A Place to be Ourselves and More | Nebraska Stories | Nebraska Public Media

Intro (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Coming up on Nebraska stories, a place where everyone can be themselves. (upbeat music) The little courthouse of Arthur County, (upbeat music) A celestial celebration like no other. (upbeat music) And a look back at Kearney's Surprising role during World War II. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Our Place After School Care (upbeat music) - Matching. - The yellow goes over there. - Oh, I did need- - The back of the tile -matches. -- Good. -There you go. - Good job. -Nice one. - We've got peak. (gentle music) -[Adeline] To be able to have your child go to a place that you know is safe, that they love to go to, (gentle music) it's everything. (gentle music) That's what every parent wants. (gentle music) - [Narrator] Before 2018, there was no place for teens with special needs to go when the school day was over in Hastings. Parents were forced to find in-home care or leave work early to ensure their kids were safe. As Adeline was looking at these options for her own daughter, she knew there had to be a better solution. -[Adeline] Our oldest daughter, who is six years older than Zoe, she was a junior in high school and it kind of occurred to us, oh, she's going to college. What shall we do now? And so I started hunting around other like Special Olympics parents and saying, "So, what do you guys do?" "We stay home." Well, that's not an option. I'm a teacher. My husband works a day job. That's a no. We just gotta figure this out, and so I started asking, "Well, what if we did our own? What if we like co-opt something? Could we do that?" - [Narrator] They did exactly that and started their own program. Our Place After School Care. It began in the basement of Adeline's Church, but quickly grew into a place of its own that let them help others, like Joslynn. -[Erin] My daughter Joslynn, she's 15. She was born early and she has cerebral palsy. So, she's in a wheelchair. She's 100% physically dependent on others to care for her. So, life before Our Place was I had in-home care providers that would come to my house and watch her until I would get home from work. Unfortunately, recently, she started to have some pretty significant health issues. She's been having some seizures, and so my providers in-home are not able to provide the emergency medication, and so unfortunately, they had to let us go. I was actually looking to have to cut back my hours at work, which literally means not enough money to put food on the table, to pay my mortgage, to provide the things that my kids need. - There ya go. - Oh. K. Here, Zoe. Will you throw that away, please? -[Joslynn] Well, that was no yolk. (people laughing) - [Caregiver] That was was no yolk. - That was no yolk. Like, that was no joke. - [Caregiver] Right. -[Erin] She absolutely loves it here. The caregivers that I would have in-home before would be middle-aged, maybe a little bit older women, and so she's a 15-year-old girl. She's a teenager, and so having other teenage girls that she could be around, it just makes her thrive -in that area. - Almost a strike! - [Adeline] Depending on the day, if they're in the mood, they'll do games or things like that. Otherwise, sometimes, they're just hanging out, talking. -[Raegyn] They do a lot of fun activities, like games, baking, snacks, cupcakes, usually always cakes when we bake. Otherwise, we also do art, crafting. - It's just more fun than stuck in my bed. (gentle music) -[Christie] We have families with kids with special needs that there are so many different things that they explore or need, maybe like being able to hang out with friends, but going to birthday parties or hanging out with friends after school is not something that they get a chance to do. - [Narrator] Our Place was created to give teens with special needs opportunities they didn't have before. In 2022, they took it one step further by opening a consignment store to give the students a new level of independence. - [Adeline] So, the Freedom Factory happened, because we saw a program called Roots to Wings in Arlington, Nebraska, and they do that program for 21 and older, and I thought well, that's a fabulous idea that their people make things, and then they sell it in a consignment store. I thought, well, why couldn't my teens do that? (gentle music) They get their first paycheck and one is just staring at it, mouth agape, doing this jump up and down kind of thing. It's just so fabulous. - Who's ready to frost some cupcakes? - Woo hoo! - I am! - [Narrator] These past six years have just been the beginning for Our Place After School Care. Dreams and ambitions for the program are big. No matter what growth comes in the future, their focus on caring for and celebrating teens with special needs will always remain. -[Erin] Moms and parents, advocates are allowing those kids to be seen, and so we're not