Even though it happened 24 years ago, now, I can still remember it as if it were yesterday.
Peggy and I sat quietly reading on a warm summer night at our Hartington home when a ringing phone broke the silence, dragging us back into reality.
District 18 Senate candidate Doug Cunningham was on the other end of the line.
At first I was irritated we were getting a campaign call on a Saturday night from a man we’d told numerous times before that he would not be getting our vote in the November election.
We didn’t know him very well at the time, but he knew us and for some odd reason — he liked us.
He knew we were backing Sen. Bob Dickey in the upcoming election, and he knew there was nothing he could say or do to sour us on supporting Sen. Dickey.
It turns out, he wasn’t calling to make one more attempt at getting our vote, though.
He was calling to tell us Wausa Gazette Publisher Bob Reinhardt had a severe stroke and would no longer be able to publish the paper. He was afraid Wausa might lose its paper, so he wanted to see if he couldn’t convince us to at least take a look at it.
Cunningham had hit a soft spot — our dual love of small towns and small town newspapers.
It didn’t take long for us to fall in love with the idea, and it didn’t take long for Cunningham to become a good, trusted friend, either. In fact, we still see him from time to time and always enjoy talking with him.
Another politican we got to know because of the Gazette was former Governor Norbert Tiemann.
Shortly after we bought the paper in 2000, Nobby started calling a couple of times a month to tell us how much he liked what he was seeing in the news pages of the Gazette.
The reporter in me would always come out during our conversations and I’d ask questions — and anybody that knew Nobby knew he wasn’t afraid to talk.
Boy, the stories he’d tell. One of my favorites came when I asked him about his decision to put a state sales tax and a state income tax into place.
His response came with a laugh, “Oh, that one ended my career in politics,” he said. “But it wasn’t the toughest thing I ever had to do.”
That, Nobby said, came when he approved Daylight Savings Time for Nebraska. “The farmers were furious over that one,” he said.
Nobby’s affable personality and hard-work ethic turned his darkhorse campaign into a four-year stint at the Governor’s Mansion in Lincoln at one of the most critical junctures in the history of this state. His strong convictions and desire to do the right thing then made him one of the best governors the state has ever known.
I was proud such a man came from this small Knox County community, and such a man would choose to befriend me.
Not all of the memories from our time in Wausa were exactly pleasant, though.
I was working one day in the Wausa office trying to teach the staff how to format headlines when a long-time subscriber walked through the doors.
He looked at me and said, ‘’you must be the new guy. I don’t like what you’ve done to the paper. You won’t last two months in this town if you don’t change everything back the way it was.”
I was more than a little surprised by that one. You see, the Gazette was the fifth newspaper we’d purchased in an eight-year period. We figured we had the formula down. Go in, beef up the news coverage, but make only gradual changes in style or typography and every thing should be fine.
Well, I guess our changes weren’t gradual enough.
It turns out this old gentleman was pretty fond of the Times New Roman type face the Gazette had been using. He was not happy at all about our decision to switch to a Bookman font.
No one can say we don’t listen to our subscribers. The next week we switched back to Times New Roman, and stuck with that type until four or five years ago.
Honestly, I was half expecting him to give me a call when we changed to a Georgia typeface in 2019. The old guy scared the beejeebers out of me at the time, but now, looking at it through the long lens of history, it was just another way to show pride in this community.
So tonight, while we sit quietly on our back patio, reflecting on the years past and our time in Wausa, we will always remember that pride, the community, its people and this newspaper with fondness.
