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Authors: Mary Kay Leatherman
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for a living and preaches God’s word. Makes the brooms, too. The man’s a saint, a quiet little saint weaving around the city.”
“He’s blind? How does he know if people are paying him the right amount of money?”
“He just trusts them, I guess. I bought a broom from him when I was working downtown. He was walking around the UP building at lunch time, but I’ve seen him all over Omaha.”
Grandpa Mac turned Babe past the Wicker Witch house and onto my cul-de-sac. He parked in the driveway. “Thanks for serving, Benny.”
“You bet. Hey, Grandpa?”
Grandpa Mac looked at me as I opened the door to get out of his car.
“You waved to a blind man.” I started laughing. “Did you know that?”
Grandpa Mac smiled. “Wondered if you’d caught that.”
I ran up to my porch and went into the house. The summer of 1974 was stinkin’ hot. Gas prices were wacky. An old, blind man sold brooms on the streets of Omaha. And over in England, after a stint as a ditch digger and an English teacher, my future hero, was playing music wherever he could get a job. Gordon Sumner, music man of England, was starting to make a name for himself.
And Ben Keller, not-quite-Catholic kid of Omaha, was serving the evening Mass at Saint Pius X in Omaha, Nebraska.
7
Mrs. Mangiamelli: Wash and Set,
Delayed Graduation to Attend
Thursday, June 5
1975
T he winds across the state of Nebraska misbehaved during the year 1975. They mastered the perfect blizzard in January and later performed a mind-dazzling “ten” of a tornado in early May. Those same angry winds blew Ava Mangiamelli into my mother’s basement in early June for a wash and set.
The official icebreaker for any hairstylist is the weather. In Nebraska, this was most definitely a volatile topic. How ’bout that blizzard? Hey, how ’bout that tornado? “If you don’t like the weather in Omaha, just stick around an hour or two. It’ll change.”
So much to talk about in 1975.
In January, when mothers were hurrying to get their children back to school following two weeks of Christmas break, the blizzard of ’75 hit.Major winds and almost twenty inches of snow took fourteen lives in Omaha. The National Guard rescued four hundred stranded motorists. Employees of businesses around the city were stranded for days in their offices. Mr. Webber spent three days at a light company that was near a gas station and a liquor store. Mr. Webber and three other employees found a TV in the storage area and played cards until the snow plows unburied their cars. I still have a picture of A.C. and me standing on a drift that was as high as the roof on his house. No joke. We had the longest Christmas vacation that year since school was canceled an additional week. The city was paralyzed. The kids were ecstatic.
As if we hadn’t already missed enough school, in May we had another unexpected break from the classroom since, barely an hour after school kids made it home for the day, some of the classrooms were no longer there. At about 4:15 p.m. on May 6, several major tornados, with winds gusting up to 260 miles per hour, decided to blow down the center of town, turn left on Seventy-Second Street, and swing by the Ak-Sar-Ben Racetrack and Archbishop Bergan Mercy Hospital before driving out of town and lifting at 4:38 p.m. The afternoon tour chopped a path across ten miles of streets and residences. Nearly a year after Elvis Presley sold out performances in his “Tornado over Omaha” concert tour of June 1974, the real-life tornado of ’75 caught our city’s attention.
The miracle of it all is that this F4 natural disaster took only three lives. Omahans were proud to say that their sound-warning system was the real hero; one of the three fatalities had been a hard-of-hearing elderly lady who had not heard the sirens.
Omaha drew a breath as the paralyzed community picked up toasters and wallets in their yards belonging to people who lived miles away. An entire block wiped out near
“He’s blind? How does he know if people are paying him the right amount of money?”
“He just trusts them, I guess. I bought a broom from him when I was working downtown. He was walking around the UP building at lunch time, but I’ve seen him all over Omaha.”
Grandpa Mac turned Babe past the Wicker Witch house and onto my cul-de-sac. He parked in the driveway. “Thanks for serving, Benny.”
“You bet. Hey, Grandpa?”
Grandpa Mac looked at me as I opened the door to get out of his car.
“You waved to a blind man.” I started laughing. “Did you know that?”
Grandpa Mac smiled. “Wondered if you’d caught that.”
I ran up to my porch and went into the house. The summer of 1974 was stinkin’ hot. Gas prices were wacky. An old, blind man sold brooms on the streets of Omaha. And over in England, after a stint as a ditch digger and an English teacher, my future hero, was playing music wherever he could get a job. Gordon Sumner, music man of England, was starting to make a name for himself.
And Ben Keller, not-quite-Catholic kid of Omaha, was serving the evening Mass at Saint Pius X in Omaha, Nebraska.
7
Mrs. Mangiamelli: Wash and Set,
Delayed Graduation to Attend
Thursday, June 5
1975
T he winds across the state of Nebraska misbehaved during the year 1975. They mastered the perfect blizzard in January and later performed a mind-dazzling “ten” of a tornado in early May. Those same angry winds blew Ava Mangiamelli into my mother’s basement in early June for a wash and set.
The official icebreaker for any hairstylist is the weather. In Nebraska, this was most definitely a volatile topic. How ’bout that blizzard? Hey, how ’bout that tornado? “If you don’t like the weather in Omaha, just stick around an hour or two. It’ll change.”
So much to talk about in 1975.
In January, when mothers were hurrying to get their children back to school following two weeks of Christmas break, the blizzard of ’75 hit.Major winds and almost twenty inches of snow took fourteen lives in Omaha. The National Guard rescued four hundred stranded motorists. Employees of businesses around the city were stranded for days in their offices. Mr. Webber spent three days at a light company that was near a gas station and a liquor store. Mr. Webber and three other employees found a TV in the storage area and played cards until the snow plows unburied their cars. I still have a picture of A.C. and me standing on a drift that was as high as the roof on his house. No joke. We had the longest Christmas vacation that year since school was canceled an additional week. The city was paralyzed. The kids were ecstatic.
As if we hadn’t already missed enough school, in May we had another unexpected break from the classroom since, barely an hour after school kids made it home for the day, some of the classrooms were no longer there. At about 4:15 p.m. on May 6, several major tornados, with winds gusting up to 260 miles per hour, decided to blow down the center of town, turn left on Seventy-Second Street, and swing by the Ak-Sar-Ben Racetrack and Archbishop Bergan Mercy Hospital before driving out of town and lifting at 4:38 p.m. The afternoon tour chopped a path across ten miles of streets and residences. Nearly a year after Elvis Presley sold out performances in his “Tornado over Omaha” concert tour of June 1974, the real-life tornado of ’75 caught our city’s attention.
The miracle of it all is that this F4 natural disaster took only three lives. Omahans were proud to say that their sound-warning system was the real hero; one of the three fatalities had been a hard-of-hearing elderly lady who had not heard the sirens.
Omaha drew a breath as the paralyzed community picked up toasters and wallets in their yards belonging to people who lived miles away. An entire block wiped out near
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