ashamed or shunning or hiding them away anymore, and so we have to give them the full realm of being able to fit into a community and having a space that's safe. (gentle music) -[Adeline] That's why our name is Our Place, 'cause it is their place. It's where they can go to be themselves and not have to worry about what someone else is thinking or any of those kinds of things. (gentle music) - On your napkin. There's your knife, honey. The Worlds Smallest Courthouse -(soft western music) -(wind blowing) (wind blowing) - [Narrator] Nestled in the Sandhills of Nebraska, Arthur County is renowned as the smallest county in the state, and the fifth smallest in the United States by population. While cattle ranching stands as its predominant occupation, friendly faces and a slower pace of life are hallmarks of this close-knit community. (soft western music) - [Ruth] Most of the businesses have been here for a long time. We still have a grocery store. We have the bank, which is open one day a week. (soft western music) We have a high school, and a grade school, junior high. Our kids that graduate do very well. (soft western music) - [Narrator] In its early days, Arthur County grew to nearly 2,500 residents because of the Kincaid Act of 1904. As the population in Arthur grew, so did the need for law and order. Reflecting the size of Arthur, in 1914, a small courthouse was built. The 26 by 28 foot building was perhaps the smallest courthouse in the United States. (soft western music) (soft western music) - [Ruth] So in this courthouse right here, the sheriff sat here, the judge sat here, the judge sat up there. This was all the commissioners. This was the superintendent, which run all the schools. (soft western music) When they did have court, the court was actually held up the street past the Baled Hay church, at the grade school. So they never held court in this room. (soft western music) (door creaking) This is the vault. The vault has old records, land transfers, court dockets, divorces, death notices. (soft western music) This is filed today, 1924. (soft western music) - [Narrator] The multi-use courthouse received an addition the following year, with a similarly small county jail with unique features. (soft western music) - [Ruth] As you can see, the jail is made out of two by fours, not pipe like all old jails are made out of. (soft western music) It was little, it had two rooms and solitary confinement. The sheriff didn't stay here. If you were in jail, you were bad, you're on your own. (soft western music) I don't know that they had a lot of people in jail for a very long time. Mainly it was drunk and disorderly, horse thief, cattle rustling, just being bad, waiting for trial. Those were the main things. (soft western music) - [Narrator] Utilized until 1961, the courthouse gave way to construction of the present day courthouse, while the jail ceased operations a year later. Both structures earned recognition on the National Register of Historic Places. Ripley's Believe It or Not has hailed it as the world's smallest courthouse. This modest building has been preserved and transformed into a museum that draws visitors from far and wide to this unique landmark. (soft western music) Star Party (ethereal music) BRETT: I don't think anybody can really expect what this is. BOB: It's kind of awesome, you can a gazillion stars. It's two more than anything you can think of. KAYLEE: If you every look out there and think, what's out there, everything you could imagine. BOB: You'll never know enough about what's going on in the sky. WOMAN: Oh, beautiful! BOB KACVINSKY: You start out with a really low power eye piece. This happens to be a 38. This is going in back. Bob Kacvinsky and I'm a member of the Prairie Astronomy Club from Lincoln, Nebraska. So I'll start out with this map knowing where it's at, and then I will typically move to the little bit larger map. It's like if you go fishing, if you love fishing, the fishing act is great, but if you don't think about where you're going with the lake and properly prepare ahead of time, you're not going to have a very good time fishing. There's some really cool stuff, I don't wanna miss it. BRETT: Let's do it. BRETT BOLLER: My name is Brett Boller, and we're headed to Merritt Reservoir. I'm driving up to the star party. For about 25 miles, you see about five cars. Where I'm from in Nebraska in the Eastern part, I grew up on a farm, so there wasn't too many lights around and it's dark, you can see the Milky Way. But you come out here where it's 40 miles to the nearest town, it's just something else. (hammering) ERIC BALCOM: These headlights that we drive around in our vehicles really do a lot of light pollution up on a dark sky site like this. ERIC: Everything's covered now, and I don't have to get yelled at. (guitar music) BALCOM: The sky up here, folks, looks like the sky looked like to the Native American Indians or to the pioneers as they were going