What do we know and How do we know it?

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

While working on the Clay County News retrospective column a few weeks ago we encountered the 100^th anniversary of the indictment of Melchoir Luebben and the failure of his First National Bank. Prosecutors documented an $80,000 discrepancy on the books at that Sutton bank.

The headline of a major 1914 Sutton story as multiple hiccups and more
threatened the local banks for several weeks while busy men sorted it out. 

I was confronted by a “discrepancy” in those stories, kind of like Sherlock Holmes’ “dog that didn’t bark” story. The Melchior Luebben’s indictment and subsequent jail time is a sidebar to online accounts of the invention of the round baler in Sutton by Ummo Luebben. Those accounts state, or at least imply that Melchoir’s downfall came as a result of his use of bank funds to finance his son Ummo’s initial baler manufacturing operations.

The 1914 newspaper accounts make no mention of any connection to the round baler, its manufacturing operations or Ummo. The violations in the indictments were all banking issues, creative accounting and the like.

I’ve been including the jailing of Mr. Luebben and the bank failure as a “rest of the story” aspect to the local invention of the round baler. It looks like I have been wrong all along on that.

Original source documents are great confidence builders in any story. Here is an image of Ummo Luebben's drawing
describing his "Baling Press" invention. Especially interesting as the patent was awarded on my father's birth day,
not his birthday, but his Birth Day, October 18, 1910 - had to mention that.  jj

First, with further review, we learn that Ummo was not Melchoir’s son. He was a younger brother according to census records. So I’ve been wrong about that too.

Those accounts that conflated the bank failure with the round baler factory likely stem from something written once and copied often. Things said often enough, and loud enough become “truth.”

The problem of knowing things for sure that just ain’t so is widespread impacting us in many ways. Genealogy research is all about reconstructing the time and place of events of people in our past generations. Most families have stories that have been passed from generation to generation and often have things written down as well as the oral stories. It was common for families to write down the dates of births or christenings in the family bible. Those dates can be trusted to be correct as they were recorded “contemporaneously” that is, at the time they happened. That is an ideal situation, unless the bible was purchased years later and the dates filled in by grandkids who really didn’t know what was right.

Similarly, the dates inscribed on tombstones have credibility. After all, they are literally, “etched in stone.” And at least the dates of death were recorded contemporaneously. But the dates of births are not recorded at the time of the stone etching but a whole lifetime later.

Our family has such an instance of a gravestone with erroneous birthdates and I’ll use that to illustrate my point.

Etched in stone doesn't always make it right.

Jonas and Ingri Klintberg came from the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. They immigrated in 1876 joining their daughter and her family in Saronville where they are buried in the Lutheran Cemetery.

Ingri died in 1895 and Jonas in 1905 and contemporaneous documents, newspapers, census, family records, etc. all confirm that. The gravestone tells us that Jonas was born on January 16, 1811 and his wife Ingri on May 7, 1807. So she was three, almost four years older. Okay, fine.

However, upon further review, maybe not.

A cousin, Ken Nelson who grew up near Clay Center and now lives in Manassas, Virginia picked up the genealogy bug several years ago. His family background is entirely Swedish leading to his enviable expertise in researching Swedish records. He was initially unable to locate the birth records for Jonas and Ingri. We knew the parish they were born in and had the birth dates from the tombstone but their names did not appear where and when we expected.

But Ken persisted. He finally located the birth record for Jonas Petter in Sanda parish, as expected but in

Two hundred year old Swedish language hand writing by rural preachers
can be a challenge to read, decipher, translate and maybe understand. 

January of 1816, not at all as expected. The image of Jonas’ portion of a page of the Fodd (birth) record is included with this article so you may check it for yourself. But you may see that the parents of little Jonas Petter are recorded as Daniel Nöbelin and Anna. Do not fret if you cannot read the record. These records were hand-written, in Swedish, about 200 years ago by clergymen with varying penmanship skills.

Ingri’s birth was not recorded in Sweden on the date appearing on her tombstone either. Her birth seems to have been on July 19, 1807. We should expect that the fellow in the parish in 1807 had a better idea about that date than the fellow who chiseled the date on the tombstone in Saronville. Contemporaneous recording should win out.

So why did my great, great, grandparents “lie” about his date of birth? We can’t be certain, but we can enjoy guessing. It looks like he was almost nine years younger than her and she appears to have had a son just 13 years younger than him. I guess it looked better for the step-father to be older than he actually was.

Let’s look at one more example, Mr. John Maltby, the fellow who named Sutton.

