Random stories from Lincoln's most famous road.

D'Leons, 2140 W. O St.

You won't find any talking chihuahuas at D'Leon's, just good Mexican food. D'Leon's, a white-washed, hut-like building with an awning on the side and picnic tables, is an eatery that seems like it might be more at home on Route 66 than on West O Street.

Customers drive through, place their orders and head for the pick-up window — slowly. There's no inside seating, just long lines of cars and trucks that sometimes snake out into the street.

 D'Leon's, open 24 hours a day at the corner of Northwest 22nd and West O, has earned a reputation for serving up authentic Mexican food in big portions to go.

"These guys are awesome. It's not just big, it's good," said Terri Mumgaard, who had just ordered a bean burrito with chips and cheese on a rainy Saturday night.

"This is the best food in the whole wide world. We drive an hour and a half to get here to get their beef burritos and bacon burritos for breakfast," said Melisa Hanson of Geneva. "They're awesome."

Hanson and her husband, Mark, frequent the restaurant often, sometimes picking up "$70 orders" for friends and family.

Tony Diaz de Leon knows why his father's restaurant is so popular. 

"People like our food," he said.

D'Leon's opened about two years ago and was an instant hit, especially with the late-night bar crowd.

"You go to Mary's Place, you got to come here," Mumgaard said.

Marty Baker of Milford, with the Nebraska Army National Guard, recently returned from a year in Iraq. Within five days, he and his wife, Sue, were at D'Leon's ordering their favorite foods.

"I've got my Mexican craving in," Marty Baker said after placing his order for two tacos.

— Algis J. Laukaitis

Fred Wilson Jewelers, 1309 O St.

Wedged between a drugstore and sandwich shop along the busy north-south divide called O Street, Fred Wilson Jewelers is easy to miss.

But don't be fooled by its size.

The business is as big a part of the character of downtown O Street as any other enterprise. For evidence, just check out some of the 340 letters posted on the west wall.

"I just can't believe that people would take the time to do that," owner Fred Wilson, 80, said.

Several fat binders holding many dozen more letters sit on jewelry display cases in the business at 1309 O St. The letters, written by customers young, old and in between, thank Wilson for helping them choose the right jewelry, repairing an irreplaceable ring or watch — or just being a nice guy.

A couple of examples make the point.

Shortly after would-be burglars broke out his  display case window in July, Wilson received money along with an unsigned letter, postmarked Omaha.

The secret sender said the money was to help pay for the window. The writer then described the jeweler as the "nicest person on O Street, if not in the universe."

Another writer penned a three-page letter thanking Wilson for repairing a watch she inherited from her grandfather. Other jewelers had told the woman the heirloom wasn't worth fixing.

"You should read that letter," Wilson said. "It really meant a lot to her."

Wilson began his personalized approach back in 1948 when he moved from Oklahoma City to Lincoln to work for another jeweler. He started his own business in 1971.

The block of O Street on which his store sits had seven jewelry stores at one time. Now there are three.

"There've been lots of changes, lots less retail downtown," Wilson said. "But I'm very grateful that I ended up here."

— Butch Mabin

Hispanic Community Center, 2300 O St.

The heat pipes bang so loud in winter you can't tell which language is being spoken. It doesn't matter. No importa.

Annoyance crosses all language barriers.

It's a typical Tuesday night at Lincoln's Hispanic Community Center, a crowded former firehouse at 23rd and O streets soon to be vacated in favor of larger quarters.

A three-person intermediate Spanish language class taught by Luz Delgado is looking for an empty space, any space.

An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting has claimed the drafty basement, where the bent fan of a space heater typically prevents people from hearing.

The open room on the main floor holds a dozen people listening to a presentation on President  Bush's proposed immigration policy. In sum: no amnesty.

Posters around the room say things like "Latino Spirit" and "Porque mama esta grita otra vez?"  "Why is mom shouting again?"

One room upstairs is filled with children who have accompanied their parents to various functions.

In a blue-painted cluttered office next door, Delgado finally begins to intone today's lesson.

"Ultimo," she says.

It means last, and it's appropriate.

While this has been a good home for eight years, no one who has searched for empty space in this aging building will lament "el ultimo."

