Phoenix in brick and mortar

M's Pub, a.k.a.

Mercer Building.

Old Market,

Omaha, Neb.

Yesterday and today

Bostwick-Frohardt Collection/The Durham Museum

January 1905, 11th and Howard in Omaha's Old Market.

 

January 2016, 11th and Howard in Omaha's Old Market.

Bo Pelini: Classy to the #@#%&*$! end

Is there any doubt Nebraska is well rid of ex-football coach Bo Pelini?

If you had any lingering misgivings about NU's firing of the underachieving coach, who just was named head gridiron guy at the Economically Depressed University of Misfit Jocks Youngstown State, this article in the Omaha World-Herald ought to dispel them.

The newspaper came across an audio recording of Pelini's final meeting with his former players Dec. 2, and he went out the door in the classiest of manners. Or not.

A guy like (Eichorst) who has no integrity, he doesn’t even understand what a core value is," Pelini told players. "And he hasn’t understood it from the day he got here. I saw it when I first met with the guy.

“To have core values means you have to be about something, you have to represent something, you have to have something that is important to you. He is a f------ lawyer who makes policies. That’s all he’s done since he’s been here is hire people and make policies to cover his own ass.”

The World-Herald on Wednesday listened to an audio tape of Pelini’s address that night. He spoke conversationally, rarely raising his voice. It’s a rare window into the mindset of a coach who increasingly felt besieged by his own administration and fan base.

During the tape, Pelini expresses gratitude, support and advice for players. The majority of the tape, however, reveals Pelini’s thoughts about Eichorst. In the first minute of his talk, he uses two vulgarities associated with female genitalia to describe his former boss.

“I didn't really have any relationship with the A.D.,” Pelini said. “The guy, you guys saw him (Sunday), the guy is a total p----. I mean, he is, and he's a total c---.”

The administration’s lack of support, Pelini told players, wore on him and his family.

“I said to (assistant coach Rick Kaczenski) at one point, I said this job is killing me. I said I don't want to die doing this job. I meant it. I was like, I don't want to have a heart attack on this job.”

Pelini was fired Nov. 30 and was due to receive a $7.9 million buyout, mitigated slightly by his next salary.

On Wednesday, Youngstown State announced Pelini as its head football coach. He’ll return to his hometown and work under President Jim Tressel, who led Youngstown State to four FCS national championships.

During his introductory press conference Wednesday in Ohio, Pelini called Tressel “a president who understands football, who’s going to support me, something I don’t know if I’ve ever had.”

YEAH, Jim Tressel is just the kind of guy who oozes integrity and understanding of how to conduct a college football program the right way.

Remember that Tressel is the guy whose football program at Ohio State had gone rogue under his leadership. Remember, too, that Tressel is the guy who withheld what he knew about an improper-benefits scandal involving Buckeye players and a shady tattoo shop from his own administration and then lied to NCAA investigators. From ESPN at the time:

Former Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, who was forced to resign in May, committed the ultimate sin for a college coach when he withheld information about the scandal from OSU officials and NCAA investigators. In fact, according to the NCAA's infractions report released Tuesday, Tressel had four opportunities to reveal his knowledge of the scandal to the NCAA, but never once told the truth.

The NCAA also didn't buy Tressel's excuses for remaining silent. Before Tressel was forced to resign, he said he didn't reveal that former OSU quarterback Terrelle Pryor and other players were trading memorabilia for tattoos and cash because the tattoo-shop owner, Edward Rife, was under investigation for drug dealing. Tressel said he didn't want to jeopardize the federal investigation and feared for the safety of his players.

"The committee found [Tressel's reasoning] not to be credible," the report said. "The former head coach's inaction on four different occasions was in the committee's view, a deliberate effort to conceal the situation from the institution and the NCAA in order to preserve the eligibility of the aforementioned student-athletes, several of whom were key contributors to the team's highly successful 12-1 season in 2010."

SEC associate commissioner Greg Sankey, who serves on the NCAA's infractions committee, called Tressel's conduct "very serious and, frankly, very disappointing."

Now Meyer and the rest of the Buckeyes get to pay for Tressel's sins.

As part of its punishment, the NCAA made it nearly impossible for Tressel to become a college coach again. The NCAA hit Tressel with a five-year show-cause penalty until December 2016, under which any school that wants to hire him must submit a report to the NCAA detailing why it needs to employ him and how it would monitor him to ensure he doesn't break its rules again. Any school hiring Tressel during the five-year period would be subject to more severe sanctions if he cheats again.

Even if a school hires Tressel, he will be suspended for the first five regular-season games when he returns, as well as any postseason contests.

YEAH, Pelini's kind of guy is a man the NCAA doesn't trust to coach college football . . . but apparently is just the kind of guy to run Youngstown State. And Bo Pelini apparently is just the kind of guy a man who can't be trusted to coach college ball thinks ought to be coaching at Youngstown State.

Gotcha. It seems the birds of a feather have flocked together.

Jim Tressel's guy is a grown man with obvious anger issues who goes before a bunch of 18-22 year-old kids -- most of whom stiil have to be at NU. play for the Huskers and presumably stay in the good graces of their athletic director -- then speaks about that AD in the most vulgar and demeaning manner. "Oversharing" hardly begins to cover Pelini's actions in that meeting.

With a bunch of college kids.

For whom he set himself up as a role model.

Role model? Bat-s*** crazy cult leader, perhaps. Role model, no. Unless, of course, you expand the definition of "role model" to include being a hell of an example of how not to conduct oneself.

 

Pelini's not-so-greatest hits: EXCEPTIONALLY NSFW

I GUESS in Youngstown, role models do their damnedest to poison the well for the poor saps who have to clean up their overwrought messes. The Huskers' new football coach, Mike Riley, has his work cut out for him, it would seem.

