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Home - Cover Stories
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Dark Divide - |
Fremont’s do-it-yourself immigration ordinance has turned neighbor against neighbor
by Rob McLean
On her Nebraskans Advisory Group’s website, Susan Smith looks like a cross between Sarah Palin and “Rocky and Bullwinkle’s” Natasha Fatale.
Standing above a bald eagle wearing a sparkling American flag on its face like a luchador mask, her animated avatar’s scratchy, recorded voice warns web surfers that the group means business.
“And now a message to all sanctuary city politicians and those who profit from illegal immigration,” Smith says. “Citizens across the country will not tolerate illegal immigration or amnesty, nor will we allow you to manipulate or bastardize the laws of our land.” |
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Maha Magic - |
 >
MAHA Music Festival is on a roll in its second year
by Tim McMahan
With the second annual MAHA Music Festival a few days away, the only thing left for organizers to do is pray for sunshine.
That, and work out the kinks involved with organizing 250+ volunteers.
With a lineup including massively influential ’90s college rock band Superchunk, Omaha electro-dance punks The Faint, good-time alt-country rockers Old 97’s, singer-songwriter Ben Kweller, and headlined by indie powerhouse Spoon, ticket sales have been brisk.
“We’ve already sold more tickets than last year, and last year we sold two-thirds of our tickets the day of the show,” said MAHA organizer (along w/ Tyler Owen and Mike App) Tre Brashear last Saturday. He said that while their goal is to sell-out the event — 6,000 tickets — their realistic expectations are to sell 4,500 tickets. Last year’s sales totaled 3,000.
“We feel good about where we are,” Brashear said. “Selling out is a possibility. It would send a great message to our sponsors.” Those sponsors include presenting sponsor Alegent Health, main stage sponsor TD Ameritrade, and local stage sponsor Kum & Go.
Since this year’s lineup was announced in April, there have been a few ups and downs for Brashear and MAHA Festival organizers. On the upside: Immediate vindication that they chose the right bands. “No one has said a bad word (about the lineup), or said that we missed the mark,” he said. “Realistically, we did as well as we could, considering our budget and fiscal discipline. We wanted to make sure we didn’t spend more money than we could generate.”
On the downside, days after MAHA’s announcement, Des Moines’ two-day 80/35 Festival announced it would host Spoon as its headliner July 3. “When we learned about it, it was ‘Holy Cow. This cannot be happening,’” Brashear said. “It is what it is. We’ll have better dialogue with 80/35 in the future. We agreed not to advertise our (festival) in Des Moines and they agreed to not advertise theirs here.” |
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Power Players Pt 2 - |
Part 2:
Vicki Quaites-Ferris and other Omaha African-American community leaders try improvement through self-empowered networking
by Leo Adam Biga
African-American Empowerment Network leaders know the nonprofit must have partners to transform North Omaha.
It has reached out to philanthropists, CEOs, social service agency executive directors, pastors, neighborhood association leaders, current or ex-gang members, school administrators, law enforcement officials, city planning professionals, local, county and state elected officials.
The Network’s taken a systematic approach to build community consensus around sustainable solutions. North Omaha Contractors Alliance president Preston Love Jr. began as a critic but now champions the Network’s methodical style in gaining broad-based input and support. |
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Power Players - |
Ben Gray and other Omaha African-American leaders try improvement through self-empowered networking
by Leo Adam Biga
Editor's Note: This is part one in a two-part series. See next week's issue for the continued story.
It may have been 2007 when northeast Omaha's depressed African-American community reached its limit. A demographic bound by race, history, circumstance and geography seemingly exhaled a collective sigh of exasperation to exclaim, "Enough already!" Longstanding discontent over inequities in income, housing, education, economic development and opportunity solidified into resolve by a people to take action. |
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Master Plan - |
Meet the Joslyn Art
Museum’s new director, Jack Becker
by Sarah Baker Hansen
Jack Becker is taking his time.
The new director of the Joslyn Art Museum, who’s been an Omahan for a scant two months, is in the midst of what he calls his “90-day plan.”
He’ll get to know the city. Get to know the museum staff, donors and board members. He’ll listen and learn.
