How they write

 

Phyllis grew up in Auburn, Nebraska, where she graduated from Auburn High. She then attended college at Burns College in Missouri, which is a two-year school.

After she graduated from Burns, she was accepted at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. She studied voice and piano and received a Bachelor’s degree in music.

Before marrying Bob, she taught music and dramatics in Ponca, Nebraska. She still sings in a trio and likes to arrange music as a hobby.

Bob’s parents had three children. They moved to Lincoln when Bob was only three. Growing up, Bob had a paper route. He was also a Boy Scout and achieved the rank of Eagle Scout at the age of twelve. His father had promised to pay him $25 if he did so, quite an incentive at that time.

Bob was also very active in sports throughout his school years.

Bob attended high school one year in Lincoln, and then the family moved to Omaha when his father was promoted to a manager’s job with Safeway. Bob attended Central High School and for two years worked at a Safeway.

Bob graduated from high school in 1944 and joined the United States Navy as an aviation cadet. That same year he took his Navy Air Corps officer training at Doane College in Crete, Nebraska. He was in the Air Corps from 1944 to 1946, and after the first year spent five months in Norman, Oklahoma, where he worked on a flight line and wound up playing lots of bridge and basketball “because the regular Navy personnel didn’t want us cadets around,” Bob said.

From Norman, Oklahoma, all the cadets were sent to Cadet Pilot Training School at St. Mary’s College, north of Oakland, California. Bob explained, “When we started Winning the war, they were washing out cadets by the thousands and there wasn’t much to do.”

How we write

 

Stan Nabb always left a wonderful aroma in his wake, and it wasn’t aftershave. He delivered baked goods to Omaha homes for the Omar Baking Co.

The Great Depression drove Stan off his family’s Clay County farm in 1933. He was the eldest of five children, a drought had gripped the land, and there just wasn’t enough to go around.

“We’d take turns as to who would eat and who wouldn’t,” he said. “I felt as though I was crowding out the younger ones.”

 

Stan came to Omaha in search of work. He milked cows for a while, and sent home enough money so his family could buy seed corn each year.

Omar offered him a job in 1935. It was the only house-to-house bakery in town, supplying homemakers with nearly a dozen varieties of bread, as well as rolls, pies, coffee cakes and cookies.

Stan’s route took him through the Morton Meadows neighborhood around 42nd and Center Streets. Wearing his Omar uniform and carrying a basket of baked goods, Stan knocked on the doors of regular customers and tried to entice new ones along the way.

“We put in our orders a week in advance, so I had to guess what I’d need on the route,” he said. “Then it was up to me to convince people they needed whatever I had in the wagon.”

In the early years, he traveled the streets in a horse-drawn wagon. He loaded his basket with enough for two or three houses on each side of the street. As he moved along the block, the horse kept pace.

“My first horse could read stoplights,” Stan recalled. “The route took us along 42nd Street from Center to Leavenworth. When she got to that corner, she’d stop if the light was red and she wouldn’t move until it turned green.”