This past Sunday was Mother’s Day. So, allow me to share some history.
Nebraska expunged itself of Lincoln’s Charles Starkweather six days before I was born.
At 12:03 a.m. on June 25, 1959, Starkweather, who had extinguished the lives of eleven people from Nebraska and Wyoming in 1957 and 1958, was strapped in the state penitentiary’s electric chair and zapped with over 2,200 of the finest volts ever delivered by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln power plant. You see, at the time, UNL fed electricity from its power plant at 14th and Avery Streets to the penitentiary that was located three miles south of UNL at 14th and Pioneers.
Six days later, on Wednesday, July 1, 1959, at 8:14 a.m., I arrived at Lincoln General Hospital. I’m told that all 21 inches, and seven pounds, 11 ounces of me was screaming. The health care professionals knew immediately that I possessed good lungs.
Dr. Bernard F. Wendt billed my parents $100 for his delivery skills.
Eggheads who dabble in statistics categorize me as a member of the Baby Boomer Generation.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was President, Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans” was the most popular song in the country, the United States Flag had 49 stars as Alaska had become a state six months earlier, and the U.S. was only 52 days away from proclaiming Hawaii as the final member of the United States Family. Lincoln’s population was 125,000, the capacity of 36-year-old Memorial Stadium — the home of the University of Nebraska Cornhusker football team — was 32,000, and the Nebraska football was still a member of the Big 7 Conference.
I arrived fashionably late — three weeks late, mind you — and even though it was July 1, it was unseasonably cool. My mother wore the same spring coat to the hospital that she wore on April 14, 1955, when Mom delivered my brother Blaine, also at Lincoln General.
My exhausted mother had two reasons to be happy. I was healthy, and I wasn’t born the same day Charlie Starkweather was executed. Mom’s biggest fear was that I would arrive the same day Starkweather was fried. It makes me wonder how the mothers of children born on December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001, feel about their offspring.
My due date was June 11. But since Starkweather was still on this planet, I decided to wait. Dad had taken a week’s vacation from his job at Norden Laboratory on West Cornhusker Highway to hang around the house in case I decided to show up. I robbed Dad of a week’s vacation.
My baptism followed 40 days later during a ceremony at St. John’s Congregational Church in Lincoln. Ten months later, I was walking on my own.
My parents, Clair and Phyllis Horn, my older brother Blaine, and I resided in a small red brick home at 3345 Dudley Street — a home Mom and Dad purchased in 1958 for $8,000. The house was located two blocks south of the University of Nebraska Ag College in Lincoln.
My mother, born in Nebraska City on May 25, 1931, graduated from Lincoln High School in 1949 and attended college at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for one year.
Mom’s employment career included working as a Camp Fire Girls counselor in California for one summer; working in the mailroom of the Cornhusker Hotel in downtown Lincoln; working for the American Bus Lines, and working for the Central Telephone and Telegraph Gas Company. Her jobs paid an hourly was of between 50 cents and 90 cents.
She and my dad were married on May 2, 1953 and remained married until his death on March 13, 2008.
What took place during the nearly 55 years between those dates is not much different that what most married couples experience. Except that my parents had to raise me and you or your parents did not.
Mom died on November 2, 2017. Her funeral was held at Roper and Sons Mortuary in Lincoln. She and Dad are resting in a cemetery about a mile outside of my hometown of Valparaiso, NE
The pastor who delivered Mom’s homily nailed the closing of his message with perfection.
You see, my mother was an accomplished seamstress who also possessed an opinionated spirit and sharp tongue. The pastor told the congregation that Mom was now in heaven and probably giving Jesus her opinion of the robe in which He was wearing.
“Phyllis is, no doubt, altering His robe,” he said. And she is ordering our Savior to comply.”
“Let’s take this hem in about two inches. Hold still, Jesus, we’re just about finished! Just a few more pins and then the sewing machine will do the rest.”
A belated Happy Mother’s Day to all moms in heaven and on earth.