Then he’ll start coming up with the big ideas the museum expects him to bring to Omaha. |
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Project ALOHA - |
Alexander Payne, George Clooney and Co. find love, pain and the whole damn thing shooting The Descendants in Hawaii
by Leo Adam Biga
Alexander Payne’s version of Paradise Lost, by way of Terms of Endearment, describes the emotional arc of his new $24 million George Clooney vehicle, The Descendants, which wrapped shooting in Hawaii at the end of May. |
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Fear's Cost - |
Fremont’s proposed Arizona-style law won’t come cheap
by Rob McLean
Kris Kobach has a lot in common with Harold Hill — the traveling salesman in the musical The Music Man who moves from town to town conning and fleecing the locals, says Amy Miller, legal director for the Nebraska American Civil Liberties Union.
“Mr. Kobach has tried this on other communities across the U.S.,” Miller says of the man currently running for Kansas Secretary of State on a platform of ending voter fraud by undocumented immigrants — something that hasn’t occurred in the state for at least five years.
An immigration attorney and conservative champion, Kobach’s suitcase contains city ordinances that target undocumented immigrants. He helped write Arizona’s controversial ID-check law. But while Hill skipped town after selling phony band uniforms and instruments, Kobach leaves behind fractured communities riddled with debt and mired in lawsuits. |
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Peck's Passion - |
Magda Peck and the birth of UNMC’s College of Public Health
by Warren Francke
The passion of Dr. Magda Peck made her the midwife at the birth of a new College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
The seed was planted by her passion for social justice — a passion inspired by work as a physician’s assistant on the Mexican border. Her health care dreams led to a doctoral degree at Harvard, where a woman first denied her admission then reconsidered, saying, “I’m going to take a risk.”
Peck promised, “I don’t think it’s much of a risk,” and the rest is history that saw her play a key role as the new college promised Nebraskans to fight bio-terrorism and epidemics while bringing new jobs to a state where 95 percent of the public health work force lacked formal public health degrees.
The new college also promised to fight for preventive care and against what the field identifies as “health disparities,” especially unequal access to health care and disproportionate suffering by underserved groups. Peck defines such disparities as “unacceptable differences in outcomes.”
As associate dean for community engagement, she’s expanding the kind of help she once provided one-on-one to migrant workers. She now works on “the larger issues [that were] then beyond my control.”
She joined the voices backing pre-natal care for immigrant mothers, not only for ethical reasons, but because one premature baby, as noted by NU Regent Dr. Randy Ferlic, “could easily consume more than $600,000 in medical care.” |
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Trader Joe - |
Disruptive Technology: a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology.
Welcome to the first issue of disRUPT, a partnership of The Reader, Scott Technology Center and Silicon Prairie News.
disRUPT? Think Google, the iPod and Facebook. These are examples of disruptive businesses that changed the way we gather information, listen to and purchase music, and connect with friends. This is the first of four quarterly publications designed to give a glimpse into the lives of our region’s top disrupters — leaders, entrepreneurs, technologists, creatives and innovators. |
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Summer Stuff - |
Sun Therapy
A 10-step prescription for summer fun outdoors
by Ben Coffman
If you’re reading this, you survived last winter and all of the shoveling, slogging and snot-cicles that came with it. You, my fellow hearty Midwesterner, deserve a reward. Your prize is summertime, that glorious season when your skin should smell like Eau d’Campfire and your breath should smell like cheap domestic beer, preferably from a can. What follows is a 10-step rehabilitation program designed to guide your recovery from those awful winter months.
I want to ride my bicycle
Chances are your bike tires and Nebraska have a lot in common — they’re both crazy flat. It’s time to pump them up (your tires, not Nebraska) and ride.
If you like tacos, the famous Thursday night taco ride is a great way to ingest dozens of them and claim you’re engaging in a healthful activity. A weekly event that captures the party atmosphere and camaraderie of RAGBRAI (minus the misery of 100-mile days and saddle sores), the ride started in the summer of 1996 with just a few friends. It’s now an institution, attracting upwards of 1,000 riders some nights.
