Lincoln's Hall of Fame
Lincoln's list of famous include vice presidents, musicians, U.S. Senators, and, yes, mass murderers. Here are the famous, and infamous, sons and daughters of Lincoln.
William Jennings Bryan
A striking figure who occupies a unique niche in American history, William Jennings Bryan would captain Lincoln’s all-time speech team. His credentials: three-time Democratic presidential nominee; secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, resigning in protest over the U.S. drift toward World War I in 1915; and famed orator, renowned for castigating banks and the moneyed class.
Bryan’s populist views earned him the title of “The Great Commoner.” Today, he is remembered most for his Christian-centered argument against Darwin’s theory of evolution during the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee. Bryan died just five days after completion of the trial at the age of 65.
Bryan practiced law in Lincoln and served as a Nebraska congressman from 1891 to 1895. Born in Illinois, he moved to Lincoln in 1887, living here more than three decades before moving to Florida.
Bryan’s statue stood at the north entrance to the State Capitol for 20 years. It was moved to Bryan’s Fairview home adjacent to BryanLGH Medical Center East in 1967 upon direction of the Legislature, ostensibly because it “looked like a suitcase” in front of the towering Capitol, though some suspected political motives for the move.
— Don Walton
Dick Cheney
Often at the center of controversy in the Bush administration, Dick Cheney would win honors as Lincoln’s lightning rod.
Described by some as the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, he has been in the middle of firestorms over the war in Iraq, faulty or manipulated intelligence and special interest ties to the oil industry.
Cheney was born in Lincoln in 1941 and lived here until his family moved to Wyoming in 1954.
His long career in public service began in the Nixon administration in 1969. Six years later, he was chief of staff for President Gerald Ford.
A Wyoming congressman from 1979 to 1989, he served as defense secretary for the elder Bush. Before being tapped as George W. Bush’s running mate, he was CEO of Halliburton Co.
Even a return to his birthplace in 2004 created sparks. Cheney came to Lincoln to raise campaign funds for Republican congressional nominee Jeff Fortenberry. A number of Democratic city officials wanted the federal government or the Republican Party to pay the city’s security costs for helping protect the vice president for what essentially was a campaign stop. While in Lincoln, Cheney visited his boyhood home at 2915 S. 44th St.
Cheney is the second vice president with Lincoln ties. Charles Dawes, vice president in the Coolidge administration, was a Lincoln businessman for seven years.
— Don Walton
Teena Brandon
No one knows if Teena Brandon wanted to be famous.
Yet the 21-year-old Lincoln woman gained fame by being murdered Dec. 31, 1993, in a rented farmhouse near Humboldt.
A lifeless body found with gunshot and knife wounds let the secret escape. The secret that “Brandon,” a young man whose flair for romance made him popular with the ladies, was really a woman.
Perhaps Brandon didn’t know if you run with a rough crowd, it can be dangerous to fool people. The rough crowd Brandon ran with in Falls City included two young, unemployed drunks who had done time in prison. Tom Nissen and John Lotter beat and raped Brandon, their twisted attempt to teach a lesson on true gender.
Brandon filed a rape report. Law officers questioned the attackers but didn’t arrest them. Several days later, they found their way to the rented farmhouse and killed their accuser along with Lisa Lambert and Phillip DeVine, two people in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A true-crime novel came out followed by a documentary film called “The Brandon Teena Story,” and finally the motion picture “Boys Don’t Cry,” which won Hilary Swank an Oscar in 1999 for her portrayal of Brandon. All of those works were fascinated by the collision of youth, class, gender and violence that occurred in Falls City in late 1993.
— Joe Duggan
Charles Lindbergh
“Early in the morning on May 20, 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh took off in The Spirit of St. Louis from Roosevelt Field near New York City,” the New York Times reported on May 21, 1927.
“Flying northeast along the coast, he was sighted later in the day flying over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. From St. Johns, Newfoundland, he headed out over the Atlantic, using only a magnetic compass, his airspeed indicator and luck to navigate toward Ireland.
“The flight had captured the imagination of the American public like few events in history. Citizens waited nervously by their radios, listening for news of the flight. A frenzied crowd of more than 100,000 people gathered at Le Bourget Field (near Paris) to greet him.
“When he landed, less than 34 hours after his departure from New York, Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.”
But where did he learn to fly?
In an airfield between present-day Van Dorn and Calvert streets at Lincoln Standard Aircraft — a center of aviation in the Midwest during the 1920s.
At 20th and High streets, near the Country Club’s private golf course, there’s a small memorial marking the site.