Westward, before Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. There's absolutely no light pollution up here. * Sound of their breath fades with the light * * I think about the loveless fascination * * Under the Milky Way tonight VAUGHN STUBBY: I see 32. It looks really cool because it's all fuzzy and you can see all the stars around it, too, and it's really cool, 'cause I really like stars. When I grow up, I wanna be an astronomer. * I got no time for private consultation * (country rock music) JOHN TOWNE: A Nebraska star party is just something I've always wanted to do. There's what's called the Bortle scale, which the measure of darkness, and here in Nebraska, especially here at Merritt Reservoir, it's Bortle Scale One, which is the darkest you can get. I drove 20 hours for this. Excitement level's back up to a 10, for sure. WOMAN: Say cheese and wine! (laughing) COUPLE: We're from Savannah, Georgia. DUO: From Northern Wisconsin. PAIR: Austin, Texas. MAN: I'm from Southern Missouri. JOHN CHAMBERS: This is our first star party, and it's kind of awesome. I didn't know there was a place like this in Nebraska, five and a half hours from Omaha. In the program, I saw this, what I thought was a satellite, and it turns out to be the International Space Station, so I was hoping I can get that. It showed up, I captured a really neat moment that I really wanted to do, and it was just by chance. MAN: Thank you very much. ERIC: Oh, no, no problem. It's a very sharing and very social hobby, and we love it when people wanna come and look at the sky. Here we're a bit nerdy, and we tend to like to enjoy talking about the science and the neat stuff about why things are. KAYLEE BASAIGA: Have you ever actually got your hands on a telescope and looked through it? Because it's not just a bunch of dots in the sky, you can actually see things. Yep, I count five, I counted five. DAD: Five, you think? KAYLEE: Yes. I bumped my telescope and what happened was I looked in the eyepiece, and there was like a whole nother galaxy right there. This is far, it's huge. Hey, mom, check it out. DAD: Dropped a great lock-in. MOM: Oh, wow. ERIC: Oh, that's excellent. Look at the quality of that. Your guiding is dead, dead on. JOHN: This is a star cluster, it's the Wild Duck cluster, but as we zoom in on the image, it's all stars that are clustered together in a tight little area. It's just nice when everything works. It's fun being out here, it's a nice dark sky. You can get great photos. (telescope whirring) It's great to see everybody out here, and then you take some photos, and you start getting a crowd around your telescope. MAN: That's what I like about your photographic technique. It's uncelebratory. You quietly sit there and collect photons and don't make much celebration over it. ERIC: Our star party is such that we like to maintain this wonderful natural resource here that's out every night on a clear sky. JOHN: This is brand new to me, and the people are wonderful. BOB: It's not the event, it's the social relationships that you create and it's the sharing of ideas, and Nebraska is a very unique state that we have this beautiful site. We don't have to travel thousands of miles to get to, we can drive to it; it's kind of a nice experience. Carney Army Airfield NARRATOR: At a time of war, in the heart of Nebraska, soldiers and citizens came together at the Kearney Army Airfield. BRYON: The whole area here was mobilized to support the base. NARRATOR: Kearney Goes to War. TODD PETERSEN: Kearney was a processing base. What processing amounted to, it processed both airplanes and the men. The airplanes came here straight from the factory, some of them needed modifications before they went overseas. We had several different variants of each airplane, over time and so there were a lot of maintenance issues that had to be done. Lower octane fuel had been drained out of the airplanes, they had 100 octane in them when they left, their guns were loaded and mounted and the whole airplane got a real thorough check before they sent it off because once they left here, they were going straight into combat. CHANDLER BRYON: They'd make these 20 year old guys sign for the airplane like they were gonna be charged for it if they didn't bring it back or if they got it scratched and I've had a local farmer tell me about it, just scared him to death to have to sign, personally sign for that aircraft. PETERSEN: They were all fresh out of training, next step was combat, so they had a number of things that they needed to do. They might write wills. They might buy life insurance. They might get their teeth fixed, get their shots and another thing that was important that happened during processing was that the people at Kearney were doing the processing, we'd try to weed out the incompetents who had somehow gotten through the training and gotten to that point, at which time they were yanked out of the Air Force and then put into the infantry. It was an important