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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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I Opened a Living Time Capsule

by Evan Stair

Lincoln, Nebraska in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s was a place of beauty in the eyes of a child living in a middle class city of a 100,000 folks, but my neighborhood was more. The Bethany neighborhood was a grand playground that filled the mind, body, and soul with wholesome goodness.

Lincoln had a glorious collection of restaurants. There was a time before the “golden arches” (McDonald’s was there at the time, by the way) became the most popular restaurant in Lincoln and you would want to eat at a local favorite: King’s Restaurant, where you could get a scrumptious hamburger, or a Little Frenchie (a fried cheese sandwich); The Runza Hut where you could get of all things… a Runza (baked bread stuffed with cabbage and hamburger) or a foot long hot-dog that was actually a over foot long and made of real beef; Valentino’s (gourmet pizza — best in the country by some accounts.)

Living The Wonder Years
Some of the experiences of childhood might seem trivial now, but to me, they are a part of an age of inexperience: Innocent as an episode of “The Wonder Years.” I lived the “Wonder Years” along with several hundred other kids in Lincoln.

Behold: A child soaking up every minute of life by watching Captain Kangaroo followed by a walk next door to a school fit for kings. This was the weekday morning routine. Saturdays were spent riding a bike down a smooth sidewalk breathing in the fresh, clean, air of a new morning. Watching countless hours of cartoons ranging from uncensored Looney Tunes to Scooby Doo followed.

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Autobiography

by Steve Gaines

[Fore Word (a “Gainesian” Spelling): I wrote my first poem in 1943 in Peru, Nebraska. I published that poem. The fact that it was in the third grade newspaper of which I was the editor means nothing. I was on my way to a distinguished career as a famous twentieth century poet. Alas… something went seriously awry and I didn’t get around to my second poem until about 1957… and though I greatly admire and respect my poetry… and am reasonably convinced that it fills a significant but otherwise unfilled niche in the evolution American Letters… I never seem to gather sufficient enthusiasm to attempt another publishing. So here I am, hove to in the mid 1990’s still languishing in the closet. I don’t find that disappointing… if for no other reason than I have yet to suffer the indignities of the rejections familiar to all writers. My confidence is still intact and I am still batting l,000! After all success is not defined by quantity…

What you find within these pages are some things I have written over a long a curious life… almost sixty now (actually 62 at this writing). I do not hold out a great deal of hope of ever becoming a poet of great acknowledgment or importance. I do hope to become a poet who has said some things… mostly about himself… that somehow give a little insight into who I really am. That is mainly for my benefit. It may even be possible that some of the things I have put to paper ring a bell in other curious belfries… or maybe not.

— Steve G.]
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Cathedrals of Chalk: Return to Happy Jack Mountain

There is a special place from my childhood called Happy Jack Mountain that I visit daily from New York City even though that Mountain resides more than 1,500 miles away near Scotia, Nebraska.

Afloat in the Flatlands
I travel to Happy Jack Mountain by closing my eyes and walking the winding trail of 234 railroad tie steps up to the 483 foot Peak that pinnacles 2,000 feet above sea-level.

This is the story of a time and place that will never change for me, for every time I visit Happy Jack Mountain, it is the Fall of 1969 when life was glittering and full of innocence and promise.

My existence was purely good and clean and I was four years old.

Nebraska is notorious for being flat.

In fact, “Nebraska” is the Oglala Plains Indian phrase for “Flatwater.”

The running joke is that Nebraska is 98% sky, 1% land and 1% manure.

Wind, Rain and Sunshine are the Holy Trinity that rule life upon Nebraska’s plains.

Nebraskans are known by some as “fly over folks” where people on either end of the nation only get to know us, our customs, and our dreams en passant as they arc over us in airplanes on their way to someplace bigger.

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Joseph Baldwin

Dr. Joseph Baldwin was born in the great state of Texas and spent the greater effort of his life exploring Playwriting, Poetry and the undiscovered beauties of the world around him.

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Marshall Jamison

[Publisher’s Note: On September 2, 2003, the earth broke for us forever when Marshall Jamison died of congestive heart failure in Orlando, Florida. He was 85. Marshall was a fine man, a great scholar, a caring father, a proud mentor and a loving friend. He was a Golden Boy in the Golden Age of television. When it came to writing the only thing that mattered was if the work was good: Fame, success and money all flowed from being good first. One of Marshall’s many gifts was making bad good. We already painfully miss him for the world is less without him. Marshall Jamison’s intelligence, beauty and kindness were powerful inspirations for everyone at GO INSIDE Magazine and he will eternally shine herein and glimmer from within us always. — David Boles]

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Lincoln After Seven Years

We live in disposable times. Our lives are wispy and temporary. I suppose this has always been true, but in the present Age of Momentary Relationships and Passing Glances, I consider myself blessed that I was able to live the first 23 years of my life in the same house. Because of that rock-solid start in a community, I have an indelible sense of home and of belonging and of being a valued and of being a rooted member in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Movin’ On Up
After living in the same house Lincoln for 23 years, life changed. I moved to Washington, D.C. and I lived in two different apartments in no less than eight months. I then moved to New York City and I lived in one apartment for 60 days and then four other apartments over the last ten years. It’s a difficult task to move the essence of your life into cardboard boxes, deciding, after each move into new digs, what you want to keep and what you don’t mind throwing away and losing forever to the trash heap of former experiences.

This redaction of our lives into “save” and “don’t save” piles gives the body of who we are less volume with each move — our experience has been paged through and edited down to the basic nuts and bolts of mere survival.

Murky Bottom Memories
Memory and experience are the only threads back to our past, the physical touchstones have been pitched upon the lakes of our rippling lives and they’ve sunk to the murky bottom never to be retrieved or held again.

There’s a sliding scale of importance that is always prevalent when deciding what to take with you. Something you throw away now that you kept the last time you moved is a large mark defining who you are and where you came from: It is yet another ring in the tree of your life, for once this object had meaning and now it has none except as a breadcrumb of where you at a moment in time.

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