04 | August | 2010 | Leo Adam Biga's My Inside Stories

Isabella Threlkeld’s lifetime pursuit of art and Ideas yields an uncommon life

August 4, 2010 leoadambiga 9 comments

Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound, 1913-1914

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UPDATE: As some of you who have recently come to this post know already the subject of this profile, Isabella Threlkeld, passed away March 4, 2012. I met her just a few years before. By the time I met her she was quite on in years and living in a retirement community, but her passion and curiosity for life were undiminished. She will always be one of the more unforgettable characters of my journalistic career. Rest in peace, dear Isabella.

Someone, I don’t remember who now, told me about Isabella Threlkeld, suggesting she’d make an interesting profile subject. To say the least, she did. My New Horizons piece about Isabella follows, and I believe it’s a case in point of how people all around us have fascinating stories if we only take the time and show the interest to search out and learn their tales. As a journalist, I am in a privileged position to seek out people’s stories and to share them with others. For every great story I come upon and end up writing, I can only imagine there are dozens, hundreds, thousands, that I miss or will never have the time to get to. I am only one writer, one storyteller, after all. I am glad I found Isabella and her story. As you’ll read, she is my prototypical profile subject in that she has a great passion and magnificent obsession that permeates every fiber of her being. During the course of several conversations I had with her before the interview and then during the interview and in subsequent conversations, she described an unlikely association with Albert Einstein that I wanted to believe but that I couldn’t find any confirmation of. I still want to believe it happened the way she tells it, but even if it didn’t it’s just another manifestation of her passion and magnificent obsession, which are qualities I find irresistible.

Isabella Threlkeld’s lifetime pursuit of art and ideas yields an uncommon life

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in the New Horizons

Isabella Threlkeld could feel sorry for herself. She chooses not to. She’s too busy enjoying life. The Omaha artist, art enthusiast, collector, instructor and art therapist is still very much engaged in her passion and work at 86. Still a vivacious force of nature whose brassy personality is the life of any gathering.

Opinionated, curious, quick-to-laugh, Isabella loves the stimulation of a good conversation, book or artwork.

Despite compromises to her age she still paints/draws every day, her precious sketchpad never far from her lithe hands. She even has a new exhibition opening Dec. 5 at the Hot Shops Art Center in NoDo.

The show’s Futurism theme perfectly expresses this dynamo’s focus on energy and states of being. Always reading, always exploring, she’s more attuned to the here-and-now and things-to-come than the past. Not that she doesn’t think about her much-traveled, event-filled past. She does. She has a keen appreciation for history and what it teaches. She savors her visits to Mexico, England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Morocco, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, all locales she studied in, all cultures she immersed herself in.

She also dips into the past to inform her work, like a commissioned mural of Albert Einstein and comets she completed for her show. Einstein’s work inspired the international Futurism movement, which incorporates science in art. She’s been an adherent since the 1960s. When her thoughts turn to Futurism, she considers big bang theories, black holes, space-time continuums and parallel universes the way the rest of us do sports or politics. She reads Scientific American cover to cover.

Isabella Threlkeld

Her Einstein piece is more than an idle fan’s rendering of an icon. It displays the deep stirrings of a woman who claims to have spent time with the famed theoretical physicist. As she tells it, she was barely more than a girl when she found herself taking notes for not only Einstein, whose theory of relativity changed the world, but other leading physicists, including Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi. Scientists were embroiled in discussions over peaceful atomic energy use. She said these meetings took place at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. in the mid-1940s.

The story of how Isabella, a Wellesley art student from Omaha, may have come to be associated with the fathers of atomic energy, must wait. First, there’s more to know about her uncoventional life, one in which Einstein and Co. are but a few of the famous people with whom she’s crossed paths.

Spend any time at all with Izzie and you soon realize she’s far more than the sum of her considerable parts. It all combines to make her one of those “most unforgettable characters” the Reader’s Digest features. Eclectic to the core.

Not that her life’s been a bed of roses. Despair and regret have touched her. She lost the love of her life, husband Harry Threlkeld, decades ago. She’s never remarried. Childless, she has no son or daughter or grandkids to visit her at Mable Rose Estates, the Bellevue assisted living facility she resides in. She’s outlived most of her oldest friends. About a year ago Isabella was forced to move from the house she made her home and the base for her Threlkeld Art Studios. It’s a sore subject.

She misses her independence as well as the invigorating salon scene she presided over at her home/studio, where art was always being made, discussed, appraised, appreciated. A Mable Rose office doubles as a studio. Isabella and other residents set up easels to make art. But it’s not the same as having her own space.

She misses, too, being surrounded by young people. Her old place was often filled with her students. Some even stayed with her. Her proteges became her children.

Don’t feel sorry for Isabella though. She’s still a surrogate mother to people who studied under her, like Mary Harrington, and still a friend to old cronies, like Jack Latenser. Young and old alike, they make the pilgrimmage to Bellevue to bask in her infectious enthusiasm. All who come under her influence receive the gift of her sharp wit, throaty laughter, aesthetic musings and philosophical beliefs.

“I have known Isabella since the mid-1980s when I began taking classes at Threlkeld Art Studios while in high school,” said Harrington. “Since the day I met her, she has been a driving force in my life similar to Rosalind Russell’s famous Auntie Mame character. ‘Isabellaism’ pops into my life to this day. She continues to challenge me to do more, travel, read, think more deeply and incorporate art into my life. My life would not be remotely the same without her.”

Auntie Mame’s credo — “life’s-a-banquet,” so catch all you can “before the parade passes by” — perfectly expresses Isabella’s credo: Flaunt it, baby, flaunt it.

Ask Isabella to describe herself and she arches her eyebrows and voice to say, “Who is she? Uh, she’s a funny little white-haired lady that’s overweight and loves life.” Oh, c’mon, Iz, you can do better than that. OK, try this on for size: “She’s a little old lady who’s still trying to be an artist,” she said of herself. If there’s anything art’s taught her, it’s to never give up.

“You know what it gives you? An appreciation of the need for failure, because you fail and you try again.” she said, “and each time you have to try again. Without failure, we wouldn’t get up and do it again.”

Spirit. She overbrims with it. So much activity, so many interests. Such a rich life.

“Well, I’ve just lived a lot, you know,” she said by way of explanation.

Perhaps the best way to understand the Isabella experience is to look at what’s gone into shaping her. Born into a prominent Omaha family, the Byrnes, she was the oldest of three children of her insurance executive father and homemaker mother. She grew up in Dundee, where neighbors included Omaha’s elite. Life in their well-appointed home was the kind of never-ending banquet Mame sings about.

“My dad and mother were always very active in the community. My dad was always bringing somebody for dinner.”

Some dinner guests were living legends. Polar explorer Richard Byrd. Aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Others were simply neighbors who became icons, including a young Henry Fonda. Dodie Brando, the mother of future superstar Marlon Brando, was a frequent guest. Marlon’s mom was an Omaha Community Playhouse fixture and like many society families the Byrnes were supporters, too. “Every time there was a new Community Playhouse director he came to dinner,” Isabella recalled. “They all came for dinner. Did Dad remember to tell mother? Uh, sometimes.”

She said, “A cousin once commented, “Your father thinks he’s the chamber of commerce, and mother said, ‘You’re right.”

As the big sister it was Isabella’s thankless task to keep her young siblings in check while exciting personalities discussed their record-setting adventures. “It was hard to hold down my little brother. He would get bored at Admiral Byrd and throw a butter pad. How do you keep a 5-year-old quiet when Amelia Earhart is trying to speak? I was the oldest and I had to control these monsters.”

She admits she wasn’t old enough herself to appreciate the distinguished company her folks kept. “No, I didn’t get it.”

Weekends found the family at their Idelwild farm near Nickerson, Neb., right on the Elkhorn River .“The best part of all,” she said, “it had horses, milk cows, pigs, turkeys, guinea hens. Oh, yes, we looked forward to it. Every weekend we got to go and gather the eggs. It was a lot better than going to Dundee School.”

The farm’s still there. She visited recently and rued the disintegrating shoreline. “It just breaks your heart to see the erosion that’s went on,” she said.

Education then wasn’t a priority but she did discover her calling for art under Dundee teacher Dorothy Gray Bowers.

“I didn’t really excell until I got to Brownell Hall (Talbot), where I think I realized I was really serious about art and would major in it when I got to college. Everybody said, ‘Oh, no, you can’t do that.’ The practical one in the family was Dad. He said, ‘You’re never going to make a living. How are you going to eat? How are you going to live?’ Mother said, ‘Oh, let her go with it.’ Then I got a scholarship to Wellesley out of it, so it was well worth it.”

Wellesley. Right across the Charles River from Harvard and MIT. “Pretty good location wouldn’t you say?” commented Isabella. Attending there was “a big tradition” with women in the family. Her mother was class of 1911. A legacy school.

A rude awakening made Iz want to leave as soon as she got there.

“It was rough, I’ll tell you, very rough because I wasn’t prepared. Let’s face it, I was still with the pigs at Idelwild farm. My first letter home in 1940 said, ‘I cannot stay here. Everywhere I go there are big signs that say, ‘No Irish need apply.’ My dad was Scotch-Irish. I had never seen discrimination before. So I wasn’t going to stay in school. My parents got so upset they called me and said, ‘Don’t come home, you’re going to stay there and change the system.’”

She stuck it out but not before things got tougher.

“My sophomore year my grades went down and I was called in by the chair of the art department. She said, ‘I’m taking away your scholarship.” I told her, ‘You can’t do that — I’m the oldest of the family. This is the Depression.’ No luck. I went to the dean — a very straightlaced New England lady, who said, ‘I’m so sorry, there’s nothing we can do for you.’ And I lost my scholarship.

“‘Well, I can’t go home,’ I said. The dean said, ‘We’ll get you a job.’ I got two jobs. Best thing I ever did.”

In true Yankee fashion Isabella worked at a campus soda shop and in the school’s Italian library, where she “got to handle original Italian manuscripts. So then I decided to minor in Italian. I learned more on those jobs than I did in the classroom. I loved those jobs. I had a lot of fun.”

Half-way through Wellesley America entered the war. Her life would change in unimaginable ways. Everything accelerated and concentrated. She furthered her studies at the Cape Anne School of Art in Rockport, Mass. “A wonderful experience. It was all studio,” she said, versus the art history diet pushed on her at Wellesley. “Every morning we painted in the studio and every afternoon we painted outdoors, on the ‘rocks.’ And I got to meet some fantastic artists there. A lot of these were New Yorkers vacationing in Rockport. They’d come up and make comments on your work. I turned around once and said, ‘Aren’t you Joan Miro?’” Yes, I am, came the reply by the Spanish surrealist painter/sculptor.

Around the same time Isabella also studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where, she said, “I learned the most.”

She graduated Wellesley in ‘44. She took her first paying jobs in art at summer camps in Hackensack, Minn. and on Orcas Island in the Pacific Northwest.

“My parents were impressed. ‘Well, she’s proving that art will pay,’ Dad said.”

She said her association with Einstein began around war’s end when her uncle, Walter Wohlenberg, dean of the Yale University School of Engineering, called to ask if she had Friday afternoons free. She did. At his request, she said, she agreed to take notes and make sketches for meetings in Princeton, N.J.

The arrangements made, Uncle Walter picked her up in his car the next Friday and drove them to Princeton. As the pair walked across campus, she said, “along came little old Albert (Einstein).” She recognized him instantly from newsreels and press photos. “He embraced my uncle, which shows you some intimacy, and spoke to him in German, and I was totally left out. And we walked along to the little white cottage where he lived with his sister.”

Meeting Einstein, she said, came as a complete surprise. She knew little about him except he was a preeminent scientist from Germany. “That was about it,” she said. She later gathered from her uncle the two were colleagues on an atomic energy committee Einstein led at the Institute for Advanced Study. It was this committee, she said, for whom she began taking notes-making sketches that very afternoon.

“He (Einstein) went into the little cottage and sat there with a few others and I took notes. It was that simple,” said Isabella.

Einstein, a one-time avowed pacifist, begged President Franklin Delano Roosevelt not to militarize atom splitting research. After the war he led groups of like-minded scientists. Isabella said the exploratory committee she sat in on met “to discuss the problem of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.” The participants varied, she said, but at one time or another included Oppenheimer, Fermi, Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard and other luminaries. Einstein and Wohlenberg were fixtures.

Marcia Tucker, librarian for the Historical Studies-Social Science Library at the Institute for Advanced Study, has been unable to confirm Isabella’s experience. Neither has Barbara Wolff with the Albert Einstein Archives at Hebrew University of Jersusalem. Is it possible the committee was a precursor to the Emergency Committee for Atomic Scientists Einstein headed after the war? Nobody knows. “I hope that this mystery may be solved,” said Tucker, whose search continues.

For a time, Isabella said, committee meetings were unsupervised. No security clearances or secrecy oaths. “We were a bunch of academics. We were all civilians.” Still, precautions were taken. “We never got to keep the notes. They were always collected at the end of a session. They confiscated everything,” she said, including sketches she made of the participants. Then it got more restrictive.

“Things changed,” she said, once Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the secret Manhattan Project already under way, began sitting in on the proceedings. “It was so hush-hush then. Gen. Groves sat right here (indicating next to her). Very military. How much he knew about atomic physics, I don’t know. He scared the hell out of me.”

Einstein biographies have established the eccentric genius as a womanizer. So, did he ever come on to Isabella? “No, no, no, no, he was preoccupied in outer space,” she said. “You won’t get any tittilation there.”

She does offer a few Einstein anecdotes that reveal aspects of his peculiar self.

“This man had a wonderful sense of humor — like Warren Buffett (a lifelong friend of hers). He (Einstein) had a chain hanging down in this little cottage’s living room, and he would say good evening to my uncle in German and good evening to me in English, and he’d pull this chain and a step-ladder would come down. He’d go up and pull it up after him. She ascribed the behavior to his focus “on outer space, on planetary changes, on other universes than the one you and I live in.”

