It came with boxes, it came with bags, and even an aging kangaroo (costume). Keep Alliance Beautiful is settling into its cozier office space in a lower level of the Municipal Building at Second and Laramie, still in downtown Alliance after more than a decade at the bank.
Our local Keep America Beautiful affiliate, connecting with kids in Box Butte County and drawing regular recyclers from as far away as Chadron/Crawford, the western Sandhills and the North Platte Valley, is glad to accept the City’s offer of office space. This past year, the city council signed off on a plan to move KAB into a room at the northeast corner of Alliance’s historic city hall – space that originally served as the anteroom to/and actual women’s restroom. The most recent tennent? My former Boy Scout troop nearly a decade ago.
The three-member KAB staff, as before, will operate from the same location. As major grants become more challenging to secure, the change is also a way to reduce annual expenses.
However, like moving from a house with four bedrooms, three baths, a two-car garage and perhaps a pole barn, to an apartment there has been some significant sorting. Newspaper clippings from 1994? Ok, I kept those. Items such as out-of-date binders and their contents were among pickup loads taken to the recycling center. Dixie and her son-in-law made a couple trips worth of donations to the Mission Store one day. The Dumpster had a few deposits itself during late December. We hauled two large black and red totes to the Knight Museum and Sandhills Center to store Christmas decorations. What was left after the winnowing slid down the temporary exterior entrance ramp for placement in the basement.
Back to the kangaroo connection. Alliance’s KCOW Home Show filled the entire AHS (big) gym floor, stage and balcony when I was a kid. One year, when KAB’s predecessor – Alliance Clean Community – manned a booth, a scout I knew from our troop drew the mascot card. As I recall just over 30 years later, Derrek was a friendly George that day. I hadn’t thought about him (or the costume) for years until Paula picked up the head while organizing. I met Derrek when Troop 344 met in the top story on the northwest corner of the Municipal Building. The structure has always had plenty of room. After starting in that suite we moved out for a few years only to return. This time, the City hosted us for a much longer span in the former fire hall’s meeting space and shower area. The leaders and parents built a wall and shelves. We were welcome to utilize the larger area for games and instruction, even drying wet tents and gear, until the APD needed the room for an exercise center. The last group of boys began to shrink as they aged out.The City moved us to the third and final room until we disbanded. What gear nobody wanted stayed on the shelves, the property of our sponsor. I’m not sure how long it took to cart away though I know the empty shelves remained.
I took apart those shelves last week, plank by plank. Whitewashed with the original barn red showing in spots, the wood did not separate quietly. I needed four different bits from a Millwauke drill the City supplied.
Loading cardboard into the baler, G.O. likes to comment on how I “stack wood”. This time it was literal. One day soon the stack of boards will finally leave the building.
Funny how things come full circle.