Pieces of the John Maltby story appear in many of the texts about the history of Sutton. We learn about his youth in Sutton, Massachusetts, how he went to the Australian gold fields, to India and to England. He and Matilda Mary Cooke entered into a stormy marriage in London and that story survives in several versions too. The Maltbys made it to Sutton after more adventures where, among other things, John Maltby named our town after his own home town in New England.

Our well-circulated and multi-sourced
photo of John R. Maltby

So how sure are we that this story is accurate or even credible? We can first guess that since all of the published accounts are similar the later ones probably drew upon the early ones. So how did the details become parts of the early accounts?

Short answer: we have the goods on this guy. An internet query based on Mr. Maltby and Sutton leads you to the Nebraska Historical Society’s website where we find the inventory of the contents of 13 boxes of material about John Maltby.

I visited the state historical society a couple of years ago to check out the Maltby collection. The material comes from as early as 1837 through his death in 1895 in Fairfield. The man kept diaries through much of his life and we can read about the 5 month voyage from Boston to Australia, travels in India, his many business dealings (mostly unsuccessful) and his days in Clay County. There are receipts and financial papers from the very early days of Sutton and much more.

I believe we can be sure that some, maybe all of those who wrote about John Maltby’s story spent some quality time with those boxes of John Maltby’s stuff to learn the details of his life.

To learn more about the Sutton related “stuff” at the historical society, go to their site at nebraskahistory.org and search on “Sutton.” You’ll have to work past some references to guys named “Sutton” but you’ll find local church records and much more. There is material from the Buck-Hoerger families and early hotel registers from the Occidental Hotel.

If we are serious about accurately relating the stories of the past, then we must understand how to distinguish information that may be factual from that which is just “close to right” or just ain’t so. We do this by questioning everything and evaluating our sources. There really are good sources and the best are those from the time of the event that generated the information.

Even then, we cannot be certain that we’re right. We’re taught that it is bad to tell a lie so when writing about things in the way-back past there is always a cloud hanging over our heads reminding us that it is only a matter of time before we write something that “just ain’t so.” To the extent that we speak in certainty we are heading for trouble.

Or as Bertrand Russell said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

One exception. On February 12^th Sid Caesar died at the age of 91. I am certain that he was the greatest comic of the 20^th century. End of exceptions.  

This article first appeared in the February, 2014 issue of Sutton Life Magazine. For information about this publication contact Jarod Griess at (402) 983-4203 or LIKE Mustang Media, Inc. on Facebook.

1930 Sutton High School Annual excerpts

The Sutton Historical Society continues to accumulate annuals from Sutton High School Classes. This post is excerpts from the 1930 annual called The Suttonian.

The cover of the 1930 Sutton High Annual. It is a soft cover 8" X 10 1/2".

The Faculty - 1930.

First page of 1930 seniors. Winning nicknames: Guzzle & Fungi.

#2 page of seniors. A batch of fine nicknames here but I like Ludwig and a 17-year old
gal who has to answer to "Runt" (wonder if she did) deserves some recognition.

"Lovely" and "Mumps" may need some explaining, well, "Mumps" anyhow.

Juniors - too bad we lost some faces here. 

Add caption

Defense! Defense! Defense!

Are Alumni games still legal?

Nuss Bakery: butter, bread and Russian seeds - I believe they were actually called
Russian Peanuts and were one reason surrounding townsfolk called Sutton folk,
Russians. 

Check elsewhere for our list of on-hand annuals to see if you might have a spare annual gathering dust
that you might want to contribute - much appreciated - the staff.

1914 Sutton News Business Advertisements

These ads appeared in the May 1, 1914 issue of the Sutton News newspaper, a Thursday publication priced at $1.00 per year. Advertising rates were 10 cents per inch per issue.

John M. Gray and his father Hosea Gray founded the Gray Lumber Yard on August 24, 1871, the
second lumber yard in Sutton in the town's oft-told story, very oft-told of how Thurlow Weed's
carload of lumber arrived in town on the 23rd narrowly but decisively edging out the Gray's for the
distinction of Sutton's First Lumber Yard. The Gray Lumber Yard was on the west side of Way
Avenue just north of the railroad track. It extended south of the Gray house at 311 N. Way Ave. to
the intersection with Maple Street encompassing the lots where the Hunzeker and Aunt Emma
houses are today.

This ad gave no additional information of who/where this company was.

