Omaha history – the 1900s

Omaha history – the 1900s.

Hello, everybody. How are you? We’re back again with another Omaha video. Omaha, our featured community this week, and this time we’re all the way up to the 20th century, yeah, the 1900s.

And now, at this point, Omaha has gone through what I call the teenage years of the eighteen hundreds and is now exploding. The population’s increasing, the industry’s increasing, the construction is increasing. It’s becoming a modern city.

Kidnapping case and labors strikes

And right in the middle of it, right at the beginning of the 1900s, unfortunately, there was a major kidnapping case. A local meat packing boss’s son was kidnapped for ransom. Now, what’s interesting about that case is that the kidnappers didn’t want money. They wanted some a boxcar of porterhouses, a boxcar of T-bones, a boxcar of New York strips, and a boxcar of rump roast. That was their demand.

And then, also, of course, come, as in all growing industries around the world, there was strife between labor and management in factories, in meatpacking districts, in the railroads, all over. It’s just natural. But a lot of times in those days, strikes got out of hand.

And the employees, though, are demanding what all employees generally demand, and that’s good working conditions, better pay. Now, sometimes they went a little crazy. You know, it would be Valentine’s month, right? It’d be February, and some of these employees are demanding, “I demand a box of chocolates and flowers every day of the month through the 14th.”

Come on now, any good labor negotiator would say, “Come on now, what are you talking about?” Sometimes, during the 4th of July, right in those few weeks leading up to Independence Day, workers would be demanding bottle rockets, okay, black cats, and what they call tongue depressors. All of these are fireworks of different kinds.

Fireworks explode

And sometimes, even if you’re a patriotic worker and you want to display that on 4th of July, you really can’t demand that that is part of the labor negotiation to have all of these fireworks, especially, and who knows what was going on at the time, especially in states where it’s illegal.

Now, that, the problem is, sometimes workers demand, oh, these fireworks, and let’s be honest, some of them are closer to armaments and munitions than they are to harmless firecrackers. They’re so loud and so big and so explosive, they make the hair on your arms stand up when they go off and make you jump out of your seat.

But nonetheless, you also have the need to travel to get some of these firecrackers. You have to go all the way down in Texas. Now, are you trying to tell me that in a labor negotiation, workers should be able to demand firecrackers and fireworks of such size and firepower that management would have to get in the station wagon and drive all the way down to Texas, to the panhandle of Texas, to buy these fireworks, or to the hills of Kentucky, and drive all the way back to Omaha? I mean, it was just those kinds of things that made the labor negotiations during the 1900s so full of strife and stress.

Dialing up Omaha tornadoes

Okay, and then you also have the fact that there were tornadoes through much of that time period. Now, they have dialed down the tornadoes. Tornadoes, even with climate change, have lessened because in those days, they could dial up a tornado. I mean, it was the type of community where the power was so centralized that all they had to do was make a couple of phone calls, that or a couple of tippy tabs on the Morse code, and here comes a tornado.

And they didn’t exactly wield this kind of power with justice, right? It was more of a keeping down. Well, going back to our earlier comment about the labor negotiations, a lot of times, they’re trying to keep down strikers and keep strike breakers from getting mauled by strikers when they showed up on the line, trying to cross the line.

And you know, they dial up a tornado, and here it comes, all of a sudden, and there goes, you know, there goes the strike. So, it was again, it was a rough and tumble era where you have the getting through the teenage years of the eighteen hundreds, now into the real, the real growth of the 1900s and onward.

Omaha music

Okay, so some of the things that were going on in that time period is that Omaha, believe it or not, it wasn’t Nashville, I’ll give you that, it wasn’t New Orleans, but there was a growing and exploding music scene during that time period. Okay, and a lot of these bands and groups were known around the country, including the Missouri Whitecaps.

Now, there was early Whitecaps, that was kind of a joke about their name because the Missouri honestly didn’t have whitecaps, but they toured around the country as a barbershop quartet and were pretty well known, because mainly because of a couple of big hits. Just like any other music act, you go for the hits, and they try to work in a lot of their old stuff, and, or even worse, they try to work in some of their new stuff that nobody in the audience really cares about. They’re just like, “Play the hits, and you know, sit down.”

