As Told By C.S. Beaty

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Douglas County Assessor

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January 26th , 2025

Dear Mr. Fudd,

I also finished reading your piece of literature. Not thumbing through, I read every beautiful word and hoped the recipients had as much fun as I did. The title “pure bliss” is fitting, though I was also reminded of the following quote that I recently read on the wall of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, right above the donut making robot:

“We all crave experiences that bring more joy to our lives.”

I’ve read a lot of words about the word “joy” written by CS Lewis, but I think the marketing gurus at the donut shop summed it up just as well as Mr. Lewis and with fewer needs for re-reading the line multiple times for comprehension.

Your book brought me joy.

I never watched any of Mr. Knievel’s stunts, but one of my favorite movie quotes is from the Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler classic apocalypse movie Armageddon.

“Have you ever heard of Evel Knievel?”

“No, I’ve never seen Star Wars.”

Gets me every time. Which is about two times. You don’t really need to re-watch Armageddon the movie.

C.S. Beaty

…

Definition

bliss: noun

1. perfect happiness, contentment, joy: a rack of hickory smoked ribs and cold beer is pure bliss.

2. Shangri-La: the sanctuary where The Prime Architect holds court and where no one can screw you over.

3. Place: Bliss, Idaho

I think my newsletter will bring you joy. Or happiness. Or contentment. Or pure bliss.

Words are just containers for ideas. I heard a pastor say that once in a sermon. It was a good point since pastors tend to use weird church language. People nod their heads at it because it’s familiar, but they have no real grasp of what it means. Sanctification. Edification. Salvation. Propitiation. All these —TION words become cliche from overuse, but their meanings are fraught with theological conviction and argument, which can be avoided if the preacher simply uses some five syllable —TION word and assumes that whatever working definition comes to mind is the one God wants. It’s easier that way.

A good sermon trick is to pick one of these words and give it some interesting new definition. And the word that gets the makeover treatment most often is “joy.”

It really was C.S. Lewis’s favorite word, or at least the one he obsessed over the most. He used “joy” to describe some intense longing that often goes unsatisfied. That pit-of-the-stomach sort of visceral response to some moment of beauty that you want to experience forever, but it slips through your fingers as soon as you grab hold. To C.S. Lewis, “joy” is fleeting, but the desire for it is proof that there is something more. Something beyond our own world. Because to Lewis, never being able to achieve that “joy” in a permanent state sounds unbearable. It can’t be the truth. It sounds like hell.

Sometimes that’s the definition of “joy” the pastor uses in his sermon, but typically not. Usually, it’s some idea that you can be “joyful” even when you’re not “happy.” The implication is that “happiness” is fleeting but “joy” is permanent. At least if you’re doing it right. Obviously the “s**t happens” truism tells us that happiness can’t be permanent, but you can still be “joyful” when said “s**t happens.”

The implication quickly becomes that you don’t need to be happy.

And most people aren’t.

Certainly, most people I’ve met aren’t.

Certainly, most pastors I’ve met aren’t.

But doesn’t this all just feel exhausting? At a certain point, doesn’t the slicing of definitions reach its limit and turn into utter b******t? If the idea you’re trying to contain with a word is “I’m not happy but I think I should be” then we probably don’t need to try to fit that emotion into a single word that people already use for something else. Some things are better experienced without all the extra thought. So, when Haywood Fudd sent me a copy of his 2023 letters in his book titled “Pure Bliss,” I knew what he meant. And reading it was.

But just in case you didn’t understand, I still liked the definition he gave at the beginning of his book. The one where “happiness,” “contentment,” “joy,” and “bliss” all mean the same thing.

Because if you are “happy,” “content,” “joyful,” or “blissful”—they do all mean the same thing. It’s only unhappy people who need to give those words new definitions.

…

Book Report III: Things I’ve Been Thinking About

Enjoy your writing style. Some random personal points of order from your book:

· Houston: A long-ago coworker told me that a couple of knuckleheads who worked for him went to Houston on business, found themselves adequately lacquered in a strip club, ran out of cash, and then sold their rental car for $100. Suffice it to say, it didn’t turn out so well for them.

