Somewhere in middle America
Get right to the heart of matters
It’s the heart that matters more
I think you’d better turn your ticket in
And get your money back at the door
————————————————–
I’ve been looking at Google maps and Wikipedia entries. Trying to find the house we moved into once we got to Omaha. Fred, Maria and the kids… and me.
My memory is a bit scattered but I’m pretty sure it was around North 30th and Cuming. I see Izard Street and that sounds really close to (if not exactly) the street our house was on. But I look at the Google map street view now, and it seems way different than I remember it so… I can’t be sure.
Granted, it’s been forty years. Many of the houses that were there at the time, may very well have disappeared and/or been replaced or changed dramatically by now. Probably have.
The above image is not really all that near the area we moved into. But it shows a good view of how the outer reaches of Omaha looked then. In the 70’s. The photo is around 168th and Dodge Street. I’m pretty sure I walked near there at least once. I walked a lot around Omaha during my time there and I think I went by “Boy’s Town” which is near this intersection. But I spent most of my time walking in the other direction.
Towards downtown.
I eventually became a kind of downtown street creature for a short time before finally going home. A whole BUNCH of stuff happened to me over those seven or eight odd months. Stories galore, and many are bound to end up here.
Between my arrival in Omaha sometime at the end of September in 1978, and my return to the von Ahsen family home north of Rochester, Minnesota that following spring, I left Fred, Maria and the kids and assisted Maria in ridding herself of that parasite of a predatory scammer (you know… Fred) and got my own place.
I got hired as a scab for a large, Omaha-based industrial roofing company, got chased off the roof of a building at the Kansas State Mental Hospital by union thugs with clubs in Wichita, got laid up with frostbite and thus laid off without warning or compassion by that same large, Omaha-based industrial roofing company. A company that I now see as yet another form of predatory scammer.
Oh, and there is so much more.
Starting with the bloodstain in the middle of our first apartment’s living room floor. There’s the street urchin gang, the hookers, strippers and pimps. The off duty cop, the racist dog and The Hell’s Angels right next door.
All this and more.
In the several posts to come, I will share whatever stories I find in the recess of my mind to tell in this blog here. Of my time in Omaha. Through those stories I will hopefully be able to begin to make some sense of how these adventures and ordeals changed me, affirmed me, possibly even facilitated some of my growth towards who and what I am today.
Or… NOT!
At the very least I hope I can keep you, my dear reader… interested enough to read on into this chapter of my memoir which will surly need to be….
To be continued…
