I’ll be slumbering under the stars tonight. The sun is slipping below the horizon, and I'm settling into my sleeping bag for a glorious night under the Milky Way.
Read MoreNebraska
Robert F Kennedy Award for Whiteclay Reporting /
When Mrs. Ethel Kennedy called to tell me that the depth reporting class at University of Nebraska I was teaching along with Joe Starita had won a Robert F Kennedy Journalism award, we talked about several things.
Read MoreMy Nebraska and The Nikon D5 /
I’m a fifth generation Nebraskan, this was my first home and will be my last. I was born in the badlands of the western end of the state. I grew up in the cattle country of the Panhandle.
Read MoreA Town Too Tough To Die /
Last summer my daughter Havana and I were driving along Highway 20 -- one of the prettiest stretches of Blue Highway in America -- across the top of Nebraska. Approaching Cody -- A Town Too Tough To Die -- we saw a small football field nestled between hills just outside of town.
It pulled me straight in like a visual magnet.
As I stepped out of the car, I was mesmerized. The air was so fresh. That giant crystal clear blue sky was littered with puffy white clouds. Gentle prairie sounds hummed all around. I walked across the field and stooped to pick a blade of the sweet long grass.
I knew I had to come back in autumn. As it has been my entire life, a good chunk of my focus this fall would be football -- in Nebraska.
It's about the game, but more about community. Life in a little Nebraska town.
My story and film about the Cody-Kilgore six-man football team is now on ESPN.com.
The Nebraska Name Game Continues... /
The Nebraska name game continues...... I was the keynote speaker at the Freedom Awards in Kearney, NE. on Tuesday night. Great crowd, completely sold out.
Walking to the conference room, Laura and I were discussing how long it would be before I met someone I could play connect the Nebraska name game with.
I immediately connected with my cousin Kip, but Laura claimed he didn't count.
At dinner, the woman seated next to me introduced herself and her husband. Thirty seconds into our conversation, I learned my Uncle Ron married them.
After the speech more familiar faces showed up.
http://www.nebraskaproject.com/portfolio-item/rodney-delores/
Nebraska, the good life.
The Nebraska Project Continues /
From the only in Nebraska department. On our way to Gibbon Sunday night we stopped for coffee. I was paying when I heard Laura exclaim. “Katie Morrow!!!”
Read MoreFull Circle in a Pair of Small Nebraska Towns /
Amy Sandeen and I were standing on a glacier in Iceland and I looked her and said do you know where we need to go? Sutton, Nebraska.
She smiled and said, of course we do.
A few weeks later we were walking into Browns' Thrift Store. More than fifty years ago my grandfather Adolph Roemmich would take my hand and walk me three LONG blocks from his house to Sutton’s main street. We’d go to Browns. For chocolate clusters and pickles. And to look at the magazine rack just inside the front door right next to the cash registers.
He’d show me Life, Time, Sports Illustrated. It was my window on the world outside rural Nebraska. Big bold beautiful images crafted by the best photographers working. What a life they must have had. Real life Walter Mitty’s. I saw things I’d never seen before presented by people who knew how to observe. .
I would spend hours looking at those publications—and the man running the store took pity on me, at my age, I couldn’t afford any of those glorious glossies, so he let me treat his store like a library.
So on a lovely late September afternoon this year I went in to pick up a coke. And found my past and my future.
The chocolate and pickles are still there. So is the magazine rack. Looks about the same, a little the worse from decades of use. There was a tow headed kid standing there looking at an SI. And one of my images was on the cover.
I grew up in the Panhandle. The big paper there is the Scottsbluff Star-Herald. As a kid I was a newspaper boy carrying the StarHerald to 100 homes, 6 days a week, for 4 years.
The Star-Herald would drop a bundle of the papers on my front lawn around 4:30 a.m., and by 5 a.m. I had folded them, put rubber bands around them and packed them into a cloth bag that fit on the handle bars of my bike. My route was 3 1/2 miles long. During the spring, summer and fall it was awesome. Up early, out on my bicycle, throwing things. Best exercise, best time of day, and it paid well.
It was a wonderful education.
Imagine my delight when the StarHerald devoted a big chunk of their Sunday front page real estate to a story about my nebraskaproject.com.
Yet another nice hug from Nebraska.
Home.
It's Here: The Nebraska Project /
After six months of shooting and traveling around the prairie lands, I'm excited to announce the launch of Straw Hat Visuals' new artistic and storytelling endeavor -- The Nebraska Project.
To me, Nebraska is not only my birth place, but a rich terrain for the imagination and the journalist. It is a place of cowboys and poets, buffalo and meadowlarks.
Often overlooked as the middle of nowhere, Nebraska is actually the center of everything, providing sustenance and grit for the country.
Some stories are small, like the 60 year romance between Rodney and Delores, and some are as big as the Nebraska sky itself.
There are many more stories to tell and ways we can together preserve and record the beauty of America’s majestic frontier.
I hope you enjoy our project and learning more about Nebraska - the land and people who make it great.
Nebraska Nights /
It doesn't get better than this.
Sublime night. Perfect temperature — 65 degrees. Crystal clear skies. Virtually no wind. Nothing between us and the heavens — just now starting to sparkle, and by midnight the stars will completely fill the sky.
This is my favorite place on earth. Nebraska. Right smack in the middle of the USA.
Tonight, I'm in the Sandhills in the middle of a long grass pasture. No one for miles in any direction. Except for friends helping me work on a series of short films saluting my birth state.
Absolutely peaceful. Incredibly stimulating.
Home.
