Nebraska Side Trip: Hastings, Red Cloud, and a Hop into Kansas

We're taking a quick break from the interstate (again) and heading south through the plains of Nebraska to see where America's favorite childhood drink was invented and stop by a literary gem of a town before heading to Lincoln to pick up our journey again. 

Transcript

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Hello everybody and welcome to episode eight. We're in the middle of Nebraska right now. We've driven across the Rocky Mountains and into the Great Plains, and today. It's time for another side trip. Now, to give a brief background on why I choose these side trips, because there's so many we could probably take, but I really thought about the whole length of the journey in, in itself, which, uh, 13 days, I think I'm about 13, 14 episodes into this. Uh, that's a long two week trip across the country, but also the places that I have these small side trips, which will just be. Carson City, lake Tahoe, and then today in Nebraska also because there are no other interstates near them. Uh, yeah, there's no other interstates that make this an easily accessible trip, whereas many other places that we could get to, that could be a really great side trip, they would be included for another interstate. So let's get started with Nebraska. Nebraska, as we talked about in the last podcast, is a much maligned state. People just think of it as very boring. It's very flat, it's very monotonous, which is kind of the really great entrance into the Great Plains in the Midwest if you're coming from the West. And I guess that would make sense after the drama of driving from San Francisco to Cheyenne. That makes a lot of sense. But Nebraska is, I think, a hidden gem in the United States. And it's right in the middle of it, which is really interesting that for being the heart really along with Kansas, literally the heart, that a lot of people just want to get through it and ignore it and pretend that it never exists. So today we're gonna talk about some reasons why Nebraska really does matter and how you can find some fun places in Nebraska. So we are going to Hastings, Nebraska first. It is about 30 miles south of the freeway. If you take the exit to Grand Island, grand Island is north of the freeway. So if you turn to the south and drive just for a little bit, you'll reach Hastings, Nebraska. And you might just think this is just another one of those random farming communities out in the middle of nowhere. However, Hastings. Uh, factors into every American's childhood. Hastings is the location where Kool-Aid was invented, and the recipe perfected, in fact, shocking. I know a lot of people think Kool-Aid probably comes from a big city, but it doesn't. It comes from a man who just worked in a general store in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska Kool-Aid has been around. For almost a hundred years, it was invented by Edwin Perkins in 1927, and Edwin Perkins was just your typical Midwestern man. He worked in his father's general store in a town called Henley and was principally interested in the patent medicines and household products. And when Jello came out and was becoming. A bigger thing and widely distributed across the country. He was fascinated and he was the one that convinced his father to actually sell it in the store. So we can already see he has a mind for new innovations and for what is going to sell. Edwin Perkins also began making his own creations, and one of the most famous was a liquid concentrate called Fruit Smack. And he got the money from this by selling products that helped returning soldiers from World War I to stop smoking. So we have to remember that this is a boom time for the health industry, for people who are trying to be healthier, that drinking and smoking are no longer ways to relax or have a good time, but they're being thought of as ways that, or things that affect the body In harmful ways, and so they're coming up with alternatives, It's kind of like frozen orange juice, but a highly concentrated liquid that you would add water and end up with this really great fruity drink. This involved into a powder which he originally called Kool-Aid, and that's spelled KOOL dash a DE, like lemonade or orange aid. It originally came in six flavors, raspberry, cherry, grape, lemon, orange, and root beer that most famous of American sodas. I know we can talk about Coca-Cola all we want, but root beer is very peculiar to Americans. Raspberry was Edwin's favorite flavor he came up with a strawberry flavor that was added a little bit later. Soon. All he sold in the store was Coolaid, and by this time he had changed it to its spelling that we all know today, which is capital KOOL dash a ID. Kool-Aid and it became a summertime staple really quickly. And part of the novelty and a big reason for its success is that it could easily serve an entire family. And anybody who's had Kool-Aid knows it's really easy to stretch. Sure. You might end up with basically what is just a lightly flavored sugar water, but you make a picture of it and there's, there's a fun drink for the family at dinner. I think everybody has memories of Kool-Aid. My mom always made grape Kool-Aid'cause grape was her favorite flavor, but she always added extra sugar, and this was because her grandmother would add extra sugar. And every time when the kids would gather around and watch their grandmother make Kool-Aid, she always told them it was because now they had extra sugar to add because she. Lived through the depression. And so having that little extra sugar was a luxury and she delighted in being able to