Soon, the posters, cloth maps of South America and everything else will take a three-block journey to remodeled quarters at 2615 O St.

Por fin. Finally, people learning Spanish won't need to share a table with those waiting to be tested for English language placement.

Por fin. There will be space.

— Mark Andersen

DMV, 500 W. O St.

Shift left. Right. Slouch. Doesn't matter — the Watergate-era plastic chairs lined in neat rows inside the Department of Motor Vehicles Driver Testing Center hurt the posterior regardless.

Look right at the woman dozing off in the blue jean jacket. Left, at the little girl growling like a dog on the floor. Close your eyes — there's nothing to see here, unless you're into a little local human suffering.

Nothing to read here unless you'd like to thumb through the driver's manual, learning about right-hand turns on red, the right-of-way, the right way to make a right-hand turn signal with your arm.

Nothing to hear save for the robotic, Orwellian voice that occasionally fills the waiting room: "B202, please report to Counter 8."

"Counter 8!" yelps the little dog girl. Blue jean jacket doesn't stir.

Someone checks their watch. Someone moves outside the building at 500 W. O St. to talk on their cell phone.

Eventually, they move to the counter themselves, to get a license, to renew one. They take written tests, driving tests, eye tests.

Mostly, they stare at the white wall behind the counter, a purgatory that's the defining characteristic of this West O landmark everyone calls the DMV.

The nondescript red brick building sits just north of the city's main street, nestled between Sun Valley Boulevard, Sun Valley Bar and Grill and Sun Valley Lanes in an area overrun by fast-food joints and used-car dealers.

But you likely already knew that, because the DMV is the place everyone is Lincoln has been, the place where the rich and powerful sit side by side with the poor and powerless, united in their impatience.

Bozorgmehr Khadin knows what's worse than waiting to get a license. It's waiting with someone else who's waiting to get a license.

He came along on this dreary mid-February day to keep his wife company, he says, so she wouldn't have to suffer alone.

They spent about 45 minutes in those uncomfortable plastic chairs, eventually running out of things to whisper about and staring in silence.

For a while, the recent Middle Eastern immigrants sat next to a man who crossed and uncrossed his fancy blue suit pants and tapped his dress shoes on the floor.

Khadin could feel the man's pain. He could feel everyone's pain.

It was his own, until it was over.

"I was bored," he says, standing in the DMV parking lot. "… but now I am free."

— Matthew Hansen

Kuhl's Restaurant, 1038 O St.

Cartier Walker and his buddy Alonzo Wiggs have just finished breakfast at Kuhl's Restaurant.

Walker doesn't need a menu. He loves that breakfast special, a half- pound chopped steak, two eggs, hash browns, toast and jelly, $4.95.

"I hope he loves me, too," calls Stella Hametis, who owns the place with her husband, Pete.

Walker and Wiggs are regulars.

Nearly everyone is a regular here in the restaurant that time has not changed.

Kurt and Pearl Kuhl opened Kuhl's  at 1038 O St. in 1968. The couple had run their restaurant in south Lincoln until one of their regulars, former Lincoln Mayor Bennett Martin, persuaded them to move downtown.

They were on P Street until the city built the new YMCA, then another Kuhl's customer, businessman Ben Misle, gave them a deal on this long narrow wedge of real estate.

They lined it with dark paneling,  maroon booths and a revolving pie case. They served chicken-fried steak and liver and onions.

Clerks from Kresge's and Ben Simon's, Hovland's and Brandeis came for lunch. The football crowd  came in on game days.

Twenty years ago, Pearl and Kurt sold Kuhl's to Stella and Pete. "We had people who ate with us three times a day," remembers  Kurt. "When I go in there now it seems like a time warp."

Liver and onions is still on the menu. Pie spins in the glass case. And Kuhl's still has customers who come in for nearly every meal.

"We have a nice crowd," says Pete, up from the kitchen. "You feel like family."

— Cindy Lange-Kubick

Eccentricities, 2937 O St.

Iron elephant planters, old school desks, chairs and things unidentifiable to passers-by adorn the space in front of the first two houses east of 27th Street on the south side of O.

