Outsiders' impressions of McCook

Are you interested in how people see McCook? I guess that for about the past 40 years I've been really interested in how relatives, newcomers or visitors are impressed (or not) by my hometown.

The first impression of our city comes from Anne Matthews, author of Where The Buffalo Roam, a book about the visit to McCook of Rutger's University professors, Frank and Deborah Popper. Their "Buffalo Commons" theory was basically that the Great Plains should be given back to the buffalo with a few population centers such as McCook to service people living in the area.

Plains residents were generally incensed. The Poppers and the accompanying press were touring what they considered the Buffalo Commons and explaining their theory to unfriendly crowds. In McCook, they spoke at the McCook High School theater on a warm fall evening. I remember I did not go because my Mother and I had just come in on the Zephyr that morning early from a trip to see my brother. I've always regretted not going.

Ms. Matthews arrived from Denver, also on Amtrak and was grateful for the Chief motel's limo service, which was Susie the night maid with her station wagon. Anne describes McCook's business district as stretching, "up a half-mile hillside to the residential areas as bluff-top, where shady streets are lined with frame houses-all neat, a few grand-set back on wide lots." She visits with college faculty, hospital personnel and Judge Cloyd Clark, quoting Clark probably the most frequently. More than 30 pages of her book are dedicated to the Poppers visit to McCook and the surrounding Benkelman and Hayes Center areas. I enjoyed reading the book and felt that Ms. Matthews presented both sides of the Buffalo Commons debate.

Author Pat Jordan created a verbal picture of McCook in about 73 pages of his autobiographical A False Spring. The time he spent in McCook was in 1959. I was only in the seventh grade, not at all interested in nor aware of 18 year olds in McCook to play baseball. It was amazing for me to learn that the Milwaukee Braves had agreed to pay for 18 year old Pat Jordan's college education, plus a salary of $500 a month during each baseball season and to deposit $8,750 each June 27th for four years, amounting to more than $45,000 to be distributed from 1959 through 1962.

He was sent to McCook to begin his professional career as a pitcher with the McCook Braves of the Class D Nebraska State League during July and August, 1959. A footnote of Pat Jordan's said that the "McCook Braves were one of the wealthiest minor league teams in history and certainly the wealthiest Class D team that ever existed. Its players had been given almost $500,000 in bonus money, and many of them were drawing monthly salaries in excess of $1,500."

Pat called his new assignment a "land of horizons" as his taxi brought him into town from North Platte, passing our population sign reading 7,687 ... the Drive-In Theatre, A&W Root Beer stand, Phillips 66 Station, wood-fronted pool hall and the M&E Diner. I loved the way he described reaching the heart of the city, which he said was, "Inexplicably built on a hill. Main Street rose ahead of us at a 30-degree angle." Most people love the brick streets leading up the hill ... Pat Jordan seemed unsure.

As he said though, many situations he met in McCook were new to him, nothing from his past applied to this life. He had never heard of "dragging Main" but sat in front of the Keystone hotel and watched, fascinated. He called the ritual as being "indigenous to small, isolated towns like McCook." The ball player wrote of a "low-slung and ponderous black Mercury with narrow windshield and hump back that crawled up Main Street looking as sinister as an alligator."

My brother, Brad, who graduated in 1960, had a Mercury which never got beyond its dark gray primer coat, but I thought the author might have been writing about him. I e-mailed him the description and waited anxiously for a response. He said, no ... there was a black Mercury that came up from Kansas to drag Main and that was probably the car. He also said that Bud Kleckner bought his Mercury and later acquired that sinister-looking black one too.

The team played at Cibola ballpark which was roughly where the ball diamonds are located now west of the Red Willow County fairgrounds. The team's dressing room however, was the armory -- south of the present high school on West Seventh Street. The players walked or caught a ride.

Jordan spoke of discrimination encountered in McCook by minority players and also by minority fans. "When Stevens first arrived in McCook he had had difficulty finding a room to rent because of the town's ordinance prohibiting non-whites from living in the residential section." It was a snapshot of what we were in 1959 ... as seen by an outsider. Then there was the Open Forum letter from the visiting parent of a McCook resident. The letter began, "My first impression when driving into McCook on Highway 6&34 from Denver as not very good. It is unfortunate that Highway 6&34 through town is so ugly, because I later learned that most of the rest of McCook is very nice."

The rest of the letter was complimenting us on the preservation efforts, sidewalks, trees, parks and downtown shopping.

Seeing ourselves through the eyes of others is always enlightening. We need to hear the bad along with the good...see ourselves and our city as others see us.

The Barn Again! display at the High Plains Historical Society museum will bring many repeat visitors and some first-time visitors to McCook. There will be two special programs in the next few weeks, both free and open to the public. There will be a program including music, barn stores and more at the Fox Theatre this Thursday, Jan. 8 ... join us please. John Carter of the Nebraska State Historical Society will present a program at the High Plains Museum the evening of Monday, January 14 at 7 p.m. It will be an entertaining look at the manufacturing of food in Nebraska between World War I and World War II, including the role of the barn.