· Most meetings are damning echo-chambers that only waste time.

· With American kids reading less and less, I would find it a crime against literature to punish any kid who stole a book.

· Freakonomics is excellent. I believe I’ve read every John Krakauer book. I’ve never heard of David Sedaris until reading your book. Regarding books about Nebraska, I recommend Once Upon a Town by Bob Greene.

· My brother and I were the youngest people to receive a library card in our town. That was back in the Dewey Decimal System days that categorized books with numbers and letters and dashes and closed and open parentheses, and such.

· Been a KC Chiefs fan since Christmas Day, 1971, when I watched the Chiefs lose to the Miami Dolphins in a triple overtime game that lasted seven hours.

· Not an autograph collector, though I’ve collected an autographed Hank Aaron poster, Stan Musial jersey, and two baseballs (Willie Stargell and Willie Mays).

· Some Husker players once came close to massacring my family and me due to careless driving. They sheepishly offered to give me their autographs. I told them to go f**k themselves.

· Regarding fiat money, I propose The Creature from Jekyll Island.

· My brother has hundreds of autographed pucks from HOF hockey players including a Phil Esposito and a Tony Esposito puck. If you haven’t watched the movie “Slap Shot” you are denying yourself one of life’s most delicious treats.

· Routinely tell people I met Elvis and members of his Memphis Mafia in 1974 in the parking lot of the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.

· There aren’t any significant differences between Grand Island and Kearney other than the wildly embarrassing Great Platte River Road Archway Monument.

· More chapter and verse to follow...

Haywood

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Political parties in the United States are led to rally round an individual in order to acquire a more tangible shape in the eyes of the crowd, and the name of the candidate for the Presidency is put forward as the symbol and personification of their theories.[1]

—Alexis de Tocqueville

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Grand Island decided to do something about living in Kearney’s shadow. No, we weren’t getting a Target department store so we could purchase stylish yet affordable clothing while eating a box of popcorn, but we were getting something else they already had. An arena.

Whoa.

We were stoked.

Naturally, once you get an arena, you need to fill it with stuff, right? Wrong. That’s not the Grand Island way. When Kearney built an arena, they brought with it a United State Hockey League amateur team called the Tri-City Storm. The “Tri-Cities” are Kearney, Hastings, and Grand Island, but we all knew it was Kearney’s team. They were just trying to rub our noses in it. Come to Kearney, watch hockey, shop at Target … f**k off Kearney.

But when Grand Island’s arena was built, Kearney was surprisingly cool about it. The Tri-City Storm people made a big deal about how they would love to have another hockey team nearby. They said Grand Island would provide a natural rival and help grow the sport across central Nebraska. The USHL unanimously approved putting a franchise in our fair town. The only problem was, Grand Island was Grand Island. They didn’t want it. They didn’t want anything to change. The arena people made a statement about how a hockey season would fill up too many dates and conflict with their other plans. Never mind the fact that filling up dates is the point of an arena, but what were these other plans? We never found out. They had some rodeos and stuff, but mostly I used the parking lot to learn how to drive a manual transmission.

Then something interesting happened, and in Grand Island interesting things don’t happen. The nation was in the thick of midterm elections, and blood red Nebraska was somehow being represented by (GASP) a Democrat. Ben Nelson was a former Governor and political centrist. He was well liked across the state, even by my parents. The same parents who when I asked, “what’s a liberal” responded with, “oh, those are the bad people.”

“I am pro-life, from before birth to all the days on Earth.”[2]

Check. Yup, that plays well in Nebraska.

“I’m an avid hunter and have a lot of trophies to show for it.”[3]

As the home of Hornady Manufacturing Company, the self-proclaimed “largest independently owned maker of bullets, ammunition, and tools in the world,”[4] Grand Islanders liked that about Ben.