And so do those Nebraska football players who thought Pelini was just the kind of man they wanted to be someday. Breaking up is hard to do, but for these poor guys, growing up is going to be even harder with a role model like their former coach.

Bo Pelini is not what Nebraska football has, by and large, been about. May it never be again.

In firing this underachieving hothead -- the Freudian concept of the human Id personified -- Shawn Eichorst has done not only Nebraska football a great favor but done a great favor to the entire state of Nebraska as well. If that makes the man a P-word and a C-word, those are labels he should wear with pride.

Pelini is Ohio's problem now. Thanks be to God . . . and Eichorst.

Why they stay; why we won't go

(New York) Daily News

Some people.
 
Sandy the Superstorm has laid waste to large chunks of the Eastern Seaboard -- most notably, New York City and the Jersey Shore -- and some people's first reaction is to wonder why the suffering souls they see on the TV news didn't get the hell out of Dodge.

I have some thoughts on that. 

They were there because it was home. Was.

 Is?

They also were there because, generally unused to hurricanes, they couldn't believe how bad the wind and surge could be. And who thought an inferno would start amid the flood? Memories of what happened in New Orleans with Katrina are short . . . except for those of the looting, and of families there who may have escaped the federal flood but were cleaned out by the feral among them whose daily existence is preying upon their neighbors.

That's why they stayed.

Was it a particularly bright idea to stay? Hell, no. But the human instinct is to try to protect what one has worked a lifetime for, and the fear of abandoning one's home oftentimes is greater than the fear of nature's fury.

I'm waiting for someone to wonder why in the world anyone would live in New York, which sits so perilously astride the ocean fierce, which awaits the first opportunity to reclaim it, if but for a short while.You know, just like some people did about New Orleans in Katrina's murderous wake.

It happens every time.

THE ANSWER is the same as that of the citizens of New Orleans, and of the smaller communities of Plaquemines Parish, La., whose homes were sent under the waves by Category 1 Isaac this August. They live there because it's home, the place they know and love . . . and the people they know and love. It is who they are. In large part, it made them who they are.

No matter where you live, you very well could be done in by something -- hurricane, flood, tornado, earthquake, wildfire, drought, tsunami or blizzard. Such is life in this fallen world and on this wild and perilous planet.

I was born and raised in south Louisiana and have lived almost half my life in Nebraska. I know hurricanes, I know tornadoes, too, and I have come to know drought, catastrophic thunderstorms and blizzards. Folks down South wonder why I'd willingly live in a place where summer can bring 110-degree days and winter can hit you with 25-below-zero cold and snow drifts up to your neck.

It's the same reason they refuse to pack up and move because of air you nearly can drink and catastrophes you know by name that blow in off the Gulf of Mexico to try and kill you. It's because Nebraska is home now. I love it, and it's where the people I know and love stand beside me to brave whatever curveball nature chooses to throw at us. Because between the bad times and the peril lies the beauty and the wonder of the Great Plains.
 

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

HERE, JUST beyond Omaha's suburban sprawl, lies a horizon that stretches beyond all telling, rolling hills that give this wild land its texture and an endless expanse of sky brilliant with untold billions of stars. The threat of an F5 tornado once in a blue moon is nothing in the face of a landscape "charged with the grandeur of God."

I imagine the good people of New York and New Jersey feel the same way about endless beaches, the Manhattan skyline, boardwalks and an ocean that stretches beyond the blue horizon. I grew up feeling that way about the Mississippi River, upon which my hometown of Baton Rouge was built 313 years ago.

And the Mississippi can kill you in a New York second in more ways than you can list.

I know why people live on peril's edge in New York and on the Jersey Shore, and I can understand why -- foolish as it ultimately was -- they balked at surrendering their homes and home places to nature's fury without a fight, futile as that usually is.

I suggest that instead of second-guessing people who probably already are second-guessing themselves, we instead hold out a hand -- preferably one filled with cash -- to our brother and sister Americans during their darkest hour.

No man is an island, even though he might live on one, and we never know when we will be next in fate's crosshairs.

Fire and rain

Won't you look down on me, Jesus
You've got to help me make a stand
You've just got to see me through another day
My body's aching and my time is at hand
And I won't make it any other way

Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again

I’ve been walking my mind to an easy time
My back turned towards the sun
Lord knows the cold wind blows,
it’ll turn your head around
Well, there’s hours of time on the telephone line
To talk about things to come
Sweet dreams and flying machines
in pieces on the ground.

-- Fire and Rain (1970)
James Taylor

Mother of the Year

A woman had her children take the rap for a fire that severely burned her boyfriend, authorities allege.

Surveillance cameras showed Tanesha Beard, 30, buying two one-gallon gas containers at a gas station a half-hour before the fire that severely burned and critically injured Jermaine Westbrook, Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine said.

On Friday, authorities reported that Beard's two children a 12-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl admitted setting the fire and mentioned watching a Tom & Jerry cartoon.

That appears now to have been a foil designed to cover for their mother, Kleine said.

Kleine said charges will be dropped against the children. However, they and two other children will remain under the supervision of state Health and Human Services officials.

Kleine charged Beard Tuesday morning with first-degree arson, first-degree assault and four counts of child abuse.

Relatives said Beard started the fire to hurt her boyfriend, and then blamed her children because she thought they would escape serious punishment..

Beard, who could not be reached for comment Monday, interrupted a juvenile court hearing Friday and claimed she set the fire. Douglas County sheriff's deputies removed her from the room. 

-- Omaha World-Herald

Simply '70s: The hottest car of the decade

Meet the Ford Pinto -- new for the '71 model year.

Look at that baby! It's "a little carefree car to put a little kick in your life."


I'll say!