So, they had, they had one song, “I Have Council Bluffs in My Heart for You,” and then another one, “From Muskogee to Down to Missouri, Right into Your Heart.” And those are two of their big hits, and they used to tour around, and they’d come back to Omaha for big dates. So, for example, in the spring, they’d hit all the high school proms, and then were making big money back then. It was, you know, 50, 60 bucks, but in those days, that was a lot of money. The problem is, they had to split it between all four of the Whitecaps, and, you know, they’d get ten bucks there.

So they weren’t making a lot of money, but they were on the road, and they had all of the benefits of being on the road in terms of seeing the world, traveling, expanding their horizons, and learning what bedbugs are up close and personal when you get to Toledo, Ohio, and you have to stay in a bed bug-infested, you know, bed bug-infested flat house because the Holiday Inn where he made the reservations suddenly can’t find, suddenly can’t find your reservation, simply because you made a song about them that was, in some eyes, was not as friendly as it might have been for a hit song. But there’s nothing you can do about that; it’s part of being in a popular music group.

Omaha insurance industry

Now, so up through the middle of the century, then, the, you know, the industry that really grew in those days was the insurance industry, and that, much like Des Moines, Iowa. Des Moines, Iowa, is the center of a lot of insurance, and, and, and you may have heard of a company called Mutual of Omaha, and it was firms like that that were starting to establish themselves in Omaha because, for one, you had this no-nonsense Midwestern approach that a lot of people, that a lot of people appreciated.

Stable banks

So, that’s why financial institutions often blossomed in the Midwest, is because people would put their money in a bank where they didn’t think you were full of baloney. You know, you get to some of these cities, like, like, for example, if you had, let’s say, a million dollars, where do you put that? In a bank that was located in, let’s say, Philadelphia?

No, you know, you know that they’re just gonna gamble away that money with trips down to, at that time, they could gamble in Cuba, they could go to Vegas, wasn’t quite a thing yet, but they could go to the South of France, they could go to Asia Minor, where there was a lot of gambling halls, and that’s what the Philadelphia tax would deal with it.

Now, say your money’s gone, or they put it into a new Cadillac Eldorado, and they’re cruising around the streets of Philadelphia, and what was your money? So, what you want, and at least in those days, where you’d want to put your money, is in a steady, boring, a city like Omaha, because you know the founders and owners are gonna keep your money safe, and they’re not gonna be buying Cadillac Eldorado and driving around Omaha, waving at people from the candy-colored car, right?

Omaha bowling

So, that is why insurance companies became big there, and you know, Omaha then started that TV show, and everybody knows which, every week, feature wildlife in different, from different parts of the world, that were in bowling tournaments. And you haven’t lived until you’ve seen an American Eagle grip a bowling ball in its giant talons. You don’t really realize how big they are till you see it on TV and rip a bowling ball down the lane for three strikes in a row to win almost a perfect game, and more importantly, beat the Gibbon monkey that he was playing against in the final rounds of a tournament on the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, a bowling, bowling tournament show. So, that was an important part of the growth of the early days of the entertainment business in Omaha as well.

Winter tornadoes

So, then, on to the 70s, and, you know, ease, and what’s what was still happening? Tornadoes. Now, they weren’t dialing them up on demand like they used to, but they would still occur, and a major tornado hit in the 70s, as well as a major blizzard in the 70s as well. And sometimes, they would happen at the same time. Now, if you’ve ever been in a tornado that’s in the middle of winter, in other words, a blizzard tornado, some call them blizznados, some people call them tornizzards, all right? So, they really had both names. We hadn’t really settled on names by that time, and it just depended on what region of Omaha you’re from. But, if you, whether you call that a tornizzard or a blizznado, it just didn’t, it’s depending on where you’re from. And so, in other words, it’s a tornado in the middle of winter. Well, guys, that’s a whole new level of destruction and freezing temperatures that you don’t want ever to experience for the rest of your life.

