NENebraska Famous People

Between 1899 and 1935, one mid-sized city on the Missouri River produced Fred Astaire, Gerald Ford, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Malcolm X, Warren Buffett and Bob Gibson. All seven were born in Omaha, and only Buffett stayed. Nothing about the city explains it, which is why lists of famous Nebraskans tend to read like a coincidence someone made up.

Gerald Ford left the state at three weeks old under a different name

The 38th president was born in Omaha on 14 July 1913 and christened Leslie Lynch King Jr. His mother Dorothy took him and left his father within weeks, moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and married Gerald Rudolff Ford, whose name the boy took. He did not learn the full story until he was a teenager. Ford is the only person to serve as both vice president and president without ever being elected to either office: Nixon appointed him in 1973 after Spiro Agnew resigned, and he took the presidency in August 1974, holding it until January 1977. The Omaha house he was born in burned in 1971, and the site is now the Gerald R. Ford Birthsite and Gardens.

Two Nebraskans who changed what the law recognised

In 1877 the Ponca were forced from their Niobrara homeland to Indian Territory, where a third of them died. Standing Bear walked more than five hundred miles back in the winter of 1879 carrying his son's body for burial, was arrested, and went to federal court in Omaha. In May 1879 Judge Elmer Dundy ruled that an Indian is a person within the meaning of the law and therefore entitled to a writ of habeas corpus, the first time an American court said so.

Malcolm Little was born in Omaha on 19 May 1925. His father Earl was a Baptist preacher and an organiser for Marcus Garvey's movement, and after Klan riders surrounded the family house the Littles moved on to Milwaukee and then Lansing. He is remembered as Malcolm X. A statue of Standing Bear and a marker at the Malcolm X birthsite now stand a few miles apart in the same city.

The Omaha Community Playhouse and what came out of it

Henry Fonda, born in Grand Island in 1905 and raised in Omaha, was working in an office at twenty when a family friend pushed him into auditioning at the Omaha Community Playhouse. The friend was Dorothy Pennebaker Brando, whose son Marlon was born in Omaha in 1924 and who would remake screen acting a generation later. Montgomery Clift was born in Omaha in 1920. Darryl F. Zanuck, born in Wahoo in 1902, ran production at Warner Bros. and then 20th Century Fox for decades. Johnny Carson grew up in Norfolk, did magic tricks as The Great Carsoni, studied at the University of Nebraska, and hosted the Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992. Nick Nolte was born in Omaha in 1941 and Hilary Swank in Lincoln in 1974.

Willa Cather made the Divide into literature

Cather was nine when her family moved from the Shenandoah Valley to Webster County in 1883, and the shock of open grass with no trees never left her writing. She grew up in Red Cloud among Bohemian, Swedish and Norwegian homesteaders, wrote O Pioneers! in 1913 and My Ántonia in 1918, and won the Pulitzer in 1923 for One of Ours. Six of her novels are set in the state. Wright Morris, born in Central City in 1910, won the National Book Award for The Field of Vision in 1957. Loren Eiseley, born in Lincoln in 1907 to a deaf mother, became the anthropologist whose essays in The Immense Journey taught a generation to read landscape as time. Ted Sorensen of Lincoln wrote the speeches John F. Kennedy is quoted for.

The senator who abolished half the legislature

George W. Norris represented Nebraska in Congress from 1903 to 1943 and left an unusual amount behind: the Twentieth Amendment, which moved inaugurations from March to January; the Tennessee Valley Authority; the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932, which curbed anti-strike injunctions; and the campaign that persuaded Nebraska voters in 1934 to abolish their state house of representatives. The single chamber first met in 1937 and is still the only unicameral legislature in the country. William Jennings Bryan, who came to Lincoln as a young lawyer, went to the House in 1891, gave the Cross of Gold speech at thirty-six in 1896, and was the Democratic nominee for president three times. He prosecuted the Scopes trial in Tennessee in July 1925 and died five days after the verdict.

Buffett, Gibson, and a drink invented in Hastings

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha on 30 August 1930, bought his first shares at eleven, filed his first tax return at thirteen, and has run Berkshire Hathaway from an office there since the 1960s while living in a house he bought in 1958. Bob Gibson, born in Omaha in 1935, gave up 1.12 earned runs per nine innings in 1968, a season so lopsided that baseball lowered the pitcher's mound the following winter. Gale Sayers, raised in Omaha, played six seasons for the Chicago Bears before his knees ended it. Edwin Perkins, working in Hastings, turned a liquid concentrate into a powder in 1927 and called it Kool-Aid, which is now the official state soft drink.

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