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Day 8 - Omaha NE to Lexington NE

From the Diary of Eagle Scout Bernard R. Queneau Member of the 1928 Lincoln Highway BSA Lincoln Highway Promotional Tour Monday - July 23, 1928 - We left Omaha this morning with the Omaha Auto Club who are making a trek with us to Cheyanne.  Their purpose is top try to get the people to understand that they would be benefited by having an increase in traffic, and to accomplish that, the Lincoln Highway must be paved.  We did three little road good turns:  pushed a car from a ditch, helped change a flat, and lent some gasoline.  We stayed and heard the speeches of the trekkers, and I nearly left for the world of nod.  We stay in Columbus, Nebraska tonight, sleeping in Scout homes.

Sunday - August 24th Today is a long morning to drive – 150 miles to the lunch stop and the mid-point celebration in Shelton, NE.  There are some college students sitting out in front of their rooms – even a couple lying down.  Given that it is only about 7 a.m., they might have been out there all night.  As we pack up, Bob and Donna Leibensperger pull up in their 1964 Lincoln.  Turns out that they have a lot of family and friends following the tour on this web site who are questioning of they are actually on the tour since they haven’t been pictured.  OK, you doubters – here’s proof!  (Actually, they are hiding in a hotel just outside of Canton and sent me the photo by email.)

We head out of Omaha, passing Boy’s Town.  Made famous in the 1940s movie with Mickey Rooney and Bing Crosby, Boy’s Town started out as a home for orphaned boys, and has grown into a large center for delinquent and troubled children. We turn off into a rural area just outside the city and stop at the National Register of Historic  Places monument, which has two Lincoln Highway markers (both missing the Lincoln head medallion).  The monument is at the start of another section of brick Lincoln Highway.  This stretch is not as smooth as earlier sections, but the surface is still in remarkable shape.  This morning we are taking a detour from the main group (what else is new?) so that Bill can visit with his father-in-law and take him for a ride in Sophie.  As we head for Aurora NE, we see signs for Norfolk!  OK, Norfolk,  Nebraska, but it is still a little weird.  According to Ken, this is the only other Norfolk in the United States.

This is still corn and soybean country, though the crops are not as green.  There are huge processing plants and lots of farms.  The grass is brown alongside the road, and the prairie grass is so tall that it almost completely hides a pair of horses grazing quietly by the side of the road. In order to make up some of the time we will lose going to Aurora, we skip some of the side jaunts.  As a result, we actually have the main tour group come up behind us for a bit before Bob and Maryanne sweep past in the 2003 Lincoln.  We cross over the Platte River – it looks more like a puddle than a river because it has been dammed up.  As a sad foot-note, the state of Nebraska had about a hundred original Lincoln Highway Markers that had been dug up when the old road was widened.  When Interstate 80 was built, they dumped the markers into the riverbed to become part of the footing for the Interstate bridge!  So we just drove over more markers than we will see on the whole trip.

Just beyond the river, we spot a 1900-vintage locomotive on display.  Trains have been really obvious ever since we got into the part of the country.  It’s not just the tracks that are always close by – we usually see a train rolling by every fifteen minutes or so.  Bob Martin follows us for a short time in his 1970 Cadillac convertible – he bought the car new and is one of the tour members actually going the whole distance. As we get close to our detour, we spot an Elks Club facility that is different than most – it is the home of real Elk!  The huge animals eye Sophie and the Woolfitt’s Packard nervously, but don’t move away until I come to the fence for a photo.  Guess they don’t want me crashing their stag party.  There are two large enclosures – the males are in one, with a herd of females and calves next door.

We leave the tour route and head into Aurora, where Bill drops us off at the Plainsman Museum.  He promises that he is not going to abandon us here, and drives off.  The museum is actually this early on a Sunday, but it offers dry grass and shade.  There are two historic buildings here – a one-room schoolhouse dating back to the early 1900s, and the Victorian-era home of a man who commanded one of the few black Union regiments in the Civil War.  It turns out that Bill’s father-in-law was responsible for saving the beautiful old home from being razed, and had it moved to the museum and restored. People drive by giving us odd looks.  Ken has zonked out in the grass with empty bottled water containers around him, while I am busy on the computer.  We look like a couple of high-tech vagrants – I half expect some of the locals to toss coins at us.  Happily, Bill lives up to his promise and returns for us, so we can make the run to the midpoint celebration. Sophie’s voltmeter has been showing an erratic discharge today, giving us some concerns about the generator.  We stop for gas (a regular occurrence at 8 mpg) and when it comes to restart, there is a loud clicking from under the hood.  The initial thought is that the voltage cutout has gone bad, but we discover that the auxiliary electric fuel pump was accidentally switched on!  When that is turned off, the voltmeter goes back to normal – there is apparently a short in the pump.

We continue into Shelton NE for the midpoint celebration, only to have Sophie start to buck and stumble.  She keeps going, but we are relieved to get into Sheldon.  The Mayor and other dignitaries held a nice ceremony for the Lincoln Tour Group, presenting Tour Co-Host Bob Lichty with a proclamation honoring the tour.  We get this second hand, as we didn’t quite make the ceremony – luckily, Bob and Shirley Woolfitt took photos of the event for me.

On top of the electrical problems and the bucking, Sophie also was running a bit warmer than usual, so we propped her hood up and went in to the Sheldon Activity Hall for lunch, which was provided by the volunteers of the Shelton.  The event is big news not only for the small town, but is the feature story for NBC Channel 5 out of Omaha.  Best of all, the reporter films her opening for the clip in front of Sophie. The town is tiny, with many closed businesses.  However, the community has preserved most of its fine old buildings.  The Lincoln Highway Society purchased an old bank building as its headquarters.  There is a good story behind the bank.  Back in 1902, when the bank was being built, the wealthy would-be banker who owned it was not satisfied with the progress the bricklayers were making on his building.  So he went over and hauled a load of bricks up himself to show them how much faster they could be working.  He went home and died of a heart attack that night, never to see the building completed.

The society has made good headway in repairing the old bank, and has set up some great displays of original Lincoln Highway artifacts and memorabilia.  We got a personal tour by some of the Society members, and also got a goodie bag which had a cancelled check from Shelton’s Lincoln Garage dated from the early 1930s. As we get ready to leave, a large and slightly battered motor home rolls up.  Joyce and Bob Ausberger have driven all the way across country trying to catch up to us after having an accident with the motor home on the way to New York for the start.  They had emergency repairs made, and will travel with us the rest of the way to San Francisco. Sophie is still stumbling a little, but the charging system is doing OK now that the fuel pump is off.  We head for the hotel in Lexington, but decide to stop at the Arch Memorial Museum – a multimedia historical theme attraction built by the Disney Corporation.  It is the only commercial venture ever built over an Interstate in the United States.

We find a number of Lincoln Tour members already inside, including co-hosts Rosemary and Bob.  The plaque just inside seems to address the Lincoln Highway Tour as much as it does the pioneers of the old West – 'The Cowards Never Started'.  Ken chats with the tour guides before going in to get some background on the facility – it cost more than $85 Million, and uses the latest technology to present the story of the Pioneers. The displays are all static, but extremely well done.  Narrated through headsets that somehow change channels as you move from one scene to another, they tell the story of the early pioneers.  Not all the stories have happy endings, and they don’t gloss over the hardships, danger, or death.  We spend a good hour wandering the displays, which include a section on the Lincoln Highway, and the growth of modern transportation.

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