Interviews remembered

I recently read an obituary in the Gazette for Vaughn King that launched a flood of memories. Vaughn was McCook’s water guy in the early 2000s, and back in the days when I was publishing interviews, he gave me a nice tour of our wastewater treatment facility. What stands out in my memory from the visit was a concrete spillway studded with concrete cubes to aerate the treated water that Vaughn called “effluent.” That was my new word for that day.

I think the concrete structure was fairly new at the time because Vaughn seemed pretty proud of it. He explained the benefits associated with aeration, allowing microorganisms to thrive and break down undesirable constituents in the water. Other elements of the tour were clearly over my head, but concrete blocks are a fairly easy concept to grasp. When I saw Vaughn’s obit, that low-tech concrete device was the first thing to pop into my head, but I also knew him to be a pretty good guy, as most of our City employees tend to be.

Throughout that period of my life, I interviewed state, local and national representatives, all of whom were gracious and generous with their time. Ben Nelson was still in the Senate, and since he was our local guy, we turned to him for comment on current events fairly often. We also had a good relationship with Chuck Hagel while he served in the Senate. My team was particularly interested in a rural economic development package that Chuck was working on with Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) called the “New Homestead Act,” but the war in Iraq put rural economic development on the back burner. To this day, I don’t know that any single element of that plan ever came to fruition. As a former military officer, Chuck was more focused on the war and as we now know, he later became the Secretary of Defense for a brief time during the Obama administration.

In what I can only describe as a privilege, I had an opportunity to spend a considerable amount of time with former Governor Frank Morrison when he returned to McCook. Our initial interview took place on the enclosed porch of his modest home, facing Norris Park. It was a great conversation, but a difficult transcription. I used a mini-tape recorder for my interviews, and Frank fidgeted with it the whole time. As he was talking, he would grab the recorder, tap it on the table, spin it, then tap it again.

He consented to my use of the recorder, as all of my subjects did, but I can’t help but suspect that the wily old guy knew that he was selectively sabotaging my recording. We stayed in contact for a while, but when I ran into him a couple of years later in the McCook Clinic waiting room, we spoke for the last time. He died soon after in the spring of 2004.

Frank also attended one of the earlier candidate forums that I threw together. I held mine at Sehnert’s, which I thought was a perfect venue for the event. Until then, they had been held at the senior center, but the availability of casual seating and a nice cup of coffee gave the events a warmer feeling (compensating for my otherwise rigid format). Frank sat at one of the large, round tables at the front of the room with Cloyd Clark, Walt Sehnert, and County Judge Wendell Cheney. Good table, huh?

Wendell was another one of those show-stopper, local interviews. Wendell’s time as a judge was interesting in that he was elected to the position, but had never practiced as an attorney. He recounted a few amusing experiences from his time on the bench, but his best story was about his service in World War II. Wendell was assigned to an army intel unit in the Pacific Northwest that found, collected and kept secret the balloon bombs that Japan sent over to us via air currents. He said that the bombs themselves weren’t particularly impressive, but keeping them out of the public eye was the biggest challenge. Recent events have reminded me of Wendell too.

Then, of course, there was the time that I interviewed Thomas Friedman in the back of a private plane on the tarmac at Midway Airport. You don’t do that every day. Friedman ran the Middle East desk at the New York Times, had won a Pulitzer prize a couple of years earlier, and had a new book on the bestseller list. It was a big catch and I enjoy the bragging rights for that, but I remain conscious that it would never have happened without the help of powerful local allies.

Those are just little chunks of a great career packed into a few short years. I could write a few more articles about the characters I met along the way, and probably will. Chasing stories, meeting people like Vaughn King, and pretending to be a journalist was a fun job. As I grow older and look back at the people I met, some still with us, many who are not, I think of the lessons I learned along the way. The experience, particularly those interviews with elected officials and civil servants, allowed me to look behind the curtain at what it takes to make a community work, and I nearly always walked away with a little more respect and a little more appreciation for the folks who make things happen in and for Southwest Nebraska.