One of her cosmic art pieces

After the A-bombs detonated over Japan, press reports tied their development to some of the very physicists whose words-visages Isabella recorded for posterity. She said it “put a guilt trip on me. I was appalled at Hirishoma. I was appalled at Nagasaki. I went as far away from atomic energy as I could get. When we started in the United States with peaceful uses of atomic energy, then I woke up again, and I realized I was in on the ground floor. We need energy, man.”

This is the first time she’s spoken publicly about her brush with the atom men. She’s longed to talk about it all this time. She never told anyone. Not even Harry. “Well, you can tell by my intensity you just took the cork out of my bottle,” she told a pair of guests who came to hear her story. “I don’t know how I stayed silent all these years. I sure poured it out to you.”

She said the thought of defying Gen, Groves was enough to muzzle her. “He kept my mouth shut for how many years? Oh, I was scared to death. I didn’t want Gen. Groves back here or his ghost,” she said, laughing. She said she’s still nervous about it all. “You wanna’ go to Guantanamo Bay with me?” she joked.

So why’s she talking now? “The information has just been released. It’s been sitting there all along,” she said, adding that someone from a national archives, she’s unsure who or which one, called in August to say her materials are now declassified. The New Horizons was unable to determine what archives may have them. Is it a case of Isabella, who keeps a biography of Einstein near her, wishing herself with people in places? Or might there be a perfectly good explanation for it all? Either way, it’s a good story.

Top secret described some of Harry’s work in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. After retiring as a Navy commander he practiced international law.

As the war wound down Isabella joined the American Red Cross. “I wanted to serve and I found a way to serve,” she said. “They kept sending me back to school for art therapy,” a then-new discipline. Her duty saw her assigned to military bases in Virginia. At one of these she met Harry, then a lieutenant. They married in ‘46. Her final RC stint was at Walter Reed General Hospital in D.C. — in the psych section. She worked with male and female patients suffering from both physical and psychological war wounds. She trained for it at American University.

She embraced the work. “Art therapy really works,” she said. “It’s a great field.” She found the work so gratifying she’s “done it off and on ever since. We have three hospitals in this area that work with art therapy.” Overall, she noted, the discipline’s “still not accepted” here as in some other cities. “The healthcare institutions that don’t use it are ones whose people have never been exposed much to art. There’s the problem. So they just can’t see that art therapy would be of any benefit.” She said she’s some trained area art therapists.

She left Walter Reed after butting heads with officials she felt ignored concerns WAC/WAVE patients received inadequate treatment. She was “a wreck”. Her own therapy came working as a stewardess aboard a Great Lakes cruise ship.

Soon after a three-month honeymoon in Mexico, Harry left to serve on Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s staff for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which convened war crimes trials in Tokyo from 1946 through 1948.

The newlywed pined to go but Harry had her rejoin her family. “I never made it to the Orient. He did come back twice (over three years) and each time he was sick.”

Upon his return the couple moved to Seattle, Wash. Isbella worked at the Seattle Art Museum. Back in Omaha in 1950, she began her Joslyn Art Museum career as education director, instructor and extension services director. In her outreach role she was an art appreciation ambassador. It suited her outgoing personality.

She served under Eugene Kingman, someone whose contributions to the museum and the city haven’t been fully recognized in her view.

After leaving the Joslyn in the early ‘60s she filled a series of art teaching posts at Duschene College, the College of St. Mary and Bellevue University. By the late ‘60s-early ’70s the counterculture movement was in bloom and Isabella was caught up in it. She encouraged students in helping make the Old Market a happening scene.

“College kids built that thing,” she said, referring to the transition from wholesale produce to arts center. “I sent all my students there. I drove them down there after school. Oh, I was really impressed with what kids could do. They learned to mix cement, lay bricks, to use the tools I was hoping they’d use. Lee Leubers (the late artist and art teacher) was a driving force and leader. He was the key to getting them down there and going to work. They worked like mad.

“I really got to love those kids. I did not love them when teaching art history and they were marching (protesting) outside the window.”

It was in those halcyon times she met Ree Kaneko (then Schonleau), who went on to found the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and to marry noted artist Jun Kaneko. Isabella and Ree once had an exhibition together.

During this time Isabella wrote an Omaha World-Herald art column. Then, as now, she made and exhibited her own art, filtering life experiences through her work. Inspiration came from the many travels she and Harry made outside the country. They preferred seeing the sights on their own and doing as the natives do.

“We were never on a tour,” she said. “We were alone. If you’re that outnumbered, baby, you have to go with the flow. I didn’t need a tour. I had read all the stuff before I went. While he was busy doing his legal stuff as an international lawyer, I had time to draw and paint.” Or visit museums-galleries. Meet the people. Her fluent Italian and servicable French went a long way. Harry knew five languages.

On a ‘58 European excursion she studied at the Louvre in Paris. The couple met Pablo Picasso. “We were watching him make a disturbance at an outdoor cafe.,” she recalled. “I wanted to go over and say hello but my husband couldn’t stand it and said. ‘We are leaving.’ So we left, and on the way out he (Picasso) came to us and said hello.” In Avignon, France in the early ‘70s she saw the last exhibition Picasso had before his death.

Once, Isabella nearly got her hubby arrested over art. After visiting a Cairo gallery she said she discovered Harry had removed a necklace from a sarcophagus on display. What he thought a lark — “I think he was showing off, ou know, look what I can do — offended her orthodox art sensibilities. So she snitched.

“Oh, yes, I turned him in in Egypt,” she said. “The average wife would not have, I realize that, but I’d been trained at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. You never touched anything in the Boston Musuem of Fine Arts, let alone take something…”

Harry was detained by a gallery guard. “This could have been really bad,” she said. “Oh, it was so awful. I was so scared. I thought I’d lost my only husband.” All turned out well in the end, as Harry used his gift for gab and, she suspects, a cash bribe, to talk his way out of the jam and keep the artifact. Said Isabella, “They didn’t turn him in. I would have lost him. He would never have gotten out of an Egyptian jail. He came back speaking Aarabic and drinking tea. But he never let me forget it. Oh, he was so angry at me. Whenever he’d get upset with me he’d say, ‘I’ll take you back to Egypt and turn you in.’” She still has the necklace.

By ‘68 she was engrossed in Futurism, That whole year in Europe she researched in Italy, where the movement began. “We lived on the Mediterranean outside of Rome,” she said. “Oh, was it beautiful.” She studied at modern art museums and the University of Rome. Her work fed the master’s degree in art she earned at the University of Nebraska at Omaha in ‘71. Her thesis subject? Futurism, of course.

Reflecting the turbulent times in her work, she created an anti-war piece called “Vietnam Fortune Cookie.” In the wake of Watergate, she made a large painting symbolizing “the disillusion of the United States into pure energy. Wait till you see this painting,” she said. It’s in her new show.

When Harry died in ‘73 Isabella reinvented herself again. She and a friend, photographer Mae Louise “Hinky” Hamilton, bought a house together at 324 So. 68th St. that became their creative base. “I went in business for myself,” is how Isabella puts it. “I couldn’t have done it without Hinky Hamilton’s help. She put in $25,000, I put in $25,000. I helped her in photography, she helped me in art.”

Threlkeld Art Industries employed artists to create commissioned murals, many for area schools. That business became Threlkeld Art Studios, which found Isabella giving private art lessons to youths and adults and providing professional appraisals. She’d often lead students on field trips to local-regional museums: the Joslyn, Lincoln’s Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, the Des Moines Art Center, the Nelson Atkins in Kansas City, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Denver Art Museum. Several students, such as Paul Otero and Stephen Roberts, have enjoyed successful careers as artists. Already established artists sought refuge at her salon.

Over the years she hosted UNO graduate exchange students from Japan, China and Nepal. Interacting with young folks from around the globe invigorated her. “The one from Nepal changed my life. I mean, she really changed my life,” she said. “Her name was Amoura Lohani She was from Katmandu.” The political major introduced isabella to Hindu traditions. Isabella, who took in Lipani’s family, always thought her Asian guests were compensation for her never visiting the Orient.

She stopped hosting international students awhile ago but she was still doing everything else out of her home up until January, when relatives prevailed on her to give up the large studio/residence. That’s when she moved into Mable Rose Estates. “It was not my idea,” she said. How much does she miss her own place? “A lot,” she said, her voice breaking. “A lot.” She appreciates all that staff do to make her feel at home. “They spoil me. They invent things to make me happy. Well, they’ve never seen anybody like me. You can believe that can’t you?”

An October estate sale liquidated a lifetime’s worth of fine artworks, books, furniture, decorative objects. Many of her prized possessions went to Collectors Choice. Sad to see it all go. As usual, she learned something in the process.

“Because of that estate sale I sold thousands of dollars worth of art to men, to corporations, to businesses, not to little old ladies with pretty little houses. The point I’m making is I’d never been in a gallery where I sold art. It taught me about the buyer and where the money is. I had so much to learn and boy did I learn a lot about money. Men control the money.

“We had 400 people at this the first day, 500 the second day, 400 the third day. Can you imagine the amount of art?”

The sold art included works in various mediums by local artists she’s championed.

Just because she’s moved doesn’t mean she’s retired. She continues doing appraisals right out of Mable Rose Estates. She jumps on the Internet to research items. Some real treasures have surfaced. “It’s wonderful the things they bring to me,” she said. “A lot of times they (clients) don’t know what they have.”

Making art remains her main escape. Her show has her all “revved up,” she said. “I want people to see this show on Futurism. It’s big. I don’t mean just in area. It’s big. You’re going to see outer space, the energies of outer space. E-equals-mc-squared. Super novas. Other universes. You’re going to see the future in my work.”

Forever an artist and searcher. “My life has been a mess of dirty smocks,” she said.

19 reviews of Albert Einstein (rateitall.com)
Blog – Using Einstein’s Relativity to Speed up Supercomputer Simulations 10,000% (technologyreview.com)
Inpsired by Einstein: Monday Morning Mantra and The Continuum Conundrum (chicagonow.com)

Categories: Aging, Art, Education, Isabella Threlkeld, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Personalities-Characters, World War II, Writing Tags: Albert Einstein, Art, Art therapy, Education, Futurism, History, Institute for Advanced Study, Isabella Threlkeld, Omaha

Theater-Fashion Maven Elaine Jabenis

August 4, 2010 leoadambiga 3 comments

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©Photo by Bill Sitzmann

Cities the size of Omaha or smaller have their local theater legends. Omaha claims many, including at least two figures, in Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire, who became legends on a much larger stage. One of the local legends who stayed local but whose talent might have played well beyond these confines had she sought to try is the subject of this New Horizons story. As I was growing up, Elaine Jabenis epitomized glamour by the way she carried herself in theater, in fashion, in television, and at community events. She was a queen and a diva without the baggage. She seemed apart from yet wholly approachable. When I finally met her seven years ago I found she is still that charming mix of Grande Dame and down-to-earth hometown girl. She’s still full of vitality and curiosity. I must admit that I’ve never seen her perform in the theater, the domain where she perhaps made her biggest impact. But I saw enough of her on television to appreciate her expressive talents. And even interviewing her at her home I was captured by her magnetic charm. She gives off a positive energy that you can’t help but be energized by yourself.

As if I needed proof, not long after my story appeared Elaine appeared with Michal Simpson in the SNAP! Productions staging of Richard Alfieri’s Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, earning as usual rave reviews. She’s gone on to win a series of lifetime achievement awards. Look for a new story about Elaine and her unaging passion in a coming post.

Theater-Fashion Maven Elaine Jabenis

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in the New Horizons

Elaine Jabenis

When considering her charmed life, Elaine Jabenis, that pert, pretty, petite bundle of energy Omahans have come to know as a well-versed radio-television personality, veteran stage actress, longtime fashion maven, seasoned author and perennial woman of style, has to admit it reads like “a storybook.”

Take the time she was waiting out a rain storm in the Times Building as a young newlywed in 1944 New York, where her husband Mace, a Kansas City native, was stationed as a flight crew member aboard Army Air Transport Command missions over the Atlantic, when she decided, on a whim, to put in an application at that bastion of American newspapering — the New York Times.

Mind you, she’d never worked on anything but the Omaha Central High School Register staff and had only taken a few courses at Northwestern University’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism before her money ran out. But, showing the penchant for imagination that would define her life, she bent the truth a little, well, a lot, by inventing from whole cloth a high-gloss work background, including a fictitious World-Herald reporting stint. What gave her the chutzpah to pull such a cheeky stunt?

“I was really doing it as a kind of lark,” she said. “I exaggerated, never in the world expecting to get a job. I was just playing this silly little game. This was the sense of drama in me” coming out, a vivacious Jabenis said in an interview from the home she shares with hubby Mace in Omaha’s exclusive Loveland neighborhood. The rich, tasteful decor of the home, featuring art objects from the couple’s wide travels to China and elsewhere, is a reflection of Jabenis, whose well-coiffured hair, stylish ensembles and trim figure, still make her every inch the fashionable lady.

After all, there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d get on at the venerable Times, right? Wrong. In a case of being at the right place at the right time, she was on her way out the building when a certain Mr. Tootle flagged her down and, much to her disbelief, offered her, on the spot, a temporary job filling-in for a secretary taken ill that day. She accepted and in typical Jabenis fashion she displayed such poise, industry and charm that at the end of her term she was kept on as an assistant in the high-octane city room. Thus, what began as a lark turned into a three-year whirlwind that provided invaluable experience and exposed her to the high-end creative world she would make her life’s work. “That application was probably the best piece of fiction I ever wrote,” is how she sums up the episode today.

Despite the frivolous attitude she adopted when applying at the Times and the fortuitous manner in which she got hired there, she really did have a hankering to write. Growing up one of three children of Sol and Ida Lagman, Russian immigrant grocers whose Laggie’s Market was a north Omaha fixture, she said, “I always had a pencil and pad under my pillow and I was always writing poems and stories.” At Central, she was encouraged to pursue writing by journalism department head Anne L. Savidge, who persuaded her to continue her studies at Northwestern.

At the Times Jabenis was first assigned to the Town Hall page and later as an aid to several experienced journalists under whose doting tutelage she learned a thing or two about writing, working under deadlines and trusting her muse. As a young reporter-in-training, she did a little of everything, from fielding phone calls to fixing copy, and sometimes accompanied beat writers on assignment, once to the first meeting of the United Nations security council.