“I keep a sharp eye on my spending, my investments, and my family’s financial bottom line. Always have. My staff liked to tease me that I’m tighter than three coats of paint.”[5]

Pro-life, pro-second amendment, and fiscal conservative. Ben Nelson hit upon the holy trinity of Nebraska convictions.

“So, in Washington, I wouldn’t give up those core values, but I would look for ways to bridge differences, to find creative ways to reach goals, and perhaps most important, to listen to what others offered in the way of compromise to get something done. I would be willing to cross party lines; I would try to be constructive.”[6]

We loved this guy.

But despite Nelson’s ability to find common ground across his constituency, dammit he still had a (D) behind his name whenever he made an appearance on C-SPAN. The Republican Party smelled blood, and a potential Senate seat. Infamous political strategist Karl Rove certainly did at least. After Nelson spurned an offer to serve as the secretary of agriculture in the presidential cabinet to get him out of the Senate, Rove “traveled to Nebraska and recruited Pete Ricketts, the son of Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, to run against”[7] Nelson in the 2006 election.

Pete Ricketts was a political newcomer, and to make up for it, he actively spent millions from his trust fund to bombard the Nebraska airwaves with political ads and Nelson hatchet jobs. His family still owned the financial giant TD Ameritrade and eventually bought the Chicago Cubs. And his head was shaped like a penis. The millions of dollars in ad time weren’t really working. My buddy Noah Woods liked to jokingly say, “did you know Pete Ricketts eats babies?” Since we had yet to enter the post-Trump political climate where crude hyperbole and explicit lying were considered campaign strategies, this was still funny to us.

Pete needed some help. Pete needed a hero. Enter W.

In a Hail Mary pass, George W. Bush, the current president of the United States of America, announced he was going to make a campaign stop in Nebraska to appeal to the people. His people. Bush had handily won Nebraska in 2000 and 2004 by a margin that exceeded Nelson in his own election. Despite Nelson’s two terms as Governor and one in the Senate, there was something about the aww-shucksy demeanor of Bush Jr. that appealed to Nebraskans. Even though Bush said Nelson was “a man with whom I can work, a person who is willing to put partisanship aside to focus on what’s right for America” and nicknamed him “Benator,” he was coming to Nebraska to convince us to fire him.[8]

But the tricky part was lil’ George needed an event space large enough to hold a political rally, secure enough to host the ruler of the world’s largest economy, and completely available with zero scheduling conflicts within a week’s notice to allow for several days of security sweeps without something like, well any sort of event, getting in the way. Grand Island had just the arena. The W. bullet was aimed smack dab in the middle of the state. The part of the state where it’s safest to shoot at things.

The president of the United States of America was coming to Grand Island, Nebraska. Holy s**t.

I’ve never been very political, but George W. Bush amused me. I had bought an animatronic Bush doll at KB Toys in the Conestoga Mall that moved his hands, hips, and mouth while the robot recited some of the president’s famous gaffes. The doll sat on my bedroom shelf next to my Hillary Clinton nutcracker and matching Bill Clinton corkscrew. With the push of a button, I relived our world leader’s profound and poignant rhetoric. Inspirational maxims such as:

“Rarely is the question asked, ‘is our children learning?’”

“Will the highways of the internet become more few?”

“A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.”

“It isn’t the pollution that’s harming our environment. It’s the impurities in our water and air that are doing it.”

“I understand small business growth. I was one.”

“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.”[9]

And my personal favorite:

“The vast majority of our imports come from outside our country.”

The only celebrities who came to Grand Island were in country bands playing the county fair circuit. And the last presidential visit to central Nebraska was when Bill Clinton planned an impromptu visit to Kearney after realizing Nebraska was the only state he had never been to during his two terms in office.

But that was dirty liberal “bad guy” Bill Clinton.

This was God’s gift to democracy George W. Bush.

F**k off Kearney.

The rumors spread through Grand Island Senior High faster than the time Sadie O’Connor’s older sister’s water broke in gym class and no one knew she was pregnant. Mike and I were in the band room when our director got a phone call. He looked excited, Ricketts’ team just called to ask our high school pep band to play ahead of the rally. I’m not sure what the protocol for a public high school participating in a campaign event is, but for us it was a no-brainer. We were going to play for the president. George was going to f*****g love our pep band rendition of “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne.

