Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
Reliable, Trustworthy Reporting, Capturing The Heartbeat Of Our Community
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Best-selling true crime author and Nebraska native Harry Mac-Lean knew he'd one day examine the most infamous crime in Nebraska history, the 1958 Charles Starkweather murder spree. But MacLean's reluctance to revisit his own fraught upbringing in Lincoln, where most of the murders occurred, kept pushing that day further away. Until now. MacLean offers his own take on one of the nation's first mass media serial killings in his book "Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That...
TAYLOR – Bailley Leibert walks into civics class and plops her sunflower-print backpack onto an empty table. The 15-year-old rummages for her notebook and colored pens. Around her are enough chairs to seat 10 students. But today, and every day, there are nine empty seats. It's just the ninth-grader and social studies teacher Ken Wright – an unintentional private lesson for the only freshman in this school. At Loup County High School, Bailley is the sole member of the class of 2027. The cla...
Quick, somebody give the governor a shovel, I want to see how much deeper he can dig the hole. Weeks after he insulted a reporter who questioned the high nitrate levels on his pig farm, Governor Jim Pillen has yet to apologize for his xenophobic remarks. The reporter, born in China, has been working in this country since 2017. She wrote about the nitrate issue for "Flatwater Free Press," her employer for the past two years. On an Omaha radio call-in program, Pillen said he hadn't read the...
Kathy Mesner has a word for the potential fallout from a property valuation dispute in Lancaster County. Catastrophic. "I don't think it's too much to say it may be catastrophic not only in terms of bankrupting projects ... but displacing all these low-income households across the state," said Mesner, an attorney and president of Central City-based Mesner Development Co. In the past year, a narrow disagreement on how to value 21 Lincoln-area properties has morphed into a court fight over a...
Their low, rumbling bellow first cuts through the silence of the Sandhills. Next comes the crunch of pointed hooves, trudging their way through tall prairie grasses. Then, the oohs of the out-of-towners watching – people up close and personal with the majestic thousand-pound mammals for the first time. This is Golden Prairie Bison, a ranch nestled in the Sandhills where Carl and Vicki Simmons raise a herd of 50 bison. Theirs is one of the dozens of bison ranches in Nebraska, one piece of an o...
KEARNEY – Americans have recognized military veterans in vastly different ways over the past 247 years. They've thrown parades for some and scorned others. But the Pawnee scouts, who protected pioneers, freighters and railroad workers in Nebraska during the mid-19th century's great migration west, were largely forgotten outside the Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma. "Those scouts were the very first in our tribe to serve in the military, so we hold our veterans on a high pedestal, almost like c...
A free press has been always a common denominator in this country’s history. Since the origin of the “Federalist” papers, which offered the ideas which became the U.S. Constitution, the press has played an active role in being the watchdogs - or fourth state - ensuring American citizens, and their civil liberties, are protected. The free press serves as the voice of the people, providing transparency and challenging government abuse of power. In several states, including Nebraska, lawma...
John Heaston opens the door to a brick warehouse next to Johnny's Cafe in South Omaha and walks through rooms holding his life's work. "It's kind of a hot mess," says the 52-year-old longtime publisher of Omaha's alternative newspaper, "The Reader." Here's a garage bay holding empty green newspaper boxes emblazoned with the word, "FREE." Here are floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with yellowing copies of "The Reader" and "El Perico," a separate publication that Heaston owns. Sticky notes...
Before he took office, Gov. Jim Pillen joked about phone conversations being exempt from public disclosure. Now, his administration has taken what seems to be an unprecedented step to shield the governor’s communications. Pillen’s staff denied the “Flatwater Free Press” access to four emails the governor sent, in part citing “executive privilege” – a phrase absent from Nebraska’s public records laws. A half-dozen former and current officials and advocates who spoke to the “Flatwater Free Press” couldn’t recall any other Nebraska governors who i...
The dining room table, it's not my style. But it was my parents' style, and we ate every holiday meal there at the house they built after we all grew up and left home. A bigger house. A house with the dining room my mom always wanted. What my dad wanted was to die in that house. Now a dark-haired stranger was carting that table away from the retirement home my mom and dad had landed and where Dad would spend his last months. His journey was a fill-in-the-blank primer on aging, as predictable as...
Editor’s note: The Nebraska Community Foundation is a Flatwater Free Press sponsor. It has been edited by Flatwater Free Press staff. The roughly 370 miles between North Omaha and the heart of southwest Nebraska aren’t slowing a group of Nebraskans from forging relationships that they hope will serve as a model for bridging the gulf between rural and urban communities. In less than a year, residents from either end of that span have crossed the state to experience how the other side lives – from mock cattle auctions in Ogallala to a Junet...
In a letter dated June 16, the group, led by Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, urged Xavier Becerra, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to drop a proposed modification of HIPAA’s Privacy Rule. The change would prohibit the use and disclosure of protected health information — including reproductive health — “for a criminal, civil or administrative investigation or proceedings” against those who lawfully provided care, such as across state lines. The attorneys general wrote that the Biden administr...
Each year, dozens of American farmers are injured or killed after they climb into a grain bin. A father-son duo from Aurora founded their one-of-a-kind company with one mission: No more boots in that grain. Chad Johnson and son Ben Johnson have created a robot, the Grain Weevil, meant to do most of the necessary – and oft-dangerous – tasks that farmers do inside their bins. The pair started developing their robot in 2020, after a farmer friend asked them to build a robot so the farmer would nev...