J. J. Goll is not a household name in Sutton but it appears he was a Ford dealer in 1914. No Goll family
appears in the census for Sutton or nearby in 1910 or 1920 but we can find Jacob Goll Sr. and Jacob J.
Goll Jr. in Potsdam Township (Blue Hill), Webster County in 1920. Jacob Sr. would have been 56 years
old in 1914 and Jake J. Goll Jr. 28. A 1923 plat map of Potsdam Township finds Goll land to the extent
of seven eighties for J. Goll and an additional two belonging to W. Goll just south of Blue Hill.

So our educated guess is that Jacob J. Goll Jr. was this 1914 Ford distributor in Sutton and that sometime
between 1914 and 1920 farming in Webster County looked better to Jake than selling cars.

And speaking of Ford dealers, this Yost business in 1914 was advertising the
IH Farm Wagon for their Sutton & Grafton businesses. I may need some help
understanding that fifth wheel feature however. 

This posting of just a few 1914 newspaper ads in Sutton is a small snapshot of transition, farm wagons,
Fords and tire technology. A common transition at about this period of time was the morphing of
livery stables to car dealerships and mechanics' shops. 

The weekly column for The Clay County News is a task that should take two or three hours but often extends into a second half-day or more as I find myself reading the damn papers. 

jj

History as the Observation of Change

History is only the observation of change.

I was reminded of that in a recent article in the “Prairie Fire” newspaper. Dr. Paul A. Johnsgard wrote a lengthy piece on the way the migration of water fowl has changed over the decades he has been carefully tracking various birds.

The advantage that he had is that he had been writing things down over the years. Most of us are more likely to track changes in our own fallible memories.

One of the many things I found that had changed during my 44 year lapse of Clay County residency was how deer had become common in this area. Suttonites who wanted to hunt deer during the ‘50’s and ‘60’s had to go off on an expedition to somewhere near the Wyoming border. Fifty years later deer are not only commonplace in Clay County but may be even a nuisance.

Another surprise came when I saw large numbers of distinctive little birds at our backyard feeders. They were dark above and white below. I learned they were a type of sparrow called the junco – cute little fellows. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention but I did not remember them on the farm when I was growing up.

European Ringneck Doves, a recent (last 25 years?) immigrant to the U. S. 

A larger bird was a bigger surprise. These guys looked something like the morning doves I remembered well except they were mostly white and a larger bird. Normally when we encounter things from our childhood they seem to be smaller than we remember – not so these birds.

Then I saw an article in the World-Herald describing the European ringneck dove that first appeared in Florida in the ‘90’s and spread quickly across the country. Other sources tell almost the same story about something called the Eurasian Collared Dove. Whatever they are, we’ve enjoyed several years of watching from six to eight pairs in our back yard.

These little wildlife stories illustrate a few tiny examples of local change in which the nature of our wildlife is different now than just a few decades ago. The common pheasant may be a better example. They were introduced into Nebraska about 100 years ago and flourished. For large numbers of Lincoln and Omaha sportsmen in the 1950’s and ‘60’s the word “Sutton” meant “pheasant hunting.” The population seems to have dwindled from earlier levels.

The pheasant example illustrates an important point about history as the observation of change. Do I really know how the population of pheasants has changed over the years? Nope.

One really needs some well-grounded statistics and evidence to make sweeping statements about how things change over time. Otherwise, we’ll make statements of qualitative opinion without stopping to consider the level of certainty we actually have.

So let’s go back to that “Prairie Fire” article by Dr. Johnsgard. He has been called “the Birdman of Nebraska” with something like 50 publications mostly about the birds of this area. This article is titled, “Changing Great Plains Climate and Bird Migrations.”

The author grew up in North Dakota in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s where the peak of fall foliage colors occurred in early September and major waterfowl migration was in October. He moved to Nebraska in the ‘60’s where he reset his fall and spring calendars to expect the fall foliage colors to peak at the end of September and snow geese first appeared in early October with peak sightings at the end of that month.

His fall Nebraska calendar was so reliable that he could confidently reserve an expensive camera many months in advance for his NETV documentary at the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge for the third week of October.

Then bird migration patterns began to change. Snow geese arrived at Squaw Creek in the second and third weeks of September, peaked at the first of November and were gone by the end of December. In 2008 through 2012 the peak population of snow geese was at the first of December. In 2013 those birds did not arrive until the end of November and wintered there.

Dr. Johnsgard was observing Canadian geese during this same period seeing their migration being delayed year by year until the early 2000’s when up to one hundred thousand Canadian geese wintered in the Platte Valley.

