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A 1984 North Loup Photo Memory

During Christmas of 1984, I visited North Loup, Nebraska to spend the holiday with my mother and Great Aunt Ellamae along with her son Russ, her daughter Martha and the their families. Christmastime in North Loup was always a postcard: Tables overflowed with smoked turkey and candied ham and chokecherry jam smiled from hot slices of homemade bread. Santa Claus with his dancing reindeer kicked along rooftops while flickering colored lights reflected from rain gutters and downspouts.

North Loup is my mother’s home village (it isn’t big enough to qualify as a “town” in Census records). She and I would visit my Grandpa there often as I grew up. My Grandpa, Bill Vodehnal, was the village pharmacist and he and I would explore the village together in his old, slate-grey, Plymouth Fury II at a blazing two miles per hour. Every street, except for “Main Street” (which was really Highway 11) was paved with gravel. My Grandpa was long dead when I visited North Loup in 1984, but I always felt his spirit rumbling deep within me every time we pulled into town.

In 1984, I wanted to take down a visual diary of the village for a novel I was writing based upon the atmosphere and earthiness I knew only to exist in North Loup, Nebraska. The images you’ll tour in this article are the touchstones I committed to film that day. Even now, these images speak to me without having to listen or comprehend. These thoughts touch me on the dirt level of the soul where things silently grow and blossom into magical, emotional, things one could never comprehend in any intellectual moment.

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A Joyous Memory…

by Marshall Jamison

…Of Sunday morning in the little town where my mother was born and my brother and I first saw the light literally and spiritually.

My great aunt Mame used to worship our Lord at the top of her rich, contralto voice out on her front porch across the street from our house. For an hour before she and Uncle Will walked across the green to church she sang the glorious old hymns, Rock of Ages, Onward Christian Soldiers, Lead, Kindly Light, The Old, Rugged Cross and other favorites.

Occasionally passersby would pause to listen, eyeing the Doctor’s sign beside the door, weather-beaten by the passing years. Uncle Will had been a true horse and buggy practitioner in his early days. Later he drove his ancient Nash with great care on his round of house calls. When he sometimes took my brother and me with him, we would sing the hymns we learned from Aunt Mame on Sunday.

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For My Father

by Steve Gaines

captured in the bronze of time
my father’s memory shines
hangs prominently on the granite wall
of my own mortality.

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