeles County.
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I went there and listened to the little discussions.
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Went back the next day.
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Wednesday was press day.
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And I sat at my desk and Jim, the managing editor, he said, well, Bob, let’s have your story.
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I sat there and I sat there.
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Dune came and went.
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Jim finally says, Bob, where’s your story?
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I said, Jim, I don’t know what happened.
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I thought, well, that’s the end of Bob.
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Jim laughed.
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Didn’t know what happened with your story?
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No, I didn’t know what happened so I could write about it.
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I didn’t know how to write it.
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Nothing happened of note at the city council meeting.
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Apparently.
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I knew what happened.
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I didn’t know how to put it to words.
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Jim kind of chuckled.
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And he got on the phone to the city administrator and said, hey, Joe, what happened last night?
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And Jim wrote the story for me.
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Did he give you credit?
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Did he say it was written by you?
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No, no, no.
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Okay.
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But that was the last time Jim had to write my story.
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I went to the next one.
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I went to the library where there were three papers covering it.
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And I read what they wrote and got this hang of it and was able to write my own
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stories after that.
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So you went and you read what other people wrote about the thing that you were
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supposed to cover?
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Yes, I read Jim’s story and Farewell is the House Done and I learned from that.
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All the time learning how to type.
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Yeah.
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But it worked.
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On a manual typewriter?
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What was that process?
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You had a manual typewriter and then you... You turn the copy into the back shop.
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They read it.
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They put it on a line of type.
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Cast the lead type.
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And put that lead type on a...
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Printing Press and Print Your Paper.
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Is it just one at a time, every letter at a time, or how do they cast it?
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No, no, no.
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They read my copy and type it out on the linotype.
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There’s a separate machine that you type it into?
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No, the linotype does.
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Yeah, yeah.
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A different person does?
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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I turn in the paper to the back shop.
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I turn in my paper to the back shop.
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and story to the back shop and they put it down to type and print it.
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So a linotype machine,
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that was what you learned how to use and what you did in Bellevue or is that
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something else?
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No, my work stopped there.
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The reporters don’t do the linotype.
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But you did when you were in Bellevue, so you did your own?
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No, I typed my own.
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Okay.
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No, I typed
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When you were a typesetter, didn’t you say you did that before too?
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Before it?
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Oh, I see what you’re getting at.
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No, I never did that.
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I never had to work the back shot.
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I never had to print the paper myself as a reporter.
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Okay.
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Well,
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it gets a little more complicated because I ran a Ludlow,
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which Ludlow Press,
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Ludlow typesetter,
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which printed the fancy type.
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Okay.
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A larger type that wouldn’t fit on a line of type.
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So what was your next big story?
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So were you still covering city council meetings after that?
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Yeah, you do everything that you expect a little weekly paper to use, yeah.
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And sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes it’s not.
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How long ago were you at that newspaper?
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Actually,
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the Monrovia Daily News,
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or Monrovia was another paper in that San Gabriel Valley area,
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and they hired me as a reporter after that,
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the one that I had to learn on.
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And from there, that was a small daily report.
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And eventually the San Gibe Valley Daily Tribune,
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which was nearing 100,000 circulation daily,
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that was a big paper.
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And they lifted me out of Monrovia and the next step up was the Tribune.
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And I rose to the assistant city editor of that paper before I retired.
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And that was the last paper you were at?
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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So what was your duties like as the assistant city editor?
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They had a staff of about 20.
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And five photographers.
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And I was responsible for looking first at the copy that came through those
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reporters and pass it on to the next editor.
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Do you have any stories you remember that you had
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Were some of your favorites?
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Oh, excuse me, yes.
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I worked as a reporter for about five years.
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Then I was an editor.
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Yeah, I had some good stories when I was a reporter.
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I had a humorous vein sometimes.
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And I had my own political...
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Political writer, editor, writer for a couple of years.
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Any stick out?
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What was one that you remember that you thought was good?
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I was supposed to go to the hotel where Bobby Kennedy was murdered.
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I was supposed to go to that lay in Los Angeles when I was editor of the political
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editor,
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but I couldn’t make it and missed it,
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so I missed it.
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Writing an obituary for that.
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Really?
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Do you remember why you missed it?
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I didn’t want to go.
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Okay.
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I didn’t want to drive to Los Angeles.
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So you found an excuse to get out of it, huh?
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Get out of it.
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Foolish man.
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So what made you want to go back to Oahu?
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Why didn’t you stay in California?
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My mother was not well, and I was about ready to retire.
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And you’ve been living in Oahu ever since then?
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Yeah.
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California never was home to me.
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Now my sister Rochelle
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And my little sister Janie both moved to California too.
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Janie died pretty much early in life, bless her heart.
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But Rochelle is still there to this day and that’s home to her.
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She got married and raised a family.
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I got married and got a divorce.
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And so I never set any roots at that point.
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I should probably clarify you’re not actually my uncle.
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So whose uncle are you?
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Everybody calls you Uncle Bob.
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Rochelle and Janie, my sisters.
