A Man From Elk City

"None of us lives without places.  We can't be without having spots in which to be.  The thoughts we think, the loves we love, the tasks we perform--they all happen somewhere..Landscapes, rivers, bridges, playing fields, houses, rooms, chairs, beds--we see them over and over again in pictures that fill our memories. Who we are and what we've thought and done all happen in particular locations.  And those locations are part and parcel of our who and what."

 "No place that I belong to has more roots and rootlets winding their way into my psyche and drawing up the nourishment to keep memory fresh and strong than a little village just west of Omaha, Nebraska, where I spent over fifteen of my first years.
...That cluster of homes, businesses and 'the hall' sitting astride the one mile of highway that ran from Howard Wahlgren's corner to Grandma Cooper's corner was what the map makers identified as 'Elk City'...Elk City is a village clinging to the highway there, but it is more than the village.  Its geography reaches out to claim the Elkhorn River a mile and a half away and some farmsteads on beyond it..."
"The Elkhorn River, the wooded bluffs that rise beside it.  Decker and Turner Hills, the cemetery, the church, the school, the general store, the garage, the blacksmith shop, the filling station--these were all part of that place a few miles west of Omaha, Nebraska, that I called home from when I was not quite two till when I was four months shy of being eighteen. No other place has affected who and what I am quite as fundamentally as has Elk City."

"People have always been attractive to me...People are interesting.  People are different.  People are never really very simple.  And I have slowly, and with much inner struggle sometimes, learned in the course of more than eighty years, that judging isn't really appropriate  when I come in contact with all the rest of the people...We're all people, taking what we were given and trying to make with it something we can live with and enjoy in the midst of all the others."
"Like many other things about me, being aware of people began for me in Elk City.  It began, of course, with persons in the house where I lived, that third house from the south end of town on the west side of the street.  It began with Mother....There was security, too, in seeing her in her rocking chair somewhere near the heating stove darning socks when a winter evening came and the day's routine tasks were completed..."

"Other persons were there all through my growing years and a few impacted my life more than some of the relatives.  Frank Gelston stands most prominently among them.  A tall, lean man with a graying mustache marking his gentle, friendly bespectacled face, he owned and operated the general store.  'Mr.  Elk City' he seemed to be to me  He not only owned the general store but was also the master of the post office that was housed within it...I  doubt that much happened in Elk City without Frank Gelston's input.  In his store, he was in the central listening post and whatevr was happening to anyone in the community Frank Gelston knew about and, when important, let the others know.  He was, for me, that adult outside the family whose special interest across all my young years left me with unusual respect, admiration, and gratitude...It still stirs a tear of disappointment and grief to look at a picture of Frank and Mary in an album and read the obituary that his death occasioned.  It hurts that I was in New york studying in seminary at that auspicious moment in Elk City's life and could not be "home" to pay tribute to one of my first and most influential mentors."

"So I grew up in Elk City.  I grew up very conscious of people, relatives and non-relatives, socially and economically prominent people and those who were not so successful, older people and younger people, business people and laborers, farmers and teachers.  Early in life I experienced the mix and felt secure within it...That small community with its people and their life together provided the life that propelled mine into whatever was to follow."

"My spirit has mysterious elements in it that I cannot name.  It is a reality that my mind cannot adequately comprehend.  Yet it is, I think, the most determinative aspect of who I am.  Whatever it  now is, the seeds from which it has developed were planted, watered and tended in that small community in the northwest corner of Douglas County, Nebraska, named Elk City."