Seward County routinely seizes money from motorists on Interstate 80, keeps the cash – and never convicts the drivers of a crime. The county's sheriff's department and county attorney use this practice, known as civil asset forfeiture, so often that a third of all cases of this kind in Nebraska state courts come from Seward County, population 17,962, a Flatwater Free Press analysis of court records shows. The county has hauled in $7.5 million in forfeited cash in the past five years, some of i...
Brad Anderson still remembers the night his wife forgot hail. He was sitting on the front porch of their Lincoln home as a storm rolled in. "...I hear LuAnne running down the stairs hollering 'there's something hitting the house!'" She poked her head out the front door. "I said 'it's hailing,' and she looked at me like 'What?'" Brad grabbed a stone and showed it to his wife. It's frozen rain, he explained. "She said, 'That's amazing. I've never seen that before. What's it called again?'" That's...
A Nebraska family has plowed more than $1.6 million into the Lincoln mayor's race, an unprecedented sum and latest burst in a multi-year deluge that, at the federal level, rivals the political spending by a famed Las Vegas casino magnate and a Silicon Valley titan. It's not the Nebraska family you think. It's the Peed family and its business, Sandhills Global – not the Ricketts family – that have eclipsed all other donors while trying to help former State Sen. Suzanne Geist, a Republican, ous...
Last summer, Imperial farmer Dirk Haarberg made the hard decision to let some of his milo crop die. The heat and the wind had proven too much and Haarberg needed to save water for his other cornfields. Haarberg's water pumps also ran nonstop, he said during an interview, drawing more water than usual from the Ogallala Aquifer to feed the thirsty crops he was keeping alive. "We don't overwater, but when it was as dry as it was last summer, there's not much you can do but just water 24 hours a...
Remember when pasta was pretty much spaghetti and elbow macaroni? Now we have rigatoni and bow-tie and cavatelli and manicotti and fettuccine and paccheri and ... well you get the idea. One website I found listed 35 types of Italian pasta. There are long pastas and short pastas and stretched pastas and filled pastas and soup pastas. And that's just from Italy. So. Much. To. Know. But for the purposes of this column, let's go back to the basics: Dried or fresh? Do you use cooked or uncooked...
The forest green roof and pair of bronze stags frozen in combat are impossible to miss as you drive down Interstate 80. So are the two corporate buildings – 550,000 square feet of nearly empty office space, long offered for a $1 a year lease. The water tower looms overhead, painted in the same green, heralding what once was: "Cabela's World Headquarters, City of Sidney." For 54 years, Cabela's made its home here, a juggernaut that kept the town humming. But in 2017, the sporting goods store s...
When reporter Eva Mahoney arrived in Valentine in 1930 to profile America’s next great mystery novelist, she found Mignon Good Eberhart in a “pleasant little home,” struggling to visualize her next murder. Bewitched by her new surroundings, the big skies and grassy dunes, the author had contrived a remote hunting lodge in the Nebraska Sandhills as the site for her fictional crime. It had log doors, “a great, deep fireplace made of native, unfinished rock,” Eberhart wrote, and a hodgepodge of antique pewter lamps, a quirk of the cabin’s late own...
It came down to Ron Hull. In September, the seven members of the Nebraska Hall of Fame Commission met in Lincoln to decide whether to induct civil rights leader and Omaha native Malcolm X. Three members were in favor of his induction. Three were opposed. After years of debate and several failed attempts to get the slain civil rights leader into the hall, the long-controversial effort now would be decided by one man. It was up to Hull, a silver-haired 92-year-old, a longtime Nebraska Public...
NORFOLK – One of the last bus drivers in Norfolk begins his day by taking Nancy Stehlik to work. Wrapped in a purple coat and earmuffs, Stehlik inches her walker onto the small bus’s wheelchair lift. Driver Neil Schlecht pushes a button and the lift whirs down, placing Stehlik outside of work. For the rest of the day, he takes seven people to clinics, church and the grocery store. He jokes with riders just as he’s long done as a driver for North Fork Area Transit, the bus service which, until recently, used 35 buses and vans to give as many...
WEEPING WATER – Superintendent Kevin Reiman had a problem. He couldn’t find new teachers. So, in spring 2022, Reiman took an idea to the school board of Weeping Water Public Schools. What about a four-day school week? Reiman expected the board to take a year to study the possibility. Instead, it voted, unanimously: Yes. This fall, Weeping Water became at least the sixth Nebraska school district to adopt a four-day week. It’s a move that thrilled the school’s teachers, burnt out after teaching through a pandemic. And it’s worked better than expe...
It happened on a late spring Saturday afternoon in Omaha. The cool mid-May breeze caused the fans ringing Westside High School’s modest football field to curl up under their blankets and jackets. They watched, peering through the late afternoon sun, as 16 high school lacrosse players made history. The NorthStar lacrosse team, a group of Black boys from North Omaha, faced off against the private Creighton Prep High School for the 2022 junior varsity Nebraska state title. Creighton Prep’s seasoned players warmed up along the sidelines, while sev...
Garrett Dwyer runs about 500 head of Hereford and Angus cattle on his Bartlett ranch on the east edge of the Sandhills. The land he's on today has been in his family since 1894, when his great-great grandfather homesteaded it. Dwyer, who grew up there, is now the fifth generation in his family to ranch this land. But Dwyer didn't take over the family ranch until he did something far from home. For five years, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, including two combat tours in Iraq. Now he's...