Bird people make an annual Christmas bird count that provides excellent quantitative evidence adding credibility and a higher level of certainty to the conversation. From 1968-1977 the most common bird in Nebraska was the mallard; the house sparrow was third and the Canada goose fifth. During the ten-year period from 1998-2007 the mallard was still in first place followed by the Canada goose and the house sparrow had dropped out of the top five.

The Canada goose climbed from nowhere to the top position in North Dakota during this time. It now trails only the mallard in South Dakota. It is now in fourth place in Kansas and fifth in Oklahoma. Dr. Johnsgard offers his statistics as a measure of wildfowl reacting to temperatures. Things must have warmed a lot, don’t you think? Actually, it doesn’t seem to take much.

Over the 11 decades between 1895 and 2008 average January temperatures in Nebraska increased by 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit per decade or a total of 1.21 degrees. The corresponding number for North Dakota was 0.44; South Dakota, 0.19; Kansas, 0.10 and Oklahoma, 0.04. That is, warming has been more rapid at northern latitudes – tracks with the breakup of the Arctic ice.

So what is the importance of all the numbers? Answer: evidence.

How many of us have said things like, “Well, I remember when we had snow on the ground all winter, from November into March.” Sometimes we confidently add, “Half the time” or “90% of the time.” Of course, we generally don’t have stat sheets to back that up but too often that doesn’t lessen our certainty. It is a big deal to go to contemporary records, records taken at the time of the happening, to strengthen your story.

Moving to a topic more related to Sutton History: When did Les Bauer close his hardware store? That question could generate a discussion at morning coffee with various and conflicting answers offered with equal certainty, some even right. But some document associated with the closeout sale or a newspaper account during that week should trump our well-meaning but fallible memories. (Young people, references to memory become more meaningful at an ever increasing pace over time.)

History is the observation of change. It is also the observation of things that do not change.

Businesses come and go and there is a sequences of business in specific store fronts in town. But perhaps the personality of Sutton, at least the physical appearance of our town is centered downtown on the west side of the street. We can thank the egos of the builders as they engraved their names and dates of construction on the buildings themselves. We have a Bender building from 1906, the Carney and Woodruff buildings from 1891 and we can date, at a glance, the Central Block to 1887. Not much to discuss there, we have evidence about the history of downtown.

We should take pride in the visible evidence of more than 125 years of our town dating to not much more than a dozen years from the first settlers. We are not alone. There are plenty of opportunities to see how other people take pride in the pieces of their history that do not change – let’s stick with buildings.

The east coast is home to great historic buildings from the colonial period but the western hemisphere can’t

MDCI inscription indicates this
Florence, Italy building dates from 1601.

hold a candle to the east. It kind of takes your breath away to see a date engraved on a building that reads “MDCI.” At first, you want to pronounce it. Then it strikes you that it is the Roman numerals for 1601. Is that telling us that the building was built in 1601? Not quite. That’s when the façade was added. The building was completed in 1481. Perspective: where was Christopher Columbus then?

Rome's Pantheon, in use since ...
way back. 

Then in Rome there is the Pantheon that has been in use for about 1,900 years; it is old enough that a writer in the year 200 was uncertain as to who built or rebuilt it, and when. (Hadrian, 125 A.D.) The Pantheon is an extreme example of a structure with historical significance because it has not disappeared and changed little.

Is Sutton’s Central Block in the same league as Philadelphia’s Independence hall, Renaissance or Roman buildings? Of course not. But the path to 200 or 500 or 2,000 years starts with the first 125.

The Central Block building on the west side of the south end of downtown Sutton, an 1897 vintage structure, old by some standards, not so much by others. 

This article first appeared in the January, 2014 issue of Sutton Life Magazine. For information about this publication contact Jarod Griess at (402) 983-4203 or LIKE Mustang Media, Inc. on Facebook.

Sutton Annuals On-hand

The Sutton Museum has been slowly accumulating old annuals of Sutton High School making them readily available to everyone in the community. We have the following annuals on hand.

If you have a copy from one of the missing years and would be willing to part with it, we would appreciate your gift and will be proud to add it to the collection.

Contact Jerry Johnson or any other member of the Sutton Historical Society. You can stop at the museum on Sunday afternoons or call to have us meet you there.

