Columns

If you’ve been reading my column for honestly any length of time you know Halloween is my favorite holiday and fall/autumn is my favorite time of year.

Not to continue sounding like a broken record, but as of late my column ideas have been less than exciting, from my perspective. If you’ve continued reading them, and for whatever reason still enjoy them, I appreciate you. For those who skip a column here and there, I still appreciate you too because I definitely get that not every one of them is interesting.

Anyway, I was trying to think of a fun idea column-wise for October, and here’s what I came up with: spooky stories.

This idea came from the Full Body Chills podcast I follow, which only puts out podcasts during the month of October (sometimes leading into November, but it’s a seasonal thing).

Every year around this time they release new spooky stories, and being a writer I thought it would be fun to tell my own spooky stories.

Issue No. 662...It’s kinda crazy if you ask me, but this is the week to bring up the First Amendment rights that we all have. The Freedom of Religion; the Freedom of Speech; The Freedom of the Press; The Freedom to Peaceably Assemble; and The Freedom to Petition.

Those are the five base freedoms that we have under the First Amendment, and a right that we all Americans live with each and every day!

This issue is my 662nd issue of the Clay County News since coming to Clay County in June 2009, and each year it gets more and more tough to keep up in one way or another.

Over the past 12 and a half years (or so) the ways and means of the community newspaper world changes as does society.

It’s been a bit since I’ve let you in on another book, and this week is one of my favorites.

My hope is that I haven’t spoken about this book in my column yet, but I apologize if this is a repeat. I know I’ve spoken about it on some social media platforms but...

“Chasing the Dragon” by Nicholas Kaufmann is a rollercoaster of a ride, and one I wasn’t ready for. Before we get started, this is another one of those books where the details can get gruesome at times.

So if you don’t want to read about some more gruesome details, including some violence, then I advise skipping this one. I’ll try to write about a not-so-gruesome book next time.

“Chasing the Dragon” begins pretty much in the middle of the action, with a woman—Georgia—pulling up to a quiet diner in the middle of nowhere.

Except this quiet diner is filled with a lot of deceased individuals due to an honestly horrific event.

Friday dragged on and on, taking forever to reach that time I could leave the office and take photos of the trail ride and tractor drive.

Although Old Trusty didn’t officially start until Saturday, there is something about the two Friday events that kick-off that Old Trusty feeling.

In addition to the trail ride and tractor drive, I was able to watch the Schliep crew drive in their long line of tractors toward the fairgrounds, and that was fun to see.

Saturday was my day to spend at Old Trusty, and I was so happy to be back among the familiar sights.

Vendors packed the grass areas, music could be heard from beneath the big tree, and the smells of delicious food were everywhere. Not to mention the large number of tractors lined up along the north side of the fairgrounds.

In addition to all of that, I was able to reconnect with some people I hadn’t seen in a while.

One part of being a professional emergency manager is being aware of things that could go wrong and try to help prevent them or mitigate them if they do. That can swallow up someone new to the field if you have not had life experiences to “season” you to the reality of the world.

Bad things happen to good people, and you want to be able to make a difference. Save someone some pain, some stress, some embarrassment, some loss.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month. Many groups come together to share a message of help, support, and outreach as the days grow shorter with earlier and earlier sunset. This is a very sad topic to discuss in private, let alone in public.

We just know too well what the impacts of suicide have on those immediately connected to the event, the community and humanity in general.

There’s this country song by Alan Jackson called “Where Were You,” that’s played every year on Sept. 11, without fail.

It begins with “Where were you when the world stopped turning on that September day?”

He continues with another lyric that goes:

“Did you stand there in shock

“At the sight of that black smoke

“Risin’ against that blue sky?

“Did you shout out in anger

“In fear for your neighbor

“Or did you just sit down and cry?”

It’s one of many small reminders of what happened that day, and 20 years later, that song still makes me cry and remember what America was doing when our people were being attacked.

In the past, when people asked me what the first major world event I remembered in my life was, 9/11 came straight to mind.

Everyone who was old enough to remember knows where they were that day, and what they were doing.

Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, was a day that started like any other for me; the routine began as it always did...wake up at 6 a.m., hit the shower and prepare for a 30 or so minute drive into Kearney for work.

But that morning, as I made the trek from home to my job as a manager of a small “mom and pop” printing company, life changed, not knowing how it would change at 7:45 a.m., while driving into Kearney, it changed.

The radio dial was set for KRVN, as it was nearly every morning for my drive. I remember one of the KRVN personalities sharing the first bit of news, news that as the day went on kept getting worse....and worse!

It went something like this: “an airplane has hit one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York.”

Of course, at that moment, 15 minutes before the start of the workday, nobody could have imagined what was about to unfold that day.

Nebraska football is not the focus of the Bull this week, of which, I’m sure you could tell by the headline alone, as there was nothing “high octane” about Saturday’s majorly disappointing loss. With that said, I’ll never put down the Huskers, but they certainly aren’t setting well in many Husker fans homes.

Nope, this week, the high octane football takes me back to the 2019 Class D-6 quarterfinals when Harvard and Sioux County (Harrison) locked in for what was by far the most high octane scoring and offensive high school football game that I’ve ever covered.

Harvard held on for a 78-72 win, which paved the way to the Cardinals’ state championship a few weeks later over McCool Junction, the very team that the Cardinals will take on this Friday afternoon in McCool.

There’s a lot going on in the world right now, all of which I am not going to unpack in this column (go read or listen to a reliable news source if you want to keep up with what’s happening worldwide).

Between reading the news and seeing what’s happened in the last few years, it’s easy to see that humans have started losing things. They’re starting to miss parts of what makes them a decent human.

The first one that comes to mind is compassion. Granted, there are still a ton of people who have this deeply ingrained in them, but a lot don’t.

It’s a “me” world. Yeah, there’s time when looking after yourself and doing what’s best for you is needed (like your mental and physical health, and I will always be an advocate for those things, especially your mental health). However, there’s a fine line between taking care of yourself and turning into someone who only cares about themselves and completely disregards others.

Mentors of mine through the newspaper business have always informed me/ taught me that if you ever stop learning...It’s time to get out. Well, I will never pretend to stop learning, that truly hit a cord this week for me as I learned something that kind of stopped me in my tracks last week.

It was a social media post by Sutton’s Amy Skalka that reminded me that the 2022 graduating class this year was the kindergarten class to begin the 2009 school year, my first year in Clay County!

Say what??

Yep this will be the first full cycle of students that have gone from kindergarten through their final year in elementary and/or secondary school, before moving on to the next stage of their lives.

That means, I guess, that I’m in my 52nd year of education, since I started my kindergarten year way back in 1970. In reality you might graduate from high school, or college, but does your education ever really stop? Not even close, no way!