Ride the blizznado

Now, here’s the thing, sometimes life was so slow. We talked about the benefits of a slow, steady pace of life in Omaha, but now, sometimes, the youth of the town found this way too slow. And that’s why you had a lot of tattoos starting to happen in the 70s, but also, some of these thrill-seekers in Omaha, the youngsters, are usually guys, young, you know, crazy guys, and some girls, some crazy girls, would get out there, get up their skis, and they would ride the blizzard. They’d ride the tornado blizzard, that tornblizz, they’re the, the tornard, the tornard, or blizznado, sounds a little more flowy. They would ride the blizznado on their skis. So, you look out your window, and here are these crazy, crazy neighborhood kids, riding the winds, okay, using their skis as sort of a sail, at a hundred miles per hour, flying around the neighborhood. And yeah, you couldn’t tell from your living room window if that was a look of terror on their face or a look of total bliss from finally being free of the boredom of their life in Omaha. It was very difficult to tell.

So, that went up through the 70s, and then, as you went into the 80s and stuff, people looked around, and they go, “You know, we got to start, we got to start preserving some of our lifestyle here. We’re gonna, we have to have parklands, and, and historic places that we can give to the coming generation, so they, they can look back and go, ‘What the hell were you doing in Omaha? You know, why didn’t you at least go to St. Louis?'” And so, we have to have buildings and places of monuments and things that we can point to and say, “Well, this is why we stayed.”

Omaha founder

And they may or may not agree, you know, they may look back and go, “Well, I would have gotten in the car right away and driven to at least St. Louis, or maybe even Topeka.” Yeah, you know, but it’s nonetheless, there was a push to start to preserve some of the important buildings and monuments of Omaha, and that was a successful, successful thing. And now, you can go there, you can go, some of it, you can see the old Omaha Rogers family home from the early eighteen hundreds is still there. And, of course, the original Rogers family from downtown, that was the first family before TV, of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the original, that wasn’t, it turned out to be a different Rogers family, and they had a kind of a different take on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, because the original Rogers family, back in Omaha, the early 1800s, that has been preserved, they had a weekly play that they put on called “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Local play

And the kids from all around the city would come into Washington, put on the play from the front porch of their house. Again, that house is still there. You can see it in the old district of Omaha, just north of downtown. And they’d put on a weekly play known as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And he’d come up, now instead of wearing, you know, slippers, he’d put on his heavy winter boots. And it didn’t matter if it was summer or winter, but that was part of the gag. He’d put on these heavy winter boots that you needed to use in those days to get through an Omaha winter. And of course, during the weekly play, or at least, it wasn’t so much of a play as a monologue, that this character, old man Rogers, would put on and make the kids from the neighborhoods laugh. And that was what they called entertainment back in those days.

Become a star

So, that home is still there, and if you pay them a 100, 125 bucks, they’ll let you put on your own show on the same porch. And then, you can video record that, of course, on your phone, or on your Apple Smart Watch, and then throw it up, throw it up on the ‘gram, or YouTube, or maybe both. It depends, or if you’re an old school millennial, they might even put it up on Snapchat. And then, of course, now they’re getting requests to make TikToks from that same porch, as both a throwback, and, you know, there’s a feeling of among some of management of the old house, that they’re making fun of the Mister, the old Rogers home. But, you know, they figured, hey, we’ll take some, we’ll take some shots from people, even if it keeps the old Rogers’ home going, and also if it gets the word out there on social media.

Omaha railroads

So, guys, that is really an amazing, you know, time in Omaha’s history. And in the next video, we’ll look at the current day and find out what is happening in Omaha that is really exciting in the town and getting more notoriety for this important, you could say, you could say this important foundation in all city, really a cornerstone of the growth of the West. Because you have to remember, as an example, Omaha was the really the headwaters of the original railroad that had it when they went to do a transpacific, transcontinental overland route. Where did they start that railroad? They started it in Omaha, and it ran all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and opened up the United States for the greatest westward expansion of any country in the history of the world.