Changes of a lifetime
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By COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
Sheldon Kushner has lived much of his life along North 27th Street, beginning in a tiny bedroom above his father’s grocery store where he was born 78 years ago.
“Here it is.”
He points to a faded black-and- white photo of a store with a false wooden front that looks like something from a cowboy movie. The two windows on the second floor are owl eyes watching the action on the street.
“I was born up there. Those windows were the living room. The bedrooms were in the back.”
That was in 1928. His father, Max Kushner, a Jewish immigrant from Russia with a fifth-grade education, ran a thriving grocery store on the southwest corner of 27th and W. The street was already a main thoroughfare.
It was a great place for Kushner’s grocery store to grow and a great place for a friendly Kushner kid to grow up.
“You’d have to put yourself back in those years to know how neighborhoods were,” he says, seated at the dining room table of his duplex in south Lincoln. “Everyone knew their neighbors in those days. Every grocery store knew their customers. They were more like friends than customers.”
Kushner can still see Mrs. Wilcox, the old lady who lived right across the street from the store. He pulled groceries to her in his wagon.
He can still hear the conversations at the barbershop down the block. An Italian immigrant named Francesco was the barber. He can still smell the potato soup Francesco’s wife made and served him in their apartment at the back of the shop.
He can still taste the sugar, the fresh-shredded coconut and pitted dates he and his brothers used to snack on while packing bulk products into smaller sacks.
Although many names have faded, he can still see those familiar faces and hear the echo of his young-boy conversations with the people of North 27th Street.
He laughs.
“My mother always said that whenever I was out of the house and wasn’t at school, she knew I was visiting someone. I’d go out on a delivery for two, three hours with my wagon, when it should have taken half an hour.”
The old wooden store burned down in 1936 when an electrical short ignited egg cartons under the back stairwell. No one was hurt. The apartment was empty. His family was living in a brick house near 30th and J by that time.
Sheldon was 8 when the store burned, but he remembers a lot about it. It went up so fast the firefighters, whose fire hall was just across the street, couldn’t put it out.
His father rebuilt in brick.
“The new building my father built — here it is.”
He shows another old photo of Kushner’s, says it was one of the “Jewish” stores. His dad closed on Saturday and opened on Sunday.
Grocery stores were everywhere in those days, Sheldon says. Open a phone book from 1938 and you’d probably find six pages of grocery stores in the yellow pages. The stores lined North 27th Street.
Sheldon learned to drive when he was 12. A man who worked for his father used to take him out on deliveries to the north side of town. Bob was his name. He was a responsible man in his 30s.
They took Max Kushner’s 1936 Pontiac.
“I was a kind of a snotty boss’s son. One day I said, ‘Bob, I’m going to drive.’”
No, Bob said.
Sheldon kept pestering until he got his way.
Driving down the street, he says, made him feel like a big shot.
When he was old enough to drive legally, he was a little reckless. So were his brothers. When they’d ding their dad’s car, they’d take it to a mechanic on North 27th Street who could keep a secret. The guy joked that he made a special tool just for the Kushner boys — an ice pick with a hook that he used to shape the Pontiac’s thin chrome trim.
Max Kushner didn’t suspect a thing.
Sheldon remembers driving his dad’s car on South 27th Street one day in 1944 or 1945 to pick up a date. The girl lived about as far south as the city went in those days, to the end of the Country Club golf course.
He loved to dance, so they probably went dancing at one of the city’s ballrooms. Afterward, he pulled into a side street — Stockwell, he thinks — just south of the golf course.
“I suppose I was going in there to park with her,” he says, smiling.
It was dark. The gravel was thick. The car got stuck.
“I called a wrecker to pull me out because I was afraid to tell anyone. It cost me 15 dollars to get that out.”
He married Marcia in 1949, and they moved into an apartment in a stucco mansion behind his dad’s store. His dad owned the mansion. Sheldon and his wife lived in what had been a huge master bedroom. Their bathtub was 7 feet long.
“I could have drowned in it.”
After three years, they moved to Hamburg, Iowa, and began grocery stores in that state. In 1962, they returned to Lincoln and opened a large, two-story discount store called King Dollar, near 27th and Vine. King Dollar closed in 1973.
Sheldon’s dad died in 1954. A film shop rented the brick grocery store building after that. At first, the renters had a five-year lease. After five years, they had such a close relationship that they didn’t need to sign papers, he says.
The business climate along North 27th Street changed when shopping centers sprang up, Sheldon says. The street began to look run down. He doesn’t put shopping centers down. It’s progress, he says, and his dad always said you have to adapt to the changing business world.
Sheldon was on a renewal committee the city formed about six years ago to recommend improvements. The committee helped bring new business to the old strip.
He likes what he sees again.
“I think it’s a wonderful business street now,” he says, “and I think it’s come a long way from where it was 10 years ago.”
And 78 years ago.
The old brick Kushner’s was torn down about five years ago. That store and its wooden predecessor, where Sheldon was born, stood on a spot of that street, between what is now a Walgreens and a fast-food joint called McDonald’s.
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.
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