do that for her grandkids without worrying. So that's kind of the big memory. I remember growing up is always grape Kool-Aid that was just a little sugary, had more sugar than, than called for in 1931. So four years after he invented the, the drink, they relocated to Chicago. And this makes a lot of sense. Chicago is a great place for distribution. It also has the industry to support a larger production line, and this happened really at the start of the Great Depression. And despite being in an economic slump, sales went from. Just about$380,000 in 1931 to$1.56 million in 1936, so unheard of sums. This is an amazing economic story, especially given the economic circumstances of the country at the time. This money is roughly 35.5 million today. The man was successful. He knew what he, he knew what people would buy and he knew how to make it very marketable. In 1953, after a very long run of being a family run business, Perkins Products company was sold to General Foods. And it wasn't just the success of Kool-Aid that contributed to his success in life, but Edwin and his wife were extremely generous with all the money they had earned, and they always remembered Hastings. And so you can go around and see a lot of the. Places or things that they donated money for. And so Nebraska has officially made Kool-Aid, the official soft drink of the state, and every second weekend in August is Kool-Aid days in Hastings. You're probably wondering when we're going to talk about the Kool-Aid man. Obviously one of the most iconic. Food product mascots. He was introduced after the sale of the company to General Foods and just took off. He has his own product line. So Kool-Aid has just really entered into American pop culture and not always for the better because we have a very famous phrase in. In English, north American English, American English, probably that's drinking the Kool-Aid, which is essentially blind obedience, or how would you say that? Just blind following. And this comes from the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Yana. Which you might ask how that relates to a fun, family friendly drink from the middle of Nebraska. The Jonestown Massacre was a cult, and when things were not going the way of the leader, Jim Jones, he pretty much asked everybody to commit suicide with him in the middle of the jungle in South America. And the way they did this for a lot of it is that they would spike. A Kool-Aid like product. So we say drinking the Kool-Aid as our phrase, but the actual product was flavor aid, which I think is a massive coup for them for not being associated with that because if you do go to their Wikipedia page has a short little blurb about flavor aid being very similar to Kool-Aid and who makes it and whatnot. And then the rest of the page is about the the 1978 Jonestown Massacre and how it played a part so. Kool-Aid has really, really pervaded our lives in, in so many ways, but we'll just grab a few souvenirs and a tasty drink and then we are going to head Southwest. I love driving on these two lane farm roads, not necessarily one and a half lane farm roads like you find out in East Indiana. But. Just two lanes going over undulating land and farmland. Love it. I love it. I, I know I'm a child of mountains and I'm very used to seeing the mountains all the time, but to be able to drive over a flat area and see just unending green is really. It's just really special and I never get over the novelty of it, and part of the reason that it holds such a big novelty for me is my favorite author, Willa Kahar, which you cannot separate Willa Kahar from the state in which she grew up. A lot of people think that Willa C was born in Nebraska, however, she was born in Western Virginia, very close to the state of West Virginia, but just on the backside of the Appalachians from Washington DC, and when she was a child, the family moved out to Nebraska to try their luck at farming. The town where she grew up is called Red Cloud, and she moved there when she was nine. Obviously, that's a very important part of anybody's life, that when you're nine. And going into your teenage years that it's very formative and you're very aware of your surroundings and you start to become more aware of who you are as a person. Willa Catheter was very curious and known to be a tomboy. She loved following the towns doctor around and initially she really wanted to go into the medical field. However, she graduated high school and went to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and she began to write for the Nebraska State Journal. When she saw her words in print, she said quote, it had a hyp kind of hypnotic effect end quote, and that is where it all took off. So obviously for many of her books, they are based in Nebraska or kind of that Midwest farmer vibe so after she saw her words being printed in the Nebraska State Journal, she became a magazine writer and then an editor. So she initially moved to Pittsburgh and then onto New York, and she became an editor for one of the most famous magazines at the time, which is McClure's. And the owner of the magazine really took a gamble on having the head editor. Of a national magazine to be a woman. Obviously there were always, there's women, women writers at the time, but to have someone in that position of power to decide what does and doesn't go into the magazine, what needs to be changed, et cetera, that was very, very risky on his part, but it paid off. She decided that after being an editor, she wanted to return to writing, and so in 1912 she wrote her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. It's about an engineer