Lindbergh, who was born in Detroit, Mich., in 1902, died an American hero in 1974.
— Josh Swartzlander
Hilary Swank
During her acceptance speech for her second Academy Award in 2005, actress Hilary Swank famously said she was just a girl from a trailer park with a dream.
While the Oscar-winning star of “Million Dollar Baby” did spend a large part of her childhood in that trailer park in Bellingham, Wash., she actually was born in Lincoln in 1974 and lived in the city for the first three or so years of her life.
Swank moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career when she was 16. In 1994, she had her break-out role in “The Next Karate Kid.” Swank also acted in various television shows, including “Beverly Hills, 90210.”
Swank’s career really took off after she portrayed Teena Brandon, a Lincoln woman murdered because she wanted to live as a man. It was her role in “Boys Don’t Cry” that earned Swank her first Oscar in 1999.
Swank underwent radical physical transformation for both her Oscar-winning performances.
She cut her hair short and lived as a man for weeks before filming “Boys Don’t Cry.” To get in shape for “Million Dollar Baby,” Swank boxed and did weight training six days a week for three months before shooting began, putting on 19 pounds of muscle.
In the Jan. 31, 2005, issue of Newsweek, Swank was quoted as saying: “My most annoying question is, ‘Hilary, are you ever going to play a pretty girl?’”
— Hilary Kindschuh
James Valentine
When James Valentine left Lincoln for Los Angeles, he gave himself a musical time limit, penning a song he called “26,” the age at which he was either going to make it in the music business or give it up for a more stable career.
Valentine beat his deadline last year, earning a Best New Artist Grammy Award with his band Maroon 5, which became one of pop music’s success stories when “Songs About Jane,” its 2002 record, sold 9 million copies worldwide. That success has put Valentine on stages around the world and living out childhood fantasies of opening for the Rolling Stones and playing Pershing Auditorium.
Even with the riches and fame that come with being a pop star, Valentine is still a kid from Lincoln.
“Just having been so far outside this whole thing, then finding myself in the middle of it, I really appreciate what I have,” Valentine said.
A Lincoln Southeast graduate, Valentine learned to play “Smoke on the Water” in a group guitar class at the old Schmitt Music store in Gateway Mall, first heard the blues at the Zoo Bar, honed his jazz chops with members of the Nebraska Jazz Orchestra and played gigs at Duffy’s Tavern with his Lincoln band Square, which moved to Los Angeles in 2000.
A couple years later, Valentine left Square and joined Kara’s Flowers, a band made up of native Angelinos. That group became Maroon 5.
— L. Kent Wolgamott
Bob Kerrey
Bob Kerrey, who biked through the streets of north Lincoln as a kid, grew up to be an intriguing politician, the state’s 35th governor and a U.S. senator.
Kerrey once delivered Lincoln’s morning newspaper. He played football for Northeast High School (Class of 1961), earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Nebraska and enlisted in the Navy after receiving his draft notice.
A Navy SEAL, Kerrey lost a part of his right leg in Vietnam and received the Medal of Honor. He became a critic of that war when he returned home. Nebraskans then put the 39-year-old political novice into the governor’s mansion, where he remained popular during a bruising recession and even brought his movie star girlfriend, Debra Winger.
Nebraskans twice elected him to the U.S. Senate, and he made a brief run at the presidency.
Today Kerrey, president of New York City’s New School University, is still a media favorite, sought after for his cogent analysis, wit and unpredictability.
But his roots remain in Nebraska. And he remembers the ride from Lincoln to Omaha, east on U.S. 6 — past Boys Town, past the drive-in theater just east of 72nd Street that marked entry into the suburbs and into the business district. “Finally we crossed the river into Iowa, leaving the familiar feel of home behind us.”
— Nancy Hicks
Mary Pipher
Mary Pipher wanted to write the world into a better place. So in the early 1990s, the Lincoln therapist began, writing first about women’s deadly quest for thinness.
The world began to take notice in 1994, when Pipher wrote “Reviving Ophelia,”a best seller about saving the selves of adolescent girls.
Four more books followed: “The Shelter of Each Other,” on rebuilding American families; “Another Country,” about baby boomers’ relationships with their adult parents; “The Middle of Everywhere,” being the stories of refugees in Lincoln; and “Letters to a Young Therapist,” sharing what she has learned in 30 years as a clinical psychologist.
For weeks, Pipher’s books lingered on the New York Times bestseller list. They led to radio and TV appearances: “The Today Show,” “20/20” and “Oprah.” And newspaper and magazine interviews.
It has been close to 12 years now, and Pipher — a world-renowned speaker — will publish her seventh book in April, “Writing to Change the World.”
