by Matt Weiland
It’s the ultra-Republican state that in my lifetime has sent two Democratic senators to Washington at once, hosted the first and so-far only gubernatorial race between two women (the Republican won), and as of this writing has in the Senate one “maverick” Bush-bashing Republican and one conservative Democrat. Going back a few years, Nebraska was the site of the 1892 Progressive Party convention; the home of William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate; and the state that sent Senator George W. Norris, the man FDR called the “perfect, gentle knight of American progressive ideals,” to Washington for nearly forty years. Nebraska produced Ike’s Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who promoted early civil rights legislation, and JFK’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen. And since 1934, it’s the only state in the union with only one legislative house—the Unicameral—conceived by an early advocate as a way to decrease partisanship and “to save time, talk and money.” Perhaps it’s telling that my father is a lifelong Republican, my mother a lifelong Democrat.
I was flattered to be asked to write this entry on Nebraska not only because of the company of such prominent fellow writers but also because I’m a WPA hobbyist with a moderately extensive collection of WPA literature. Yet I was a little sheepish about accepting because I was born and raised in Omaha, and asking an Omahan to write about Nebraska is a little like asking a New Yorker to write about the United States. Like New York, Omaha is the metropolis perched on a far eastern border whose citizens are often ignorant of and spiritually distanced from the country stretching westward, and like New York, Omaha has more in common with other cities its own size than with the geographical area that surrounds it. One can extend this analogy further still. As Washington, D.C., is to New York, Lincoln—the more genteel and provincial capital city to the south, named for a president and conjured practically out of nowhere in order to decentralize power—is to Omaha. And as in the United States as a whole, Nebraska’s west lies in a different time zone, is geographically distinct, and looks to a different metropolis—Denver—as its locus of culture, transportation, and shopping. But since roughly a third of all Nebraskans are Omahans, it’s not unreasonable to single out my city for discussion, and as a film director who has shot three feature films there, I’ve spent a lot of time observing it and thinking about it.
In contrast with the more sober agrarian and ranching nature of the rest of the state, Omaha evolved as a rough-and-tumble boomtown anchored in one main industry—transportation. Sitting on the bank of the Missouri River and not far from the Platte, it was perfectly situated to receive steamboats and stagecoaches, outfit travelers, handle freight.
Then, as the natural fulcrum-point between East and West, Omaha was selected as the headquarters of the Union Pacific Railroad. This more than anything else was responsible for transforming what was in the 1850s a sleepy territorial capital of 2,000 people into a bustling regional city of 100,000 four decades later. As a place to process and transport all manner of goods, late nineteenth-century Omaha exploded with factories, mills, breweries, grain elevators, smelters, construction, and the livestock markets and packing houses that drew thousands upon thousands of immigrant Europeans. The Mexicans and Central Americans thronging historically ethnic South Omaha today are but the latest wave of largely Catholic immigrants finding work in meat-packing, construction, and manufacture.
The sedate, white-collar city of today betrays few traces of the Wild West origins that survived into the first decades of the last century—saloons, gambling houses, bordellos, street brawls, political bosses, and old-school prejudice. When my grandfather arrived in Omaha in 1912, he quickly changed his name from Nikolaos Papadopoulos to Nicholas Payne not only as a natural way to assimilate, but also because, just a few years earlier, an anti-Greek riot in South Omaha had forced most Greeks to flee the city. Given my Anglo-Saxon surname, people are often surprised to learn of my true ancestry, but in Nebraska one finds many “secret Greeks,” with names like Peterson and Mitchell. In 1919 Omaha history was sadly marked by the lynching, shooting, burning, and dragging through the streets of a black man accused of raping a white woman; the mayor who tried to stop it was nearly lynched as well, and the county courthouse was torched in the process.
