Stories of Omaha's history by Stu Pospisil

News item: City looks at ways to route truck traffic away from Florence business district.

That idea to move traffic from 30th Street has been bandied about since the 1930s. It’s older than the Mormon Bridge. Older than John J. Pershing Drive, the drive along the Missouri River that has been mentioned as a possible bypass.

Santa Claus is coming to town.

In Omaha through the years, his arrival has been by planes (OK, by helicopter), trains, automobiles and parades. Santa has listened to hundreds of thousands of children’s wish lists indoors and out, on the courthouse lawn and in discount department stores.

The impetus for this column on Omaha’s neighborhood movie houses was the renovation of the Benson Theater to an arts performance space and education center.

But get a bite of this: Those burgers that Dinker’s Bar and Grill on South 29th serves? Their customers are sitting in the old Hanscom Theater.

One Saturday afternoon on the outskirts of Omaha, the automobile was here to stay.

One night only in Omaha, it was Frank Sinatra, Buddy Rich and Tommy Dorsey on stage at the Chermot Ballroom.

Sinatra got only second billing in that 1942 appearance. It was Dorsey and his orchestra who had a weekly Sunday night broadcast on NBC radio. Ol’ Blue Eyes was still a year away from making it big.

Mention the Lazy Leopard, the Bird Cage, the Crest or the Crystal Tree dining rooms, and it signaled that a night on the town was in store at the New Tower Inn.

Omaha’s first motel evolved and sprawled to five blocks along the east side of 78th Street between Dodge and Cass Streets. It began as an amenity to Peony Park and took on a life of its own in the early 1960s.

Peony Park has been gone for nearly 30 years. Can you believe it?

A generation of Omahans — and newcomers — likely are unaware that the city’s major amusement spot from the 1930s through the park’s closure in 1994 was at 78th and Cass Streets. A shopping area anchored by a Hy-Vee Supermarket has replaced it.

The Native American woman might have been an Otoe, an Omaha, a Pawnee.

She might have been old. She might have been left behind in her tepee on purpose or while her tribe was on a hunt along the Elkhorn River, or abandoned to die by the roadside.

Southwest of 13th Street and Missouri Avenue is some of South Omaha’s hilliest terrain, and within that area were the Curo Springs.

Before Curo Springs, it was known as the Medicine Springs and, still further back, as Oowanoos, the Otoe word for the “springs of eternal life.”

This week’s column is one for the books.

Sewer squabbles, traffic snarls and a bakery strike were on the list of the top local news stories The World-Herald covered in 1951. No. 2 in the newsroom poll were the stranger-than-fiction Douglas County Jail breaks, which fed into the No. 1 story: the escapades of habitual criminal Kenneth Allen Kitts.

They were the twin banes in Omaha’s pioneer years. One of them came back to life during the nighttime deluge that hit the area last weekend.

The Jones Street “river” of floodwater south of the Old Market followed the hollow of the long-forgotten Otoe — or South Omaha — Creek. Go back to 1882 to find a storm that saw water levels that high in the area.

The transfer was only days away. Omaha’s air-mail service would be moving from Ak-Sar-Ben Field to Jarvis Offutt Field at Fort Crook.

The Omaha Chamber of Commerce, which had a 5-year lease on the Ak-Sar-Ben property running out on July 1, 1924, was prepared to remove its $35,000 hangar — built in modular sections — until the city was ready to build a municipal airport.

Since this would have been the centennial of Thoroughbred horse racing meets at Ak-Sar-Ben, let’s look back at the history of the area northwest of 63nd and Center Streets.

The research has turned up a juicy nugget — the whereabouts of the burial site of Omaha, the Triple Crown horse in 1935. Hint: there are people resting every night on top of it.

Check out a city map to visualize what turned into Omaha’s Keystone neighborhood.

See the route between Marian High School and Adams Elementary School, mostly along Keystone Drive and 79th Street?

Ezra Meeker’s one-man crusade is credited for reawakening awareness of the Oregon Trail in the early 20th century.

In the process, he erroneously linked Omaha to the trail and others took his word for it.

Back in my boyhood, a family treat was Sunday dinner at Miller’s Fairway Café in Venice.

Nebraska, not Italy.

Before he met Dr. David Livingstone in Africa, Henry Morton Stanley was using Omaha as a home base for his newspaper reporting.

Who did he hang out with? Phillip King (1822-1888), one of the earliest Black Omahans. And it wasn’t Stanley who was buying dinner.

‘Dan, I’m going to get you afore the sun goes down. Do you understand?”

“All right, Tom, but make sure. If you get the better of me I won’t squeal. But if I get the better of you, you won’t have time to.”

Sky View, Capri, Golden Spike, Q-Twin, Council Bluffs, 76th and West Dodge, 84th and Center, Grand View.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Omahans had their pick of drive-in movie theaters. Cars with families and cars with teens — some watching the film and others, well, you know — side by side, wired speakers hanging inside a car door.

Remember when you’d go to Rosenblatt Stadium for a College World Series game and look for a parking space in the neighborhood south of the ballpark?

And some of the streets were diagonal to the city’s standard grid?

‘Mascotte” means lucky charm in French. It was popularized by the debut of the comic opera “La Mascotte” in 1881. “Mascot” entered the English lexicon soon after and every sports team had to have one.

What could have used a lucky charm was the failed factory town of Mascotte. Born in 1886-87, its life as an Omaha suburb was short.

World-Herald sports writer Stu Pospisil pinch hits with an occasional column on Omaha-area history. Pospisil has two books on Benson history to his credit. His latest title, “Nebraska Golf: Out of the Shadows,” is due out in June. See a preview at owhstore.com.

West Dodge Road has been rebuilt over and over.