Menu
Memorial to honor conservation visionary, Gazette founder
McCOOK, Neb. — The legacy of newspaper founder and visionary conservationist Harry D. Strunk will be honored with a memorial at the corner of Norris Avenue and East H Street in McCook.
While the concrete work is being done now, the 10x5-foot granite stone will be unveiled during McCook’s 2018 Heritage Days celebrations in September.
Harry Strunk’s grandson, Grant J. Strunk, of McCook, has designed the memorial’s graphics, and Tim and Kristi Daum of Carpenter-Breland Funeral Home, McCook, are coordinating the creation of the granite memorial stone. Tim described the stone as a combination of Georgia gray and India black granites. The 10x5-foot stone will be inset into two 3x2-foot boulders.
In 1911, Strunk and his partner, Burris Stewart, started the twice-weekly Red Willow County Gazette. While the publishing industry proved to be too much for Stewart, who committed suicide after the first day’s paper was printed, Strunk persevered. The newspaper went daily and became known as the McCook Daily Gazette in 1924. The Gazette celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 2011.
At just 19 years of age, Strunk was quite possibly one of the country’s youngest publishers and editors. Throughout his long newspaper career, he never shrank from controversy and believed that if people were arguing the issues or were upset by his editorials, it was proof they were reading his newspaper. Strunk said often, “My goal in life is to irritate someone every day, and some days I do a whole week’s work.”
In 1929 and 1930, Strunk made journalistic and aviation history when the Gazette became the first newspaper in the world delivered by air. In a brand-new, bright orange and yellow 1929 Curtiss Robin C-1 airplane christened “The Newsboy,” self-taught pilot Steve Tuttle flew a 380-mile non-stop route six days a week to deliver 5,000 newspapers to readers in 40 Southwest Nebraska and Northwest Kansas communities. Flying 500 feet above each town, Tuttle or his “pilot’s assistant” opened the lever-operated trap door installed in a 10-inch hole cut in the floor of the plane and dropped tightly-wrapped bundles of newspapers to carriers waiting in open fields below.
In mid-1930, the Newsboy was damaged beyond practical repair by a tornado that tore through the McCook airport, and Strunk grounded the little plane and sold him. Years later, TWA pilots Perry A. Schreffler and R.C. Van Ausdell of Camarillo, Calif., restored the historic Newsboy. In 1972, the men loaned him to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Wash., where he is on display in the museum’s Great Gallery.
Strunk was always a believer in the power of irrigation to transform farming and lives in Southwest Nebraska. Caught in the grips of the dry and dusty “Dirty 30s” and following the deadly and destructive flood of the Republican River in 1935, Strunk and the Republican Valley Conservation Association led the campaign for dams and reservoirs that could save lives, irrigate crops and, as nice side benefits, provide outdoor recreation and wildlife habitat.
The new dam built in 1948-49 northwest of Cambridge created a 1,850-acre lake that the 82nd Congress named “Harry Strunk Lake.”
Enders, Trenton, Medicine Creek (Cambridge) and Bonny dams were completed, but there was no progress on the McCook-area Red Willow Dam project approved by President Harry Truman in 1944. Strunk told friends and family, “I want to live long enough to see Red Willow built.”
One month and one day after ground was broken on July 4, 1960, for the Red Willow Dam project, Harry Strunk died. He was 68 years old.
Kent and Susan Strunk own the home at 801 Norris Avenue and have provided a corner of their front yard for the new granite memorial and a flagpole.
Although they’re not related to Harry D. Strunk, Kent and Susan are impressed by Strunk’s legacy in McCook and Southwest Nebraska. Kent said about the memorial stone, “I can’t think of anything better” to grace the corner of his large front yard.