Omaha’s different now, and the same. Probably as a deliberate repudiation of its “immoral” past, gambling is prohibited in the city, as are real strip clubs (the girls have to wear pasties). But casinos and strippers are right across the bridge in Council Bluffs, Iowa. There are no more lynchings, but there was an anti-immigrant demonstration in front of the Mexican consulate in 2006, and Omaha’s black population is one of the most segregated and impoverished of any city’s in the nation.
Omaha is different but still the same in lovely ways, too. It’s a wealthy, highly “livable” city with successful large corporations, low unemployment, terrific public schools, nice houses and trees, restaurants filled to capacity, a thriving arts and music scene, even a new cinematheque. Visitors are startled by how cool and modern Omaha seems to be, and in the last five years in particular it has ripened into a city sweet with livability. If Minneapolis is the Seattle of the Midwest, then I contend Omaha has become its Portland. Unlike previous generations, my own included, who couldn’t wait to get the hell out of that cow town, young people today like it, want to stay, and those attending university in other states return earlier and in greater numbers. In Omaha you don’t feel the rumble beneath your feet the way you do in a big city; you can be calm, hear your own thoughts, get your work done. You can still run a string of errands—buy a gift at the mall, drop off your laundry, pick up a prescription, grab lunch, stop by and say a quick hello to a friend—in forty-five minutes, and despite Omaha’s massive sprawl, you can still, bizarrely, get anywhere in under twenty minutes. I once heard Warren Buffett say that if he lived in New York, he’d get too many ideas in a day, but he only needs one and the time to follow through on it.
Omaha has been able to absorb influences both cosmopolitan and homogenizing without losing its essence. Omaha is still Omaha, perhaps even more than ever. Journalist Robert D. Kaplan, in his 1999 book An Empire Wilderness, contrasted it favorably to St. Louis, which he thought had lost its sense of a center, a soul. When Starbucks came to Omaha just six years ago, opening its first store, in typically predatory fashion, a few doors down from a locally owned coffeehouse called the Village Grinder, patronage of the latter increased. No nationally owned franchise business has been granted a lease in The Old Market, downtown Omaha’s restaurant and boutique district and the most popular tourist destination in the entire state. We put great value on the local—Omahans support other Omahans, both in town and in the diaspora.
I have lived for years in California, spent long periods in New York, Europe, and South America, but I return constantly to Omaha for work, family, and friendship. Recently I purchased a condo downtown that I plan on owning for the rest of my life. People talk about Sedona, Arizona, as possessing some magical nexus of power, but I think they’re talking about Omaha. For some reason the city exercises tremendous gravitational pull over its offspring. One friend, a lawyer and author, lived for years in San Francisco but returned to Omaha, he told me, “to be woven more deeply into the fabric of life.” By way of example, he noted the difference between merely hearing of the birth of an old friend’s child from afar and being there to go visit during the first week. More poignantly, he spoke of what it’s like to hear of the death of a childhood friend’s parent. “When I was living in San Francisco, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to come back for the funeral. Now that I’m here, I go. That alone has been a huge thing in connecting to my friends, to this place, to my younger self. Those people raised me as much as my own parents.” Such sentiments are not unique to Omaha—they can be said of anyone’s hometown—but I feel them the way he does, and I know we have our own uniquely flavored version of them in Omaha.
Not long ago, I was in a dispute involving the construction company I’d hired to build the interi
or of my condo and the developer who had converted the 1929 Art Deco hotel that houses it. The issue involved leaks in the roof and exterior walls that had been revealed during recent rains, and we needed urgently to assign responsibility and seal the roof and façade before dry walling confirmed. Two friends from New York happened to be present to listen in on the discussion among the contractor, the developer, and me, and they told me later it was like hearing a different language. What had struck them was the tone of utter politeness and respect that would make one think there was no dispute at all. No one had begun a sentence with “You goddamned well better …” or “I’m going to sue you if you don’t …” My friends had barely been able to discern when the pleasantries had finished and the true discussion had commenced. Of course it helped that the three of us in dispute were about the same age and had attended the same high school, but business is conducted in Omaha utterly differently from how it might be conducted in New York. It’s not just about remaining “nice,” although that is part of it: pushiness backfires here. The best way I could explain it to my friends—and I was articulating this even to myself for the first time—was that in Omaha we tend not to doubt the good intentions or innate sense of fairness of others; all we need do is discuss what plainly needs to be done and remind them gently, even indirectly, of their duties. At the same time, and with no contradiction, Omahans are among the frankest people I’ve ever met.
