"Where the girls are the fairest and the boys are the squarest": YA YAME special

That's what the official University of Nebraska song claimed anyway - girls are the fairest and boys are the squarest - when I learned it in the mid-40s. I don't know if it still does.

We moved to Lincoln in 1944. I remember we got on a train at Union Station in Chicago, where the big waiting room was full of guys in uniform - I hung onto Russ's coat and stared at a forest of khaki-covered knees. But even more I remember that night as the beginning of my serious and long-lasting love affair with trains - lying in a bunk by the window and watching little towns, all lit along their main streets, flash by in the night, the bells at the crossings clanging. And then waking up the next day in a new place to live. For quite a few years after that, every time we got on a train it was like that. And I still get nostalgic when I see a passenger train pass, people going somewhere new.

I was already a veteran of WWII by the time we moved to Lincoln. In Downers Grove the big guys on the block wouldn't let me play "war" with them unless I agreed to be The Japanese Prisoner, and I spent most of the time tied to a tree. But by the time I got to Lincoln I was a grizzled first grader, and ready for the real thing.

Lincoln was an Air Force city - there was a base nearby and downtown was full of guys in uniform saluting. But we were all involved in the war - we saved newspapers and tin cans and the tinfoil from gum wrappers and even bacon fat, which went back to the butcher. Everything was rationed - Marge had books of stamps and tokens for buying groceries and Russ sold the family car before we left Illinois because there was not enough gasoline to drive it all the way to Nebraska.

The house in Lincoln was right at the end of a streetcar line. Every once in a while a car would arrive in front of the house, clang a few times, and then the motorman would get out and walk the big arms that reached up to the overhead cables around to the other end of the car, and then he'd switch the control handles from one end of the car to the other, and that's how the thing got turned around to head back downtown. Russ loved it because he could wait until the car arrived in the morning and still have time to grab his hat and coat and get out the door.

The other thing about that corner was that it was where the newspaper company dumped off bails of papers for the carriers, so after school the parkway was full of older guys breaking down the bundles and folding their papers and filling their big canvas bags. I hung around with them and discussed the merits of the different folds. They all had their special ways of folding the papers - some into rolled tube shapes, others into triangles or squares, the idea being to achieve an aerodynamic perfection that would allow them to fling the papers up onto the porches from the sidewalk without having to get off their bikes. Lotta physics in that.

Russ became the first guy on the block to ride in a commercial airliner - an American Airlines DC-3 that took him on a business trip to New York, and a neighbor bought a new radio with a hole about the size of a salad plate cut into the front of its cabinet, claiming that some day we'd be able to look into the hole and see the Lone Ranger - sounded like a cool idea to me. I got my first bike, my first camera, and my first roller skates, and had measles, chicken pox, and mumps.

Oh, and the University of Nebraska had the league doormat football team, lost every game. And the boys were the squarest. I don't know about the girls for sure, but I'll take their word.

We moved again in '47, to Duluth the first time.

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