…

Austin was eating a late-night stack of pancakes at Tommy’s Restaurant when he overheard the waitresses talking about plans for the next morning. To…

Fiberglass Lawn Ornaments

Art is a reflection of the artist’s inner and outer world during the period of creation.[1]

—Rick Rubin

Italy has frescoes, Paris has oil paintings, Mexico has a stone wall with skulls carved in it of the people who won a ball game and got their heads chopped off, and Grand Island has oversized fiberglass lawn ornaments. And we’re damn good at it. Less than a mile from E-Free was the not-so-private collection of one of these master artisans. His spacious front yard was more sprawling than most, which made a perfect canvas to fill with masterpieces. Fiberglass deer, fiberglass bears, fiberglass moose—posed in graceful tranquility in the most serene of wooded getaways. Then he said “f**k it” and added a dinosaur, sasquatch, and a bunch of cacti. It’s awesome. My visiting friends never got it. But they also never saw it during Christmas when the guy put a Rudolph nose on one of the deer. I mean, how great is that?

There are more beauties out there in our great city, enough to create a fiberglass scavenger hunt. There’s the giant cow with a marquee sign advertising steak. When one steakhouse closed, the cow moved to a different steakhouse. There’s the giant rooster in front of the twenty-four-hour diner—Tommy’s—which is also on its second life after it migrated from a farm supply store that went out of business. A gigantic roller skate beckoned all to skin their knees on the wooden floor of Skate Island. It used to rotate and have flashing light bulbs around the sides, but one day it broke, and no one bothered to fix it. Rounding out the inanimate objects category, a giant hammer is on top of the local Ace Hardware franchise.[2] When the hammer started to deteriorate, it was replaced with a brand-new, even better hammer.

But the Sistine Chapel of lawn sculpture wasn’t the shark head mounted above the doorway of Bonzai Pizza, but the junkyard/auto body shop four blocks from my childhood home in the not-so-great part of town. This virtuoso/car mechanic wanted to share his gifts with the world but also didn’t want any car strippers tearing apart his scrap metal. The solution? He made characters out of car parts, welded them to poles, and hoisted them up above his fence line so the world could admire them from the street. The collection made the front page of The Grand Island Independent newspaper after he made a chili dog car with Coney Island George driving it.

Even though we didn’t have much to work with, we still found a way to create something uniquely ours.

Target

“I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing—& all good writing.[1]

—David Foster Wallace

The final tour stop is not a destination but a lack thereof. It is the embodiment of our town’s angst, disappointment, and low self-esteem. It is the daily reminder of all we lack, the one small thing that if we could just obtain, then we’d be something. We’d have made our mark. We’d matter. We’d arrive. We’d do more than just exist. But that’s not on the tour. We don’t have a Target.

I don’t mean “target” in a teleological sense. I mean the department store. The fact that we didn’t have this f*****g place to shop has been the bane of our existence. That God-forsaken cesspool of a town Kearney has one, and we all had to vacation forty-five minutes away to do our back-to-school shopping for those few classy items. Every tax dollar my mom spent in Kearney for my new clothes probably funded a methadone clinic.

The reality is, Grand Island was more of a Walmart kind of town, full of Walmart kind of people. We aspired to be the Target shopping type, but that’s just not who we were. Shopping at Target was like taking your wife to a steakhouse on your anniversary. It’s nice to indulge, to pretend as though this was the lifestyle you lived—and it’s fun to pretend. But as soon as the waitress brings you the check, you are reminded that’s not who you are at heart. You can’t pretend forever.

I didn’t know there was a stigma about Walmart until I got to college and my friends made fun of how often I shopped there. Eventually, I understood when I looked around at all the pajama pants and oversized Tweety bird air-brushed t-shirts adorning my fellow shoppers, in Omaha, these people looked out of place. I thought they just looked like Islanders.