One of her mentors was education editor Benjamin Fine, who advised Jabenis on her ambition to be a serious writer with this admonition: ‘Go home and write a million words and then tell me you’re a writer. The only way to be a writer is to write all the time.’” And, like a good pupil, she took his sage advice years later when, writing “every single day,” she authored a suspense novel, The Burning of Georgia, set amidst the fashion world, an arena she knows well from her years as fashion guru for J.L. Brandeis & Sons Department Stores. In the early 1970s she penned the first of her two long-in-print fashion merchandising college texts published by John Wiley & Sons. She’s also written the book for two musical plays. Her Generation to Generation, with music and songs by composer and producer Karen Sokolof Javitch, is “a celebration of life” about a dying Jewish woman passing on her legacy to the grandchild she won’t live to see. Generation won the best new script award from the Theater Arts Guild.

Two other Times staffers she worked for, drama critic Brooks Atkinson and film reviewer Bosley Crowther, were living legends whose printed words carried much weight, but none more so than those of Atkinson whom Jabenis describes as “the most feared theater critic of all time. I mean, if Brooks Atkinson put his thumb down on a show, it could close tomorrow. He didn’t pull any punches.”

Looking back on her Times experience, she said, “It was a wonderful training ground. I gained so much while I was there. I was like a sponge just soaking up all that knowledge.” Her association with Atkinson afforded privileged access, via her Times press pass, to stars, including rubbing shoulders with Rex Harrison at the swank Stork Club, and taking in scores of Broadway opening nights for such classics as Oklahoma and Moon for the Misbegotten. Her total Broadway immersion prompted her own passion for theater, until she knew her place was not in the audience anymore but on stage. “I began to think — I don’t want to be down here, I want to be up there. I just began to love it. It was always there, that desire to act or to perform. If that basic temperament is there, it only needs cultivation to bloom.”

With a hoped-for life in theater or journalism before her, Jabenis was in an envious position, but reality has a way of tempering dreams. It was, after all, wartime and she had more pressing concerns than what professional path she should take. She explains, “My husband was crossing the Atlantic on ATC missions and my mind was more on, Is he coming home safely this trip? than on what I would do” for a career.

A life in the theater did indeed come to fruition for Jabenis, only in her hometown of Omaha, where she and Mace moved a year after the war ended, not in New York, where she longed to study at the famed Actors Studio but never found the time and where she ached to trod the boards but never took the plunge. As she would soon discover, her destiny as an actress lay on the Omaha Community Playhouse stage, not on Broadway. But before launching her six-decade run of success with the Playhouse, which in July honored her with its Dick Boyd Award for lifetime achievement, she had an unexpected brush with Hollywood.

About the same time her thespian ambitions flowered in New York, she said, she was offered a screen test by a major Hollywood studio, she thinks Paramount, a heady thing to have happen to “a country girl” with stars in her eyes and greasepaint in her veins. Flattered and flummoxed by the offer, Jabenis sought the counsel of one of her Times mentors, Crowther, whose resulting bromide may have dramatically changed her life. “

He said, ‘Elaine, don’t do it.’ And I said, ‘Why, because you don’t think I have the talent or the warmth or something?’ He said, ‘No, you probably have both, but you don’t have a killer instinct and without a killer instinct they’ll destroy you. You don’t want to be a part of that world and those ruthless people.’” A deflated Jabenis heeded the warning, even though “it was very hard to hear,” at the time, she said. “He just decided I was a nice Midwestern girl” unsuited to the cruel vagaries of Hollywood or New York. “Later, I was so grateful because after I got back here (Omaha) I had the best of both worlds. Not only could I have theater as an avocation, I had New York through my fashion career and I was able to raise my children and have a decent life.”

In Omaha Jabenis wasted little time embarking on her entertainment career. “Almost immediately I got a job as a continuity writer at WOW Radio,” then aligned with WOW-TV. “I wrote commercials and copy for on-the-air people,” she said. Then, one day an unlikely chain of events propelled her into the performing spotlight.

As Jabenis recalls, “Shaver’s Food Mart wanted a commercial tailor-made for them” and she obliged with one, which the general manager had her put on tape. “I went in the announcer’s booth of a little studio and recorded it and they took it over for Mr. Shaver to hear and he liked the concept really well and bought the package.” Then, the story goes, when Shaver was told, “We’ll get you an announcer” to cut the spot, he balked, saying, “No, I want the voice I heard on that tape.” When pointed out to him the voice belonged to a writer, he persisted, “I don’t care, I like what she said and the way she said it.” Acceding to “the customer is always right” credo, WOW put Jabenis on the air and, she said, “before I knew it I had a show of my own” — Saturday’s Scrapbook — and a star was born.

Saturday’s Scrapbook, which Jabenis co-hosted with Ray Olson, was what she calls “a forerunner of the talk show.” She added, “We talked back and forth. We had music and special topics. We did it quite loosely, but I think that’s what made it work.”

The program was recognized by Billboard Magazine as one of the best of its kind. Soon, she joined the television side of WOW, serving as spokes-model for commercials on evening newscasts, as featured guest on local morning programs and as host of prime time special event broadcasts, such as the Ak-Sar-Ben ball. It was all live, too. “There was no such thing as teleprompters or idiot boards. You just got up there and talked. It was very stimulating,” she said of those halcyon days. “Back then, television was just coming in and none of us knew what we were doing. We just did it. It was, Let’s try this, let’s try that.”

Among the talents at WOW she worked with was a young fire brand named Johnny Carson. At the time he was hosting his Squirrel Cage TV show and one day she came on to read some prepared copy when Carson, already known for his free-spirited, anything-goes ad-libbing, forced her to improvise as she joined him on set.

“I came in scripted and he knew I was going to want to look at those notes and he just tore up the script and cleared off the desk, sending stuff flying across the studio, and he said, ‘OK, Lainie, what did you want to tell me?’ That taught me.” From then on, she said, she knew to be ready to just wing it. Lainie is what Carson always called her and the nickname, which no one else but her mother used, endeared him to her. “It was such fun. He was always doing silly things. We always had a good time together. We were good friends. I like him a lot.”

The rapport they enjoyed is evident in a 1966 interview he gave her during one of his rare Nebraska visits. On the tape, the two engage in the easy, intimate banter and horse play of old chums, as she playfully slaps him and they embrace like schoolkids. “It’s so funny to be in this position of interviewing you,” she tells him.

She and Carson stayed in touch over the years. Once, returning from the West Coast after having given himself a year to make it out there, he tried coaxing Jabenis to join him in L.A., where he predicted great things for her. But she declined. By then, she and Mace had started a family and well, just like the Hollywood opportunity before, who’s to say whether she really would have succeeded or not and whether it was right for her or not? “I wasn’t that adventurous to pack up and move my family and risk everything on that chance.” Mace was in business then with his brother Eli as owners of Travelware Luggage.

In her career Jabenis has had the privilege of working with major talents. There was Carson, who forever put his stamp on the late-night talk format as host of The Tonight Show, and, more recently, there was John Beasley, a top character actor in movies (The Apostle) and television (Everwood). “Absolutely. I have found that when you’re around very talented people it just brings your level up,” she said. “I know when I played opposite an actor of the caliber of John Beasley in Driving Miss Daisy at the Playhouse it was a thrill because John is such a perfectionist and a professional. He really brought me to places where I never knew I could go.”

Elaine Jabenis, center, hosting live TV special atopening of the new Playhouse

Jabenis got so busy working as a freelance commercial talent with Bozell and Jacobs and its stable of clients that some nights found her hurrying from station to station to pitch products on the evening newscasts.

“I would be booked into a commercial at Channel 3 for Peter Pan Bread, which I’d have to commit to memory and do live, and then I’d get in the car with the script for another spot beside me and as I drove up to WOW I’d be reviewing the lines I had to do for MUD and its new gas ranges. And then I’d go over to host a late-night movie show on Channel 7 and do the live cut-ins.” The excitement was intoxicating. “You just had to really move. But, boy, that really taught you to think fast on your feet. I loved the action. I loved the electricity of all those personalities and how ideas bounced off of each other. You began to pick up the pace of that kind of life. It was really wonderful.”

While her TV career flourished, she pursued a parallel career in drama.

“There was that pull to go into the theater,” she said.

So strong was the pull that in 1952, six weeks after giving birth to her second child, she played the ingenue in Father of the Bride at the Playhouse, then at 39th and Davenport. Years of award-winning lead and character roles followed, the most recent a 2001 supporting turn in My Fair Lady. Like a true calling found, the theater became her second home. “Yeah, I really loved it. I could just hardly wait to get into the next play, but it was very hard at first because I was raising our two children. I kept watching to see what was coming up next that had a good part for me.” Her passion extended to all aspects of theater. “There were times I worked backstage…props, costumes…I would do just about anything because I wanted to be in the environment of the thing I loved.” She could only pull it all off, she said, with “the support of Mace.”

Omaha Community Playhouse

Whether as a radio-TV personality or theater actor, Jabenis proved a natural. Without any formal training, she simply took to it.

“I had an aptitude for it, I guess,” is how she explains it. “Nobody had to tell me. I just think it’s something you do and you know. I think it’s in here,” she said, patting her heart. Natural or not, Jabenis still battled stage fright. “I was terrified every time I went on camera, but the minute the light went on I was fine. That’s the same way it was with the theater. I’d stand back in the wings and feel like I was going to have a heart attack before the curtain went up, but once on the stage I forgot about Elaine and became whatever I had to become.”

Her absorption in her craft is complete. Take her approach to acting.

“What I think is important is to have a moment of truth with the audience…to give an honest interpretation of the author’s words. It’s exciting when it happens. It really is,” she said. Now, forget the glamour of the theater and consider the grind of working a full-time job, as she did 23 years at Brandeis, then coming home to shower and catch a bite to eat before spending hours in rehearsal or performance. “Once I got involved with the Playhouse it was totally consuming,” she said. “You have to be up every night.” Her devotion is such that one night during the run of Wingless Victory the trouper went on despite a high fever. “I was just going on sheer guts,” she recalls. “I just had to do it.” After her final exit she was delirious in the wings. “I didn’t know where I was. I was really sick. I was in bed the next two days.”

Broadcasting and acting success led Jabenis into another creative field — fashion. It happened this way. Having covered the Ak-Sar-Ben ball, Jabenis “got very well acquainted with the buyers and presidents of the stores furnishing gowns for the event. Brandeis invited me to be a guest commentator for fashion shows and this and that. Then, one day I got a call from Dick Einstein of Brandeis asking if I’d like to make it a permanent arrangement.”

As Brandeis fashion coordinator and, later, fashion merchandising director, she canvassed the designer market by reading the industry trades and by frequently visiting New York, Los Angeles and Europe to catch the biggest shows and identify the hottest trends. She met the top name designers — from de la Renta to Cardin — and worked with celebrities — from Irene Dunn to Vanna White. She recommended entire lines and styles of clothing for the store to purchase and pitched those fashions via all size and manner of shows.

“I was probably the first one to introduce theatrical pieces into fashion shows here when I started adding singers and dancers and that kind of thing,” she said, adding that she drew on her theatrical acumen in staging events. After Brandeis was sold she formed her own fashion production company and dished-out fashion advice as a TV and print commentator. Her biggest fashion forum has become the Woman of the Year Gala she created as a benefit for the Arthritis Foundation. As she said, “All stops are pulled,” for the extravaganzas. “That’s right up my alley.”

Reticent about revealing her age for professional reasons, it’s safe to say Jabenis is years removed from traditional retirement age, but she does not concede anything to mere numbers. “I haven’t retired from anything, honey,” she told a visitor to her home. “I don’t believe in that. I’m not going to let chronological years interrupt what I want to do.” What she wants to do is continue traveling, writing and acting. She’s already planning her next novel and she’s awaiting the next prime part to come her way.

“I’ve always felt there’s some kind of little angel sitting on my shoulder guiding me and taking care of me. I feel like I’ve led a charmed life.”

Elaine Stritch and Other Matrons of ‘Night Music’ (nytimes.com)
Theater Talkback: The Replacements’ Greatest Hits (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)
Omaha Arts-Culture Scene All Grown Up and Looking Fabulous (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
Canceled FX Boxing Show, ‘Lights Out,’ May Still Springboard Omahan Holt McCallany’s Career (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
Omaha Fashion Show: VIP Spring Runway Show (thebrunetteone.com)
Quiana Smith’s Dream Time (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
Great Plains Theatre Conference Ushers in New Era of Omaha Theater (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
Kevyn Morrow’s Homecoming (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
Walking Behind to Freedom, A Musical Theater Examination of Race (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
A Q & A with Edward Albee: His Thoughts on the Great Plains Theatre Conference, Jo Ann McDowell, Omaha and Preparing a New Generation of Playwrights (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
Playwright/Director Glyn O’Malley, Measuring the Heartbeat of the American Theater (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)

Jim Suttle Feels the Heat as Omaha’s Mayor

August 4, 2010 leoadambiga Leave a comment

Cropped image of Omaha Mayor, Jim Suttle. (Ima...

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UPDATE: Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle incurred the wrath of some fat cats and some average Joe the Plumbers and became subject to a recall election this winter. Voters opposed to the recall and in support of Suttle remaining in office defeated the pro-recall ranks in a tight Jan. 25 election. The situation even caught the attention of the New York Times, whose Jan. 26 article makes note of how Omaha and greater Nebraska seem to take the recall route with unusual frequency. My take is that Suttle’s rigid engineering demeanor was the wrong note at the wrong time for some in the community who saw him as an interloper on the scene. He walked into a slate of problems that would have alienated almost any leader, but he didn’t do himself any favors with his autocratic style and superior attitude. Like most of us, he is his own worst enemy. But he’s survived to at least complete this term, and now that the economic forecast is looking a bit better for the city and the nation he’s out of the hot water, at least until the next crisis hits.

Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle was feeling the heat in office when I wrote this story for the New Horizons about nine months ago. But the temperature has only gotten hotter since, as the City’s economic morass has proven even deeper than once thought, and the mayor’s ideas for digging out of the hole have elicited the ire of more and more residents. It may be that the recession that’s forcing difficult decisions at every level of government is a problem too big for any one elected official to effectively address, and that whomever is in office would be compelled to take stands and to propose fixes that displease a whole lot of people.

NOTE: As of September 2010 the anti-Suttle sentiment ratcheted up to the point that a formal recall petition drive was instituted, requiring organizers collect a substantial number of signatures by a certain deadline. If the required signatures are gathered within the designated time frame then a recall election would be held. Omaha went through this before when rancor directed at then mayor Mike Boyle led to a recall campaign, and in that case the sitting mayor was unseated by a vote of the citizenry. The action didn’t necessarily lead to better city government or leadership in the mayor’s office, but it did shake things up.

Jim Suttle Feels the Heat as Omaha’s Mayor

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in the New Horizons

Jim Suttle served as an Omaha City Councilman during a mostly robust economic period for the city. Then last spring he went and got himself elected mayor in the midst of a recession, promptly inheriting the worst financial crisis in recent city history. Priority one his first six months in office has been getting a grip on a budget that’s been running in the red and finding ways to trim spending and increase revenues to avoid a projected deficit next year.

Dealing with the city’s precarious financial straits has been a trial-by-fire baptism for Suttle, who’s weathered much criticism over his cost-cutting and revenue- generating plans. The 66-year-old retired corporate suit and City Hall veteran knows that flak comes with the territory, especially when city programs, services, jobs, wages and benefits are on the line.

Before becoming a household name the Baltimore native and West Virginia University grad enjoyed a decades-long career with international architecture-engineering firm HDR of Omaha. As mayor, he’s been vilified in the media, but he’s been nothing if not consistent and resilient. He’s called it like he’s seen it. He’s gone on record saying he’s not only ready for the challenges of this crucial position in this uncertain time, but relishes the responsibility for pulling the city out of its quagmire and, what’s more, that he’s uniquely qualified to do so.

He proudly points to a long private sector career and to service as Omaha Public Works Director as experiences that steeled him for the tough issues he faces in the hot seat he now occupies. As a civil engineer he headed up the controversial urban renewal North Freeway project that displaced residents and ruptured a community. As public works director under Mike Boyle in the ‘80s he felt the wrath of taxpayers over street repair, snow removal, garbage pickup, et cetera.

“I certainly knew all about the tenseness of the job and the pressures because I worked very closely with Mike Boyle when he was mayor, and so I was in this office a lot and I saw what he was going through and that was all in my mind as I prepared for this,” he said.

Even in the best of times a sitting mayor feels the heat that comes with the position, but the temperature rises when people’s pocketbooks and bank accounts are hurting, their jobs hang in the balance and the basic city services their tax dollars support are reduced. In grappling with severe budget issues Suttle’s been forced to make some Solomon-like choices.

He’s not helped by a dull, clipped delivery that falls flat in this sound bite era. He can come off as cold and imperious in print or on TV. On the other hand, the calm and certainty he radiates may be just what the city needs in a leader at this unstable juncture. Spend any time with his honor and it’s hard not to note his sure, decisive air. Where some see arrogance, he exudes confidence.

“I am confident,” he said. “I know I can do this job. I’m just prepared for meeting these challenges. I’ve been through this, I was through this as public works director, I was through this in my time at HDR when we would have something chaotic happen with a project or something catastrophic happened with the company, and I would just plow right into it. I’m not afraid of problems. I’ve dealt with catastrophic problems all throughout my career, and you can’t run from them, you have to turn and face them and step into them, and that’s what I do.”

Fairly or unfairly, he’s come under extreme fire from the moment he entered office. Even before then, really. In a headline-grabbing episode a week before he was sworn-in reports emerged that one-time key Suttle adviser Matthew Stamp, who was slated to be co-chief of staff, had been the subject of a police investigation some years ago regarding allegations he’d had sex with a minor. No charges were brought against Stamp. Suttle at first seemed to dismiss concerns about Stamp as rumblings from the rumor mill and implying he didn’t believe in background checks. He seemed to be sticking by his man.

Then, in the wake of public outcry, Suttle did an abrupt about-face and rescinded Stamp’s appointment and cut all ties to Clear Communication Partners, the political consultant firm of Stamp and Gary Di Silvestro, another key former aide. But Suttle did not reveal what he knew about Stamp prior to the story blowing up. Some chided his decision-making process and penchant for staying on-message platitudes to the exclusion of answering legitimate questions.

Months after the imbroglio Suttle acknowledged that ending associations with such close aides “was really difficult. We were family. They were involved in my campaigns and in my personal world for five years.” He said the news caught him “blind sided,” adding, “I learned something for the first time in my life when my wife called and read me this horrible article. I was in West Virginia visiting my mother. That was not fun. I was a deer in headlights, but I came out of that, I saw what I needed to do, I called some 20 people and 27 hours later I made my mind up to sever relationships. I just made my decision and I did not look back.”

As he’s settled into the job he seems less reactive and more open to seeing other points of view, although he makes no bones about standing firm on his beliefs.

“I like to make decisions and then run with that decision, but if I find the decision has got flaws or there’s something better I will change my mind, and I’m not embarrassed about that. I’m not driven by the ego, I’m driven by doing what’s right
for this city and not what’s right for Jim Suttle, and if that leaves me in the wake of the tide, then so be it. The people put me in this position, I represent the people, I don’t represent any other special interest groups whatsoever.”

He won’t temper his assertive manner to avoid critics.

“No, because to do that you’re starting to go in the direction that you see too many politicians go,” he said, “and that is they start paying attention to polls. They start making decisions around the polls or they start making decisions around what’s on the editorial page or letters to the editor or talk radio. No, that’s wrong and that’s going to get you in deep trouble when it’s all said and done because the problems will still be there and there’ll be messier. You get to the problems and get to them now and don’t let them get worse.”

He won’t be thrown by negative comments directed his way.

“I would say you’ll find me take five percent of it personally, whereas my wife takes 95 percent of it personally. I’m conditioned to just go ahead and let the flack come forward and deflect it to the side and then get on with the mission. This is the whole thing I was faced with in the campaign and in these early months in office.

“I could see there was a particular course that needed to be followed and I was going to stay on that course, and those who didn’t want me in this office or those who disagreed and were trying to get me off mission, off course, they never succeeded. I stayed the course, and I think quite frankly that’s a reflection of my leadership — that I can let the flak and the noise and everything else go around and stay on course toward the better good in front of it.”

He can come across as stubborn, cantankerous and aloof when pressed. At other times he can be easy, warm and engaging, which is how this reporter found him on a recent visit to his office in the City County Building.

Some might view becoming mayor just as the recession hit as rotten luck. Not Suttle. This self-described “optimist” and “glass-is-always-half-full” fellow sees it as an opportunity for making a difference in his adopted hometown. Public office is the fulfillment of a long-harbored dream and long-practiced philosophy of service. Being in this lightning rod post is exactly where he wants to be, good times or bad. It’s why he left corporate America six years ago to run for City Council.

He credits an HDR mentor, Bob Rohling, with instilling in him a greater-good orientation. “He said to me, ‘You can’t just take, take, take from your community without give, give, giving back.’ I’ve never forgotten those words,” said Suttle.

“I think we need to start though with a foundation. I am following a dream and I’ve had this dream for 40 years, and so as I was approaching my 60th birthday I said to myself, You have a choice here. So I went into see Dick Bell, the chairman of HDR, and started talking to him and he said, ‘Jim, I know this is your dream, let’s make it happen.’ I talked to my wife that night and she said, ‘Let’s make it happen.’ And then I went to talk to my financial adviser, who I thought would tell me to pound salt and he said, ‘Now you can afford to do it,’ and so we put it together.

“So I had the basics of what you really need to run for public office — you gotta have that fire in the belly, you really do, and I was committed to taking my dream and moving on my dream. And I had the support of my employer, I had the support of my family and I had the financial capabilities to do it. I didn’t have to be dependent on anything else or anybody else except me.”

While he seemingly came out of nowhere to defeat incumbent Marc Kraft for the District 1 City Council seat in 2005, Suttle was no newcomer. There was his public works tenure. His Council win came in his only bid for public office up to then, but he’s been active in local and state politics since HDR brought him to Omaha in 1971. He and wife Deb raised their two daughters here. A trained nurse, she’s also been active in politics — appointed by then-Gov. Ben Nelson to a Nebraska Legislature seat she later won election to. She’s also a busy community volunteer.

The couple had moved around the country for his work but once they came to Omaha they stayed put. Before long the political animal in Suttle found him raising money for candidates, stumping for them, advising them.

His involvement in politics goes back even farther, to college in the mid-’60s, when he served on the WVU student legislature, and to HDR posts in New Mexico, Missouri and Massachusetts. His student government experience got him hooked. As he worked in politics he recognized his analytical mind, managerial skills, leadership qualities and collaborate bent made him suited for the field.

“I found I liked it. I found my engineering mind let me figure out how to get good problem definition, which is necessary in anything you do, so that’s what I’m good at and I’d been doing it all my life in my professional world but also doing it while dabbling in politics as well. Good problem definition lets you begin to assemble the people and the alternatives to solving, and then you can solve — one, two, three. That’s my success as an engineer, that’s my success as a politician.”

At HDR Suttle embedded himself in the political arena of the communities he served, laying the groundwork for the company doing business in new markets. He beat the bushes, he pressed the flesh, he did dog-and-ponies, he cultivated relationships — the very things a lobbyist or politician does in building a base.

“I was part of the growth engine that took the company from seven offices to 150 offices, that took the company from 350 people to 8,000, and I found as I went to the different marketplaces I needed to know who the local officials were, be it at the state, county or city level, so they knew who HDR was,” he said. “And out of that we really began to follow the decision makers. So when it came time for us to seek professional work or offer professional services we were in the right places at the right time dealing with the decision makers. It helped us to maximize our time, get focused and make sure we were paying attention to local customs, local cultures, whatever it might be that was going to let HDR be hired.

“An example of that was going to Boston with nothing and winning back-to-back contracts on the Central Artery. That was a design all around the community in what I was seeing and learning, and that headline in the Boston Globe when we won that second contract says it all, because it told me I succeeded with my plan: ‘Local firm wins Central Artery contract.’ Notice it said ‘local firm,’ and we really weren’t, but we were because we designed it that way and in the eyes of the community and of decision makers and of the Boston Globe we were local. We became local as we continued to grow that office from zero to 75-100 people.”

Suttle also gained much political capital in Omaha by serving on civic boards, giving him an insider’s entry to the movers-and-shakers who make things go and some built-in traction and name recognition for when he sought public office.

Outside local Democratic political circles and corporate back rooms, however, Suttle remained relatively unknown to the general public until his City Council stint. Even after four years on the Council his low-key style made made him a dark horse candidate against mayoral challenger Hal Daub, a Republican stalwart and former Omaha Mayor and U.S. Congressman from Nebraska. Suttle’s blunt but bland persona and short elected history undoubtedly worked to his advantage though in facing off with the sharp-tongued Daub, who carried the baggage of a long, productive but contentious-filled public service career.

Though he seemed a decided underdog at the outset, Suttle appeared supremely confident in his chances from the get-go. He’s well aware he didn’t inspire excitement in many quarters, but he never let detractors spin him from his prize. In his bulldog manner, he kept grinding away, focused on that big bone, never doubting he’d get it. He drew extra motivation from being underestimated.

“I think it goes to the fact that a lot of people didn’t want me in this job, a lot of people didn’t think I would even win. I did, I knew I was going to win. From the moment I made the decision to run in August (2008) I knew I was going to win. And I’m not saying that from an ego standpoint, I’m saying it from something that the people didn’t study about me, the media and the Chamber and other places — I am a part of the marketing success of HDR, which was always looking for a new mousetrap. Every two years we reinvented our marketing thrust, and so I built on all that because I knew how to put the winning plan in place, and I did.

“What has been the challenge here is how do I get the acceptability of the business community and the Republicans that didn’t vote for me in the west and any of the other naysayers. I have to earn that, I know I have to earn it. I don’t lose sleep about it. I know it’s on my shoulders to earn their trust, not on their shoulders to just automatically give it to me.”

Soon after taking the oath of office June 8 as Omaha’s 50th mayor, Suttle put in perspective just how dire the budgetary crunch is when he spoke about the need for taking drastic measures “to prevent the city from falling off a cliff,” perhaps even into bankruptcy. This was unchartered territory for a city that had drawn the admiration of analysts and observers for its stable, diversified, economy, Triple A bond rating, low unemployment and high quality of life. It was only when Suttle delineated a laundry list of cuts that the crisis made page one news.

“I’ve been feeling all along and saying all along that the public was in denial that there was a problem. Closing the swimming pools one week early, closing libraries on weekends, shutting down helicopters for a month, all got us out of denial and the public began to see there is a real problem.”

After the campaign but before taking office, the fiscal crisis was only partly known. Still, he spoke about the need for belt tightening. Once the full extent of the dilemma was apparent, he no sooner took office than he described the hard choices that lay ahead and laid out in no uncertain terms what was at stake.

He confronted the problem head-on, a trait he learned long ago and still lives by.

“Well, my whole persona, my whole methodology for being an engineer, for being a manager, for being a business person is molded by the people who influenced me in my career,” he said. “So let’s just take Chuck Durham (an HDR founder) — he had a philosophy that if you see something that needs to be done, don’t ask permission, get it done. I never forgot that and that’s always been in my style. And this got me into some conflicts when I was on the City Council, with some Council members who maybe saw me getting in the way of things in their district, or in the way of their issues, but that’s the way I was trained.

“I ran for mayor because I did sense we had some horrific problems and we were doing too much waltzing around those problems, and as an engineer and as a trained problem solver that was the frustration. I saw when I was on the City Council that I was one of seven in trying to get things done, but as mayor I was going to be one of one. I felt the times were calling me to be the leader of this city because of my engineering and my business background.”

Suttle sensed the time was right to take the leap.

