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This rim-of-the-prairie picture is of Veterans hospital. Here men lie
and think of war. Planes thunder over their upturned faces and they
remember the airplanes of 1918, tho a few may be occupied with planeless
thoughts of San Juan Hill, and a very few with moldy memories of the
blue and the gray. Here, perhaps, war news is taken—largely by radio—in
larger and more frequent doses than anywhere else in Lincoln. All the
patients—capacity is 251—have been thru war somewhere. Before long the
doors will swing open for a fourth generation.
Veterans Hospital is probably the first place in Lincoln to practice the
art of blackouting—a wide precaution, for the hospital, with its 28
subsidiary buildings, off by itself on a hill, sparkles at night like a
row of Christmas trees.
A few veterans at the hospital are veteran patients—five or six
years—but only a few. The turnover in most cases is more of the
pancakes-on-a-hot-griddle sort. It is a general medical hospital which
does not handle long, slow cases. There are 92 veterans hospitals
sprinkled over the country. Except in special cases, each takes veterans
living nearest, so that those treated here are mostly from Nebraska or a
narrow strip around it.
The patients are not left alone with their gloomy thoughts. Tuesday and
Saturday nights they have movies. On Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays
there is some other form of entertainment. The hospital library contains
4,000 books, and if the patient can’t come to the library, the library
comes to the patient. From now until Christmas occupants will be busy
making next spring’s American Legion poppies.
If you, too, are puzzling over the 28 buildings, check them off as
living quarters for attendants, power plant, warehouses, electric shop,
plumbing shop, utilities buildings, garages, etc. etc.
No. 55—Yankee Hill Brick Mfg. Co.
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To the child, grandmother and grandfather were never young—that was too
far away and long ago for him to picture in the faintest degree. So with
cities and towns as we contemplate them today. Our imaginations are
scarcely more elastic than the child’s. We see Lincoln as it is now;
Yankee Hill as it is, or almost is not, today. Seventy-five years ago
they were two little sisters, side by side, quarreling over a pile of
blocks—the first state capitol.
The story is that when the commissioners were on a tour in search of a
capital site they were given a chicken dinner by the ladies of Yankee
Hill, followed by ice cream, “a treat which astonished them greatly, as
it was undoubtedly the first ice cream to be served in the wilds of the
salt basin.” The commissioners, nevertheless, gave the prize to Lincoln.
And now, as in some parable of two sisters, Yankee Hill, in her barren
old age, toils daily in the making of bricks which pile up to the
magnification of the fortunate sister, Lincoln.
The bricks works are almost sixty years old. It is an interesting fact
that as late as 20 years ago there were nearly 50 brick plants in
Nebraska. Gradually they disappeared, for one reason or another, one of
which was that the right kind of clay can’t be found just anywhere one
might throw up a factory. There are now four in the state—at Yankee
Hill, Nebraska City, Hastings and Endicott. Yankee Hill, adjoining
Pioneers park on the southeast, makes all kinds of brick, many of which
are used in Lincoln and many shipped to other places. Plant capacity is
80,000 bricks a day.