WORK IN PROGRESS
i
When I was a freshman in college, my father, Tom Coffey, owned and operated Coffey’s Transfer Company. His 25-truck line ran from Omaha through central Nebraska and dropped into Kansas. That school year, 1955-56, I watched Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters run Dad out of business. (See “Bomb Scare”).
But the fight wasn’t over. My dad sued the Teamsters and collected, a rarity. In 1958 his testimony about the Teamsters before Robert Kennedy at the McClellan Committee helped create the Landrum-Griffin Act with its curbs on labor activities.
A chapter of my Great Plains Patchwork: A Memoir describes my father’s clash with Hoffa but since then I’ve expanded my Teamsters research considerably. Thanks to a grant from the Nebraska Humanities Council, I prepared an illustrated lecture, “Jimmy Hoffa in Nebraska.” Later I presented it in the Teamsters Hall, IBT Local 554, Omaha, and at the 36th Annual Missouri Valley History Conference, among other places.
ii
Currently I’m editing Thieves, Rascals & Sore Losers: The 13-year Wrangle to Secure Harlan County’s Seat, a book that an early reader said, “It's droll humor reminds me of Mark Twain.”
I grew up in Harlan County, Nebraska, and from my childhood heard about the fight, which placed the county seat in my hometown, Alma.
When I returned to Harlan County in 1993, I found the controversy still active. I watched in amazement as Alma’s primary rival, Orleans, voted three-to-one to pass a $7.4 million school bond issue so its schoolchildren could avoid attending school in Alma. Orleans citizens voted this bond issue even though sending its students to Alma would cut its taxes by 25 percent and would cost, at most, the salary of one more teacher. But Orleans citizens said, “No.” And why? They cited Alma’s “stealing” the courthouse.
What in the world, I wondered, had happened in those early years, 1871-1884, to cause such long-lasting rancor?
I found some answers in dusty newspapers and Nebraska Supreme Court tomes. I read about county records stolen, lies told, votes bought – even about an impressive Orleans courthouse, built but never used. Along the way, I met an array of curious characters, Thieves, Rascals & Sore Losers among them.
iii
America’s orphan-train movement is the largest mass migration of children in the world’s history. From 1854 to 1929 a quarter-million children were shipped from big city orphanages to rural areas all over the United States, but particularly in the Great Plains.
I’d been lecturing about this movement for several years when I received a small letter written in a somewhat shaky hand.
“How can you be talking about the orphan trains,” the writer asked, “if you haven’t heard my story?”
Curious, I visited Teresa Martin’s apartment and found a treasure: Teresa, a bright articulate woman who rode the orphan train from New York City to Kansas in 1910 as a three-year-old. She had piles of papers to show me, stories that she and others had written about her experience. A retired librarian, Teresa had amassed an archive. As we met regularly to draft her biography, I marveled at her excellent memory and enjoyed her sense of humor.
Most orphan-train stories focus on the drama of being taken from a big city street or orphanage to what was usually a farm, but Mail-Order Kid is a bit different. It asks, “What happened next?” How do children deal with being shipped half-way across the country and left with strangers? What impact does it have on their adult life?
Ashamed, like many orphan-train riders, Teresa concealed her background whenever she could. But forces larger that herself – the orphan-train movement and supportive relatives – helped her come to terms with her past as a mail-order kid.
