Arena donor Tom Kiplinger dies Saturday

Tom Kiplinger

Connie Jo Discoe/McCook Gazette

McCOOK, Neb. — McCook rancher John Thomas “Tom” Kiplinger died Saturday at Hillcrest Nursing Home in McCook, after a fall in his rural home about two weeks ago.

Tom’s funeral will be on the Red Willow County Fairgrounds in McCook, inside the big indoor roping arena for which he provided funding in 2003.

Services will be 10:30 a.m. Wednesday in the arena that bears his name. Visitation will be 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday at Herrmann Funeral Home in McCook.

The fact that Tom’s funeral will be in the arena “has always been set in stone. There can be no other place … not for Tom,” said friend Charlie Collins.

Tom was responsible, too, for funding for the Trudy and Alice warm-up arenas, arena enhancements and expansions, all the horse stalls and an endowment fund to maintain the arena complex into perpetuity.

At the time that Red Willow County commissioners accepted the endowment fund, in 2013, commissioner Vesta Dack said that all the components of the Kiplinger complex “have been given from the goodness of Tom’s heart, and because of his passion for the western way and cowboy way of life.”