Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website.

Editorial

TIME OF REDEDICATION

Article Image Alt Text

At Christmas each year, I like to share a portion of a Christmas speech from President Reagan - I would like to think the hope he shared 40 years ago matches the hope we can have as we enter 2021. After a year of unprecedented challenges, it can be difficult to look for the bright side of things. It is important to remember, although the COVID pandemic is unprecedented, we have been in difficult times before.

Nebraska State Normal School

In September of 1872 C. L. Brainard, Sr., entered the state normal school at Peru, Nebraska, in what he called “my first real venture away from home.” Brainard was then only fifteen years of age but later wrote, “It was not so very hard to be away from home for I did not get along very well with my stepfather.”

TECHNOLOGY IN 2020

Article Image Alt Text

Over the past two weeks, I have met via video conference with winners of the Third District Excellence in Innovation and Adaptation Recognition (EIAR), as well as the Third District’s winner in this year’s Congressional App Challenge. While I prefer meeting with Nebraskans in person, being able to recognize Nebraskans who innovated in the face of a pandemic while using technology seemed entirely appropriate.

Christmas At Fort Robinson

Fort Robinson, Nebraska, provides the following holiday story of devotion and courage. It can be found in A Frontier Army Christmas, a book published by the Nebraska State Historical Society. Martin J. Weber, an old soldier, remembered: “December 1882 then a corporal in Troop H, Fifth Cavalry, I was ordered to report to the quartermaster at Fort Sidney, the nearest railroad point, to get the the Fort. A driver and a six mule team were detailed for the purpose.”

Flashbacks:

January 1960

A new radio station in Cozad would begin operation in September, it was announced in Cozad. The station will operate seven days a week from 6 a.m. to sundown. Call letters for the station were yet to be assigned by the FCC.

U.S. Congressman from Nebraska’s third district said his mail indicated that western Nebraskans want to continue the House Un-American Activities Committee.

January 1970

THE LOGISTICS OF TRANSPORTING THE COVID-19 VACCINE

Article Image Alt Text

By now, we’ve all heard the good news about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Each of them is roughly 95-percent effective against COVID-19, and they have both been approved by the FDA.

Thanks to Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership between the federal government and these manufacturers, we have developed these vaccines in record time. But creating a vaccine is only part of the battle. The next challenge is getting hundreds of millions of doses where they need to go.

THE 2ND AMENDMENT

Article Image Alt Text

At the end of November, Nebraska closed another successful deer hunting season. While hunting is a great benefit of our constitutional right to bear arms, it is not the primary reason our founders chose to specifically enumerate this protection in our Bill of Rights. Nationwide our Second Amendment rights continue to be under threat. In fact, ongoing attempts by the House majority to weaken our Second Amendment rights, not to mention possible future presidential actions, have destabilized the arms and ammunition markets causing widespread shortages and shocking prices for common hunting and self-defense firearms and ammunition.

Coal Thieves In Capitol City, 1878

The advent of winter at one time prompted many Nebraska householders to lay in a supply of coal. Those who lacked the money sometimes found creative ways to fill the family coal bin. From Lincoln’s Daily State Journal of January 27, 1878: ‘A successful raid was made upon the coal thieves frequenting the [Lincoln railroad] depot night before last. Ever since last fall our dealers have been missing from one to three tons per night taken from loaded cars standing upon the track.

COMMONSENSE HEALTH CARE

Article Image Alt Text

When I meet with hospitals and health care providers around Nebraska, both prior to and during the current pandemic, the impact of unnecessary regulations on their ability to provide care in rural areas is always at the top of their list of concerns. Over the last four years I have appreciated working with the Trump administration on these issues because of their persistent willingness to listen to rural Americans, take these concerns seriously, and act. We cannot afford to go in the other direction.

Hair Hoax In Nebraska, Late 1800s

It was the style during the 1880s and 1890s for women to augment their own long hair with carefully matched hair from other humans or animals. Nebraska women usually obtained this additional hair through local grocers. The trade must have been lucrative, because storekeepers sometimes inserted ads in their local newspapers offering to fill "hair embellishment needs." During the 1930s workers of the WPA Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration recorded the following reminiscence of a Nebraska woman whose desire for such embellishment in the 1880s led to a joke at her expense.