ON HAND

1912
1917
1924
1926 (book of senior pictures)
1929
1930
1931
1935
1937
1940   http://suttonhistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2014/03/early-sutton-high-annuals-1940-and-1942.html
1941 (copy of the Spring issue of the Mustang Round-Up
         http://suttonhistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2014/03/1941-sutton-high-mustang-round-up.html
1942
1946
1947
1952
1953
1958
1959
1960
1968
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981

1941 Sutton High Mustang Round-up

The Mustang Round-up school newspaper of May 23, 1941 was devoted to the senior class of that year. We're not sure if there was an annual that year. People who graduated during World War II have told us that the tradition of publishing an annual was discontinued during the war but our recent receipt of the 1942 annual calls that into question.

The "in lieu of" replacement for the annual was the last issue of the school newspaper in which the normal senior stuff would appear. We received such a paper from Beth Bartell which is consistent with that story, except, May, 1941 was before the war.

Dunno. I'm confused.

Here ya go:

 

The major traditional items about the graduating seniors appeared in this last issue of the Mustang Round-up for the year. There is the Class Prophecy, Will, the graduation photos with class activities listed on a separate page and the Class History. They even had a Class Poem, though...

The lead story was Sneak Day. That was always a deal. The Class of '41 spent the day in Lincoln. Twenty years later, the Class of '61 followed the tradition of that period with a trip to Chicago. As I recall, we left on the train on Friday evening for the overnight trip arriving in Chicago in the morning. We had a bus whisk us about town to the big tourist attractions: the Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry as I recall. I don't think we made it to the Art Institute, now my favorite Chicago attraction. If we did go there it made zero impression on me at that time.

Here are the senior photos with some easily recognizable faces. This was a crummy year to be eighteen years old if you were a male. December 7th was not far off. A separate and interesting look would be to see how many of these fellows or gals were on active duty.

Annual ads are not at all interesting at the time of publication, unless you are upset with someone who didn't pony-up. There weren't many this year. Wonder what the "Mustang Special" sundae at the Central Café might have been; don't want to guess. Even stranger was "Jungle Bread" at the Nuss Bakery.

There you have it...
jj

From the Golden Age of Chickens

This ad appeared in the Sutton News newspaper one hundred years ago touting the local Sutton manufacturing business of Emil Ochsner with his egg incubator and other poultry related products.

The Sutton Museum has one of Ochsner's incubators on display. Not sure how many of the younger generation actually
understand what it was used for. Explanations generally seem to be reflected back from glassy eyes.

Clay Center had the reputation for some kind of Poultry Capital for Nebraska as the Old Trusty manufacturing plant of M. M. Johnson dominated the industry. The Clay County Sun newspaper annually serialized the story of publishing the catalog for that business over multiple weeks each spring. It was a large format and thick publication with a subscriber list numbering tens of thousands and coast to coast.

The Old Trusty plant was a huge compound employing several hundred. One story was about a traveling salesman who came to Clay Center and part of his sales pitch was that he represented a business so large that it employed nine stenographers. One Clay Center businessman listened patiently to the salesman then asked him to come along with him. The two went to the edge of downtown Clay Center and upstairs at the plant where the salesman stood in awe of a room with 90 stenographers pounding away on their typewriters supporting the various business functions of Old Trusty.

The poultry incubator was the signature product of the Old Trusty line. Emil Ochsner's Sutton operation was in competition with the Clay Center operation but much, much smaller. I've also heard that Fairfield had a third poultry incubator manufacturer but I do not know the name or any other information about it.

February, 2016 addendum:

Why blogs are superior to newspapers, magazines and other printed matter:

The Fairfield Auxiliary newspaper on February 27, 1941 ran, in their "15 years ago" section, the story of the B & H Incubator Co. that had just shipped a 120-egg incubator to Greece. The 1926 paper had applauded the company for their international outreach. The gentlemen in the "B & H" name were identified as Bayles and Hayes. ...

Someday we'll maybe dig into census and other records from the 20's and 30's to locate more info on the gentlemen - first names, for instance. But, later...

The poultry business, mostly chickens but including ducks and geese was a big deal 100 years ago through at least the 40's. A typical farmstead may have had a hundred or two laying hens and a diminishing number of roosters providing protein for the farm family and selected friends in town. The county newspapers, the Clay County Sun, Harvard Courier, Sutton Register, Fairfield Auxiliary all carried weekly columns with advice to the chicken and goose growers. There were ads for feeding supplements, medicines, equipment, etc. Large poultry shows attracted growers from a wide area. One account told of stacks and stacks of crates containing show chickens and ducks sitting on the depot platform in Sutton as farmers waited for the train to take them and their birds off to a show.

Chickens and a few milk cows produced enough eggs and cream for a small and steady revenue stream that covered the weekly grocery bill for many a farm family.