“I would say I got indications. See, I’m a visionary, I’m a guy who’s got a nose for what’s over the crest in the road. I don’t have any magic crystal ball, I just have a feel. About two years before the election I could sense there was going to be a whole different scenario and so I kept my eyes and ears glued to what I thought was going to happen and then just waited for it to happen.

“Now I was preparing in the meantime, I was continuing to get myself mentally ready because I had to have it down here,” he said, tapping his belly. “I basically put the final decisions together in August right after Mike Fahey made the announcement he would not run (for reelection). That’s when I moved into a hundred percent go, 24-hours-a-day mode.”

Fahey, enjoyed an eight-year reign as mayor that during more prosperous times saw the city grow its tax base via annexation and its debt via the Qwest Center. When revenues declined, cutbacks to city services began. By the time Suttle defeated Daub in the nonpartisan general election, it was clear city revenues were on a continuing downward spiral while expenditures were going ever up.

A looming budget shortfall required some hard decisions from the new mayor.

No one knew the depth of the economic woes until after the election. Suttle said his and Fahey’s jaws dropped upon discovering the city’s sales tax stream took a major hit. The sales tax collapse, combined with rising costs and pension payouts, resulted in a $9.5 million hole for 2009 and an even larger projected deficit in 2010. By charter, the mayor was mandated to submit a balanced budget by late July.

None of the options for addressing the problems have proved pleasant or popular. All involve some level of loss or sacrifice. Suttle and his team went about devising a plan. In the lead up to the final plan, Suttle drew the ire of many when he broached cutting more city services, raising property taxes, imposing an entertainment tax, laying off city employees and enacting wage-hiring freezes.

“I could not get any sense of consensus from the Chamber, from the Council, from the public or anywhere,” he said.

At roundtable budget forums he got an earful from taxpayers. When he announced specific cuts, debate began anew. With “the clock ticking,” he said, “we rolled it out. Right or wrong, we had a balanced 2010 budget document. When it was all said and done we had to do some massaging but at least I had something out there I could stand on and felt confident about and it forced the Council, the Chamber and the public to come up with other ideas they could put it into the game.”

As things played out, the Mayor won some points and compromised on others.

“There were really some decisions I did not like to make but some good came out of that,” he said. He admitted to “a couple” sleepless nights in the deliberations.

The city also faces major financial obligations outside its general fund budget: $325 million owed on the Qwest Center; a $500 million shortfall in the police-fire pension fund; and the $1.7 billion federally-mandated sewer improvement project. He wants more fiscal accountability in how the city budgets and conducts business.

Among those advising Suttle are some young staffers not long out of college. Asked if he’s concerned about their inexperience, he said, “no, because City Hall is steeped in the status quo, City Hall needs change, it needs constructive change, so I want to bring in fresh faces and fresh ideas and fresh people in a businesslike process. You’ll see me do that in just about everything I do.”

He said his “keen eye” helps him identify top talent. “I have hired roughly a thousand people in my career, and I’ve failed a few times, I’ve hired some real dogs, but I would say 98 percent of the folks I’ve hired I’ve made good choices. I’m trained to read people, I’m trained to read situations, I’m trained to read the tea leaves and so I will only employ the best.”

One of his older hires, City Planning Director Rick Cunningham, was a protege of Suttle’s at HDR. Suttle’s still looking to fill a few positions. “I’m ready to move on and get a personnel director hired from business that can do the changes in the system here that are progressive, the same with the parks director, and I do want to fill the deputy chief of staff position.”

He termed “bothersome” the tendency by some to compare every move he makes, including personnel and salary decisions, to what Fahey did.

“Making those comparisons is useless and worthless,” he said.

Aside from budget fixes, Suttle wants to create jobs, attract new business, upgrade the city’s infrastructure and spur more development. As for what kind of job he’s doing, he’ll let the only critics who matter decide.

“I’m the actor on the stage. It’s the audience that’s going to take me and it’s the audience that’s going to judge whether or not I do a good performance.”

Hilton Omaha to Undergo $35 Million Expansion (eon.businesswire.com)
Clean Energy Leaders Discuss Innovation at First Regional Summit as Offshoot of White House Conference (kauffman.org)
States Combat Health Costs, Workforce And Safety Issues (medicalnewstoday.com)
You: Recall Campaigns Become a Growing Hazard for Mayors (nytimes.com)
Recall drives popular tactics for irate voters (sfgate.com)
Omaha mayor narrowly survives recall effort (reuters.com)

Categories: Jim Suttle, Omaha, Politics, Writing Tags: Democratic Party (United States), Jim Suttle, Mayor of Omaha, Omaha Nebraska, Politics, Recall election, Recall Suttle

One Day at a Time, A Recovering Alcoholic’s Story

August 4, 2010 leoadambiga 4 comments

General view of part of the South Water street...

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

I met the subject of this New Horizons story, John H., while on assignment for another story. His intelligence and honesty struck me and when he revealed some hard things about his life I knew I wanted to write his story. This is the result. This account of his struggle with alcoholism is written mostly in John’s own words. After all, he’s lived it, and because he came out the other side to become a treatment specialist at a detox unit, he can speak with the authority of someone who’s been there, done that. I lost track of John after the story appeared. I don’t even know if he’s still around. I really like him though. Maybe I’ll make a call and see if he’s still in town. I have no doubt that if he’s still living, he’s still helping others out of the dark and into the light., because that very service is part of his own recovery process.

One Day at a Time, A Recovering Alcoholic‘s Story

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in the New Horizons

“I always knew I was going to die drunk. Now I know I will die a drunk, but hopefully a sober one. And there’s a difference.”

The bittersweet words belong to John H., an Omaha resident and recovering alcoholic who works as a treatment specialist in the detox unit at the Omaha Campus for Hope, a Catholic Charities counseling and shelter site formerly known as St. Gabriel’s. It is precisely where John finally got dried out some 11 years ago after decades of abusing alcohol and other drugs. If nothing else, his journey from client to staff member there proves addicts can make a fresh start if they really want to.

Born into a family of heavy drinkers in Chicago, John tried quitting booze several times but could never stay on the wagon more than a few months. His drinking wrecked four marriages, strained relations with his children, cost him several jobs and sent him on an odyssey around the country as he fruitlessly searched to escape his worst enemy — himself and his addiction. He suffered frequent blackouts, developed cirrhosis of the liver and squandered opportunities in a constant quest for getting his next buzz or fix. In the end, it took a savage assault that nearly left him dead before he realized a higher power was looking after him and he finally accepted the fact his life was too valuable to waste away in a permanent vodka-induced stupor.

Omaha Campus for Hope

Today, John shares a modest home in north Omaha with his youngest child, Shawn. The house, whose exterior is ablaze in color from all the flowers John has planted, is mere blocks from both his job and from the scene of his catharsis. A witty and intelligent man with an Irishman’s gift for turning phrases, John works one-on-one with active drunks and drug addicts in trying to help them kick the habit. In detox he sees desperate people contending with the agony of withdrawal.

“Getting clean hurts,” he said. “It’s easier to stay clean than it is to get clean.” It is not a pretty sight between the night sweats and the hallucinations, but it is exactly what John himself went through himself and that experience allows him to empathize with clients and, hopefully, use his own story as a model of sobriety. “I love it,” he said of his job. “Where I work we try to share our experience, strength and hope. That’s all we can do. I think sometimes it helps if clients know you’ve been there yourself. I let them know I have.”

As he sees it, the job boils down to providing unconditional support to those with no where else to turn. “We can’t fix anybody,” he said. “What we try to do is help them fix themselves by talking straight to them. No alcoholic-addict gets clean and sober until they hit bottom and the only place they can go then is up. What we try to do is raise their bottom so they don’t have to go so far down. We never see our successes. They go out and lead normal lives and we never see them again. We see the failures. We don’t really consider them failures as individuals, but they’re people who just haven’t got it right yet and keep coming back.”

He said the last thing users need is reprimanding because that only exacerbates the depression and self-loathing that accompany drug abuse. “Alcoholics-addicts have no self-esteem and no self-worth. I think they know what they’re doing isn’t right, but telling them that won’t do any good. They’re already down and all you’re doing then is deflating their own low opinion of themselves. Besides, they have a disease. It’s not a matter of choice after awhile.”

With the perspective of time, John has come to understand how and why drinking overwhelmed his life. The roots of his problem extend to early childhood, when he and his siblings were weaned on alcohol as a rite of passage.

“Both of my folks were alcoholics, as were my grandfolks and aunts and uncles. From a very early age there was always drinking around me. Being the oldest of four kids, I saw how my folks would pour some Rock and Rye in a glass and stick their finger in it and rub my sisters’ and brother’s gums. So, I suppose, that’s when I started drinking too. My folks were also the type of people who gave us a small glass of wine or a weak high ball with dinner when we were children. The assumption was, ‘Well, they’re going to drink when they get on the outside, so they may as well learn how to do it at home.’ The whole family drank. It was just the status quo. There were lots of arguments because of the booze. It got very, very ugly at times.”

Drinking shadowed every family activity, even the clan’s shared passion for the Chicago Cubs. One of his clearest schoolboy memories is coming home after class and finding his mother well on the way to tying one on while rooting for the Cubs. “We lived in a 3rd floor apartment within walking distance of Wrigley Field and in the summer I can remember coming home from school and entering the apartment, which had no air conditioning, and there would be my mother in her bra and half-slip with a quart of beer in a Pilsner glass in one hand and an iron in the other while watching the Cub game on television.”

Wrigley Field and surrounding neighborhood

His own serious drinking habit developed in his teens. “In retrospect, I know now that I was more than likely an alcoholic in high school,” he said. As a young man, he somewhat successfully masked his drinking but in reality he was what he calls “a functional alcoholic.” He adds, “I could still maintain some decorum of sensibility and reasonableness. Then, by the end of the disease, I would just fall off the edge of the world when I drank.” Bothered by the turmoil in his family, he often stayed away from home. He left home for good at 17 when he and his girlfriend eloped the night of their high school graduation. The young couple lived in Texas and a number of other places before the marriage collapsed. He worked his “way back up north” and it was in Kansas City that he met wife No. 2. She was an Omaha native and her desire to return to her roots first led John here.

In his mid 20s John and his second wife suffered the loss of a young child to cancer, an event that may have triggered more intense drinking in the grieving father, who acknowledges he was bitter and inconsolable over his son’s death.

With no real skills to speak of, other than a gift for gab and an intimate knowledge of liquor, he gravitated to the one line of work he seemed eminently qualified for — bartender. He was a natural, plus the job gave him access to all the booze he could guzzle on the sly, only he didn’t always get away with it. “I was a good bartender at first until, toward the end, when I became my own best customer. Then it was not so good. It got me fired a couple of times,” he said.

Between bartending gigs he put his people skills to work selling women’s shoes and hawking greeting cards as a traveling salesman. For several years he hit the road selling door to door, relocating several times along the way. including to Atlanta and Nashville. When regular jobs like these petered out, he always went back to tending bar. All this moving around, he said, was his desperate bid to find “the geographical cure for alcoholism,” which, of course, doesn’t exist. By the time he moved back to Omaha in the 1970s, John had been through three broken marriages and several careers. He was back to tending bar again and his drinking was worse than ever. He was descending into a kind of oblivion whose end result was inevitably going to be imprisonment or death.

“Alcoholism is a progressive disease. It keeps getting worse. By the time I finally got help there was no high, there was no enjoyment, there was no pleasure in drinking. I drank so I didn’t get sick. It was pure maintenance drinking.”

His first couple attempts at getting help did not take. “I was in two treatment programs. First, I went to Immanuel Hospital as an out-patient and after a few weeks, I said, ‘I’m wasting your time and my money because by coming in only a couple times a week I keep going right back to the same environment doing the same things.’ Later, I went to Immanuel as an in-patient and I stayed there a month. I stayed clean and sober for, oh, maybe three months and then I went back and stayed out for maybe eight years.” Why didn’t these tries at sobriety work? “I wasn’t ready,” he said. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was on me. Alcoholism is a disease where you’re not going to get clean and sober until you’re ready to get clean and sober. It just depends on you. It’s strictly up to you.”

For a long time, he convinced himself he could control his drinking by moderating it. He knows now he was fooling himself. “I will never control it. Even now, going on 11 years of sobriety, I don’t control it. Abstinence is the only thing that will work for me. So, as long as I don’t take the first one (drink), I don’t have to worry about the last one.”

The leap from dependency to sobriety is a great one because it involves changing an entire mind-set. As John explains, an addict is obsessed with the acquisition and consumption of his/her drug of choice. “Your life revolves around the alcohol or drugs. You wake up in the morning planning on using. I would wake up at a quarter to six. By the time I got up, got dressed and walked to the liquor store on 30th and Laurel, it was 6 o’clock. I would get a half-pint of vodka. That was my breakfast. I would drink it on the way home, come into the house, smoke two cigarettes and start getting the kids up for school. Then I would go back and get a larger bottle and get serious about it.”

As the disease evolves John said an alcoholic alienates and isolates himself more and more from the mainstream of life until he or she is totally, utterly alone. “You start out drinking socially but you eventually hit a point where it’s just you and the bottle. You weed out people one at a time because you don’t even want your fellow drinkers to know how much you’re drinking. I had a drinking buddy for, oh, like 19 years. He had an old, battered pickup truck and we would drive to a park and sit there and drink. He and I would take turns trying to get sober. He did get sober a year before I did and that was the longest year I ever spent in my life because now it was just me and the bottle.”

Just as in the classic 1941 drama about alcoholism, The Lost Weekend, John said the shame of addiction led him to try and conceal his drinking from disapproving spouses and the disorientation of drunkenness put him on constant edge.

“You think you’re hiding it, but you’re not hiding anything. Everybody knows you have a problem except you.” In his case, he usually confined his drinking to public settings, although he sometimes snuck a bottle home. “I would very seldom bring a bottle in the house. I would just go up to the store and get some and drink it on the way back. I could kill a pint of straight booze in a few blocks. When I finished it I’d just throw it in the alley. Once in a while I would bring a pint home and hide it somewhere. I would go to bed, wake up an hour later and take a couple nips, then go back to bed and wake up another hour later to take a couple more. Well, you do this three or four times and you get paranoid, and you move it. Now, the next time you get up you can’t find it. You don’t know whether you can’t remember where you put it or whether your wife found it and threw it away. And you sure enough can’t ask her, ‘Did you find the bottle I hid in here last night?’”