Despite her success as a writer, she has remained a steadfast Lincoln resident, enjoying its people and lifestyle.
In the spring, she will attend the Cincinnati premiere of a play adapted from “Reviving Ophelia.” The play then will be performed in high schools across the country. Perhaps the silver screen isn’t far behind.
— JoAnne Young
Johnny Carson
Heeeeere’s Johnny.
Johnny Carson, the undisputed king of late night, grew up right here in Nebraska and matriculated at Lincoln’s own University of Nebraska — where he wrote a senior thesis in 1949 titled “How to Write Comedy for Radio.”
The charismatic Carson started performing magic as “The Great Carsoni” in Norfolk and moved on to radio in Lincoln and eventually “The Tonight Show” in Hollywood, where he grew famous for his 30 years of nightly monologues, silly skits and celebrity interviews.
Even today, more than 60 years after Carson left his hometown, he’s remembered for the good-natured pranks he played in high school, his years on TV and his generosity of millions of dollars to Norfolk.
Carson also gave millions to UNL, where they renamed a school — the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film — after him.
He died in January.
— Lori Pilger
Charles Starkweather
Charles Starkweather struck fear into the heart of the country with a nine-day killing spree in 1958 that left 10 people dead from his hometown of Lincoln to Douglas, Wyo.
In just more than a week, the 19-year-old had become the first media-age mass murderer.
On Jan. 27 of that year, police began finding the bodies of his victims, including his 14-year-old girlfriend’s mother, stepfather and 2-year-old sister, Betty Jean.
Starkweather immediately became the sole suspect, and the manhunt moved to Bennet, where August Meyer was found dead in his rural farmhouse and two teenagers, Carol King and Robert Jensen, were found in the storm cellar of a rural schoolhouse that had been razed.
C. Lauer Ward, his wife, Clara, and their housekeeper, Lillian Fencl, were found dead the next day in their Lincoln home.
The chase ended in Wyoming, but not before Starkweather killed Merle Collison in that state.
The scrawny, redheaded unemployed garbageman finally was cornered near Douglas, Wyo., with his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate.
Starkweather later admitted killing Lincoln service station attendant Robert Colvert, his first victim, on Dec. 1, 1957.
A jury found Starkweather guilty in May 1958. He was put to death in the electric chair on June 25, 1959.
— Lori Pilger
William Jennings Bryan
A striking figure who occupies a unique niche in American history, William Jennings Bryan would captain Lincoln’s all-time speech team. His credentials: three-time Democratic presidential nominee; secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, resigning in protest over the U.S. drift toward World War I in 1915; and famed orator, renowned for castigating banks and the moneyed class.
Bryan’s populist views earned him the title of “The Great Commoner.” Today, he is remembered most for his Christian-centered argument against Darwin’s theory of evolution during the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee. Bryan died just five days after completion of the trial at the age of 65.
Bryan practiced law in Lincoln and served as a Nebraska congressman from 1891 to 1895. Born in Illinois, he moved to Lincoln in 1887, living here more than three decades before moving to Florida.
Bryan’s statue stood at the north entrance to the State Capitol for 20 years. It was moved to Bryan’s Fairview home adjacent to BryanLGH Medical Center East in 1967 upon direction of the Legislature, ostensibly because it “looked like a suitcase” in front of the towering Capitol, though some suspected political motives for the move.
— Don Walton
Dick Cheney
Often at the center of controversy in the Bush administration, Dick Cheney would win honors as Lincoln’s lightning rod.
Described by some as the most powerful vice president in U.S. history, he has been in the middle of firestorms over the war in Iraq, faulty or manipulated intelligence and special interest ties to the oil industry.
Cheney was born in Lincoln in 1941 and lived here until his family moved to Wyoming in 1954.
His long career in public service began in the Nixon administration in 1969. Six years later, he was chief of staff for President Gerald Ford.
A Wyoming congressman from 1979 to 1989, he served as defense secretary for the elder Bush. Before being tapped as George W. Bush’s running mate, he was CEO of Halliburton Co.
Even a return to his birthplace in 2004 created sparks. Cheney came to Lincoln to raise campaign funds for Republican congressional nominee Jeff Fortenberry. A number of Democratic city officials wanted the federal government or the Republican Party to pay the city’s security costs for helping protect the vice president for what essentially was a campaign stop. While in Lincoln, Cheney visited his boyhood home at 2915 S. 44th St.
Cheney is the second vice president with Lincoln ties. Charles Dawes, vice president in the Coolidge administration, was a Lincoln businessman for seven years.