"No, we're not your neighbors from the hills," says Cecil Calvert. "We're Eccentricities."

Someone once described the business as a low-end antique shop.

"I was highly offended," Calvert says, tongue in cheek. "I prefer to think of it as a high-end junk shop."

It's both. The retro hunter, antique seeker or kitsch connoisseur can find a working 1950s Admiral TV, a giant wooden horse head, a soup tureen that looks like a fresh-baked loaf of French bread, an antique cast-iron stove or a figurine of a chubby man with a screw sticking out of his belly.

"I'm in the business of want only," Calvert says. "Very rarely do you have to have a what-not. But you can come in and find a couch, a dresser …"

Calvert and a partner opened Eccentricities in 1998, with Calvert bringing the creative side, his partner the business sense. They parted ways about a year later, but Calvert kept the business.

Drivers on O Street may wonder what Eccentricities is but never stop. "I hear that every day," Calvert says.

Plus, Eccentricities is, well, eccentric. His grandmother could never throw away anything, his mother rebelled by throwing away everything and Calvert rebelled by being like his grandmother — and then some.

A sign on the door invites visitors to "feel free to dust as you go."

"They also can feel free to vacuum," says Calvert, adding that he has few takers on that proposal.

But many take him up on the offer to look, touch and carry. And when someone does, he says, someone else invariably comes in later and buys the item.

Kitsch karma? Who knows?

The shop is a labor of love, he says, or perhaps a sickness.

But it's a sickness true hunters of things from days gone by will enjoy. Need a green-and-pink hutch? A fabric snake? How about a big iron lawn ornament thing-a-ma-bob?

— Erin Andersen

Tam O'Shanter, 105 S. 25th St.

Outside, the sun is just starting to set. It's the middle of the week, at the end of most people's work day.

Inside, it's dark as night at the Tam O'Shanter Lounge & Steakhouse. A faint orange aura from the lanterns ringing the bar barely reaches the black booths and tables, the dark red shag on the walls and the plaid carpet on the floor. 

Carlee Shearman tends the bar.

"The Tam O'Shanter is an original," she says.

She chats with men who come in for a beer, a burger, a game of pool.

You come here long enough, you get to know people, she says.

"It's nice to have a neighborhood bar."

The Tam sits on the corner of 25th and O streets, where signs of corporate America that have crept into the neighborhood include the Burger King catty-corner from the Tam, an Old Country Buffet and an OfficeMax a couple of blocks down the street.

But the Tam itself remains virtually unchanged. The only neon lights in here outline a blue music note by the piano bar where Pat Glenn plays on Saturday nights.

The "Tami" — a 6-ounce steak, choice of potato, piece of Italian bread and soup or salad — remains the restaurant's signature meal.

This nonconformity is not accidental. Owner Diona Peithman doesn't like chain restaurants. When she bought the Tam two years ago, she wanted it to look like it did when it opened in 1973.

That's why she repaired the black Naugahyde booths and left that carpet clinging to the walls.  "That kind of appeal is never going to go out of style," she says.

The Tam is a dinosaur, she says, and that's why it needs to be saved.

"How many sports bars do you need?"

— Leah Thorsen

Southeast Community College, 8800 O St.

The 117-acre Lincoln campus  of Southeast Community College was  planted in a field at the eastern edge of Lincoln amid controversy 26 years ago.

Why a new building when the city had lovely old buildings awaiting a good use?

Why so far out in the boondocks, with only crops as neighbors?

Still, the new campus, part of a 15-county regional educational system that offers training in dozens of vocational areas, flourished. And  eventually, the city grew to engulf the low-riding brick building, surrounded on three sides by acres of blacktop  for the cars and trucks of its 8,000 students. 

Today, SCC has other O Street addresses. When the college began offering college credit classes in 1995 in the abandoned and bankrupt Centrum shopping center between 11th and 12th streets, school leaders expected about 200 students. Five hundred enrolled that first quarter, SCC President Jack Huck said.

And this summer, when seven newly remodeled classrooms are  finished, Huck expects 2,000 students will be taking academic transfer classes at 1111 O St.

