Inspiring blog

Dear Editor,

Where are they now? We sometimes wonder what happened to people we know. When I was coaching high school tennis at McCook High School I met a young man who played tennis on the Grand Island High School tennis team.

He was very polite, honest, was quite mature, and had a great attitude. His name is Jeff Schmahl. Many of the readers may remember Jeff as the sports announcer for KOLN/KGIN TV in Lincoln for many years.

Jeff was also instrumental in constructing and operating the Husker Vision in Memorial Stadium in Lincoln.

Recently a segment of the news on KOLN was dedicated to visiting with Jeff who now lives in New York City. A recent editorial in the Omaha World Herald sports page also was about Jeff.

Why were they talking with and about Mr. Schmahl? Jeff found out on April 16, 2014 that he has pancreatic cancer that has spread to his liver.

He was told he probably had less than a year to live. Terry Pettit, great volleyball coach at the University of Nebraska, encouraged Jeff to write a blog about his battle with this cancer and his thoughts of his past and future life.

Jeff started this blog on the Internet on May 6, 2014. He has stated that when he is no longer able to write, he will dictate to his son Zach.

I have read all his segments of the blog and I believe many of your readers would like to visit his site. I encourage you to start at the beginning (do not jump to the most recent) and read all of them.

They are interesting, informative, inspirational, and have many words of wisdom. Even though you may not know Jeff personally, it is hard to not want to read the next segment. I would like to tell you some of the items written about that I found very interesting, but I will leave that up to your readers -- some are sad, others inspiring, and one provides hope.

When I started reading the first one, there were over 1,200 people following the blog. Two days later there were over 1,900.

You can sign up on the blog site to be contacted by email when Jeff has written a new segment - just click on the follow box on the lower right side of the first page.

Enough said. The blog site is called The Last Train and can be found on the Internet at http://the-last-train.com/introduction/ Remember when reading start at the first one and continue to the current one.

Dennis Irwin,

McCook, Nebraska