Early Sutton High Annuals - 1940 and 1942

Received a call recently from Washington State. Seems our caller was going through the belongings of a relative and found copies of the 1940 and 1942 Sutton High annuals. Having no direct connection with the flatlands, she offered to send the two volumes.

The first striking thing about the annuals are that they are in great condition. One visualizes that they have spent much of the past 70+ years packed away in something approaching a sterile environment.

Secondly, both volumes are of a physical size differing from most annuals we have from earlier and later though the 1947 is similar. These are 6 X 9 inches as you can see in the photo. Both have 40 pages. And they are hard-bound unlike the annuals of years just prior to 1940 which had cloth covers which have generally not held up well.



The 1940 and 1942 Sutton High annuals in their distinctive appearance - 6 X 9" with textured hard covers. Attractive and in great condition - a gift from a friend in Washington State.

The third thing was a surprise which I expressed in the phone call. I had the impression that the school did not publish annuals during WWII. The 1940 preceded the war but 1942 came out months into the conflict. The 1946 annual is a full format hard-bound volume with a lot of pages which I remember being told was produced in response to the long dry spell. In fact, while I was on the phone the copy of the Mustang Round-up school newspaper dated May 23, 1941 was on my desk. It has the class prophecy, will, senior photos, sneak trip story and other features about the 1941 seniors. Yes, this was also before the U.S. entered the war in December but this is the format I've seen for mid-war end-of-year papers that were published in lieu of a regular annual.


So, what unusual thing do you notice about these annuals, at least the one on the left?

What is this "Blue and Gold" thing? I've been commenting that those were the school colors in 1940 though it might have been the colors for the senior class (do classes still do that? I was somewhat baffled by that tradition.)

Okay, onto the innards. Senior pictures are what these things were all about, right.



The first dozen - alphabetically. There's Fritz Bender: "If arguing were money, I'd be a millionair." Always fun to catch a 74-year old typo, isn't it. Studious fellow, Fritz. Samuel Carney would have been Sam III, his father and grandfather ran a hardware store bridging I. N. Clark and Les Bauer in that business.

Lorene Griess married Rolland Johnson ('42), a successful farming couple on the road to Harvard.
The Heinz name was quite common in Sutton with 30 graduates listed in the Sutton High rolls through 1959.

Group 3:

Here is Artis Johnson, later Lemkau and brother of Rolland Johnson (my cousins). Levander was a common name
as was Lohmeier (17 grads of our school), both names fading out. The Nuss name however persists.

and Group 4

Another distinguished looking group including down in the lower left, Mr. Roger Sheridan.

and to Zimbleman, an even dozen per page for five pages, good planning.



Gloria Yost (Griess) was President of S. N. T. (Sutton Normal Training) for her senior year.

That's the senior class of 1940. Oh, and they did have underclassmen that year:

The Juniors:

The Sutton High School Junior Class of '40. You may spot a few familiar faces here. I'll start you off with an
easy one there in the second row toward the left side, Wayne Erickson.

The Sophomores:

The note that went home to Moms on dress code met with mixed results. I am sincerely partial to the fashion statement
represented in the white shirt, tie and overalls. That's a young man just oozing self confidence.

And the Freshman Class of '40 to graduate in 1943.

What we have here is a photographer with strong feelings about style and form or maybe design. That, or maybe a
frustrated choreographer with dreams of working a major musical stage production, one with a train theme perhaps.

And there were sports in 1940:

Basketball

This is the Sutton High Basketball Team for the 1939-1940 season. The back row: Mr. George Clark, a graduate of Doane College; Morris Schneider, Junior; Milton Scheerer, Senior; Jim Barbee, Junior; and Mr. Jess Weyand, U of N grad and School Principal. Front row: Gerald Sharkey, Junior; Roger Sheridan, Senior; Frederick (Fritz) Bender, Senior; Melvin Levander, Senior and Wayne Lohmeier, Sophomore.

Football

The write-up for the football team from the fall of 1939 mentioned injuries to Roger Sheridan and Leon Scheideman as though that affected their season. Maybe so. Check below.

 

The 1939 Sutton football team had a serious Jekyll and Hyde season.


Opponent                      Sutton               Opponent

Fairfield                           32                         0
Hebron                             22                         0
Exeter                              40                         0
Clay Center                     41                         0
Friend                              14                         0
                 (pretty good so far, don't you think?)
Superior                             0                       48
Geneva                              0                        19
Nelson                               7                        21
Harvard                             3                        19
                 (kinda took a turn for the worse there in mid-season. May need to flesh out this story.)