We loved Walmart so much that it was a highlight of my adolescence when they announced they would be building not one, BUT TWO, new Walmart stores in Grand Island.

Damn right we’re a two Walmart town. F**k you again Kearney.

I mean I loved Walmart, so much so that my friends and I hung out there. Noah and I invented this game where we separated and tried to find an item that would make the other person laugh. We’d establish a rendezvous point, break for twenty-five minutes, and then present our discovery to the other and watch his reaction. It was great. He won with a book written by The Dog Whisperer Cesar Milano. Walmart was one of four places open past 9:00 p.m. that welcomed minors. When I was on staff at Camp Augustine and had the night off, we ran the circuit between Bosselman’s Truck Stop, McDonald’s, Tommy’s Restaurant (of fiber glass rooster fame), and both Walmarts. One time we did the whole trip in Native American regalia and saw the same drunk guy at the truck stop and Tommy’s. Clearly, he was as tuned into the Grand Island nightlife as we were. I bet he gave his meth dealer a big tip when he started seeing Indians follow him around.

My dad was in such a state of excitement and disbelief that he used the news of the two Walmarts as a conversation starter. In middle school I went to a national wrestling tournament in Denver. I was a terrible wrestler, but my parents volunteered to drive so I made the team. Olympic Gold Medal winning wrestler Rulon Gardner was making an appearance and signing autographs. If you’re not sure who that is, he completed one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history, then almost died after being buried in the snow after a snowmobiling accident. He lost a toe and kept it in a jar in his fridge, got super fat, and then won the reality competition, The Biggest Loser. If that’s not a resume, then don’t come to me for career advice.

As I waited in line for a signature, I got a little star struck, but Rulon led the conversation:

“Where you from?”

“Grand Island, Nebraska. You’ve probably never heard of it.”

“Oh, I know Grand Island!”

“You do?”

“Yeah, I went to school in Lincoln. I’m a Husker. I’ve been there a couple of times.”

My dad couldn’t help himself.

Dad: “So, you know how big Grand Island is?

Rulon: “Yeah, I think so.”

Dad: “Can you believe that we’re getting TWO Walmarts?”

Rulon could believe it. Or couldn’t. He mostly didn’t know what he was supposed to say. He signed my shirt, took a nice photo, and moved us along without matching my dad’s enthusiasm. He was mostly just happy that my dad was so happy. He could tell this was important to him.

[1] David Foster Wallace, “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress,” (1990) in Both Flesh and Not, (Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 83.

[1] Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, (Penguin Press, 2023), 171.

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Tornado Hill

Grand Island, Neb., June 4 (AP)- A string of seven tornadoes destroyed this central Nebraska city last night, killing four persons and injuring 134. Initial reports said five persons were killed, and one county official said this morning that she thought more than 30 bodies had been found … The city was battered by the tornadoes over a three-hour period. When they were over, a six-block-wide swath along Grand Island’s two main streets was devastated. The Federal Emergency Management Administration said that 513 homes and 60 businesses had been destroyed. In addition, 450 homes and 15 businesses were damaged … Radar indicated that the tornadoes that hit Grand Island were touched off by a thunderstorm cell at least 35 miles wide that formed shortly before 8 PM.[1]

Seriously, Tornado Hill is the s**t. You should see what else I think is cool.

Tornado Hill was a hill made after a tornado. Well, tornadoes. We’re a very literal people. Our naming conventions consist of:

1. “Grand __________”

2. “__________ Island”

3. “the name of the thing is what the thing is”

Grand Island doesn’t make the news much. Cocktail historian David Wondrich found one of the earliest references to drinking straws in a Grand Island newspaper, but otherwise you don’t see a lot about GI on the wire service.

As the Grand Island Times (that’s in Nebraska) pointed out in 1873, “a straw is a very useful article— when one end is bathed in a Sherry Cobbler.”[2]

But there’s one event that shaped our city even more than straws: the mother f*****g Night of the Twisters.