The rolling party takes place on the Wabash Trace, a rails-to-trails project with its trailhead near Lewis Central Elementary in Council Bluffs. Don’t let the 20-mile (round-trip) ride scare you, somehow it doesn’t seem that strenuous when you’re pedaling and chatting with 1,000 friends — and you stop halfway for a beer. Bicycle magazine once rated it one of the top 10 weekly rides in the world. |
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On The Corner - |
OG T-Shirt artist Rayvell "Spankey" Vann talks straight from the street
story by Bryan Cohen
photography by Marlon A. Wright
It was a snowy evening Feb. 7 when 19-year-old Maurice Parker pushed open the doors at Kelley’s Hilltop Lanes to confront rival gang members in the bowling alley’s parking lot. Shots rang out and Parker became an Omaha statistic: The city’s second homicide victim in 2010.
A few days after Parker’s death, Paul Richards entered Sweets & Stuff Corner Store at 63rd and Lake.
The 19-year-old, known as Hollywood, was a friend of Parker. Like so many others over the years, he was coming to Rayvell Vann, known as Spanky, for an ‘RIP’ shirt for his friend. Memorial shirts for kids killed in gang shootings are the biggest part of Spanky’s business. The custom shirts usually cost between $30-$40 each and feature a picture of the deceased with airbrush styling.
He sat here, right here in this shop and said ‘Man, sometimes I just feel like I’m next,’” Spanky said. Exactly one month later, he was. |
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Rough N' Rugby - |
Omaha’s very own goats rugby team has been kicking ass, literally, and they look mighty fine doing it... the reader style crew caught up with the coach and few players at the new parliament pub
special cover style pictorial by Dale Heise story by Niamh Murphy
Fueled by Lone Star Beer and rocky mountain oysters, the Omaha Goats Rugby Club took home the West Rugby Football Union Championship this past weekend after beating Fort Worth 45-24 and annihilating Colorado Springs 65-0. The Goats played flawlessly all weekend in Fort Worth and the only mishap was Coach Shawn Rediger’s lost iPod. |
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Buffett's Buddy - |
Newspaper man
Stanford Lipsey and
Nebraska’s Pulitzer
by Leo Adam Biga
Omaha native and veteran newspaper publisher Stanford Lipsey has seen and done it all in a six-decade journalism career that’s closely allied him to Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.
Lipsey climbed the ranks at the now defunct Sun Newspapers in Omaha to become owner-publisher. In 1969 he sold the Sun to Buffett, but remained as publisher. In 1972 Lipsey was at the helm when the Sun, acting on a lead from Buffett, poked into the finances of Boys Town. The Sun’s probing led to sweeping changes at the charitable organization and earned the paper a Pulitzer Prize.
Buffett later appointed Lipsey publisher of the Buffalo (N.Y.) News. Lipsey is still its publisher today. In 1988 he was named a Berkshire vice president. The old friends, inducted in the Omaha Press Club Hall of Fame in 2008, may or may not get together this weekend at Berkshire’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha. |
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Sustainability Super Heroes: and how You can be one too - |
We hear a lot about ‘going green’ these days. Everything from the No Impact Man in New York City, who spent an entire year with his family living a zero footprint lifestyle, to ExxonMobile and WalMart touting their green and local practices.
It’s hard to tell who’s really making a positive impact on the environment, especially since many of us wrangle with our own eco-guilt. We need role models. Luckily there are several right here in Omaha proving we have plenty of opportunities in our corner of the world to make a difference.