There had been girls' athletics in the schools decades earlier but that disappeared and was not revived until the '70's. Athletics and physical activities in general were seen to be unladylike, I guess. Though can you explain cheerleaders in that context?

There was a Pep Club and this may be the highlight of the post, they were called the Ponies. Isn't that just worth the effort to get this far down the page?

The girls of the Pep Club were called the "Ponies" back in the day. Did not know that.

"Saddle your blues to a wild Mustang,
And gallop your troubles away."

Nothing personal regarding the person or persons who wrote or chose that epigram, but I think they could have worked on the question for another hour or two with good results. Just sayin'.

There were 60 graduating seniors in 1940, 60 juniors, 56 sophomores and 48 freshmen by my count, or 224 in high school enabling the music department to excel in gross numbers at the very least.

 

 

Gertrude Traeger, a grad of Wisconsin was responsible for the vocal music teacher;
W. O Sanberg, NU had band and orchestra.

Sutton Normal Training was still going strong in 1940. These were the prospective rural school teachers destined for the dozens and dozens of schools in the surrounding area (67 in Clay County alone.)



Miss Anna Moehring, far right, was the Normal Training teacher and a graduate of Midland College.

And finally, the group that put the annual together had to take a bow. This is the Applied English Class which likely was or included what we later called Journalism.

Unsure how today's graphic designers would react to this collage but it does identify the folks, tells us they were responsible for the school newspaper and likely they produced this annual. The advisor and English teacher was Marlys Bell who is pictured in the upper right hand corner and a graduate of Hastings College. And yes, she is quite young looking but that is the same photo that appears on the faculty page.

This post covers most of the 1940 Sutton High annual. We received the 1942 annual at the same time and we have quite a number of the collection but with major gaps. Stop in the Sutton Museum or contact us to learn what we have and which annuals are missing from our collection. We would like to accumulate as many as we can and make them readily available to graduates and friends and especially the offspring and grandchildren of graduates. Nothing brings a smile to a kid's face like a picture of 17-year old grandmas and grandpas. Deal with it.

Sutton Businesses - 1917; extract from Polk Directory for Omaha

Stumbled onto an unexpected treasure recently. While searching for a Sutton business name it cropped up in what I thought was an Omaha Polk Directory. Turns out, that's what it was. The 1917 Omaha Polk Directory had sections for many Nebraska small town businesses including Sutton.

These directories are linked to ancestry.com though for how long, I don't know. Will now have to spend some more time to see how many of these directories are linked in and do they all have Sutton business listings?

Watch this space. Or, look into it and let me know. -jj

Rev. William J. Bonekemper died 75 years ago, March 18, 1939

The Sutton Register newspaper of March 23, 1939 carried the story of the death of Rev. William J. Bonekemper in Long Beach, California. Rev. Bonekemper was the pastor in one of the Reformed churches in Sutton from 1876 through 1908.

The Bonekemper story begins on page 265 of Jim Griess' book on the Sutton Germans from Russia.

Clipping from the March 23, 1939 issue of the Sutton Register newspaper.

 

Suffrage Petition Submitted 100 Years Ago - March 14, 1914

Nebraska’s largest ever petition was delivered to the state house on March 14, 1914 by a delegation of women with a film crew recording the event. The petition with names of 42,523 voters called for a suffrage vote in the November election. Clay County contributed 599 names to the document.

 

The Sutton Register: “The suffrage fight is now on.”

NORMAL TRAINING and the 1924 Sutton High School Annual

The cover of The Champ, the Sutton High School
Annual of 1924.

The Sutton Museum has a growing (slowly) collection of the annuals of Sutton High School. We are still well short of having one half of the years representing the years for graduating seniors that began in 1884. Certainly the school did not produce books those earliest years; our oldest annual is the 1912 edition which is actually a common possession of Sutton residents. That was the year that the "new" school building was built southeast of downtown which served as a high school into the mid-1960's and as a grade school for additional years.

That 1912 annual was a "half-page" nicely bound volume that was dedicated to the new school by that year's graduating class which "just missed" the new school.

The annuals for the next decades were cloth-bound publications and while modest in external appearance were still quality products in terms of content and professionalism in design and execution.

This posting uses the 1924 Sutton High annual as a representative example of the era.

There are a number of interesting things in this '24 annual and we will update this posting to add more later. The initial version of the post addresses the Normal Training program at Sutton High in 1924.