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My niece and my two nieces, Kathy and Tina, are Janie’s children.
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Actually, to my neighbors, I’m Uncle Bob.
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Yeah?
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Everybody, even your neighbors call you Uncle Bob?
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Some do, yeah.
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Yeah?
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Yep.
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Kind of trips off the tongue.
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Yeah?
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Yeah.
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And I’m so damn lovable.
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Yeah.
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You might as well be everyone’s uncle.
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That’s true.
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Why not?
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It doesn’t cost anything.
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Yeah.
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My kids are always,
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they call you Uncle Bob and they try to figure out how you’re related to them too.
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Oh, is that right?
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Yes, it hurts.
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Yeah, that could be kind of, that could be kind of
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So why do you why do you write so much about the wigwam cafe and your childhood
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what is It’s for some reason I can’t remember what I had for breakfast But I can
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remember when I was five years old.
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I was first day in kindergarten And it just comes to be natural.
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Yeah
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It’s just,
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I mean,
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down to the,
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what I was smelling when I first walked outdoors kind of remembrance.
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It just comes back.
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And if I’m not exactly on cue, I’m absolutely correct.
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There’s nobody who’s gonna correct me.
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I can be Superman’s uncle
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Nobody would doubt it.
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Nobody would doubt if you’re Superman’s uncle?
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That’s true.
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I won’t challenge you on it.
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You could bring up figures and dates, but it wouldn’t help me.
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How much has Wahoo changed since those times?
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Has it changed a lot or not by much?
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Just about what you’d expect.
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Missing some of the good stuff, God knows.
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But it weren’t all that good.
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Everybody lives a life that looks better from a distance.
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Yeah.
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I’m one of them.
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Your life looks better from a distance?
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It’s, well, I’m different from what I was, so so am I.
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So you would say Wahoo’s changed a little bit,
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but at the end of the day,
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it’s still got a lot of the same things or a lot different?
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I mean,
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you chose to retire and live here the rest of your life,
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even after seeing the glamour of Hollywood and California.
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Well,
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I tell you,
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I miss more than that,
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because I can entertain myself just about anywhere,
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but more than that,
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I miss the people.
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Of Wahoo?
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Yeah.
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What do you like about the people of Wahoo?
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Not much.
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You want to change your answer then?
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I wonder about that.
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Actually, life is the further away from it, the better and the milder it becomes.
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Well, you have anything else you want to... We’ve been going for about a half hour.
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That’s pretty good.
(00:22:16):
Anything else you feel like... Any wisdom you want to impart to the world?
(00:22:21):
Any thoughts about... Oh, God, don’t follow me.
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Don’t follow you?
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You can do better.
(00:22:29):
No, I... Wahoo people have a sense of humor.
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And I was born with it and I kept it.
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I think I owe it to a lot of the people I grew up with who treated me mildly and decently.
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Bless their hearts.
(00:22:59):
I hope to have a worthwhile
(00:23:10):
lifetime.
(00:23:13):
Sometimes when I wasn’t as human as I thought I should be, I forgive myself.
(00:23:24):
I did the best I could.
(00:23:25):
We all do the best we can.
(00:23:28):
And what they do in Wahoo is pretty damn good.
(00:23:34):
But the damn weather.
(00:23:37):
Curse that weather.
(00:23:41):
California’s got them beat on that, huh?
(00:23:43):
Oh my gosh.
(00:23:47):
I wonder what the heck I’m doing here sometimes when the snow flies.
(00:23:55):
I always did.
(00:23:56):
Now my dad was the, I don’t know why I didn’t inherit more of his.
(00:24:06):
He was born to be an Eskimo and missed his calling.
(00:24:11):
I was on the back end.
(00:24:15):
I was a child at the time.
(00:24:17):
I was riding in the back end of his 1947 Harley Davidson Hill Climber motorcycle.
(00:24:30):
And it didn’t even have a,
(00:24:31):
it had a little small shield,
(00:24:34):
windshield on the driver’s benefit up front.
(00:24:40):
But his arms were stretched out, bare arms, I might add.
(00:24:46):
It was wintertime.
(00:24:48):
Bare arms.
(00:24:49):
And I said, Dad, I’m freezing back here.
(00:24:55):
Aren’t you cold?
(00:24:56):
He said, no, no, no, I’m not cold.
(00:24:59):
Your arms are out there in the wind.
(00:25:03):
No, no, feel them.
(00:25:05):
Warm as toast.
(00:25:07):
In the wind.
(00:25:08):
In the wintertime.
(00:25:10):
Bless his heart.
(00:25:12):
So you didn’t inherit that from him?
(00:25:16):
I wish I had inherited his Harley.
(00:25:19):
You wish you inherited his Harley?
(00:25:20):
Yeah, I wish I had.
(00:25:22):
Later he had a real knucklehead full size.
(00:25:28):
Boy oh that the hill climber though that I was on the back of that’s a little
(00:25:37):
leather pad leather stuffed pad on that fender and that was designed for the hill
(00:25:45):
climber driver rider driver I guess to sit his butt back there and put the weight
(00:25:53):
on the
(00:25:56):
Powered Rear Wheel.