By 1990 John was a wreck. He was separated from his fourth wife and raising their two oldest children alone. He functioned, but moved through life like a ghost. Life was a blur. Everything was muted and dulled in a kind of permanent haze or fog. He was about to get a rude awakening.

On a September night he walked from his house to fetch — what else? — a half-pint of vodka on his way to a meeting at the Viking Ship community center in nearby Miller Park.

“I was cutting through the park and I saw three guys sitting on the side of a hill and one of them stood up as I approached and asked me if I had a cigarette. I reached down to grab one and as I looked up I got hit in the face and that’s the last thing I remember for a month,” he said.

Immanuel Medical Center

The beating he absorbed at the hands of the strangers, who were never apprehended, left him with five fractured ribs, a jaw busted in three places, broken bones above and below his left eye (whose sight is permanently damaged), a broken nose and countless cuts and abrasions. Amazingly, he managed walking home, where his kids answered the door to find a grotesque figure sagging on the porch. They did not even recognize their own father for all the blood, bruising and swelling. He was rushed to St. Joseph Hospital, where he drifted in and out of consciousness and needed weeks for his concussion and other injuries to heal.

What happened to John that night had nothing at all to do with his alcoholism, yet he attributes the event and others following it with finally getting him to make the pledge to stop drinking stick.

“I have very mixed emotions about it,” he said of the beating. “It was a negative event but it had a positive result.”

Before he could make the commitment to stop drinking, he still had one last bender to go on.

“My jaw was wired shut and when I got it unwired I went out and got drunk that night, and I drank for a couple months. My last drunk was like a two-week drunk and it was a real bad one. Eight consecutive days are a total black out. Then, I finally got sick enough that I quit. In the meantime, my wife filed papers with the Douglas County Attorney that I was a danger to myself and others, and I more than likely was. Sheriff’s deputies came to my house and hauled me off in handcuffs to the psyche unit at Immanuel Hospital (Medical Center).

“Sitting there at three-four in the morning the light bulb finally went off in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, whoever is keeping you alive isn’t doing it so you can go get drunk again.’ And at that time I finally made peace with God. Ever since I lost my son to cancer, God and I didn’t get along. We agreed to disagree for about 30 years. But after I made peace with Him it got easier. And from that point on I’ve never really had the urge to go drink.”

After his release from Immanuel John checked himself into then St. Gabriel’s detox unit. Before entering detox, however, he had a whole weekend on his hands at home, which posed yet another test to his resolve. “I had free reign to do what I wanted and yet I found myself not even wanting to drink. Even in my fuddled-up condition I thought, ‘There’s hope now.’ That was the start of it.”

Upon completing treatment at St. Gabe’s, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous, whose program he continues in today and that he intends participating in the remainder of his life. These days John is a content man who finds love and support among both his AA family and his own family. His son Shawn is living with him and sharing in his new life. He said, “Shawn got a lot of the benefits of my being sober. I’ve taken him places and done things with him that I never did with the older kids, who were out of the house by time I got sober. There was some resentment by my older kids, but we’ve been able to talk about it and work our way through it.” John’s dream is to one day retire to Mesa, AZ, where his beloved Cubs have spring training. Until then, he remains ever vigilant.

“Recovery is a continuing process. The first time I think I’m recovered, I’m drunk. I was an alcoholic yesterday. I’m one today. I’ll be one tomorrow. They’ll always make the stuff. They’ll always sell it. I’ll always be addicted to it. That doesn’t mean I have to give into it, though,” he said.

He realizes that without the support of his AA sponsor and circle of friends, he would be lost again. His philosophy about sobriety reflects the AA creed.

“It starts with attitude. And for the first time in my life I am comfortable in a sober world. I am not comfortable with my sobriety in that I take it for granted. I do what I have to do to maintain it.”

That means attending daily AA meetings. For John and others like him, sobriety is a one day at a time thing,

“All it is a daily reprieve,” he said.

AA marks 75 years of helping alcoholics ‘rise from the depths of hell’ (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
Getting Sober: Hope In the Rooms and Online (beliefnet.com)
Alcoholism: The Basics (addictionts.com)
A Dry Drunk is a just as mean as a wet one (spreadinformation.wordpress.com)
Alcoholism and alcohol abuse (addictiontreatmentnow.wordpress.com)
Is addiction a brain disorder? (theage.com.au)

Categories: AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), Health/Wellness, Medical, Omaha, Personalities-Characters, Writing Tags: AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), Addiction, Alcoholism, Catholic Charities, Health/Wellness, Omaha, Rehab, Substance abuse, Substance dependence

Lela Knox Shanks: Woman of conscience, advocate for change, civil rights and social justice champion

August 4, 2010 leoadambiga 2 comments

Image via Wikipedia

UPDATE: As the world turns these days I know when the subject of one of my stories on this blog is in the news by the corresponding uptick in views. When I noted dozens of viewers landing on my profile about Lela Knox Shanks I hoped for the best but suspected the worst, and sadly as some of you reading this right now already know she has passed away after a long illness. She is a woman worth remembering and if you haven’t read the story below yet I trust you’ll take the time to. If you don’t know nothing about her, then by all means familiarize yourself with some of her work and experiences in the civil rights and social justice struggle. If you knew her or her story, you still might find oout something new about her you didn’t know before. In either case, you’ll be honoring her memory by reading about her good works. Rest in peace, Lela.

New Horizons editor Jeff Reinhardt told me about the subject of this profile, Lela Knox Shanks, and I’m glad he did. I’d never heard of her, but she’s someone who deserves to be more widely known because she’s spent the better part of her 80-plus years doing the right thing in the struggle for freedom, justice, and equal rights. Jeff and I drove to meet with her at her home in Lincoln, Neb., and we were both captivated by her unwavering commitment to equality. She’s taken many brave stances in her life and she’s paid some dear prices, but she’s never backed down, never given up. She’s a model and an inspiration for us all. I think you’ll find as memorable and impressive as Jeff and I did.

Lela Knox Shanks: Woman of conscience, advocate for change, civil rights and social justice champion

©by Leo Adam Biga

Originally published in the New Horizons

Activist, humanitarian, scholar, speaker, feminist and author Lela Knox Shanks could be excused for getting weary after a lifetime of agitating for equal rights. As an 81-year-old African American who came of age in the Jim Crow South and fought many civil rights battles in the Midwest, she’s stood up against injustice. She’s picketed, protested, demonstrated. She’s written countless letters to elected officials.

Driving up to the cozy home in Lincoln, Neb. she’s resided in 43 years, expressions of her activism are visible in sloganed signs on her porch: “War is not the answer,” “Every human being is born legal,” “The State should be about life, not death.” She’s butted heads with the-powers-that-be. She’s advocated for the oppressed. At various times her activities have made her the object of harassment and surveillance. She’s been arrested but never convicted for her civil disobedience.

Her partner in life and in social justice causes was her husband of 50 years, the late Hughes Hannibal Shanks, who developed Alzheimer’s Disease in the mid-1980s.

A fellow product of the South, he fought his own battles on the job and in the community. Together, the couple proved an immovable force, never backing down from a perceived wrong, always striving to do the right thing. They saw much social progress flower in America, including gains by minorities in education, employment, housing. Their children, now grown with families of their own, are all professionals. The prospects for their grandchildren, bright, too.

AD marked the progressive loss of her best friend. She was Hughes’s primary caregiver when little information about the illness or how to care for loved ones afflicted with it existed. She did what she always does when confronted with an obstacle, she educated herself and threw herself into finding solutions.

Hughes had been the family radical. He presided over lively discussions at the dinner table. Everyone was expected to join in. He and Lela were kindred spirits with their keen social consciousness. As dementia stole more and more of him, she said, “the thing I missed most about my husband was that I didn’t have anybody that I could share that kind of intimacy of conversation with.”

Her odyssey caring for him was a profound experience. It led her to write a book, Your Name is Hughes Hannibal Shanks: A Caregiver’s Guide to Alzheimer’s, that received praise upon its initial 1996 publication and 1999 reprint. It was a fitting project for a woman who earned a college journalism degree and worked for the famous black newspaper, The Chicago Defender, but who abandoned a dreamed-of career as a writer in deference to Hughes’s wish she not work but raise the kids.

Reception to the book was so strong she became a much-in-demand public speaker, thus ushering in a new phase in her life as a lecturer and independent scholar. For years she’s shared her insights on caregiving with audiences around the country. She’s also given many talks about women’s empowerment, once serving on a United Nations panel addressing the subject.

She’s made many African American history presentations, too. Just as she became an expert on caregiving for AD by reading everything she could find on it, she researched black history so she could share this rich heritage with others.

“When I became a speaker on African American history for the Nebraska Humanities Council,” she said, “I made a comprehensive study of it.”

That’s the way Lela does things. No half measures. It’s all or nothing with her.

Her interest in history was stoked by the legacy of her great-grandmother, Hannah Mason McCrutcheon, who was born a slave. Lela knew her well and said this matriarch’s proudest moment was having seen Abraham Lincoln speak. This is why Lela’s so passionate to have history disseminated.

“I went to segregated schools (in Oklahoma) and in my school I took Negro history,” Lela said. “So I grew up learning it. Plus, I heard famous African Americans speak at my high school. Mary McLeod Bethune for one.”

Slavery was a taboo topic, however, in her family. Whenever Lela tried bringing it up with her elders, she said, “It was always, ‘Baby, we don’t talk about that.’ It was too awful.” It’s a painful enough history that generations later some descendants of slaves would rather not be reminded of it. “I have relatives today that don’t want me to ever say anything about that. I guess its’ so degrading.”

Linked as she is to that past Lela testified before the Nebraska Judiciary Committee last April in support of a resolution (LR284) that the state apologize for slavery.

“Words cannot really express the emotion I feel, living long enough to testify at such an historic hearing,” she told members. “An acknowledgement by this official body of the historical facts of injustices perpetrated on African Americans due to race, dating back to the Nebraska Territory, clears the air and provides an atmosphere in which honest racial healing and reconciliation can finally begin to take place in Nebraska.

“Passage of this official document can hopefully provide school administrators and teachers with the courage and the information and the permission to teach, finally, an inclusive American history not yet included in American history textbooks, thus preparing all Nebraska children with a better understanding of themselves and their prejudices…and to live in the larger, multicultural world…”

After Hughes died in 1998 there was a hole in her that could not be filled. No one could have blamed her if she’d retreated from her public life. But she’s gone right on fighting the good fight. That’s because adversity is her old friend. “We were born into it,” is how she puts it. Life in the South was a constant reminder to blacks of their second-class citizen status. “It was something I was constantly plagued by growing up,” she added. “One of the hardest things for me to accept was why I have to be treated this way. Why can’t I do something about this?” The experience toughened her for the hard times.

“My husband and I didn’t set out to be activists. We really just wanted to have whatever a so-called normal life was and raise our family, go to church and do the things that were acceptable, support the government where we could.”

Lela Knox Shanks has enjoyed pressing flowers almost all her life. Her husband made the frames and she said she gave at least 500 as gifts.

Racism made that difficult. Said Lela, “From time to time as African Americans you get so tired of it all. You would like for it to just go away. You’d kind of like to not have to think about it. But we could not ignore it, there was just no way.”

She and Hughes, a World War II vet 10 years her elder, met at Lincoln University outside St. Louis. She graduated with a journalism degree and he with a law degree. He worked for the Social Security Administration. They started their family in segregated St. Louis. When denied the opportunity to apply for jobs he was qualified for he moved the family to Denver, Colo. in the early-’50s.

“Denver was like heaven,” she said, “because we could go to the swimming pools, we could go to the museums, we could go to restaurants. It was wonderful.”

But when the couple’s oldest child, Nena, was denied equal access to the education they wanted for her, Lela drew the line.

“I went to the Urban League, the NAACP, all the civil rights organizations, to see if there was anything they could do about the problem,” she said. “There wasn’t any help coming from anybody, and I just threw myself across the bed and cried, and then it just came to me — You’re the one who’s going to have to do something.”

Questioning authority is something Lela inherited from her Okie upbringing.

“I’m not sure my parents would have even known civil rights, it was just that my mother was given intuitively the ability to speak up for herself. She was not afraid to be her own advocate, and I always say I learned that at my mothers breast because I never had that problem. It’s a great feeling to feel like you always have the inner strength to speak for yourself. It was just given to me — that’s the only way I can explain it.”

Growing up under such “a powerful person” as her mother, who “defied whatever” was in her way, Lela knew she, too, could stand up for her rights.

This same sense of independence is something Lela and Hughes instilled in their own children. As a token of their admiration and appreciation for that lesson they presented her with a card that simply reads, “Question Everything.” It’s displayed on the mantel above her fireplace, next to some of her many awards.

“That’s what my children gave me because that’s what we had taught them — question us, because if you don’t question us and state yourself and stand up for yourself as a human being with us, you won’t stand up to other authority figures. And that’s what you have to do in life — you’ve got to be your own advocate. You can’t depend on somebody else being there for you.”

When the time came for Lela and Hughes to stand together, they never wavered.

“We were different in many ways but we were essentially the same when it came to what was important to us. When we were courting we talked about what was important to us in life. We wanted to help our people but what, of course, I came to realize was that I was helping myself.”

Faced with an unfeeling educational system and Hughes once running into a glass ceiling at work, the family left Denver for Kansas City, Kan. at the height of the civil rights movement. There, they butted heads with the public school board. She said boards then used such tactics as gerrymandered school boundaries, selective pupil transfers and feeder schools “to keep the schools separate and unequal.”

Upset by this bias the couple joined others in lodging complaints and finally withdrew their children from school to enroll them in a “protest school” they opened at home. Others joined the protest by removing their kids from the public schools and having them attend what students lovingly called Shanks University.

Ten children in all attended Shanks U that 1962-63 school year. Lela was their primary educator. The ruling class though took a dim view of this renegade school operating in defiance of the established order.

