Progress to Polk

Notes from Margo:

We’ve really cranked out the mileage, running through a state a day the past two days – Colorado to Kansas, Kansas to Nebraska. And we got all literary, too. Highlights were the childhood home of Willa Cather, and a visit to the home of the late Norris Alfred and his late weekly newspaper, the Polk Progress, in Polk, Nebraska (See Lynn’s notes about this).

In Nebraska, Willa Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud looked a lot more prosperous than the towns we rolled through on our way there on Highway 136. We had camped on Harlan County Lake near Alma, where we had a spectacular sunset while Lynn tried unsuccessfully to light a campfire. He finally admitted defeat and decided to enjoy the fire in the sky, and its reflection in the lake. We hit the road in the morning, looking for a cup of coffee. Republican City, Franklin, Riverton – towns, like so many here, that reached their peak populations in the 1920s or '30s. The two- or three-block-long downtowns were asleep at 9 a.m. and still asleep at 10. Maybe we missed the morning rush, but we couldn’t find an open café to coffee ourselves up in three straight towns.

(A side note: Most of these small towns where we stopped, even though they are shrinking, slowly dying with no tax base, somehow maintain small, but tidy public parks or rest areas. The rest rooms are clean. Overnight camping is allowed in some city parks. Even Polk, Nebraska, population about 800, had two places where you could camp overnight. It’s as I remembered from my bike trip through here 25 years ago: this part of the high plains takes hospitality seriously.)

Red Cloud, as we suspected, has made a little industry from Willa Cather, so the downtown was alive. We saw a few B&Bs, an open restaurant and a general store selling boots and jeans – and renting tuxedos. A bookstore is open by appointment. At the Cather Foundation, we were treated to a tour by Angela. She gave us a private $5 tour of Cather’s childhood home, even though no tour was scheduled just then, the latest in our string of lucky breaks. Cather’s home (at right), a few blocks from downtown, accommodated the seven Cather children, mom, dad, grandma and a live-in maid, all in pretty close quarters. (When the Cathers moved from Virginia to Nebraska in the 1870s, they packed their plates and china in Confederate money.) Willa had papered her attic room in a rose-patterned wallpaper, now of course very faded. But I love that being a future great writer didn’t keep her from being good and handy, too.

Her father’s office and the doctor’s office where she worked as a youth were, like most of the downtown buildings, red brick. The streets were also paved in red brick – dating, according to Angela, from the early 1900s. So the streets were muddy when Cather was here, but now they are truly lovely. And how often can you say that about pavement?

We also saw red brick streets in Oberlin, Kansas, where we stopped just to be able to tell Kenny we had. We called her at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, just to say: “Hi, honey. We’re in Oberlin. (Pause). Kansas.” It took a few seconds before she laughed. She’s in the middle of midterms.

Notable:
I saw prairie falcons on Norris Alfred’s “birding road” on the Platte River near Polk. My bird book describes them as “medium-sized falcons,” but they look huge to me. They perched on the crosspieces of telephone poles and calmly looked around for prey with their yellow and black eyes.

Notes from Lynn:

“A future world of people, who will long have been conditioned to doing with less, may also read about life in the 20th century and wonder at our greed: ‘They had so much. Why couldn’t some of it have been saved?’ ” This comment, at once so simple and complex, appeared March 28, 1974, in the Polk Progress, a tiny Nebraska weekly that was written, edited, printed and produced by a shy, gentle, self-effacing prairie genius of the Linotype.