It’s that unique flavor of the Midwest in general and Omaha in particular that I’ve been trying to capture on film, because I find it so different from the America I see in movies, and because it’s so deeply in my heart. I’ve been interested in trying to observe how human frustrations play out within a culture of niceness and seeming normalcy. I don’t think I’ve yet succeeded, but I’ll keep trying. Researching and writing this essay has been yet another stab at it, too. Maybe we Nebraskans feel a little like the travelers—we pass through the state our entire lives without ever quite grasping it. All we know is that Nebraska is at once the middle of nowhere and the center of the universe.
NEVADA
CAPITAL Carson City
ENTERED UNION 1864 (36th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From the Spanish for “snowcapped”
MOTTO “All for Our Country”
NICKNAMES Sagebrush State, Silver State, or Battle Born State
RESIDENTS Nevadan, Nevadian
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 3
STATE BIRD mountain bluebird
STATE FLOWER sagebrush
STATE TREE single-leaf pinon and bristlecone pine
STATE SONG “Home Means Nevada”
LAND AREA 109,826 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Lander Co., 26 mi. SE of Austin
POPULATION 2,414,807
WHITE 75.2%
BLACK 6.8%
AMERICAN INDIAN 1.3%
ASIAN 4.5%
HISPANIC/LATINO 19.7%
UNDER 18 25.6%
65 AND OVER 11.0%
MEDIAN AGE 35.0
NEVADA
Charles Bock
There’s a picture of me in the back of my parents’ pawnshop. It must have been taken during the seventies, because I’m not ten years old. Wearing a black knockoff Adidas sweatsuit, I’m surrounded by racks of record players, eight tracks, golf clubs, and typewriters. I’m half turned, looking toward my father, who is holding the camera. In front of me, a long flat cardboard box is jammed with rows of booklets, which are stuffed with pawn tickets. I spent untold afternoons in the back of that store, numerically organizing the tickets and stapling them into the correct books. Sometimes, when I finished with one book, I’d count and roll quarters. It’s a Polaroid photo, most likely taken from a hocked camera whose owner had never come back to redeem his ticket.
My parents were far from any clichéd image of pawnbrokers. As soon as you walked into the shop, my dad—a lanky guy with a thickening middle, bright brown eyes, and black hair receding at his temples—greeted you with a kind smile. I see him making small talk while writing up a loan, bringing up the previous night’s ballgame, or rolling out one of his favorite groan-worthy jokes, Hey, do you know who likes cats? No? Mrs. Katz. In the mid-sixties, he and Mom left the East Coast, following her parents who’d moved to the warmer climate of Vegas from New York City after Mom’s mom got cancer. Dad then spent ten years trying to write plays and short stories while dealing craps at different casinos. He once had a screenplay that supposedly was going to be developed into a movie starring Burgess Meredith. Mom taught grade school and tried to sell Tupperware over the phone. They got into pawnbroking because my grandfather—a dice-throwing, trifecta-betting, mathematical genius—had his own pawnshop on Fremont Street, the gambling and tourist mecca of downtown Las Vegas. The struggle of being pawnbrokers became more appealing to my folks than the struggle of trying to make ends meet on their crappy salaries while raising four children. When I was eight or so, Gramps guaranteed the loan that allowed Mom and Dad to take over a struggling downtown pawnshop of their own.