In the third and final installation of our environmental cover series, we profile a few of these local leaders, the work they’re doing, and how you can participate in ways that won’t hurt your wallet, and could even put some green back in it. As Daniel Lawse, who is profiled in this story, told us “People say you’re just a drop in the bucket, but that bucket is filling up.” |
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Paints Pains - |
EPA’s ‘re-do’ on the
Omaha lead project raises questions over the projects efficiency and effectiveness
by Bryan Cohen
Omaha is the nation’s largest residential superfund site, a classification reserved for the most polluted and environmentally hazardous areas. Since 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency has spent some $175 million to remove lead contaminated soil in east Omaha and estimates $406 million will be needed to complete the project. But for years public officials, landowners, and health experts have questioned whether the money is making a difference on human health. The rush to replace yards, and lack of communication between the federal government and local officials, have led to duplicating work and confusion over responsibilities. Since the beginning of the project it’s possible that hundreds of yards replaced by the EPA may have been recontaminated with lead from exterior lead-based paint chipping on to the ground. |
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Winds and Losses - |
Another year passes with little wind development in Nebraska
Bryan Cohen
Wind energy is the biggest thing to hit Saline County since Czech immigrants. In 2008 landowners in the south-central Nebraska farming community were attending a flurry of meetings with eager wind energy developers. The regions ‘modern-day gold rush’ had arrived. Landowner Dave Vavra was excited, but hesitant to sign on the dotted line so quickly.
“When the developer came in we decided we wouldn’t let them get to us one by one,” he said. Some landowners had already signed bad contracts that precluded them from working with other companies or adding turbines on other parcels of land. That’s when Vavra and others pooled their resources and formed the Saline County Wind Association.
“Our main goal is to protect the land owners,” Vavra said. “As an individual land owner you’re like a mosquito up against 757s.” |
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Speed Demon - |
Midtown Mom Makes Mach 1 Field
by Leif N. DaFastlane
“I guess it’s just something you have to come to terms with if you live in Omaha,” Denise Edwards said as she casually maneuvered her Honda Odyssey minivan through the pothole-laden streets of Saddle Creek at a high speed without hitting a single one. “I mean, you can’t say you’re surprised that a) these things exist and b) that they won’t be fixed until Labor Day. Come on.”
That pragmatic attitude, coupled with her skill behind the wheel, led to endorsement offers, from shock absorber and tire manufacturers to professional race clubs like the NASCAR Winston Cup Series team Mach 1. Edwards lives with her husband and three children in Field Club, where potholes are a way of life. The attention has been “a bit of a shock.” |
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Texas Tales - |
Toast of Texas
Another year of SXSW blurs by
by Sarah Wengert
When I was in college I never went on a conventional balls-out, belly shots, stumbling back to hotel, burrito in one hand/shoes in the other, wondering where this tattoo came from type of spring break. Back then I used the time off to pick up extra hours at the record shop I worked in, which prepared me well for the music industry’s own annual spring break, Austin’s South By Southwest.
But, much like I imagine (and MTV verifies) those Florida Keys college getaways center on so much more than a simple day at the beach, there’s a lot more to surmounting SXSW than simply going to a bunch of shows. Even if you are a music lover of the truest order, it’s a marathon, a mission, a vision quest.
You want to see all the bands you love and have heard buzzed about — whether back home, in the blogosphere or even in the shuttle downtown that morning. You want to eat Austin’s famous breakfast tacos you read about in the New York Times. You want to intersect with your friend from Philly. You want to shop at one of Austin’s stellar record shops. You want to soak in every last drop of music and magic the swollen streets have to offer. |
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Rescuing History - |
The long and tumultuous saga of the Great Plains Black History Museum takes a healthy and
promising new turn
by Leo Adam Biga
In a tumultuous decade for the Great Plains Black History Museum, its doors were closed and its funding ceased. But the organization may be taking tentative steps toward a sustainable future.
Its leaky, unsound, 103-year-old building at 2213 Lake St. has been off-limits to the public. Even before city code inspectors deemed it uninhabitable, executive director Jim Calloway stored its collections to avoid damage. The Reader confirmed boxed archives have been in a rented metal storage container in back of the building, with artifacts and display items in remote warehouses.
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Mat Men - |
UNO’s wrestling dynasty built on a tide of
social change
by Leo Adam Biga
As the March 12-13 Division II national wrestling championships get underway at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, it’s good to remember wrestling, not hockey, is the school’s true marquee sport.
Host UNO, the defending national champ, has been a dominant fixture on the D-II wrestling scene for decades. It is expected to finish on top again under Mike Denney, the coach for five of UNO’s six national wrestling titles. The first came 40 years ago amid currents of change. |
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