With McCook in the midst of celebrating Heritage Days, this is a great opportunity to reflect on the influential heritage McCook has on a regular basis ... something that many of us take for granted. Last week, I was hanging out in front of the Senator George Norris State Historical Site, or as it is more commonly known, the Norris Home. No, I don’t normally just hang out at historical sites, but was scoping out the yard for a future project...

This is McCook’s decade! I believe we’ll be sitting downtown after a Live at the Bieroc show in 2030 and look back and be amazed at what the community has accomplished. We’ll talk about how we built a new aquatics facility and new athletic fields. We’ll be excited about the improvements in programming and facilities at the Y. ...

This past weekend, I stood atop a 14,000 foot mountain in Colorado and was thankful for the opportunity to be there. While my family are regular skiers, we had never purposely climbed to the top of these mountains. Yet, there we stood, gasping for air and gazing for miles in every direction...

There is a crowbar sitting in the corner of my bathroom at home. In fact, it has been there a few days, slightly hidden among the robes hanging from the hooks. Now, most people would be asking themselves, “Why is there a crowbar in my bathroom?” I quit asking “why” a long time ago after locating my missing dish soap on the trampoline or discovering three bags of marshmallows had disappeared overnight...

Last weekend, I took the latest Graff child to college in northwest Iowa. It is a small school with a swimming program. Additionally, it was located in a small community, where he won’t get lost in the shuffle or just be a number. (The same can be said for McCook Community College and yet another reason for kids to stay here, if only they had a swim team.)...

Anyone who has ever read this column knows that I try to stay positive, focusing on the good things happening in our community and how to get involved. At the same time, my personal views and feelings make into the mix, as well as tidbits about my family much to their chagrin...

If there has ever been a need to be adaptable, it is now. When schools began closing down in mid-March, everyone - including myself - hoped that this pandemic would quickly pass and we’d be back to normal soon. As the weeks turned into months, there was hope that everything would correct itself over the summer. But as we head into fall, “normal” seems far off on the horizon and we are forced once again to learn how to adapt...

Learning, growing right here at home If you would’ve asked me back in March what I was going to be doing for the summer of 2020, coming home to McCook was not at the top of my list. It was not that I didn’t love McCook or enjoy being here but rather I was making plans and looking at opportunities elsewhere. Just like the rest of the college students in this country, COVID-19 had other plans in mind...

Anyone with more than one child knows that none of them are the same. They each have their own characteristics and their own quirks, their own way of learning and their own way of responding to a situation. Just as every child is different, every high school class is different. Ask any teacher who has been teaching a few years about the ebb and flow of classes through a school...

With my mother-in-law, Dolores Graff, celebrating her 88th birthday on Friday, my family will wrap up a month chock full of birthdays, including mine a few weeks ago. If birthdays do nothing else, they give you a chance to reflect on the past year and evaluate what you have accomplished and what has happened in your life. Sometimes it is a good reflection; other times you may be left wanting to just forget...

Alongside my driveway stands my favorite tree, a giant, gnarly cottonwood. As you approach our house, the lone cottonwood towers over all the other trees and serves a s guidepost to our location. We’ve planted many trees since we moved into our house nearly 20 years ago, but this tree continues to dominate the landscape...

If there is one thing which has changed for my family over the past few months, it is the reduced number of miles on our vehicles. For the past decade, if we weren’t hosting a road race for the Republican River Fitness Series, we would be driving to a nearby state for an athletic event. ...

“There’s nothing to do here.” “I can’t have a career here.” “There’s no entertainment.” On the flip side….”Good schools.” “Low crime rate” “Great outdoor recreation.” These are just a few of the views from McCook youth as part of a recent survey. This past spring, the McCook Community Foundation Fund conducted a youth survey through the McCook High School. All 400-plus high school students were given the opportunity to voice their opinion on a variety of topics related to their community...

If you want to get noticed, take out a billboard, wear a Big Bird costume for the day, write a column about your mundane life. Or even easier - go for a bicycle ride. Earlier this week, a friend along with a few family members went on an early morning bike ride to Culbertson to get breakfast. i spent the rest of the day responding to everyone who had seen us out riding...

A few fun facts about Kitten Season I am constantly reading, have radio news shows playing for hours on end and have downloaded so many podcasts I could drive across the country without repeating a show. Yet, I learned something this week that I had never even considered. And it had nothing to do with a disease or injustice or even the never-ending, incessant, mind-numbing wind...

There are many variations to the telephone game but everyone has probably played it at some point in their life. It’s the game where the first person whispers a sentence to the person next to them, so that no one else can hear it. That person then turns to the person next to them and whispers what they heard. And so on and so on...

Last weekend, my family and I camped at Red Willow State Recreation Area north of McCook. Every camping spot was taken with fire pits surrounded each evening by people enjoying the outdoors. Boats sped across the water with kids laughing as the tubes bounced off the boat’s wake. And kayakers paddled in and out of the bays regardless of their age and athletic ability...

This column contains my comments (with some modifications) made during Monday’s McCook City Council meeting as part of citizen’s comments, which cannot have any further discussion or actions taken. In October 2015, the McCook City Council appointed 12 community members to the pool committee. ...

If you are like me, there are events and activities on your calendar which you wrote down or typed in months or even years ago. While the birthday reminders are still applicable, nearly everything else has been cancelled or moved online. Just yesterday, I removed the reminder on my phone about the high school band trip to New York City, scheduled for later this month. ...

Let’s be up-front about this: I am not going to win the best homeschool parent award. (Let’s be honest about that too: We aren’t really homeschooling either because we don’t develop the curriculum and we don’t do the grading; we are just doing what we are told to do during this crisis, so really we are crisis-schooling parents.)...

I have had the privilege of being on various Zoom calls with people from across the country as we make our way through these trying times. And one theme continues to emerge on a regular basis: People are turning to the outdoors to deal with this crisis...

If there is one thing this pandemic has taught me, it is that our world is changing quickly and we are all learning to adapt on the fly. Maybe you are a small business trying to figure out if you should let your employees go on unemployment or keep them on the payroll while trying to find things to fill their hours...

Every day, we make choices. We make the choice about what we will wear, what food we put into our bodies, what time we will get out of bed. For a couple of my kids, that is closer to lunch than to breakfast these days. Many of these decisions are made without much thought, but right now we have the chance to be very intentional about those choices...

In 2001, I had been writing a weekly column in the Gazette for several years, highlighting activities in our community, recounting the highjinks of my family and commenting on things that peaked my interest. But that column stopped the week Graff kid No. ...