— Don Walton
Teena Brandon
No one knows if Teena Brandon wanted to be famous.
Yet the 21-year-old Lincoln woman gained fame by being murdered Dec. 31, 1993, in a rented farmhouse near Humboldt.
A lifeless body found with gunshot and knife wounds let the secret escape. The secret that “Brandon,” a young man whose flair for romance made him popular with the ladies, was really a woman.
Perhaps Brandon didn’t know if you run with a rough crowd, it can be dangerous to fool people. The rough crowd Brandon ran with in Falls City included two young, unemployed drunks who had done time in prison. Tom Nissen and John Lotter beat and raped Brandon, their twisted attempt to teach a lesson on true gender.
Brandon filed a rape report. Law officers questioned the attackers but didn’t arrest them. Several days later, they found their way to the rented farmhouse and killed their accuser along with Lisa Lambert and Phillip DeVine, two people in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A true-crime novel came out followed by a documentary film called “The Brandon Teena Story,” and finally the motion picture “Boys Don’t Cry,” which won Hilary Swank an Oscar in 1999 for her portrayal of Brandon. All of those works were fascinated by the collision of youth, class, gender and violence that occurred in Falls City in late 1993.
— Joe Duggan
Charles Lindbergh
“Early in the morning on May 20, 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh took off in The Spirit of St. Louis from Roosevelt Field near New York City,” the New York Times reported on May 21, 1927.
“Flying northeast along the coast, he was sighted later in the day flying over Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. From St. Johns, Newfoundland, he headed out over the Atlantic, using only a magnetic compass, his airspeed indicator and luck to navigate toward Ireland.
“The flight had captured the imagination of the American public like few events in history. Citizens waited nervously by their radios, listening for news of the flight. A frenzied crowd of more than 100,000 people gathered at Le Bourget Field (near Paris) to greet him.
“When he landed, less than 34 hours after his departure from New York, Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.”
But where did he learn to fly?
In an airfield between present-day Van Dorn and Calvert streets at Lincoln Standard Aircraft — a center of aviation in the Midwest during the 1920s.
At 20th and High streets, near the Country Club’s private golf course, there’s a small memorial marking the site.
Lindbergh, who was born in Detroit, Mich., in 1902, died an American hero in 1974.
— Josh Swartzlander
Hilary Swank
During her acceptance speech for her second Academy Award in 2005, actress Hilary Swank famously said she was just a girl from a trailer park with a dream.
While the Oscar-winning star of “Million Dollar Baby” did spend a large part of her childhood in that trailer park in Bellingham, Wash., she actually was born in Lincoln in 1974 and lived in the city for the first three or so years of her life.
Swank moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career when she was 16. In 1994, she had her break-out role in “The Next Karate Kid.” Swank also acted in various television shows, including “Beverly Hills, 90210.”
Swank’s career really took off after she portrayed Teena Brandon, a Lincoln woman murdered because she wanted to live as a man. It was her role in “Boys Don’t Cry” that earned Swank her first Oscar in 1999.
Swank underwent radical physical transformation for both her Oscar-winning performances.
She cut her hair short and lived as a man for weeks before filming “Boys Don’t Cry.” To get in shape for “Million Dollar Baby,” Swank boxed and did weight training six days a week for three months before shooting began, putting on 19 pounds of muscle.
In the Jan. 31, 2005, issue of Newsweek, Swank was quoted as saying: “My most annoying question is, ‘Hilary, are you ever going to play a pretty girl?’”
— Hilary Kindschuh
James Valentine
When James Valentine left Lincoln for Los Angeles, he gave himself a musical time limit, penning a song he called “26,” the age at which he was either going to make it in the music business or give it up for a more stable career.
Valentine beat his deadline last year, earning a Best New Artist Grammy Award with his band Maroon 5, which became one of pop music’s success stories when “Songs About Jane,” its 2002 record, sold 9 million copies worldwide. That success has put Valentine on stages around the world and living out childhood fantasies of opening for the Rolling Stones and playing Pershing Auditorium.
Even with the riches and fame that come with being a pop star, Valentine is still a kid from Lincoln.
“Just having been so far outside this whole thing, then finding myself in the middle of it, I really appreciate what I have,” Valentine said.
A Lincoln Southeast graduate, Valentine learned to play “Smoke on the Water” in a group guitar class at the old Schmitt Music store in Gateway Mall, first heard the blues at the Zoo Bar, honed his jazz chops with members of the Nebraska Jazz Orchestra and played gigs at Duffy’s Tavern with his Lincoln band Square, which moved to Los Angeles in 2000.