Normal training was the term used to describe programs to train school teachers. The term comes from the notion that prospective teachers were taught established teaching standards, or norms. Some areas established separate normal schools but for much of the early days in our area high schools had a normal training program that produced teachers to meet the demand of the rural schools.

I was surprised by the size of the normal training program in Sutton in 1924. I had envisioned that a small number of the high school students, mostly girls were enrolled in the program. The vast majority of the rural school teachers were young women so it seemed logical that normal training was a girls' thing. Most of the literature spoke of women teachers seeming to confirm that idea.

There were men teachers in the rural schools but they were rare enough that I thought I knew them by name: Henry Vauck, Roy Oakley, Albert Nejezchleb appear in articles about county schools. We had a male teacher, Dick Anderson in 1953-1954, our last year at District #16 northwest of Sutton.

So imagine my surprise to learn that in 1924 fully 26 of the 33 graduating seniors including seven boys were listed as in the normal training program. It was not a minor part of the high school curriculum and it was not a girls-only program.

The 26 Normal Training students in the senior class at Sutton High in 1924. Yes, there are 27 in the photo. I'm guessing
that that is Miss Hawk, the Normal Training Instructor there front and center. The annual did not identify the individuals
in the photo but we list those below who were identified elsewhere as normal training students. Your challenge is to match 'em.

One 1924 Normal Training graduate, Clemens Chambers was listed as "Post Graduate." We also find him listed as a 1923 grad in the Alumni Directory. I'd seen references before to normal training post grads and guessed that some graduates came back for another year, the fifth I suppose probably to get that teaching credential, just guessing.

The 1924 graduates who listed Normal Training among their high school activities were: Frances Baass (later Mrs. Earl Vauck), Helen Bauer, Ralph Bauer, Blanche Bishop, Mabel Case, June Easley, Catherine Elfring, Marie Ebert, Marie Griess, Frieda Grosshans, Frances Hanson, Edna Hansen, Ethel Johnson (my Aunt Ethel Nelson), Kathleen McLaughlin, Wilbert Nuss, Ralph Nolde, Clinton Ochsner, Sara Perlenfein, Martha Rath, Helen Swanson, Mary Wells, Elizabeth West, Gilbert Wieland and Eva Zimmerman.

Okay, if you've been counting along with me you are rightfully telling me I have some wrong info here. I wrote that 26 of the 33 grads were in Normal Training. The class photo has 27 faces but I came up with a plausible, perhaps correct hypothesis that the instructor is in the photo and I guessed which one she might have been. But I just listed the 24 names of graduates who listed Normal Training among their activities. I did not list Mr. Chambers as he was a post grad and was listed as a 1923 grad. That would make 25.  However, Miss Helen Swanson was also listed in 1924 annual as a post graduate and her name does appear with the Class of 1924 in the Alumni Directory.

So, I guess someone in the picture of 26 senior normal training students (plus instructor) did not graduate to make the Alumni Directory. Suppose?

Point being: this historical research thing veers off of the straightforward path especially when you are working with two sources, here the 1924 annual and the current Alumni Directory. There is a sound saying from the information technology world: never put your data into two databases; they will so quickly diverge and you will expend a lot of time and energy determining which is right and which is wrong. The real disgusting thing about that illustration is that too often both of your databases will be right as the purpose of each will also diverge from the other in the slightest way.

Just so in the case of the number of normal training seniors in 1924. The photo of the class was the snapshot of the group at some point in the school year. The senior pictures in the annual were a similar, but not exactly the same group at another point in the school year and the 1924 high school annual is the historical record of the members of the group who also received a diploma that year, at the end of the school year.

These are the kinds of things generate coffee shop discussions and bar fights. At another level, these kinds of things make reading Daily Kos and World Net Daily such unlike experiences.

But I digress.

Here is the image of the Normal Training page of the 1924 Sutton High Annual where the curriculum and the requirements for completion of the program are listed.



This page from the 1924 Sutton annual gives us the four year curriculum for normal training
and college preparatory work at Sutton High. Twenty-six of the thirty-three graduating seniors
appear to have followed this program and were identified as normal training students.

Here's hoping that you enjoyed this article and that if you were interested in knowing more about Normal Training in Nebraska schools in the 1920's we have helped you better understand that topic. If you do not have an interest in this topic, then howjaheck did you get this far in the post?

Thanks for visiting the Sutton Historical Society blog.

Sutton Historical Society
P. O. Box 92
Sutton, NE 68979
suttonnehistory@gmail.com