OCR Text |
Show Cozad's claim to fame lies in its position as the longitudinal center of the United tli States, a fact duly marked in the middle of the town with a metal disc set on the 100 Meridian. As a child, I found this geographical fact impressive. The town with its one Higgly Piggly and a Dairy Queen out near the highway seemed so dusty to me, so quiet. But the plaque marking its place as the heart of the heartland made me proud of my father's hometown. Although Nebraska Plastics did run a factory there for years, Cozad was and is a farm town. In its heyday neighboring townspeople would flock from miles around to Main Street on Saturday night for a movie and maybe a soda at the dime store. On those nights the cars parked in slanted rows down the middle of the street, occupying every spare inch of road. Everyone arrived decked in their finest, brushed and scrubbed, necks burned from the sun, good overalls stiff against tired limbs. For a quarter you could buy a movie ticket, a bag of popcorn, and a licorice whip, a fact that my father repeated like a charm when I was growing up. I never knew if I was supposed to be impressed by the quantity of fun a quarter could buy-at the time movies at Pearl Ridge Shopping Center cost $4.50~or my father's thrift, not a penny wasted. I knew how he earned the quarter each week-not by an allowance but by shooting crows and taking them in lots often or more to town for a bounty. I can imagine the blood-encrusted, legs bumping against his thighs as he walked the Nebraska-straight roads, his mind on the movie he would see that weekend or the thunderheads in the distance. At home he collected the dimes in a coffee can or a box or maybe even a sock that he kept under his bed, their heft a response to the poverty around him. Perhaps the point my father wanted to impress upon me and my brothers with his stories of Saturday nights in Cozad was the reward of hard work, 16 |