Mrs. Clyde Goldsberry Jr. said she has worked for years at the polls, but never helped out before at the courthouse.
"Ho, ho, ho," Clerk Jerry Schmitz said, "you've got yourself a job, Lucy."
We adjusted ourselves to the cushion in the designated chair and settled down for an evening of taking down election returns, tabulating them and filing our news reports.
What we didn't get to see in action was Lucy The Telephone Operator, Lucy The Election Board Poster-Upper . . . Lucy The Gal With All The Questions or Lucy, Answer The Phone, Lucy, Who's Ahead Now? Lucy, Bring Us Some Coffee, Please.
She had a ball and we're sure of one thing . . . she'll remember for a long time, Election Night, November 5, 1974.
Jerry checked in the election reports and handed them to Mrs. Jim Polston, Mrs. Les Kinnison and Marcina Cody to record.
John and Sue Quinlan and myself joined Jerry and his staff at the desks. Thanks to County Treasurer Wilma King for the use of her office and adding machines.
As usual, the evening went pretty smooth as the results trickled into the clerk's office. Then, when they started coming in rapidly we got behind and the hurrier we worked, the more behinder we got, or so it seemed.
I promised Millie I'd call as the school board returns came in because a number of Union friends had called about that part of the election.
Lucy kept reminding me to call home and after putting the call off "just a minute" for a few times, I found that over two hours had passed.
The TV reports you saw on Omaha stations and on the national news about the vote in Otoe county came from our reports. We telephoned results to Omaha and New York throughout the evening making the last call at 2:20 a.m.
Then came the final tabulation and re-checking our addition. At 3 a.m. Jerry shut off the lights in his office and locked the doors and recalled that four years ago the job took until 6 a.m.
"That's pretty good this time," he said with a sleepily smile.
"Y-u-c-k," someone answered.
Remember Myrna?
Many News-Press readers will remember the by-line "By MYRNA POWELL."
Mr. and Mrs. Tom (Myrna Tegtmeier) Powell and their two children live in Norfolk but make frequent visits this way to visit relatives, Mr. and Mrs. Sterling Vock.
When Myrna came to work for us several years ago she said she could only work 11 months or so because when her husband (then in the Marine Corps) got back from Vietnam they would be moving elsewhere.
Tom is with the Internal Revenue Service. Myrna worked for the Omaha Sun when they lived in that town, but now her time is devoted to a son, Matthew, four and a daughter, Kristen, one.
(I always like the stories with the happy endings).
It pays to advertise.
We fired up the family car the other day and spent Sunday afternoon with the grandmother in Fairbury where we found that good buys are found in Nebraska City businesses.
We drove around the community for awhile in the afternoon and stopped in a couple of stores. One store had permanent anti-freeze on sale for $4.99 a gallon and another offered it for $4.85.
Gibson's ad on the permanent solution in the News-Press listed the item for $4.67 a gallon. We stopped by the Nebraska City store the other day, picked up a supply, put it in the radiator so now we are ready for winter.
Lonnie Lambrecht, a graduate of the Nebraska School for the Visually Handicapped, is a car salesman for Jack King Auto in Omaha.
We ran into Lonnie the other day in Omaha. We hadn't seen him for about 10 years, but we remembered him from those school years when we lived across the street from the SVH.
Lonnie and his late brother, Harlan, had similar visual impairments — their vision was pretty good in the daylight, but reduced greatly at night, a retinal pigmentation problem.
Harlan was killed in an auto accident several years ago.
Lonnie's vision is about the same, but it has not prevented him from steady work and he likes the job as a car salesman. "It's one easy way to get a new car," the young bachelor from Bostwick said.
He said he hasn't been back to the school for a long time, but as we prodded his interest we left with the feeling that he would return, perhaps to attend a Workers for the Blind convention.
Coast Guardsman Dennis Hubbard, St. Louis, said a cutter with orange and blue stripes will be on the Missouri river in the Nebraska City area beginning November 22.
The cutter is one of four that will be removing navigation aids, ending the river shipping season. "Pulling the buoys after the last commercial vessel has passed has to be done in a lively manner," he said. "Sometimes the crews have only a few hours to retrieve buoys before the water level becomes so low that navigation becomes a problem."
Three and a half months later the work will be reversed. Meanwhile, this winter crews will be doing maintenance work on the gear for next season.
Dear Leona:
Thanks to Mrs. Earl Korring for the zwieback (I had to call neighbor Mrs. Fred Wusk to spell it) and the horseradish.
There must be an easier way to eat the zwieback, but I haven't found it yet. So far, the choice is dunking it in coffee. Millie's cookbook said zwieback is a sweet biscuit which is first baked and then sliced and toasted in the oven to make into kind of a dry toast.
The word comes from the German and means "baked twice."
Now the homemade horseradish . . . B-O-I-N-G! KA-POW! Y-e-e-e-e-ah! Y-I-K-E-S!
It's good. I put it on chipped beef. I like the tang. It put some snap in my taster.
Since I had to get back to work right away as the calm, cool and collected reporter, I washed the whole thing down with milk and sour cream chocolate cake.
Yours truly, JOHNNY DOLLAR.