“We were going against the power structure so they weren’t about to certify us and that’s why we were arrested for truancy,” Lela said. “We didn’t trust any of the attorneys there and so we went to Topeka to retain Elijah Scott, the attorney who filed the original brief for the Brown vs. Board of Education case.”

The arraignment proved traumatic. Lela remembers: “Our attorney went to post the bond and while he was gone a couple deputies came over. One pulled on me from one side and the other pulled on me from another side, with my husband and children standing there. My husband knew not to move, not to say a word. The children though were yelling and screaming, ‘Mama, Mama,’ and hanging onto my legs, because it was obvious they were trying to take me away. That was the most terrifying thing about that experience.”

Scott returned just in time, her bond posted, and she was released. Lela and her family left the courthouse breathing a sigh of relief.

In retrospect Lela said, “I can’t even begin to imagine what would have happened to me if I had actually been jailed, because African Americans were telling us it was stupid what we were doing — that we were going to get killed. A lot of the parents wouldn’t let their children play with our children. They were afraid because they just knew whatever we were doing we weren’t going to win and something terrible was probably going to happen to us. In those days African Americans could be killed and nobody gave a second thought to it.”

Lela ran afoul of authorities again when she and others were arrested for picketing outside a federal building. By this time she was active in CORE or Congress for Racial Equality. She was ordered to appear before a federal grand jury. Hughes couldn’t be with her — he was in the nation’s capitol for Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic march and speech on the mall.

She stood up to that inquisition with uncommon grace and eloquence.

“The first question a juror asked me was, ‘What were you doing picketing the federal building?, and I said, ‘I was doing what my husband is doing right now, and that’s marching for my freedom.’”

Lela was acquitted but intrusions into her and her family’s private life continued.

She said their home phone was tapped and that on one occasion three FBI agents showed up unannounced when she was home alone with her youngest child, Eric, demanding she answer questions, “trying I’m sure to intimidate us.”

“They (the FBI) went on my husband’s job and they went on the jobs of several other people who had been picketing,” she said. “We received some death threats, just like all the rest of the people who spoke out.”

Despite the risks, the Shankses stood firm. “We would not have done what we did if we had let fear take us over,” Lela said.

Meanwhile, an integrated lay Catholic social action committee took up the fight to get black children an equal education. Lela welcomed the support.

“We decided it would not be wise to put our children back in public school. We were really afraid of reprisals. We had already had an incident with our oldest child,” she said. “The black teachers were afraid for their jobs. They knew that in integration the black teachers lost out initially. They were the first to be let go. A lot of these principals and teachers we’d gone to college with. They were my sorority sisters, his fraternity brothers. And those people didn’t want to have anything to do with us. We were pariahs, we were troublemakers.”

As Lela can attest, being an activist can be lonely.

“It was always a struggle. I’m a human being and I wanted a fine house and a fine this and a fine that, like anybody would want, but I just found I had to forego that to do what I knew deep within was the right thing to do. We had both agreed that trying to do away with segregation was more important than making money.”

After much wrangling the social action committee arranged for the Shankses and other parents to enroll their children in a Kansas City parochial school.

Hughes was transferred to Lincoln in 1965. The family found a home in an all-white district. He and Lela knew little about Nebraska besides it being the birthplace of Malcolm X and the home to a militant young barber, Ernie Chambers, “who dared to speak the truth to power.” Forty-three years later she praised the outgoing state senator at a dedication naming the capitol’s judiciary review room in his honor.

Before Hughes moved his family up north he went on ahead alone, unsure what reception awaited a black man in the Woods Park neighborhood. As a precaution, Lela said, he slept on a board in their home’s bathtub. When a week passed without incident, he had Lela and the kids join him. One neighbor, who later became a close friend, asked Lela if they wouldn’t feel more comfortable in the Malone area, a black section. Another neighbor circulated a petition “to get us out,” said Lela. Nothing happened. The family wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

Lincoln became home. The kids went to public schools — often the only blacks in their classes. Hughes still brooked no inequity at work. Once the nest was empty he finally relented and let Lela work — as a field supervisor for CETA with the Nebraska Department of Labor. She’s immersed herself in Nebraskans for Peace.

The journey that is her life is “an evolutionary process” to “break through the boundaries of tribes, ethnic groups, religions, nationalities” that, she said, separate us. Her search is to “find that common thread…that lives in all of us and links us one to the other.” She said this “unseen force pushes the human race forward to do new things, such as discover cures, invent the computer and to elect a Barack Obama. The change we need is already here. We just have to catch up with it.”

Like most folks Lela’s age the idea of a black president seemed remote and yet Obama’s attained the highest office. Did she think she’d see it happen in her lifetime? “No, I did not, but without a doubt I knew it was possible,” she said.

“Hughes would have celebrated Obama’s election. We would have hugged each other and cried together.” The way she sees it, Obama seized a moment in time when America was ready for historic change.

“Obama is a man for his time,” she said, “and this is his time right now. I think the time is more important than the person. I don’t think you can stop a thing when its time has come. You just can’t stop it. And he’s the man at this particular time.”

No matter what happens during his administration, she said, things will never be the same because his presidency has broken barriers once thought unbreakable.

“Even if he’s the worst president…it still will have changed this world, not just this country,” she said. “It’s inevitable that there will be psychological effects on peoples around the world, and that’s just for starters.”

The fact the White House is occupied by a strong black family presents an image that not all the marches during the entire civil rights movement could project. Obama’s victory is a culmination of what that movement and a lot of other efforts to combat discrimination and racism fought so hard to bring about.

Lela recalls how not so very long ago even the suggestion that blacks be portrayed in the popular media like anyone else amused or appalled producers, whose views, she said, reflected the demeaning way blacks were held.

“I remember when I would hear advertisers on television laughing when asked, ‘Why don’t you use African Americans in commercials?,’ and, ‘Why don’t African Americans ever kiss on television?’ These were big Madison Avenue advertisers and they thought it was funny to even ask the question,” said Lela. “Their reply was, ‘White people wouldn’t be interested in seeing African Americans kiss or caress. They don’t want to look at them on TV.’”

The Cosby Show disproved that notion. That was a situation comedy though. Oprah’s immense popularity has given lie to that thinking as well. But she’s a talk show host. The Obama presidency is on a whole different scale.

“Every day now there’s going to be a black face on TV for the world to see.” Lela said. “I mean, they’ll see his two little children and his wife, and him with his family, and see these people acting like what they are — human beings. That’s part of that psychological effect that it will have.”

Looking at things from a broad perspective, Lela believes the Obamas will do much to supplant the dehumanizing stereotypes that for so long have been used to denigrate African Americans. The First Family’s example won’t eradicate racism, she knows, but it will expose the fallacies of long ingrained beliefs that blacks are somehow inferior or different.

“The people who say that are people who have not yet discovered their common humanity,” she said. “That’s ignorance, sheer ignorance. That’s the way I would describe it, because when you discover that common humanity then you know at least intellectually that you have to accept everybody as they are. It’s the same with any of the differences (between people). When you get right down to it we’re all just people. All wanting the same thing pretty much, and all doing the same things pretty much every day. Why can’t we get this through our head?

“That doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with everything you say. I certainly don’t agree with some of the things Obama says. But you see when you discover that common humanity and you know that that DNA is virtually the same in all of us, you don’t think like that anymore.”

If nothing else, she hopes the Obama factor opens the door to multiculturalism.

“You know the great tragedy of the bigotry that we have so made a tradition in this country is that it denies us the enriching life we could have if we opened ourselves up to three fourths of the rest of the world’s population, because three fourths of the world’s population are people of color.”

Her extensive travels to speak across Nebraska convince her the state is a microcosm for a parochial outlook on the world.

“Nebraskans have not permitted themselves to really learn enough about the rest of the world,” she said, “and I think many Nebraskans still envision that the world is just like Nebraska — mostly all white.”

Along with a broader world view, she’s hopeful “a more inclusive history” — one that includes the whole of the African American experience — will be adopted and taught in schools, where there’s a paucity of materials from a black perspective. “You can graduate from college with a Ph.D. having never read a book written by an African American,” she said. It’s something dear enough to her she’s gone out of her way to promote it at teachers conferences.

“I made up a bibliography of books for children about black Americans in l986 to give to teachers. I took about 25 books with me to show to them. These were primarily children’s books about every aspect of African American history, culture and life. Some of the schools where I spoke in during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s either had no books or very few about African Americans, so for awhile I bought books and donated at least one to their school libraries in honor of Hughes.

“When I talk on African American history I say, ‘The important thing for you to know about the slaves first of all is that they laid the foundation for this country to be the number one economic power in the world through those 200 years of free labor.’ Nobody ever talks about that. Let’s talk about what African Americans were doing besides being slaves — they were inventors, they were artists, they were explorers, they were in every discipline of American life. There were always some free blacks, even in the midst of the darned slavery.”

At times she’s rankled by mainstream America boxing black history into one month, February. She said, “We ought to be talking about African American history in every month of the school year.”

In an even larger sense, she feels Obama’s presidency represents a return to the common origin of our species. “There’s always deeper meaning of things than just the obvious and I think symbolically he represents taking America and the world back to where we began. History’s been rewritten so much that people forget this is where it all started — in Africa — and symbolically he represents the possibilities of the uniting.”

One thing Lela won’t do is give Obama a free pass just because he’s black. “I know that being African American is just one part of who I am and so my judgments don’t go through that prism before they go through just common humanity.” She realizes Obama must tread carefully. “I understand what he’s going through. I know that as an African American he’s going to bend over backwards trying to make sure he doesn’t come across as a militant or these things that don’t put you in good standing with the public in general.”

Similarly, she doesn’t view Obama as some kind of savior figure. “I don’t feel that way about people. You have to be your own savior. And I’m not inferring I don’t believe in a higher power.” She does, explaining, while “I am not a member of an organized group, my faith is my anchor, my life. That is where I draw my strength from. My faith is what I hang on to. That is what keeps me going. Outer labels have different meanings for different people, so I avoid them. Ultimately, I believe it is our energy that tells people who we are.”

To Lela’s way of thinking, we’re each responsible for making our own path. “I think everybody can be a leader and certainly should be their own leader,” she said.

She’ll judge what kind of president Obama is on his own merits and it’s much too early yet to form an opinion. Lela will closely eye his decisions.

“Now whether he will be this person of peace, that’s to be seen, we don’t know that. Only time will tell,” she said. “He’s already calling for more troops in Afghanistan. He believes in the death penalty. Rev. (Jeremiah) Wright said he would be watching Obama just like he would anybody’s administration, and that’s exactly what I will be doing. And when I think he’s wrong…well, I already wrote him two or three letters during the campaign about things where I thought he was wrong. I have a file. One thing I may write him a letter about is — if Rev. Rick Warren is acceptable why is not Rev. Wright? That is something I would really like to ask him.”

If Lela’s learned anything it’s that the change we seek is within us. “With what I did in the civil rights movement, really the most important thing was that I changed myself. You’ve got to free itself. I learned I can’t free other people, but I can share my experience if people ask for it and maybe something will have some meaning for them. But ultimately something has to be triggered on the inside for each of us.”

In her book she writes about “finding the strength to face each new obstacle and a solution for each new problem. Difficulties can be transcended. There is always a new way. The choice is ours.” Through her trials Lela has learned the art of surrender. That’s why as trying as Hughes’s condition was, she said, “I knew it was a gift, I knew it had happened for a purpose, never dreaming that I would go all over the country speaking to people that they have a choice in life. That they don’t have to be a victim. That’s really what I try to do.”

For all her contentment, would Lela still be willing to go to jail for her convictions? “If my medical needs could be met, yes,” she said. If she could relive her life, would she be an activist again knowing the sacrifices it exacts? “Yes, I would, because it gives purpose, meaning and value to my life.”

Lela says one’s words or actions tell only so much. “The doing is the being. I think it’s what we transfer to each other in an unseen way that tells about you.” In that case then Lela Shanks Knox is a warm light in the cold darkness.

In the Spirit of Juneteenth, Sixties Activist Timothy Fitzgerald Commemorates the Pillars of the Civil Rights Movement (prweb.com)
Clarence Lusane: Racism, Shirley Sherrod and the Obama White House (huffingtonpost.com)
NAACP takes on Tea Party’s ‘racist element’ (thegrio.com)
Letting go of the past lifts a weight from caregivers (mayoclinic.com)

Categories: African-American Culture, Books, Civil Rights, Education, History, Lela Knox Shanks, Race, Social Justice, Writing Tags: African-American Culture, Alzheimer's disease, Civil Rights, Education, Health, History, Lela Knox Shanks, Race, Social Justice

Show goes on at Omaha Community Playhouse, where Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire got their start

August 4, 2010 leoadambiga 1 comment

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I wrote this New Horizons story during the 75th anniversary season of the Omaha Community Playhouse, a not so ordinary community theater where stage and film legends Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire both got their start in acting. The Playhouse is a genuine institution in my hometown. It’s rich history is interesting enough, but the theater’s success over all these years is the passion of the people who make its productions possible. That love of theater is the same today as it was decades ago, only the names and faces, casts and crews, most all volunteers, have changed. After a rocky couple years, the Playhouse has regained its bearings and the tradition, just like the old theater credo about the show going on, continues.

Show goes an at Omaha Community Playhouse, where Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire got their start

Originally published in the New Horizons

For 75 years now, just about anyone with a bit of ham in them has been afforded the chance to trod the boards or rig the lights or erect the sets at the largest community theater in America — the Omaha Community Playhouse. Because it is first and foremost a volunteer theater, where no professionals need apply, countless people, from all walks of life, have left their 9-to-5 jobs behind at the door for its magical world of greasepaint. For a chance to go on with the show. And for the chance to launch a Broadway or Hollywood career, as some Playhouse alums have done, most notably Nebraska natives Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire.