base, the rest of the air bases in Nebraska were all operated under Kearney as the main base with the exception of the one in Omaha. But the other thing that should be remembered is the contribution that the civilians made. BRYON: The whole area here was mobilized and they came in from quite a ways away to support the base here. Ladies come in from the farm and pack parachutes, for example. There was a WAC mechanics group here where they were working on the engines and just all aspects of the base life, there were civilian and military workers. PETERSEN: This was true all over the country, everybody wanted to do their bit and so there was no shortage of people that were trying to help and had we not had the cooperation of the civilians for that war, would we still have won it? Most likely but it would have taken a lot longer and we'd have had to have a military that was three or four times the size because of all the contributions that civilians made. So the base at Kearney, in many ways, was a microcosm of what went on across the country, as far as people having an opportunity to really contribute to the war effort. LEO SINNETT: Shacks they put up out there for us to live in was about next to nothing, then they had the guts to feed us with that food out there, every other spoonful was sand. NARRATOR: Thousands of soldiers had left the comforts of home behind and it was up to the citizens of Kearney to provide them with hospitality. BRYON: Many of the families kind of adopted these young fellas and invited them into their homes for home cooked meals and picnics and other things. (people chatter) (baseball bat clacks) NARRATOR: Among the ways the Kearney soldiers stayed entertained, the most popular were easily the dances. (lively orchestra music) Dances were an almost nightly event with big name acts regularly coming to the base or to clubs in the surrounding area. ROBERT NEEFE: We had Harry James and we had Tommy Dorsey, all the big name bands came there because they were going across country and they'd make that stop and make a few dollars and then keep on going. PETERSEN: The biggest problem had to do with turning a couple of thousand testosterone-laden young men loose in the community and the parents were justifiably worried about what could result. They formed what was called the Hostess Club and to be a member of the Hostess Club, you had to be at least 18 and single and of good moral standing. It was organized along military lines. They had captains and colonels and the captains and the colonels consisted of older women from Kearney who served as chaperones. This pretty much allayed everyone's fears and it worked very well throughout the war. It wasn't until the tail end of the war that it kind of fell apart and that was because there were so many young women that were attending the dances at the air base that the whole chaperone thing just kind of disintegrated. (lively orchestra music) (people applaud) (somber music) NARRATOR: Another result of the boosted population, the presence of black soldiers, meant Kearney had to begin enforcing the racial segregation practices common at the time. This included separate facilities for blacks and whites. PETERSEN: The thing you have to remember about it is that a white soldier can go into any tavern in town and buy a beer but that wasn't possible for the blacks, so they got right to work on building a black serviceman's club. The spot that they chose for it happened to be right across the street from the Methodist church and at that time, there was a very active dry movement in Nebraska and most of the clergy in Kearney objected strongly to the fact that this was gonna be right across the street from the church but what ultimately happened was that the commanding officer put his foot down, he said, you have to find a place where these guys can congregate and drink beer and if you don't, then we're gonna restrict everybody to base and not allow any of the troops into town. Well, these guys were real free spenders and certainly the city council didn't wanna see them restricted to base, so right away there was another meeting held and they promptly approved of the location on Avenue A and they announced that the beer would be free until such time as they obtain a liquor license. Especially for the airmen that were passing through, it was the last real impression of America that they got before they left, 'cause again, when they left here, they went straight overseas, they didn't sit in Maine for two weeks waiting to go. The people in the community went out of their way to try to make them feel welcome. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Watch more Nebraska stories on our website, Facebook and YouTube. Nebraska Stories is funded in part by the Margaret and Martha Thomas Foundation, and the Bill Harris and Mary Sue Hormel Harris Fund for the presentation of cultural programming. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)