SCC's administrative offices, which have traveled the O Street corridor from far east to downtown, still have an O Street connection.   They are now in the old Gallup complex, just south off 68th and O streets.

— Nancy Hicks

Thrift shops, 1700 and 1800 block of O Street

Cynthia Davey remembers the days when her grandfather would take her to Rip Van Winkle's Auto Exchange. She'd play outside and drink orange soda while he played poker.

Before they'd leave, he'd admonish her: "Don't tell grandma."

One day, 50 years later, Davey pulled into the parking lot of the business she and her husband, William, have owned since 1986.

"Rip Van Winkles' Auto Exchange," read the faint words on the side of the building next to theirs. 

Davey was surprised she hadn't noticed the faded letters sooner. But the buildings on the block between 17th and 18th streets have housed many things over the years.

When the three-story building that now holds the Daveys' BB&R Pawn Shop at 1701 O St. was built, it housed a retail shop on the ground floor, and a hotel on the top two.

For a while, several shops, including a barber, operated below the street level. Today, their pawnshop occupies the bottom level and their home — for the past few years — the top two.

"It ended up with more square footage than my house," Cynthia Davey said.

The pawnshop also anchors a block of secondhand shops: two thrift stores, a vintage clothing store and a pottery store that used to be a vintage clothing and furniture store.

On a recent afternoon, Amanda Smith and Jason Votz hit the entire strip. Votz bought clothes and, at the pawnshop, a tin in the shape of a race car. "We had the day off," he said.

The Daveys' son, Christopher, grew up watching secondhand videos on secondhand VCRs, courtesy of the family business.

Someday, he'll take over the business he describes as both ordinary and exciting. Once, someone tried to sell the the Daveys a human skull (they weren't buying), and another time,  a prosthetic arm.

That one they bought, Cynthia Davey said.  "And it sold."

— Cara Pesek

Planned Parenthood, 2246 O St.

It sounds hokey, but Bobbie Kierstead has loved the building on O Street since she was a child. She talks about its glazed tile exterior like it's something delicious.

She could be biased, considering she speaks of the place where she works as vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Nebraska and Council Bluffs. But probably not.

"It just caught my fancy as a child, and I always loved passing it on the street," Kierstead said of the building at 2246 O St. "To work in it today is an unexpected pleasure for me."

The building has been a part of O Street history since it was built in 1928 for a dry-cleaning business. A freestanding building in an area from which many of its clients come was just what Planned Parenthood was looking for when it bought the space in 1986 and moved from its location on Adams Street.

Although its mission is offering reproductive health services, Kierstead and the staff at Planned Parenthood consider their 10-year-old garden to be  a big contribution to O Street.

"I just love to look and sniff," Kierstead said. "Before, the small yard on the O Street side and 23rd Street side of the building was — I'm trying to be diplomatic here — not scenic."

The street adds dimension to Planned Parenthood, too, she said. The location is good advertising for the clinic, and access is easy for its clientele. Plus, in the winter the street is always plowed.

"I guess the only real drawback I can think of is that, in the summertime, it gets pretty noisy when I open my windows," Kierstead said. "I guess that's hardly an insurmountable obstacle."

— Jonnie Taté Finn

Old City Hall, 920 O St.

She's seen it all. Well, just about all. Old City Hall, sturdy and dependable and attired in Victorian Gothic, took her place in the old market square in 1879.

From her vantage point near the corner of Ninth and O streets, she has watched a city grow. She set her first stone foot on the land in 1874, barely seven years after Nebraska gained statehood and the village of Lancaster was chosen as its capital and renamed.

Nine years after conclusion of the nation's great civil war. 

She began as a U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, has lived most of her life as the site of city government and remains an enduring and unbroken link to the past, her memory stretching back almost to the beginning.

She's the grande dame of O Street, the oldest building on Lincoln's main street. And she sports "the funkiest old elevator in town," says Ed Zimmer, city planner and historic preservationist.

Not to mention the rough stone, marble, cast iron posts, elegant staircase, globe lights, arched doorways, terrazzo flooring.

And some interesting neighbors, to boot. On the same block, which evolved from market square into public square, is a capped artesian well sunk by an infant city in search of potable water.