In 1980 there was a single evening where seven tornadoes simultaneously touched down and obliterated the town. Five people died and about two hundred were injured. It was such a big deal that they wrote a fictionalized young adult novel about it, which was then adapted as a made-for-TV movie that filled up several days of Mrs. Saunder’s lesson plans. The book contains impeccable prose like, “there’s nothing I hate more than zipping up my pants in front of a girl,”[3] but the film took the tale to the next level. The Family Channel’s depiction of our way of life was a big moment for Grand Island, our coming out party to introduce the world to our way of life. Except the movie was filmed in Canada. And all the actors spoke with Canadian accents. And dressed like cowboys. And said “soda” like dipshits instead of “pop.” And were unaware of basic tornado safety measures. And they changed the name of the town from Grand Island to Blainsworth but mentioned nearby St. Paul and Dannenbrog. Other than that, the movie was a big deal, if you lived in Grand Island. Otherwise, it was safely ignored, just like Grand Island.

But seven tornadoes can really f**k some s**t up, around $800 million worth in 2025 dollars. And then you needed to figure out what to do with the $800 million worth of s**t that has been fucked. Broken glass, dismantled buildings, torn metal shards, shredded personal belongings. I’m sure there’s some kind of protocol for that, but how were we supposed to know? So, what did us thrifty Islanders do? What any logical township would: piled it all up into one massive garbage heap, covered it in dirt, and called it Tornado Hill. Now we all go sledding there.

Every kid who grew up in Grand Island has a Tornado Hill story. The Grand Island Senior High drumline a generation before me used to go “urban sledding” and pilfered lunch trays from the school cafeteria to use as snow boards. The activity escalated until they stole the gong from the band room to make a toboggan that retails at $1,270. Years later, my brother Jason told me they put a historical marker up at Tornado Hill and showed me a photo of it on his phone. Underneath the picture were text messages from his buddies guessing what it said:

T’was here on the site where that one kid a few years older than us went down backwards, hit a chain link fence, and ripped open his scrote.

Seriously, that fence is a real b***h.

It’s the monument to the sturdiness of our people. Even when everything around you is upended, when tornadoes level your home and scrotums are torn, us Grand Islanders persevere. We still exist.

And now our town has its only hill. Just make sure your tetanus shots are up to date.

Suck on that Mother Nature.

The Grand Theater

That’s the way of the world, of course. Possessions get discarded. Life moves on. But I often think what a shame it is that we didn’t keep the things that made us different and special and attractive in the fifties. Imagine those palatial downtown movie theaters with their vast screens and Egyptian décor, but thrillingly enlivened with Dolby sound and slick computer graphics. Now that would be magic…What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I’m afraid.[1]

—Bill Bryson

Downtown Grand Island is an eight-block stretch between the YMCA on the east and The Salvation Army on the west. The main drag is West 3rd Street—though the only GI street name I knew was Capital Avenue. My mom liked to tell the story about how it was named after the false hopes of some speculators who thought Grand Island would one day replace Washington, DC as the nation’s capital. I didn’t realize we had a downtown until my dad pointed it out while I rode with him to the post office. Not coincidentally, the strip runs parallel to a prominent stretch of railroad tracks, where hobos once jumped off railcars to frequent GI’s bustling redlight district. In July 1878, The Grand Island Times wrote an article under the headline “Tramps Beware” about four of these vagabonds who were hanged and “a notice was placed on the bodies warning aimless wanderers to give Grand Island a wide berth.”[2] A century and a half later, Grand Island tourism still isn’t what it used to be.

Downtown wasn’t exactly Champs-Élysées, but it was the longtime home to Wayne’s Pawn Shop. My mom purchased a discount snare drum from Wayne’s since it was markedly cheaper in both price and quality than the name-brand snare drums available from Ron’s Music. Wayne’s also had a thriving paintball supply section and sponsored the YMCA soccer yellow team. Everyone wanted to be on the yellow team.

