A city worker's price

Metamorphosis.

A seventy-five cent word that we wordsmiths use to emote creation of a beautiful butterfly. From ugly worms of green or gray that crawl on their belly, God majestically transforms that very same creature into one possessing brilliantly colored wings bold as the rainbow. Ah the beauty to our eyes as they flutter about their summertime business of laying eggs to begin a new generation.

Something similar happened in my 25-year absence from McCook while serving country in our Air Force. During my high school years, city friends told of their nocturnal sport, shooting rats at the dump in South McCook.

Frank Gillen and sons pumped gravel there, creating small ponds and leaving large mounds of sand. Good ponds for kids to swim and fish for crappie and bass. During the day it was a swampy area along the banks of the Republican River where the trash haulers dumped and burned their daily collections. Few open areas, mostly grown up to trees planted by the '35 flood.

Only a block or so from South Street, just below the breaks, a small stream meandered through the place. Fed by wetlands to the west it tended to overflow into the sand pits following big rains. Oil from servicing the trains in the rail yard above seeped through the high banks to give a sometimes colorful sheen atop the waters. Idyllic -- not!

When we completed our nomadic lifestyle to settle back on the family farm the former dump had been transformed into a pleasant city park. No sign of moldering trash, no peaks of sand, no sewage-tainted oily water, instead open vistas, pleasantly shaded picnic areas, pretty ponds populated by ducks and geese, and paved streets for easy access. Metamorphous. How did it happen?

Jack Lytle, then head of the street department, had a dream.

First off, he and his crew diverted the stream to the south to empty directly into the river. City workers augmented in large part from the Job Corps, then housed at the old Army Airfield north of town, thinned the trees.

Then the dump was covered with a couple of feet of sand, topped with good dirt. No more rats and smoldering trash, just a pleasant mound perfect for a concrete pad, a large roof and picnic tables.

Street department crews used their trucks, plus heavy construction equipment from the Job Corps, which was their purpose in being in the first place.

The ponds left from pumping gravel were interconnected by large plastic pipes so their levels could rise and fall with the level of the ground water.

They, too, are fed and kept fresh by underground springs feeding the northern most of the group. Then too the Electric Hose Plant, now Parker Hannifin, used fresh municipal water to cool some of their processes and piped that warmed but fresh water into the ponds below.

Even, for a time, the City laid out a rectangular shallow pond that in winter became a skating rink.

Later the City Council raised water rates and it became more economical for Dayco to build its own cooling towers. That source of refreshing water went away and it became necessary to pump and aerate the ponds with attractive fountains shooting into the air.

About any nice day I get warm feelings from observing parents and grandparents teaching their kids to fish in those pleasant ponds with other families enjoying picnicking in the shelter houses. A pleasant place.

Even before McCook became known as Fairview and grew to become a town, several families lived in dugouts at the crest of the small bluffs overlooking the river valley. Even into the 1950s, Jim Holmes lived in his "cave" there, sans plumbing or electricity ,just like the hardy pioneers. Jim survived by sharpening knives and other handyman tasks for the occasional customer. The residents that developed more modern homes along South Street, eventually abandoned their outhouses but still ran their sewer pipes to daylight and drain down the bank into the swamp below. Several of the residential lots south of the street were shortened by the crest of the bank.

Irvin Coyle, think C&K, donated the dirt and city crews hauled innumerable truckloads of dirt to make the slope more gradual into the park. The residential lots were filled out to their required length and a proper city sewer line installed.

More recent improvements included stabilizing the sloping pond banks with concrete pavers. When the Valmont Plant was built excess dirt was hauled by City and County crews to create the existing complex of soccer fields. Then the public toilet was moved from atop the sand pile between ponds to above the soccer field where it could be hooked to city sewer.

Originally, the roads through the new Barnett Park were surfaced in plain old Nebraska dirt -- dusty when dry, gooey when wet. It was about the time that Nebraska initiated a tax on the sale of gasoline and dedicated the revenue for building and maintaining roads.

That included city and county so McCook rapidly accumulated a large sum of money for "streets". Jack abetted by the Mayor didn't ask but envisioned that it was a good time to pave the dirt streets in our cemeteries and the roads through Barnett Park. Sometimes it is better not to ask when you think the answer will probably be NO. Just do the deed and beg forgiveness later. Paved roads through our cemeteries and pleasant park testify to that course of action.

Thanks, Jack Lytle for your dream that is now Barnett Park. Thank you too for paved streets done below the radar of bureaucratic oversight that too easily says NO. The people of this area are all better served by your insight and action.

That is how I saw it.

Dick Trail