A couple years later, Valentine left Square and joined Kara’s Flowers, a band made up of native Angelinos. That group became Maroon 5.
— L. Kent Wolgamott
Bob Kerrey
Bob Kerrey, who biked through the streets of north Lincoln as a kid, grew up to be an intriguing politician, the state’s 35th governor and a U.S. senator.
Kerrey once delivered Lincoln’s morning newspaper. He played football for Northeast High School (Class of 1961), earned a pharmacy degree from the University of Nebraska and enlisted in the Navy after receiving his draft notice.
A Navy SEAL, Kerrey lost a part of his right leg in Vietnam and received the Medal of Honor. He became a critic of that war when he returned home. Nebraskans then put the 39-year-old political novice into the governor’s mansion, where he remained popular during a bruising recession and even brought his movie star girlfriend, Debra Winger.
Nebraskans twice elected him to the U.S. Senate, and he made a brief run at the presidency.
Today Kerrey, president of New York City’s New School University, is still a media favorite, sought after for his cogent analysis, wit and unpredictability.
But his roots remain in Nebraska. And he remembers the ride from Lincoln to Omaha, east on U.S. 6 — past Boys Town, past the drive-in theater just east of 72nd Street that marked entry into the suburbs and into the business district. “Finally we crossed the river into Iowa, leaving the familiar feel of home behind us.”
— Nancy Hicks
Mary Pipher
Mary Pipher wanted to write the world into a better place. So in the early 1990s, the Lincoln therapist began, writing first about women’s deadly quest for thinness.
The world began to take notice in 1994, when Pipher wrote “Reviving Ophelia,”a best seller about saving the selves of adolescent girls.
Four more books followed: “The Shelter of Each Other,” on rebuilding American families; “Another Country,” about baby boomers’ relationships with their adult parents; “The Middle of Everywhere,” being the stories of refugees in Lincoln; and “Letters to a Young Therapist,” sharing what she has learned in 30 years as a clinical psychologist.
For weeks, Pipher’s books lingered on the New York Times bestseller list. They led to radio and TV appearances: “The Today Show,” “20/20” and “Oprah.” And newspaper and magazine interviews.
It has been close to 12 years now, and Pipher — a world-renowned speaker — will publish her seventh book in April, “Writing to Change the World.”
Despite her success as a writer, she has remained a steadfast Lincoln resident, enjoying its people and lifestyle.
In the spring, she will attend the Cincinnati premiere of a play adapted from “Reviving Ophelia.” The play then will be performed in high schools across the country. Perhaps the silver screen isn’t far behind.
— JoAnne Young
Johnny Carson
Heeeeere’s Johnny.
Johnny Carson, the undisputed king of late night, grew up right here in Nebraska and matriculated at Lincoln’s own University of Nebraska — where he wrote a senior thesis in 1949 titled “How to Write Comedy for Radio.”
The charismatic Carson started performing magic as “The Great Carsoni” in Norfolk and moved on to radio in Lincoln and eventually “The Tonight Show” in Hollywood, where he grew famous for his 30 years of nightly monologues, silly skits and celebrity interviews.
Even today, more than 60 years after Carson left his hometown, he’s remembered for the good-natured pranks he played in high school, his years on TV and his generosity of millions of dollars to Norfolk.
Carson also gave millions to UNL, where they renamed a school — the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film — after him.
He died in January.
— Lori Pilger
Charles Starkweather
Charles Starkweather struck fear into the heart of the country with a nine-day killing spree in 1958 that left 10 people dead from his hometown of Lincoln to Douglas, Wyo.
In just more than a week, the 19-year-old had become the first media-age mass murderer.
On Jan. 27 of that year, police began finding the bodies of his victims, including his 14-year-old girlfriend’s mother, stepfather and 2-year-old sister, Betty Jean.
Starkweather immediately became the sole suspect, and the manhunt moved to Bennet, where August Meyer was found dead in his rural farmhouse and two teenagers, Carol King and Robert Jensen, were found in the storm cellar of a rural schoolhouse that had been razed.
C. Lauer Ward, his wife, Clara, and their housekeeper, Lillian Fencl, were found dead the next day in their Lincoln home.
The chase ended in Wyoming, but not before Starkweather killed Merle Collison in that state.
The scrawny, redheaded unemployed garbageman finally was cornered near Douglas, Wyo., with his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate.
Starkweather later admitted killing Lincoln service station attendant Robert Colvert, his first victim, on Dec. 1, 1957.
A jury found Starkweather guilty in May 1958. He was put to death in the electric chair on June 25, 1959.
— Lori Pilger
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