On April 7, another opening night found an electric current running through the crowd, cast and crew for The Last Night of Ballyhoo, a bittersweet comedy. No matter what the show, it never gets old, this thrilling adventure in live performance. There is a palpable excitement among the playmakers, whose craft brings a make-believe world to life, and among audience members, who willingly surrender to the spell the players cast. Then there’s the unpredictability of live theater, where anything is liable to occur. Only the night before, a mechanical wagon smashed into wooden flats that did not fly out in time and, amid the sound of splintering wood, everything came to a screeching halt.

“No matter how many plays you’ve done, it’s absolutely a live experience and anything can happen. You never get too smug because you’re always perfectly capable of having your pants pulled down around your ankles. It’s truly putting yourself out on a limb,” Playhouse Artistic Director Carl Beck said. “And being a community theater we have varying degrees of experience. It runs the gamut from veteran actors and actresses to some doing their very first show.”

Adding to the charm is the fact just plain folks — friends, neighbors, relatives, co-workers — are the ones putting on the show as performers or technicians.

With the main stage auditorium still empty that April night, the crew trussed-up the Ballyhoo set while lead actor Jeffrey Taxman paced-off nervous energy with his character’s (Uncle Adolph) ever-present stogie in his mouth. Backstage, director Judy Hart encouraged her players to “break a leg.” The show, opening in mere minutes, was out of her hands by then. According to Beck, at that late stage the director, any director, is “the most useless person in the world. There’s absolutely nothing you can do by the time opening night rolls around, except stay out of the way and keep your fingers crossed.”

In a dressing room, four female cast members animatedly chattered while applying makeup, adjusting wigs and squeezing into costumes. A stagehand knocked at the door to ask, “Hey, how’s it going?” and the actresses replied, “Just fine, honey,” mimicking the southern Belles they portray. Even as an overhead voice announced, “Ten minutes to the top of Act One,” the girls of Ballyhoo continued nonchalantly getting ready for the curtain rising on this opening night, only their steady jabbering betraying their butterflies.

Out in the lobby, arriving theatergoers buzzed with anticipation. Among them was Omahan Lisa Jensen and her family. For Jensen, the appeal of live theater is “the excitement of seeing real people up there portraying a show, a story, a song. You get a different interaction than you feel watching a movie or a TV program. You’re clapping for people who are up there performing for you, and that’s exciting. And I think you get a little different excitement on opening night you don’t get as the play progresses. The actors are more breathless, the jitters more pronounced.”

As the near-capacity crowd filed in the auditorium and settled in their seats, the sound of eager voices rippled throughout. A darkened set, meant to represent a richly-appointed Southern parlor, only hinted at what lay ahead. Then, as the lights dimmed, a hush fell over the theater and the stage was illuminated by the glare of spots and warmed by the spark of actors breathing dramatic life into a space that only moments before was cold, static, dead. For the the next two-and-half hours 400 people suspended their sense of disbelief at the unfolding story before their eyes. As in all good theater, a visceral exchange occurred between stage and spectator, until only the play became the thing. Until the lines between fantasy and reality blurred. Another show begun. Another journey into imagination joined.

Whimsy alone is not enough to make a theater succeed. It also takes guts, vision, labor, love and money. With that kind of dogged spirit behind it, the Playhouse has enjoyed 75 uninterrupted performance seasons — weathering wars, a depression, a tornado and changing times along the way. This spirit of “the show must go on” has been translated into unparalleled support for the theater, which boasts a season membership base of 9,800, a volunteer corps of 2,000 to 4,000 and a large, plush physical plant including two theaters, many rehearsal halls and bustling costume and scenic shops (The theater is unique among community theaters in building its own own costumes and sets rather than renting them.).

Former Playhouse executive director and artistic director Charles Jones, who is credited with growing the theater into the nation’s largest, said, “A strength of the Playhouse has been that people have cared so much about it, and when people really care about something it’s bound to flourish. A secret to the Playhouse’s success has been its professional staff and volunteer brigade. It has also been fortunate to have a wonderful board of directors who have always enjoyed a marvelous rapport with staff and volunteers.”

What accounts for the community’s deep embrace of the theater? Longtime volunteer Florence Young, who appeared in the very first play there in 1925, said, “There’s a feeling that it is OUR theater, and that makes it seem very close to us and very special to us. That we’re really a part of it. We love it.” She said community support for it mirrors the support Omahans show the Henry Doorly Zoo and the College World Series. “We really get behind things in Omaha. We don’t do things half-way. People really pitch-in, and that’s been the story of the Playhouse…of so many people contributing to it. One person’s enthusiasm for it draws another person to it, and they become enthused too. It’s an inspiration.”

Perhaps Henry Fonda summed it up best when he said once, “The Omaha Community Playhouse isn’t a mere building. It’s the spirit that has been put into the Playhouse by thousands of volunteers over the past many years.”

And true to its grassroots community origins, the theater’s artistic staff work hand-in-hand with amateur casts and crews to achieve productions of professional caliber. “Prior to most people’s first visit to the Playhouse they have certain expectations of what a community theater will be — a group of amateurs getting together to do a show of not so high caliber quality — but after they see the work of the Playhouse their perceptions of community theater are generally completely altered. It is the mission of the Playhouse to bring the quality of performances and production values to their highest possible end,” Beck said. Over the years its work has shined outside Omaha as select casts have participated in regional, national and international (Bulgaria and the former Soviet Union) theater festivals and through annual touring shows of its A Christmas Carol production.

The Playhouse presents 10 to 12 diverse productions each season. There is no sure formula for finding the right mix of plays that will please young, old, conservative and adventurous theatergoers alike. Said Beck, “There are people who have been members of the Playhouse for 20 and 30 and 40 years. These same people will support you but will also let you know very quickly when artistically you’re falling short. You see it directly in box office and membership sales. As a staff we try to live up to the heritage and continuity of the Playhouse by finding a balance of plays that challenge both the audience and the performer and that live up to the mission of a community theater, which is a varied and diverse season.”

The Playhouse also has an educational component via theater arts classes and workshops for all ages. It also offers an accredited apprenticeship program in technical theater. As part of an educational outreach effort to make theater available to everyone in the state the Playhouse formed a professional touring wing, the Nebraska Theater Caravan, in 1976. Since then the Caravan has taken to the road each year performing plays in smaller communities across Nebraska, Iowa and the greater Midwest. The Caravan annually mounts three productions of A Christmas Carol for audiences coast to coast. The Caravan, which recruits performers and technicians at regional auditions, has become an internal talent pool for the Playhouse. Beck, a Caravan veteran himself, said, “We have at least a dozen persons on staff who began as Caravan personnel. Together, we bring a professional strength and continuity to this community theater that is exciting.”

From the first opening night in 1925, when The Enchanted Cottage premiered, to this 75th anniversary season’s finale production of My Fair Lady, closing June 18, thousands of volunteers have supported the theater through long rehearsal hours, generous contribution dollars and annual season memberships. The story of the Playhouse is the story of the arts in Omaha. Of visionary figures (including early Playhouse stalwart Dorothy Brando, the mother of Marlon) pursuing a dream. Of a community pitching-in to realize that dream. Of supporters not letting hurdles stand in the way of grand designs. With The Roaring Twenties in full swing, the idea of creating a playhouse in Omaha was a natural. The city was fast transitioning from a frontier outpost into an urban center where all the amenities of modern life could be enjoyed. Movie and vaudeville theaters flourished. Why not a playhouse then? A group of civic and arts-minded citizens took up the challenge. By the fall of 1924 a board of directors was elected and by the following spring the Playhouse, aided by proceeds from fundraising events, was incorporated — with $10 shares issued to hundreds of stockholders. Now, it only needed a performing space.

A temporary home was found in the Cooper Dance Studio at 40th and Farnam. It was there The Enchanted Cottage, with Dorothy Brando and Jayne Fonda (a sister of Henry’s) in the cast, was performed. Within months a shy, gangly young man named Henry Fonda made his stage debut there, and, well, the rest is history. The Cooper remained the Playhouse’s home for two and a half seasons but when it was unceremoniously converted into a chicken restaurant in 1928, the theater finished its third season at the Benson High School Auditorium. In need of new quarters, the board set their sights on five nearby lots purchased a few years earlier from Sarah Joslyn, the widow of printing-publishing magnate George Joslyn. The story goes the lots, on the corner of 40th and Davenport, served as pasture land for Dame Joslyn’s cow. The fertile ground proved a rich spot for the new Playhouse, erected in only 28 days, to grow. The theater, variously described as “an old barn” and “an ungainly thing,” was meant to be a temporary facility but instead saw service for 31 years. Casts and crews made do with the structure’s shortcomings, including backstage space so cramped actors exiting stage left had to dash outside, exposed to the elements, to enter stage right.

By the end of World War II the theater was badly in need of a new and larger home. Enter Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire. The two stars, who performed together in the theater’s 1931 production of A Kiss for Cinderella, returned in 1955 for benefit performances of The Country Girl (co-starring Henry’s daughter, Jane) at the Music Hall to kick-off a capital fund drive. Within four years the Playhouse had opened at its present mid-town 69th and Cass Street site. Henry Fonda, who served on the Playhouse advisory board until his 1982 death, played an active role in visioning the theater’s future growth and ensuring its legacy. By the early 1960s, his son Peter also found his way on stage at the Playhouse. Besides the Fondas and McGuire, scores of Playhouse alumni have gone on to significant careers in theater, film and television, including actor Jim Millhollin and cabaret performer Julie Wilson. Even famed artist Grant Wood worked there — as a set designer. The place is still turning out talent. “We have a multitude of people out there doing exceedingly well. Last spring, for example, we had four former Playhouse or Caravan performers appearing in separate productions on Broadway,” Beck said.

A defining moment for the theater came in May of 1975, when a killer tornado ripped the roof off the building, blew -out the windows and doors and scattered costumes and props to the winds. A Rebuild the Playhouse campaign fund drive promptly began and by that fall the structure was repaired and a lavish 50th anniversary production, The Golden Follies, dazzled audiences. According to Charles Jones, the disaster made the community realize how much they valued the Playhouse and how fragile its continued existence was without their support, and people’s quick and generous response to its plight was the springboard for a new era of dramatic growth — in terms of memberships, contributions and additions.

Major renovations and expansions in the mid-1980s saw the refurbishing of the plush lobby, the addition of a second, more intimate, performing space (the Howard Drew Theater) and the creation of a newer and bigger scene shop. Later improvements have included a state of the art computerized lighting console. But now, some 15 years later, the Playhouse has once again outgrown its digs and is pursuing a new, grander vision: namely, to become a regional theater on par with the fabled Guthrie.

To bring that ambitious vision to life the theater is embarking on an $11 million dollar fund drive to support a new renovation project and to supplement its endowment. To stage today’s large-scale musicals, plans call for enlarging the main stage proscenium to allow for soaring two-story sets. To update the physical plant, old heating and cooling systems are to be replaced. To house the growing staff, who share quarters now, more office space is on the drawing board. To meet the growing demand for acting, dancing, singing classes, additional classrooms are in the works.

Big dreams indeed. Then again, the world of theater is all about making dreams come true. Will the Playhouse meet these lofty goals? Only time will tell, but if longtime supporter Dee Owen’s recent donation of the former Chermot Ballroom building (to provide more storage space for the theater’s $3 million worth of costumes) to the Playhouse is any indication, than Omahans will once again heed the call.

Just ask season subscribers Steve and Cindy Hutchinson of Omaha. According to Cindy, she and her husband value the Playhouse for the “consistent high quality of its marvelous productions” and “the continuity” it offers from year to year. Steve said they feel they have “an investment” in the Playhouse: “Because it’s a community playhouse the community stars in it. It’s a real expression of how much people here appreciate the arts.” Season subscriber Lisa Jensen of Omaha added, “It’s a little piece of Omaha culture at its best, and something we should all take advantage of.”

Bravo, Omaha. Now, let’s go on with the show.

La Jolla Playhouse Wins Big with Memphis at the Tony Awards; Opens 2010 Season (prweb.com)
Why the show must go on — and off — for local theater groups (commercialappeal.com)
Pasadena Playhouse Emerges From Bankruptcy (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com)
Kevyn Morrow’s Homecoming (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
Camille Metoyer Moten, A Singer for All Seasons (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)
Great Plains Theatre Conference Ushers in New Era of Omaha Theater (leoadambiga.wordpress.com)

Categories: Charles Jones, Entertainment, Omaha, Omaha Community Playhouse, Theater, Writing Tags: Carl Beck, Community theatre, Dorothy McGuire, Entertainment, Florence Young, Henry Fonda, Omaha, Omaha Community Playhouse, Theater

Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film

Check out my brand new Facebook page & Like it–
Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film
https://www.facebook.com/AlexanderPayneExpert/

The work-in-progress page is devoted to my acclaimed book about the Oscar-winning filmmaker and his work.

“This is without question the single best study of Alexander Payne’s films, as well as the filmmaker himself and his filmmaking process. In charting the first two decades of Payne’s remarkable career, Leo Adam Biga pieces together an indelible portrait of an independent American artist, and one that’s conveyed largely in the filmmaker’s own words. This is an invaluable contribution to film history and criticism – and a sheer pleasure to read as well.” –Thomas Schatz, Film scholar and author (The Genius of the System)

The book sells for $25.95.

Available through Barnes & Noble, on Amazon, for Kindle and at other bookstores and gift shops nationwide.

Purchase it at–https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MRORX1U?ref_=k4w_oembed_c1Anr6bJdAagnj&tag=kpembed-20&linkCode=kpd

You can also order signed copies by emailing the author at leo32158@cox.net.

Mini-Profile

leoadambiga

Author-journalist-blogger Leo Adam Biga resides in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. He writes newspaper-magazine stories about people, their passions, and their magnificent obsessions. He's the author of the books "Crossing Bridges: A Priest's Uplifting Life Among the Downtrodden," "Alexander Payne: His Journey in Film" (a compilation of his journalism about the acclaimed filmmaker) "Open Wide" a biography of Mark Manhart. Biga co-edited "Memories of the Jewish Midwest: Mom and Pop Grocery Stores." His popular blog, Leo Adam Biga's My Inside Stories at leoadambiga.com, is an online gallery of his work. The blog feeds into his Facebook page, My Inside Stories, as well as his Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Tumblr, About.Me and other social media platform pages.