Here are more words of acuity from the late Norris Alfred:

“Our observations have confirmed the Great Truth – where there are humans there is change, and not necessarily for the better. We are not thinking about changes we can see in the mirror. The process of aging is a natural one which is hastened by the worries and anxieties of weekly newspaper publishing. The furrowed brow, twitching ears, slack jaw, reddened nose, watery eyes, thinned hair, stooped posture and limping step are the rewards of our work which we accept with the usual amount of necessary groaning.” (Oct. 7, 1971)

“Converting Nebraska sandhill land to row-crop agriculture has been the most disastrous development of contemporary industrialized agriculture and its high-cost efficiency.” (Feb. 27, 1986)

“There are moments memorable when the conjunction of time, place and activity are harmonious; when the psychic is sensitive to soothing stimuli; another way of describing the pleasure and contentment we felt while fishing at the Polk County Wildlife Club’s sandpit, north and west of Hordville Wednesday evening.” June 17, 1971)

Excerpts from the Norris file explain our pilgrimage Friday to the nice little village of Polk, population about 800, in the field-corn farmlands of south-central Nebraska. Norris Alfred, like many of the farm folk in these parts, came from a Swedish family but was named for the Cornhusker state’s progressive senator, George W. Norris. His namesake had hoped to become a serious artist, but he returned from Kansas City to his birthplace to look after his elderly parents.

As a kid, he had helped out in the Progress backshop. When the owner quit, Norris took over. He could set type on the 1906 model Linotype, find what he needed in a California Job Case and operate the hand-fed Big Drum Babcock Press. He never studied journalism. Besides, his subscribers turned first to what in a non-corporate age were known as the “personals”or "locals”: Lars Larsen quit farming and is moving to Omaha … Emily Peterson and children visited her parents, the J.W. Thorwalds, in Central City … The sixth birthday of little Sam Mitchell was celebrated at the Lutheran Church on Saturday; the guests were … etc. His favorite subscriber was a pig farmer who once told the editor, “I like your paper, Norris, because I can sit right down and read like hell about people I know.”

I became a subscriber, the personals notwithstanding, when Examiner reporter George Williamson gave me a copy. He got it from Norris Alfred’s brother, Oren Alfred, a printer for the San Francisco Newspaper Agency when it produced the Examiner and Chronicle. I sent copies to several friends. In the end, his subscribers in 49 states outnumbered the population of Polk. I had a devious plan to enhance Norris’s standing at home among the (mostly) conservative townspeople, farmers and businessmen of Polk. Because of the Academy Awards, “nomination” of the five finalists has become a magic word. For the Pulitizer Prize, anyone can nominate anyone. So I clipped out a selection of Norris’s gems and sent the package to the judges at Columbia Univcrsity, mostly big-shot editors and renowned academics. It fell like a rock in a deep well. I never heard back. But I sent word to the Lincoln Journal and the Omaha News Herald that this quiet iconoclast at a very small newspaper had been “nominated” for journalism’s biggest award. Both papers did stories on Norris. Then the parasites of television sent crews down to Polk, which confirmed for the local folk that their kindly editor was a celebrity.

Norris died in 1989, and the Progress died with him. Some of his epistles have been collected in a book by Prairie Fire: “Butterfly Against the Gale.” Copies of the Progress have been filed and preserved in the city library. When we walked up Main Street in Polk, we saw the boarded-up newspaper office and printing plant. He had bequeathed his backshop to someone interested in turning it into an old-time newspaper museum, but nothing happened. (Norris said once, after viewing a Print Museum as a roadside attraction in another Nebraska town: “I guess that I … am … a … museum myself.”) He decorated the boards across the Progress window with bits and parts of his printshop, a sort of machine-shop collage. (at right) Through the window curtain we could see the old Linotype, shrouded and dead.

“Nearly everyone exits this life in a prone position, or hopes to (we have never heard of a head-first or feet-first burial) and as long as they can stay awake, they fight stretching out on their back for fear someone will put a lily in their hand and read an obituary.” (March 2, 1972)

Next: Marsha Redman and Poor Ralph in Polk

Mileage from Boulder, Colorado to Alma, Nebraska: 378

From Alma, through Polk, to Emerald (near Lincolon): 177

Total mileage so far: 3,850

Price of gas in Red Cloud, Nebraska: $2.39