A glimpse of the city at 5 a.m., and who's awake at this early hour.
MICAH MERTES / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Monday, August 25, 2008 7:00 pm
Lincoln is a city of secret little worlds at 5 a.m.
Of dog walkers and coffee drinkers. Of joggers and bacon cheese omelet connoisseurs. Of people coming from work and those going to it.
Of no traffic, no UV rays.
Of sleeping criminals, second-generation waitresses and men who talk to squirrels.
About a third of Americans wake up before 6 a.m., according to a Nielsen study; 6 percent are up before 5.
Early-bird Lincolnites have different reasons they’re not nestled in the balm of their big comfy beds at this ungodly hour. But one thing unites them: They live, day in and day out, in a realm of Lincoln few of us ever get to see.
“There ain’t no dark in our town any more,” Bill Shepard, 76, says to his friend Rich “Rob” Robinson, 57.
It’s 4:50 a.m. on a weekday, and the two are waiting outside Virginia’s Travelers Cafe, 3820 Cornhusker Highway. The diner opens in 10 minutes.
They talk about the humidity, the Huskers, light pollution. Lincoln’s got too many streetlights, business lights and other lights for Shepard’s taste. He remembers when a man couldn’t see a few feet in front of him this time of day.
A lot has changed in Shepard’s life. The look and feel of his city, the dwindling number of all-night diners.
If there’s been one constant, it’s the time of morning he wakes up.
Shepard worked for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for 53 years, 42 of which he spent as the head groundskeeper for the athletic department.
All that time, he’d leave for work at 4 in the morning, and he’d get breakfast at Virginia’s on the way.
Even though he’s retired, Shepard still wakes up no later than 4, no matter how hard he tries to sleep in.
“As you get older,” he says, “you have a pattern that you live by. Whatever suits you.”
Before heading to Virginia’s, he takes a morning stroll.
“Being up this early, you get to see some pretty interesting characters, if you make a habit of watching people,” he says. “I see guys who go along and talk to the birds or talk to the squirrels in the trees. You see strange stuff.”
It’s 4:58 a.m., and Shepard and Robinson are ready to be let in. They’re almost always Virginia’s first two customers, in the diner five, six, seven times a week.
Robinson jokingly pounds on the window to get the attention of Rhonda Stangl, a second-generation waitress who took over this shift after her mother retired. She smiles, then ignores him. He likes to mess with her. He enjoyed giving her mother, Kay, grief each morning, as well.
At 5:15 a.m., a personal trainer makes the jaunt from Omaha to Holmes Lake, where she leads a class of about 25 women in a daily workout. Jody Berg runs the Star City Adventure Boot Camp, a four-week session of workouts from 5:45 to 6:45 a.m.
Most of her students, ranging in age from 20s to 60s, aren’t morning people when the camp starts. But after four weeks, getting up at 5 isn’t as tortuous.
“There’s no excuse to not make it at 5:45,” Berg says. “The kids don’t have any activities. There are no meetings scheduled. There’s nothing else going on at 5:45 a.m.”
And, she notes, there’s a sense of satisfaction that comes with getting your daily workout done before anyone else even gets out of bed.
“You kind of get this air of superiority,” says Kim Hachiya, 53, one of Berg’s students, “because you managed to (get) out of bed, and everybody else is still sleeping and thinking about driving through Wendy’s to get their breakfast.”
It’s an unusual sight: the moon still out, 25 women shuffling, skipping and crunching around a parking lot as dance music plays on a tiny boombox.
Some students, especially the older ones, are nervous about being out so early. Some worry about unfamiliar joggers passing by on the trails, or the fisherman who always casts his line nearby.
And some worry about Berg, being alone before the rest of her class gets there. One of them bought her a whistle, just in case that mysterious jogger or fisherman decides to attack her.
It was a nice gesture, Berg says, “but it’s not dangerous out here.”
People are actually pretty nice this time of day.
“People seem more flexible in the middle of the night,” says Tina Hobbs, an employee of the Kwik Shop at 33rd and Holdrege streets. “They’re more down to Earth.”
Hobbs used to work overnights, when she got to see all kinds. White collars, blue collars, rednecks, bums, men dressed in fine suits, the young guy needing condoms, the mother needing baby aspirin.
And Executive Answering Service, a 24-hour business that offers hotel-style wakeup calls, sees all kinds as well.
They’ve got a few absurdly early regulars. A guy who needs to be awakened at 1 a.m. Several at 4:30.
“It is kind of an older style service,” says Trent Wohlers, one of the operators. “But a lot of people just kind of like it because it’s not an alarm clock.”
None of the operators knows exactly why the clients need to wake so early. They can only speculate.
The slowest hour of the day for the Lincoln Police Department is from 5 to 6 a.m., says Chief Tom Casady. In 2007, 1,680 incidents took place at this hour. Compare that to Lincoln’s busiest hour, between 4 and 5 p.m. In 2007, 8,107 incidents took place in that 60-minute stretch.
“It is much more of a 24-hour city, though,” Casady says. “That’s one of the biggest changes in the city of Lincoln that I’ve noticed in my years as a police officer. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and we’re still rolling and seeing lots of calls for service in the wee hours. That said, it’s still the slowest time of the day for us.”
At 5 a.m on the dot, the two regulars walk into Virginia’s, sit down at their regular tables, sip their regular cups of coffee and order their regular meals.
“Hey Rich, Hey Bill,” says one of the cooks as she passes through.
“You know you’re a regular,” says Robinson, the ornery window knocker, “when the cook comes out and knows you by name.”
They used to call him “BCO guy” because of his unwavering dedication to bacon cheese omelets. It’s what he eats before he heads to his job at Ready Mix Concrete, where he’s worked for 35 years.
“I’m just a creature of habit,” he laughs ruefully. “Don’t rock the boat. If the center’s comfortable, don’t mess it up.”
As the diner begins to fill up around 5:30, there’s still hardly a peep except for the occasional request for a coffee refill. Even though everyone knows everyone else, each customer keeps pretty much to himself, eats his breakfast, quietly ponders the rest of his day.
“It’s a great place to get going in the morning,” says John Kempston, 65, who’s been coming here since 1962.
But there’s one caveat.
You used to be able to light up a cigarette and sip your coffee in Virginia’s, he says.
“Now you’ve got to go outside and freeze your butt off for a smoke.”
“Maybe,” interjects Mark, one of Kempston’s friends sitting at the next table over, “you ought to quit smoking.”
John: “Maybe you ought to shut up. I gave up everything else.”
Mark: “No, you didn’t. You’re still breathing.”
John: “Barely. I’ve got one of them ropes in my bedroom, you know, that’s got a boot on it. That’s how I get up every morning: I pull the rope, and the boot kicks me in the ass and gets me going.”
Reach Micah Mertes at 473-7395 or mmertes@journalstar.com.