Posted: Tuesday, March 7, 2006 6:00 pm
Tiny Magnet, Neb., needed work done on its aging town hall. So a group of men dropped everything — literally — to raise funds for the community project.
BY COLLEEN KENNEY | Lincoln Journal Star
MAGNET — Kenny Bloomquist wasn’t going to pose for a nude calendar.
Not even to raise money to expand the old town hall here in this village of 85 people.
He’s city superintendent in Wausa, up the road from Magnet. He’s middle-aged, an assistant track coach at the high school, community leader. This wasn’t the kind of thing he and the other men around here are inclined to do.
He was shocked when Doris Greeno asked him to.
Doris is secretary-treasurer of the Magnet Community Foundation, which wanted to raise money to expand the town hall.
The hall is where people gather for hunters’ breakfasts in the fall and funeral receptions as needed and potlucks around the holidays when everybody comes home. Its white paint is peeling.
Doris is 77, a farmer’s widow, the mother of his good friend Warren and not someone Kenny felt he could say no to outright.
He remembers her saying something like: Will you round up some men for the calendar?
Well, he said, I’ll try.
He hoped she’d forget. But about a week later, she asked him about it. That’s when he started asking around, embarrassed to be asking around.
A few said OK.
Doris and the other women of Magnet rounded up a few more men of Magnet.
Shirley Dawson, on the fund-raising committee with Doris, coaxed three generations of her truck-driving family to pose, and as word got out, more guys said OK.
Bruce Pfeil at the grain elevator said OK.
“I wasn’t asked,” Bruce says, laughing about it recently at the elevator. “No. My wife was asked by Kenny Bloomquist, because Kenny is a coach in the school system in Wausa and my wife is a teacher as well as a speech coach.
“My wife said, ‘Yes, he will do it.’”
Kenny Bloomquist’s dad said OK. So did the other men of the Coffee Shop Brigade, farmers in their 70s and 80s who drink Bruce Pfeil’s coffee at the elevator.
Doris decided the men would pose on Labor Day because that’s one of those days when everybody comes home.
But as Labor Day approached, Kenny Bloomquist still wasn’t so sure about this idea.
The town too tough to die
In the 1920s, a fire destroyed all the buildings on the south side of Main Street. In 1975, a tornado took out much of the rest of the town.
“There was not any building that was not missed,” Doris said. “Either roofs or windows were gone or they were destroyed completely.”
People rebuilt. They came up with a slogan now on a sign at the edge of town: Magnet, the town too tough to die.
The high school closed in the ’60s, the grade school in the ’70s. The town shrunk from 200 in the ’20s to around 85, where it’s held steady the past four decades.
But Magnet is home, in the heart, to people who grew up here and moved away, making its population, in a sense, more than 85.
Doris met her husband at the roller rink in nearby Randolph in the 1940s. She came to Magnet a bride of 20. She and Delmer lived on a farm a half-mile east.
Delmer has been dead 10 years now. The other day, Doris moved from the farm into an apartment in Wausa. Family photos of her kids and grandkids and great-grandkids fill a table under the picture window; the “Men of Magnet” calendar hangs on her kitchen wall.
Her son Warren lives in Colorado. He came back Labor Day to pose as Mr. January 2007, holding a sled, wearing a Husker stocking cap.
A daughter lives nearby. She got her husband, Gene Korth, to pose. He’s sitting on an ATV in front of a cornfield, holding an ear of corn as if it’s a phone. He’s Mr. August.
Doris chuckles.
“Gene is very serious, very serious. Everyone who looks at that calendar says, ‘That’s not Gene.’”
Mayor Jason Becker posed with the volunteer fire department (September) and on the cover photo with all the men.
It was a fun day, the 35-year-old said, walking Main Street one recent afternoon, his hands in his pockets. The wind whipped around the dirt from the bare cornfields and snapped the flags on their poles over the fire station and post office.
This old grocery burned down a few years back, he said, staring at its charred graveyard on the north side the street. He thinks maybe some kids were smoking in there.
The filling station used to be across the street. It closed a few years back. So did the Methodist Church up the hill, its white paint peeling, and the bar.
Mayor Jason waved at the old people pulling their cars carefully up to the post office.
“I think like all small towns, we’re just slowing dying,” Becker said. “There’s just not the population base around to support the town.”
But one thing that is helping prolong this town’s life, the mayor and the men and women of Magnet say, is their feeling of connection to this place, from the memories that are made when people come together.
Magnet comes together, he says, thanks to Doris and the women who plan holiday potlucks and hunters’ dinners and funeral receptions, and the men of Magnet, willing to take off their clothes.
Labor Day 2005
The women of Magnet stood across the street, laughing and shouting directions.
Stick in your gut!
Put your legs together!
The men joked with each other: Don’t touch me. Don’t get too close to me.
This became the cover shot for “The Men of Magnet” calendar.
The men wore shorts and swimsuits. Through trick photography and the magic of Adobe Photoshop, the photographer replaced the shorts and swimsuits with “skin.”
For some guys, though, it took a little liquid courage to strip down even that far.
Some photos were taken at the Dawson house. And the Coffee Shop Brigade — Dwight, Randy and two Dales — sat at their usual spots at the elevator, newspapers strategically placed.
Mayor Jason and the men of the volunteer fire department posed with fire hats and hoses. Bruce posed with an elevator co-worker, both holding hunting decoys just right.
Randy and Vern covered themselves with the sign: Magnet, the town too tough to die.
Late that afternoon, the men and the women of Magnet gathered on the grass behind the old town hall. They grilled steaks and laughed over cold beers, Mayor Jason recalls, and then the men threw out a challenge.
“We tried to say there’s going to be a ‘Women of Magnet’ calendar next year,” he said. “But I don’t know if we can talk them into it.”
Mr. MayKenny Bloomquist stood in a boat on a pond, holding a fishing rod and a wooden “Gone Fishing” sign.
A group of maybe eight people, including his wife, watched him strip to his skivvies while trying not to fall into the water.
“They were standing there on the bank,” he says, “laughing their stomachs off.”
His dad posed for the calendar.
His uncle posed.
His brother, a butcher in Wausa, posed.
Kenny knew he had to pose, too.
And it was another real good time for the town.
“The one thing about Magnet,” he said, “it’s always been this way. When things have to be done, it’s always a community effort, people coming together to help out.”
And so far, the men and women of Magnet have sold 900 calendars, raising almost $9,000 of the $100,000 needed to expand the old town hall.
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.
How to order a calendar
Send $17.50 to the Magnet Community Foundation, Box 22, Magnet, NE 68749.