(00:25:59):
Well, I sat on that.
(00:26:00):
I was about 10 or 11, God knows.
(00:26:03):
And we were going to a hill climber at Morse Bluff.
(00:26:10):
This was in about 1949, I guess.
(00:26:13):
And he had to stop every mile or so on the bumpy country road
(00:26:23):
So my kidneys would stop aching.
(00:26:27):
I was bawling back there.
(00:26:30):
And we never could make a straight line to it because it wasn’t hell on wheels.
(00:26:38):
There wasn’t much of a suspension on it?
(00:26:41):
It was a hard tail.
(00:26:46):
None of that sissy stuff for us.
(00:26:48):
God knows I wanted it.
(00:26:55):
Didn’t you say he made like a special pad just for you to sit on on that bike?
(00:26:59):
No, that’s what that hill climber did.
(00:27:03):
That was its purpose.
(00:27:06):
A hill climber.
(00:27:07):
They had contests at Morse Bluff in this case.
(00:27:12):
And they’d all try to get up to the top of the hill without falling on their tail.
(00:27:21):
It was a contest.
(00:27:23):
I thought you told a story once that your dad had a special seat that you sat on
(00:27:27):
the back of his seat.
(00:27:29):
No, that was the seat I was talking about.
(00:27:31):
That was not meant for passengers, but it was designed for it.
(00:27:42):
Actually, Dad had bought that hillclamber from my cousin, my elder cousin,
(00:27:53):
He dumped it and never got back on it.
(00:27:58):
They were designed to be fallen upon and served a purpose well.
(00:28:06):
Designed to be fallen on?
(00:28:10):
To be dumped.
(00:28:11):
Oh, to be dumped.
(00:28:13):
No, the purpose of the hill climb was to stay on without getting dumped.
(00:28:18):
If you do, you get back on.
(00:28:20):
Okay.
(00:28:22):
So they’re meant to take a lot of abuse then?
(00:28:25):
Yeah, they were abusive, that’s a fact.
(00:28:30):
When’s the last time you were on a motorcycle?
(00:28:33):
I bought one of my own.
(00:28:34):
I bought a Suzuki when I was in California.
(00:28:38):
We rode that all over California.
(00:28:41):
I loved it.
(00:28:43):
Well, any parting thoughts or wisdom or anything else?
(00:28:48):
Oh, Lordy.
(00:28:55):
Yeah, brother, can you spare a dime?
(00:28:57):
A dime won’t get you much anymore.
(00:29:01):
Hey, baby, you might give it what you can.
(00:29:04):
You need to adjust your phrases for inflation there.
(00:29:08):
Brother, can you spare a 10-spot?
(00:29:10):
I’ll spare you a dime, that’s easy.
(00:29:13):
No, that’s not easy, I don’t have one.
(00:29:15):
You could have found something in my center console in my car over lunch.
(00:29:22):
I said I could have given you a whole bunch of dimes out of the center console of
(00:29:25):
my car when we were getting lunch earlier.
(00:29:30):
What would you do with the dime if I gave you one?
(00:29:34):
Probably tighten a screw.
(00:29:39):
Maybe I ought to get you a screwdriver.
(00:29:41):
No, no, no, this will work fine.
(00:29:44):
Haven’t you ever done that?
(00:29:45):
I mean, I’m...
(00:29:48):
I’m sure I have at some point in my life.
(00:29:50):
No, you can’t use a credit card either.
(00:29:54):
I tried that once and it broke.
(00:29:55):
The credit card broke?
(00:29:56):
Yeah.
(00:29:57):
Oh, no.
(00:29:58):
What kind of screws do you need?
(00:30:00):
How many screws do you need tightened?
(00:30:04):
Counting my brain?
(00:30:05):
Yeah, it seems like you got a few screws loose.
(00:30:07):
I think your screw is loose.
(00:30:12):
I’m good.
(00:30:13):
All right, let’s wrap this up.
(00:30:15):
Thanks, Bob.
(00:30:15):
I don’t know how to wrap up an interview, but you were the first one.
(00:30:19):
How’d it go?
(00:30:20):
Well, listen, I wish I could do better, but I was glad to try.
(00:30:26):
You did great.
(00:30:30):
All right, I’m going to turn this thing off.
(00:30:34):
Interesting People is produced by Chris Beaty in his basement.
(00:30:39):
And today’s episode was recorded in Uncle Bob’s recliner in his Wahoo, Nebraska living room.
(00:30:45):
If you want to hear more of Uncle Bob’s stories,
(00:30:48):
check out the As Told by Uncle Bob podcast episodes from the As Told by C.S.
(00:30:53):
Beaty podcast universe.
(00:30:55):
Please subscribe and tell all your friends about my interesting friends.
(00:30:59):
And if you have interesting friends, well, let me know so I can talk to them.
(00:31:04):
Signing off from the greatest city on earth, Omaha, Nebraska.
