On the Omahawks, Omaha's First Big-League Basketball Team

In the next issue of Nebraska History I have an article that details the brief history of the Omahawks, a professional basketball team that existed for a few weeks in 1947. Although mostly forgotten by Omaha residents today, it was Omaha's first major professional sports franchise.

I sent an advance copy of the piece to one of my favorite sports writers, Dirk Chatelain of the Omaha World-Herald. After he expressed interest in the topic, I wrote a short summary piece about the Omahawks that Chatelain published at his Mad Chatter blog last week. You can check out the blog here.  After the piece ran, I was contacted by The Bottom Line, a sports and news talk show hosted by Mike'l Severe for the Omaha World-Herald. Back when I lived in Omaha, Severe and Kevin Kugler co-hosted a radio show called Unsportsmanlike Conduct. I have yet to find a sports talk show that I enjoy more than Unsportsmanlike Conduct (in fact, I've pretty much given up on trying). So it was a thrill to talk about the Omahawks with Severe.

If you'd like to check out my interview on The Bottom Line, you can go here. Below, you can also read my short piece on the Omahawks that originally ran at the Mad Chatter blog. And for even more on the Omahawks, check out the next issue of Nebraska History.

Omaha World-Herald, Nov. 12, 1947

African Americans and Omaha: A Reading List

Recently I reviewed Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson's Free Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power, and the Politics of Race (Texas Tech University Press, 2012), for an academic journal. Although I made a few critiques, I think that Johnson's biography of Chambers is incredibly important. Because Chambers has toiled in Nebraska his entire life, serving since 1970 (with one brief hiatus) as the legislative representative for Nebraska eleventh district, he has not received as much attention on the national level as his talent, charisma, and penchant for controversy deserves. Love him or hate him, Chambers is one of the most fascinating political leaders in Nebraska history. Johnson's biography should be read by anyone interested in the history of the U.S. black freedom struggle or in Midwest, Nebraska, or Omaha history (for more on Chambers, I've written briefly on him elsewhere, focusing on his starring role in the acclaimed documentary A Time for Burning).

In national histories of the long civil rights movement, Omaha often gets mentioned for two things: it was the birthplace of Malcolm X, whose parents served as leaders of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association in the city during the 1920s, and it was the scene of the horrific riots and mob murder in 1919 of Will Brown, whose assailants posed smiling for the camera as his body burned.

But thanks to Johnson's biography of Chambers, and also to a recent influx of books documenting Omaha's rich history of African American leadership and civil rights protest, readers can now get a much better sense of the struggle and vitality of African American life in Omaha. I've listed three recently-published books that would make great companions to Free Radical below. All of these books tend towards an emphasis on the heroic. That is, while they do not ignore the segregation, mob violence, and police brutality inflicted upon Omaha's African American residents over the past century, they tend to highlight more the resilience of those fighting for justice. I can only hope that over the next few years we'll see even more work of this quality on the history of African American life in Omaha.

The Rest of Tom Osborne's "Currens Story"

Legendary former Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne has long promoted the importance of mentoring. In 1991 he and his wife Nancy launched the TeamMates Mentoring Program, aiming to inspire youth to reach their potential by matching them up with an adult mentor.

Part of Osborne's motivation is personal. As he has often explained, his grandfather, Thomas C. Osborne, grew up on a farm in western Nebraska in the late 1880s/1890s. Thomas's home life was somewhat dysfunctional because his father was an alcoholic. But a traveling preacher named Currens took an interest in Thomas. Currens encouraged him to go to college -- something that was exceedingly rare in the nineteenth century -- and to become a preacher. Thomas did just that, enrolling at Hastings College, captaining the football team, and eventually earning his Presbyterian ordination. "I'm quite certain that if it wasn't for this guy named Currens who was a mentor to my grandfather," Tom Osborne explains, "that my father wouldn't have had the life he had, [and] I would not have had the life I've had."

But who was this "Currens" character in the first place? I have not seen Osborne or anyone else provide many details beyond his last name and occupation. So I decided to see if I could piece together some details about the man who, by Osborne's account at least, unknowingly altered the history of Nebraska football more than a century ago.

From History of Western Nebraska
and its People (1921)

I suppose we can start with his name: James B. Currens. Currens was born in Kentucky around 1842. A nineteen-year-old living in a border state when the Civil War broke out, it is unclear if Currens fought for the North or South (or at all) during that conflict. But we do know that he married a woman from Kentucky named Susan, and that he settled in Mattoon, Illinois, sometime after the war. We also know that in 1877 he moved to Chicago to enroll in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary of the Northwest (renamed McCormick Theological Seminary in the 1880s). After receiving his D.D. from the school in 1879, Currens headed west for the plains, leaving Susan behind with friends in Illinois while he tried to establish himself in the new town of Parker (population: 113), in southeast Dakota Territory.

Currens spent his first summer in Parker building an eighteen-by-twenty-foot house, made of boards and paper. He also tried to establish connections with "widely-scattered Christians" in the area, but the work was hard and discouraging. "Covetousness, Sabbath-breaking, and intemperance are here before us, and meet us on every hand, undisguised, bold, and defiant," he wrote. The settlers were so busy building their homes and tending to their farms that Currens found it nearly impossible to "induce them to stop and think of religion." But Currens soldiered on, laboring in sparsely populated McCook and Turner counties for the next six years. One settler from the time recalled that Currens pastored seven churches and routinely preached in three different towns every Sunday. By 1883 Currens was reuinited with Susan, and the two earned reputations as local champions of the temperance cause.

Frank Crane, From the Pulpit to the Press

A couple years ago on a Tuesday afternoon I drove to First United Methodist Church in Omaha, Nebraska. There I met Diane and Donna, the church's two archivists. They work on a volunteer basis, coming in once a week to organize and preserve pieces of the church's past.

When I arrived Diane and Donna led me down concrete stairs to the church basement, into a small storage room that served as the church's archive. They knew that I was interested in 1890s Omaha, and they mentioned that they had the perfect source for me: a weekly church newsletter that was distributed for most of the 1890s. After scanning the archive shelves, Donna pulled down two dusty old volumes titled "The Guidon."

I did not expect to find much excitement in a weekly church newsletter. Event announcements, membership lists, sermon summaries: in and of themselves these items did not pique my interest. But I knew that studying the routine activities of Omaha's leading 1890s Protestant church would be valuable. I was also interested in finding themes related to the social gospel. As I flipped through the two bound volumes and took pictures of the pages, I looked for signal words like "Washington Gladden" and "fatherhood of God."

To my surprise The Guidon's contents frequently exhibited a flair for the creative (or at least the unexpected). Instead of mindlessly snapping pictures for future use, I found myself pausing and reading, constantly drawn into the personality exhibited in the text. To take but one example: in order to convince church members to accept a new system of church finances, the editor wrote a parody of the wildly popular 1894 free-silver tract Coin's Financial School. In the original, a man named Professor Coin taught bankers and businessmen the benefits of bimetallism. In the parody, a man named Gould Coin taught First Methodist board members the benefits of a monthly subscription-based church giving system.

Intrigued, I resolved to find out more about Frank Crane, the editor of The Guidon and the pastor of First Methodist from 1892 until 1896. I began my search, as most do these days, with google. And very quickly, thanks to the plethora of digitized newspaper and magazines from the pre-1922 years, I discovered that the Frank Crane who edited The Guidon in such an interesting way was the same "Dr. Frank Crane" who became perhaps the most widely read syndicated newspaper columnist in the early twentieth century and an icon of middlebrow American consumer culture.

From LIFE magazine in 1920.