Fifty years in McCook

The Sehnerts arrived in McCook on Oct. 31, 1957, with our two little girls, Susan, 4, and Marie, 2. (Our son, Matt was born later in McCook at the old Saint Catherine’s Hospital on West 4th St.) We were scared to death â€" out on our own for the first time, the new owners of Ben and Dora Schuering’s Harvest Bakery (the old Slauter Bakery).

A new town and a new business, which we could only hope that we could operate. On top of everything else, it was Halloween, and the movers had to leave half of our furniture out on the lawn overnight. No problem.

It didn’t rain, and we had absolutely no trouble with pranksters. The next morning the neighbors told us that it was perfectly normal for people to respect our property. They told us, “These are good people in McCook!” And 50 years later we can wholeheartedly agree. None better!

The last 50 years have brought about a lot of changes for us and for McCook. Our bakery has changed locations, from the 200 block to the 300 block on Norris. We changed from a predominately wholesale bakery to a retail bakery. Then, under Matt and his wife, Shelly’s ownership, to a multi-operation business â€" retail bakery, catering, pizza crust factory, coffee/sandwich shop, bistro cafĂ©, with Internet access to the world. The nature of business these days boggles the mind of this old baker.

In 1957, McCook was the hub town for considerably more than 100,000 people in Southwest Nebraska, Northwest Kansas, and Eastern Colorado. We were just emerging from a seven-year drought (sound familiar?) and business was very slow, but we were in a good location.

Traffic in those days went from DeGroff’s Store to the south of us, to Penney’s to the north of us. In those days, we had a product showcase on the street, which was filled with pans of donuts, peanut butter rolls, cream horns and a dozen other staples. It was difficult to walk by that window (and there was a lot of foot traffic) without coming in to browse.

I think we were lucky. We had not been in McCook very long when Myatt Volentine and his partners struck oil southwest of McCook, in what became the Ackman and Sleepy Hollow Fields. Sud-denly we had people flocking to McCook, filling all the vacant houses and apartments, and spending money like crazy. It was really a lot of fun.

The Bureau of Reclamation was very active in the ’60s. We were right in the heart of what was being called “The Great Lakes of Nebraska,” with the dams being completed at Cambridge, Trenton, Alma, and McCook.

The people building the dams were in evidence at every turn. There was so much demand for cabin sites at Hugh Butler Lake that a lottery system, for allotting lots, was inaugurated. Unfortunately, the lottery system was deemed unnecessary when the Bureau and Nebraska Game Commission drastically restricted the locations where cabins might be built.

In the late ’60s, I took a break from the bakery and we sold out to John and Lillian Power. John was an excellent baker and a neat fellow to know. He had had bakeries in Pender and Gothenburg before coming to McCook. The Powers proved to be real assets for McCook. After six years Jean and I bought back into the bakery. (At that time we changed the name to “Dutch Oven Bakery,” which name we used until Matt bought the bakery in the 1990s).

After running the bakery for three years as a partnership, we bought the bakery in McCook and John and Lillian moved to Sterling, Colo., where they bought another bakery.

In the 1970s, the bakery endured a crisis, which only marginally affected housewives. Sugar, which had been selling for some $18/per hundred weight, suddenly escalated to over $80/cwt., effectively putting a lot of small bakeries and donut shops throughout the nation out of business.

They say that no ill wind blows that does not benefit someone. That proved to be the case with our bakery. At this time Gamble Robinson, our principal wholesale house (with warehouse and offices at Third and A Street) suffered a disastrous fire, which threatened to destroy their entire structure and contents.

The firemen managed to save the building and much of the contents, but all of their bags of sugar were partially damaged by water. Chick Wagner, the manager (and Mayor of McCook at the time) inspected the bags of sugar and determined that only the outer layer of paper was wet. The sugar was unaffected. When the insurance company considered the sugar a total loss, Chick called and offered us his entire supply for his cost. Of course we had them bring it over. It was a godsend for us, and a charitable act on Chick’s part, that probably kept us in business through the crises, which abated somewhat later in the year.

In the 1980s we lost our lease on our location in the 200 block of Norris, and were forced to move one block north, to the present 312 Norris Ave. location. It was at this time that we put in the coffee shop, and were able to replace and upgrade much of the bakery machinery in the bake shop. We found that people enjoyed the coffee shop.

By the late 1980s, things had changed again. Matt had graduated from the University of Nebraska, and the American Institute of Baking at Kansas State University. He was working as a supervisor in a large bakery in Denver when I was forced to quit working to recover from heart surgery.

Matt and his new bride, Shelly, decided that they would like to come back to McCook to raise their family and that they would buy the family bakery. No sooner than they made their move the McCook Hinky Dinky Store decided to put in a large bakery, followed almost at once by the building of the Super Walmart Store, with an even larger bakery.

Matt was forced to change the nature of the business once again. He immediately expanded the small catering business that we had begun, then bought out the Wiemers Parbaked Pizza Co.

Both of these operations have continued to grow over the years. At the same time they changed the nature of the coffee shop by expanding into the building to the south of the bakery, by opening up the Bieroc CafĂ©. In addition to offering coffee and rolls and donuts as we did in the old location, they have added a line of gourmet sandwiches for the noon lunch business. The Bieroc location has provided a location for in-house catering. In addition it is the home of the popular “Live at the Bieroc” series, where folk and blues artists perform once or twice a month as they pass between Omaha and Denver. Those events have proved to be a lot of fun and have provided another form of entertainment for the community â€" and an additional way of keeping “Live Music Alive” in Southwest Nebraska.

All in all, it has been an exciting time to be living in McCook these last 50 years. No doubt the next 50 will bring its share of challenges and changes, but if these last 125 years of our town’s existence have proved anything, it is that we are adaptable, and we in McCook will make whatever changes are necessary to keep McCook a vibrant and viable city far into the future.