Several of Grand Island’s few local restaurants were housed downtown, but I didn’t know about them until my friends had their graduation parties there. Despite eating out every Sunday after church, my family was most comfortable at chains and— pending the health of our gastrointestinal tracts— occasionally Coney Island. There were a couple of reasons for the Beatys to venture downtown though. Since I was the fourth Beaty child in the Grand Island Senior High marching band, we never missed a Harvest of Harmony Parade. Kevin marched in the 1996 edition when a Guinness World Record was set after one hundred-thirty marching bands participated in the parade. But the main reason to go downtown was to see a movie at The Grand.

The Grand Theater (sometimes “Theatre”) is an homage to the desire for nothing to change and the pride we take in ensuring that it doesn’t. The theater was a classic single screen with balcony seating, a curtain, and art deco décor. The original theater opened in the 1920s, but after a fire it reopened on May 7th, 1937. For a while they required everyone to sing “God Bless America” before the movie and in 1940 they showed an “educational sex film”[3] that had separate showtimes for men and women—the women got two showtimes, the men only one. Otherwise, not much changed from 1937 to 1999 when Louis and I started watching five-dollar kid matinees each Saturday during summer break. The theater was gorgeous, preserved in time the way only a small-town downtown with no pressure to modernize could.

The Grand was a downtown fixture until a new chain of theaters opened where horny middle schoolers could feel the thong straps of their classmates. The only problem was the mall the new chain moved into already housed a theater chain. So, for about six months the Conestoga…

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—Henrich Egge, early Grand Island settler

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I grew up in Grand Island, Nebraska. If the name of our town is confusing to you, I understand. I’ve heard all the jokes and have made them myself. “It’s not an island and it’s not grand.” This isn’t the official city motto, but it might as well be. It would pair nicely with the State of Nebraska’s official tourism slogan: “Honestly, it’s not for everyone.” Yes, us Grand Islanders are fully aware of just how unremarkable we are. And we’ve come to terms with it. When I joined Facebook in 2008, our city couldn’t be selected as an option for “hometown” in your profile, so most of us just picked the closest alternative of “Grand Island, NY.” What’s a single letter difference in a state abbreviation?

Nebraskans get sick of hearing how boring their state is when they introduce themselves. If Omaha is good enough for Warren Buffett it should be good enough for the snobby Southwest Airlines passenger crammed into the middle-seat who feels obligated to ask where you’re from. But honestly, once you get past the second entry in the list of city populations, it’s kind of true. According to year 2000 Census data—the year I turned ten and was given a cool “Census 2000” lapel pin from my fourth-grade teacher—there were only two towns in Nebraska with populations larger than the 85,000 people who filled Memorial Stadium in Lincoln each Saturday to watch Husker football. ESPN loved this factoid, and us central Nebraskans were thrilled to see the name of our city publicly shamed in a TV graphic each week listing the game attendance next to population figures of Nebraska residences.

Every small town has its thing—that unique identity that sets you apart on billboards and gas station pamphlets from all the other small towns that are otherwise facsimiles of one another. The 24,064 citizens of Hastings, Nebraska celebrate themselves as the birthplace of Kool-Aid and hold an annual summer festival that boasts “the world’s largest Kool-Aid stand.”[2]

North Platte, Nebraska with its 23,871 people is also a birthplace, but not of a delicious drink adored by millions, rather the used-to-be-famous showman Buffalo Bill. It doesn’t matter that he’s buried in Cody, Wyoming and the Buffalo Bills football team is in New York—North Platte gets to keep him. But if dead cowboys aren’t you’re thing, North Platte has also capitalized on the fact that they’re conveniently located off Interstate 80 with the “get closer to where you’re going” tourism slogan encouraging stopovers on the way to Denver.

The hideous stepchild of Nebraska is Kearney, where 27,431 people made a terrible life choice by living there. You may know the place from the Oregon Trail eight-bit video game and buying supplies at Fort Kearny. The fort was christened after Stephen W. Kearny, but the dumbasses spelled the name wrong when they named their town. Grand Island and Kearney don’t get along.

And then there’s us. The 42,940 Grand Islanders.

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In fourth grade history, we were taught the superhero origin story of our great municipality. Sort of. I got the impression it was more of a generalization that Mrs. Saunder did from a historical marker she once read while pulled over to let her dog pee.