in Boston who's building a bridge up in Canada. It's okay. Most people do think it's her weakest novel, and she herself did not like it. It was not. Acclaimed in a big way. Ev the literary world obviously knew her name from being the editor, and it was kind of ho-hum. And even though there was some substantial praise about it, she ended up feeling like it wasn't her best, it wasn't herself, it did not reflect what she felt. And she then had a friend who told her, well, write what you know, and that's where her Nebraska novels started to come into play. So in 1913, she wrote, oh, pioneers. And then two years later, the Song of the Lark. And then in 1918 she wrote My Antonia. And these three books are generally considered to be the Prairie Trilogy. Now obviously these books were way more successful, widely acclaimed F Scott Fitzgerald Thought The Great Gatsby was a failure in comparison to My Antonia. And they had a really interesting correspondence between the two of them. I highly recommend looking up the letters written between F Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Kahar. They have some really amazing quotes between the two of them. However, she then also took a break for about five years and wrote in 1923, the novel won of ours. And this is about a Nebraskan farmer who goes to fight in World War I and it won the Pulitzer Prize. However many people were not a fan of this, and especially coming after the war, after World War I, and really the idea of total war being in people's minds now of how devastating humankind would be on itself towards its fellow people and just utterly destroying the landscape and careless about everything. Ernest Hemingway said that it had been sanitized, and despite Ernest Hemingway being a great author in his own right. His criticism has forever ruined my opinion of him. So sorry for any Hemingway fans, but no Cando anymore. Willa Kahar For Life. This book is actually one of my all-time favorites, if not my favorite. I can't figure it out yet. But really the most famous thing about Willa Kahar was her imagery of the frontier and the hardy people who farmed it, and it became. A cornerstone of American literature, and one of the biggest reasons for that is at this time you are getting people like Edith Wharton, who was writing about Gilded Age Society on the coast, Henry James, who would eventually move to England. You're starting to get into F Scott Fitzgerald and the twenties, but really, Willa Catherine managed this transition before it became mainstream. And she is one of the biggest authors to have become mainstream, to write about normal people, and I think that's what is great and why if you read her books and you drive through Nebraska, it makes total and complete sense because a lot of it still looks the same. Also, red Cloud. At the na, the National Willa Catheter Center. It's the only store in the world that I've ever been to that has all 12 novels at once. So if you're a big reader, it is worth the The detour. You can visit other sites in Red Cloud. Many of her books, particularly my Antonia, are very much grounded in the real world and there's whole exhibits on it. It's fascinating. And the best place that I love in Red Cloud is you drive south of the town, which we're gonna do anyways because our next stop is literally just about 20 miles south of Red Cloud. But on the way out, you'll drive down and there will be a prairie. And the people who run the National Willow Catfish Center have purchased this land to set aside as a landscape to preserve the image of what Willa Catho would write about. So it is. Undulating Hills. It's a very small plot right on the border of the, of the two states. But you go there and it's, it is just kind of magical, I'm not gonna lie. And yes, I'm sentimental and nostalgic, and I do place a lot of emphasis on what I read, but it's just really pretty and really quiet. And you just feel the people that she writes about because they were not just. Random fictional people she made up, but they were grounded in the people that she grew up around could wax on about Willa catheter forever. But I'll just leave this one quote'cause we're gonna be standing in the Prairie, the National Willa Catheter Prairie, and this is one, I guess a guiding quote for my life, but it says. The land belongs to the future, Carl. That's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county Kirk's plot will will be there in 50 years I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here and the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it for a little while. And that comes from the book O Pioneers, which fights one of ours for being number one in my mind. Anyway, enough of the fanboy club of Willa C. So you might be wondering why are we continuing on into Kansas if this is a side trip of Nebraska? And one of the big reasons is because if you're a geography nerd like I am, I mean I have a whole master's degree in geography just for the sake of having a master's degree in geography. There's a really cool place here, South of Red Cloud, which in my mind, I mean you've got these. Willa Cathar and the center of the contiguous United States worth a detour every time. So this is 12 miles south of the Nebraska, Kansas border, I have been to the center of the United States as a whole. There are many ways to declare what a Geographic center is, and it is a very impractical art, I guess, because measurements on the Earth, which is not a perfect sphere, are always difficult. It's a whole thing. You can talk about maps and map making and how you're representing the real world, but it's cool enough that