Fremont Street was the heart of the city. Originally a Mormon missionary outpost, Las Vegas was essentially born as a town in 1905, when the completion of the train station prompted the building of shops and the sale of 1,200 lots to private citizens—all downtown. The city, which was officially recognized by the state legislature in 1911, was built from Fremont Street outward. Even in the late nineteen seventies, downtown Las Vegas was just as much a destination as the Strip. Sure, the Strip had huge hotels like Caesar’s Palace, The Riviera, The Dunes, and The Sands. Some were clustered together, but for the most part, each resort was an island unto itself, a quarter mile from anything, with long swaths of hard desert between hotels. By contrast, downtown was like the French Quarter: a small and defined area, every place within walking distance. And just as Bourbon Street was lined with one bar after another for partiers to stumble between, Fremont Street was similarly packed with casinos. You couldn’t come up with five locations on the planet more ideal for a pawnshop.
Here’s how the biz works. You bring in your watch—say it’s eighteen-carat gold, and you need a loan on it. You’d like to get five hundred for it. My dad weighs it and discovers the weight is a little light. It’s not the greatest make or brand. When you bought that watch three years ago, you paid five hundred. You tell my dad you should get five hundred. Maybe you get pissed. You have all sorts of financial pressures on you and you need that money, so maybe you shout and call my dad a dirty Jew. Maybe not. I don’t know you. But let’s say you hold back the epithets, and are smooth in your negotiations, and have some luck to boot. Let’s also say your watch is actually worth a damn: you get a loan for two, maybe two-fifty. You sign a ticket agreeing to a monthly compounded interest rate of eight percent. Your $250 loan would cost you $270, if you wanted to get the watch out during that first month. Your watch would cost you $291.60 the second month; $314.93 the third. Pawnshops make most of their money on the interest which has accrued when people redeem tickets for their goods. Your ticket says you have six months to redeem your watch. After six months, if you haven’t come back, the shop owns the watch—that is, unless you call and explain your difficulties and ask them to hold on for another month. Most will then hold the watch. My parents do that, most likely, my dad wishing you well and sounding positive and trying to make you feel good (It’ll be here waiting for you, don’t worry). This having been said, at a certain point—figure the end of that seventh month—time’s up; that watch is going out in a display window.
Making a living this way is methodical, tooth-pulling work; at John’s Loan and Jewelry, my parents—neither of whom is named John—toiled for ten hours a day, three hundred and sixty days a year, my mother haggling with locals who needed to hock their goods to help pay their electric bill, my dad dealing with the couple who brought in the family television in order to get baby formula. Here’s a former UNLV basketball star turned casino security guard, bringing back in, for the ninth time, the watch he got when the team made it to the
regional finals of the NCAA tournament. Here are young lovers looking for wedding bands on the cheap. Thais and Filipinos on international gaming junkets. Drunks on the tail end of holiday benders. Tourists wandering down the showcases, bleary and angry and worn out, busting my parents’ chops about how much some item is worth. Or ripened gamblers, who’ve suffered hard dry runs and are still in the grip of gambling fever, maybe they live in the grip, and need to exchange this diamond bracelet for cash, no, not to fill the tank with gas, not to drive back home to California—these are the ones who sign their pawn ticket and receive their bread and go right back in for another run at the craps table.
And there I am, ten years old, emerging from the back of the store, slamming down a wooden security gate. To an electronic chime, I head out the front door into the July heat, darting in between tourists, down Fremont Street, running underneath vents that blow cool air during hundred-degree days and beckon pedestrians into a casino’s comfortable darkness. A giant mosaic of the queen of hearts stares up at me from the sidewalk; golden flecks sparkle beneath my every step. The famous winking cowboy sign, Vegas Vic, looms ahead, moving its right arm, pointing toward the Pioneer casino. As Vic’s recorded voice booms, Howdy pardner, welcome to downtown Las Vegas, I check the time and temperature on the digital clock atop the Mint, and run the block and a half to visit my grandfather—if he doesn’t have customers, he’ll do magic tricks for me. Or maybe I head over to the liquor store at the Horseshoe for candy and soda and then sneak into their casino, avoiding the security guards so I can stare at the million dollars displayed in a giant horseshoe.