Located in the middle of the Platte River there was once a big ass island.

How big?

No one knows. It doesn’t exist anymore. It probably never did. But as settlers traveled across country in their covered wagons they would reference “Le Grande Isle.” [3]

Why were all the settlers French?

Can’t help you with that one either.

Why were the French settlers so bad at French, since “the grand island” in French is actually “I’isle grande”?

Seriously, stop asking so many questions.

My fourth-grade self never bothered to ask about these details. Ambition and curiosity don’t really have a place in Grand Island. And my fourth-grade self didn’t get a dog until he moved away to the city of Omaha, so that Rosetta Stone of roadside markers has yet to be rediscovered. Regardless, the “Le Grande Isle” town name stuck and got de-Frenched. And then people’s wagons broke down or they got bored or had to use the bathroom and pulled over, but one way or another ended up living—not on this grand island—but kind of in the general area. And now we have a town.

The reason no one definitively knows where the town name came from is because no one really cares about anything in Grand Island. People just kind of exist there. It’s a very conservative town, which I never minded, except when this brand of conservatism seemed to spill into a general lack of ambition overall. Which I did mind. When my high school classmate David Nance moved away and started a moderately successful rock band, he described our hometown in an interview as “more or less a strip mall, so basically Anytown U.S.A.[4]”

And the type of people who settle in Grand Island are the type who love strip malls.

That’s not to say Grand Island wasn’t full of good people. Nothing could be further from the truth. They were salt-of-the-earth types. They weren’t simple in a pejorative sense either, just in a statement-of-fact sort of way. I once had a coworker in his late forties say he would never move from his farm outside city limits into Grand Island proper because “GI is just too big.” When I mentioned I had vacationed to New York City, he was incredulous. He gave me a look as if I told him I had taken a trip to one of Jupiter’s moons. It was equal parts disbelief you could actually go there and disbelief that I was still alive upon my return.

It’s kind of a lot of people like that.

But even that description’s a bit misleading, because as a farmer, this guy knew who he was at heart. And he leaned into that. Most of us Grand Islanders don’t. At least I didn’t know who I was, and the people I spent time around didn’t either. The town proper has a population slightly under 50,000 and none of us are farmers. Some of us know farmers, but most are completely clueless about agriculture. I still don’t know what a silo is for. I once asked a farmer what they put inside a silo, and he replied “silage.” Which didn’t help.

To complicate things, Grand Islanders are not farmers in a state where everyone is assumed to be. All the “non-farmers” are supposed to live in Omaha or Lincoln. Yes, we have cornfields next to our mall, and our cemetery, and pretty much any vacant lot. You kind of forget about them. And once a year my parents took us to a farm supply store on “baby bird day,” the day when they sold freshly hatched chicks and ducklings to people who needed to buy freshly hatched chicks and ducklings. We never bought any, but there is no greater day than the day you can pick up a baby duckling from under a heat lamp clamped to the side of a corrugated feed trough and hold it as if it were your own. My sister did buy my brother-in-law a full-grown chicken as an engagement present though.

And my church hosted a “Harvest Party” in place of a “Halloween Party.” All of us kids dressed up in costumes, played games, and asked for candy. If this feels like a “Halloween Party,” you’re wrong. Halloween is for the devil. At our church, we celebrated harvest—and our party just happens to get scheduled each year on the Wednesday night prior to October 31st. It’s just a coincidence, ok?

But, other than that, there’s nothing farm-related about us.

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Grand Island has a few things uniquely ours. The most satisfying bout of diarrhea you’ll ever have comes after you taste the delicious chili dogs of the Coney Island Lunch Room. At least that’s the restaurant name according to the neon sign outside shaped like a chili dog—the menu, ninetieth anniversary drink koozies, and the banner for the racehorse they sponsor all say, “Coney Island Cafe,” but never “Café.” I don’t think anyone is aware of the inconsistency; we just call it Coney Island. The food here cannot be imp…