it's close enough. Well, it's close enough to being the real center, so we'll take it. There's a small park at the intersection of AA Road and K 1 91, which is just off US Road 2 81 it's a small park and the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey found this location in 1918 by balancing a cardboard cutout shaped like the United States. That sounds really random, and especially in 1918 when Mapmaking had been really refined throughout the 19th century, and they were really starting to realize there were many different ways to represent the Earth on a flat surface. And so you think, oh, balancing it on a pin, well, turns out it was accurate within 20 miles. Wild. Some things are just wild. If the center of the contiguous United States isn't enough for you, you can go to Belfort in South Dakota, and that is the center of the entire United States with Alaska and Hawaii. But we'll just sit here and enjoy the, the slight breeze and the pretty puffy white clouds going across the blue sky. If you bring a sticker, you can stick it on the back of one of the road signs. They're everywhere and I think it really is that geography nerds and road trip lovers are the only ones who come here. There's a small chapel that has a little place where you can sign and say you've been, and then should you so desire a physical souvenir, you can drive to a little store that's back on the main road a little bit, however. We've had enough time'cause we've wandered around Red Cloud Hastings and now this at the center of the contiguous United States. So we're gonna drive back to Lincoln. The drive back to Lincoln is really great'cause we're not gonna go on the interstate, we'll just zigzag on these farm roads. We'll get some ZA and some Pepsi. And we're going to include the state capitol because the next travel day is going to be, the next travel day is going to be quite, uh, a big episode. And so the state capitol of Nebraska, you can see it from very far away. Lincoln doesn't really have a big skyline. The biggest parts of the skyline are the football stadium for the university and the state capitol. So when you're coming from the Southwest, like we are not on the freeway, but up from the farm road, it becomes extremely visible within like 25, 20 miles. The state capitol is unique because it is essentially a base with a tower and that. Yeah, that doesn't really fly for a lot of states who want to look exactly like Washington DC, the Nebraska State Capitol was built between 1922 and 1932, and it is the first in the country to incorporate a functional tower in its design. Now, this functional tower has led to many a nickname that you can go find out for yourself because I find them to be inappropriate for this kind of podcast, but it's very iconic for Lincoln and Nebraska. The architect Bertram Groner at Goodhue said Nebraska is a level country and its capital should have some altitude or beacon effect. He wasn't wrong after Nebraska made, built. Its state capital, Louisiana, Florida, and North Dakota, all built towers as well. Louisiana is the tallest state capitol with the tower. Nebraska isn't unique just for being the first state capitol with a tower, but it is homed to the only unicameral legislature in the United States, which means that most states, once again, based their legislative bodies on the federal system, which would be House of Representatives and the Senate. Nebraska did not do that. They only have one. It's just the single body. Really interesting. Nebraska has some very interesting. Uh, political just quirks. Despite Nebraska's age as a state, it is one of the youngest state capitals because the old one had foundational issues and can't really do work in a building that's gonna fall apart around you. The building is gorgeous. I highly, highly, highly recommend going inside. It is an art deco masterpiece. You walk in and the floor, the mosaics in the floor, the architectural details, the lights. Everything is, it's a step back in time, especially if you like Art Deco. The tower itself is topped by a 19 and a half foot statue called the Sower, which represents agriculture, which has been the main industry in Nebraska for a very long time. As I mentioned, there are. Mosaics in the floor, and especially the ones in the rotunda and they're five, the genius of water, the genius of fire, the genius of air, the genius of earth and earth as the life giver, you could just stop and stare at it. It's, they're huge and they're really pretty and I don't know, do you appreciate the light, the work that it took to go into them? And it's just the art deco vibes. It's like stepping back into the 1920s. It really is. You just expect speakeasies and flappers. Maybe not that extreme, but it is a step back in time. Also, what I love about the state capitol is that the 14th floor hosts a free observation deck, 245 feet above the ground, worth it, worth it, worth it. That's all I'll say. Just worth it. The view is incredible, even if it's cloudy, to look out over Nebraska. Love it. And this is not the only observation place we will see in eastern Nebraska. I'll just say that as a, as a prelude to the next, the next drive we're going to take on this podcast. But that's it for this little side trip for long distance, for for three things, but really enjoyable Kool-Aid, an author, and we got to geek out as geographic nerds at the center of the contiguous United States. So let's rest. Well folks, because tomorrow's a long day, we're going to cross a third of one's date and two thirds of another. See you next time as we get ready to finish our Nebraska trip and cross the Missouri River.