What the city got was salt water from an old inland sea and some small particles of gold, Lincoln historian Jim McKee has chronicled. 

To the west of Old City Hall sits a squat building that once served as "a comfort station" for travelers passing through Lincoln on the highway to Denver, Zimmer says.

It was the 1920s version of a highway rest stop, but for men only — with a cigar stand and a bootblack station. Women used a restroom in the basement of Old City Hall.

After five years of construction, Old City Hall served as the federal post office and courthouse for a quarter-century. The city bought the structure in 1905 for $50,000 and used it for six decades.

Today, the building houses a number of activities, including the Lincoln Arts Council, Leadership Lincoln, county-city property management and a University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Architecture community design center.

Still going strong, Old City Hall has earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

And filled with memories, O Street's great lady continues to watch a city grow.

— Don Walton

Wyuka Cemetery, 3600 O St.

Officials at Wyuka Cemetery really don't want people to know the location of one gravestone.

They haven't included it in the "Self-Guided Tour" packet because they don't want to glorify what the man buried beneath the stone did. And they don't want people to steal it — as they've done several times since 1959 — as a grisly keepsake of a killer.

A red-headed cult figure with a James Dean look. A symbol of angry youth.

Charles R. Starkweather

Nov. 25, 1938 n June 25, 1959

The pink granite rectangle lies flat on the grass on the west side of Wyuka, Section 28.

"Two families that he killed are here, too," says Ed Holbrook, executive director of the Wyuka Historical Foundation.

He points to the southeast, Section 25 of the cemetery at 3600 O St. "The Wards are over there."

He points to the northeast. "The Bartletts are in a section over there."

Holbrook shakes his head. Look how young he was, he says.

Starkweather was executed June 25, 1959, for the eight-day murder spree he and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, went on in January 1958.

First in the spree were the Bartletts, Caril's mom and stepdad and her 2-year-old sister.

Then an elderly farmer and two teenagers near Bennet. Then the Wards, a wealthy Lincoln couple, and their maid. Then, in Wyoming, a shoe salesman.

The killings were among the most publicized in U.S. history. Fugate served 20 years and now lives in Michigan. Starkweather, who would be 65 now, got the chair.

This latest gravestone, Holbrook explains, was bought by actor Martin Sheen, who played Starkweather in the movie "Badlands."

People come from all over to see this gravestone, he says. If they ask, he will tell them where it is. It's in a beautiful spot, in a beautiful cemetery, in a beautiful Nebraska town where many still remember what it felt like to be terrorized for eight days.

Rest in Peace

The gravestone rests in the shade of a large pine tree. On this day, neatly placed pine cones line its edge.

Were they put there by a fan? A family member? A person kneeling in the needles to pray for an angry soul?

— Colleen Kenney

O Asian Garden, 2535 O St.

The tan brick building was once a Hinky Dinky supermarket where people bought such American staples as frosted flakes and instant mashed potatoes.

Now it's O Asian Garden, where people can shop for such exotic herbs as lizard's tail and buffalo spinach or buy a whole roast duck with a side order of homemade kimchee.

Groceries from the other side of the world are only the beginning of the offerings at this unique cluster of businesses, which includes a Vietnamese video store and travel agency, the Cafe de Mai offering cuisine from Vietnam, China and Korea, plus a sushi bar and banquet hall.

"Our sushi chef has more than 30 years' experience," said Tim Nguyen, who owns the complex with his wife, Kim. "It's the best-kept secret in Lincoln."

A banquet hall in the lower level, also home to the Career Achievement business training center, was the site last month of a luau dinner and dance to raise money for tsunami victims.

A newly installed fountain marks the entrance to the banquet hall, where whole roast hogs were served up for the fund-raising event co-sponsored by the Asian Community and Cultural Center.

And on Feb. 28, the Asian Center moved into the complex. It will stay until remodeling is completed on its new space in the former Speedway Motors building at 2615 O St. The Asian Center, formerly at 27th and N streets,  will share the former Speedway building with the Hispanic Center, which is moving from 23rd and O streets.

Having the community center  next door to the O Asian Garden will benefit everyone, said Modesta Putla, Asian Center director. "We serve the same people, so we will be good neighbors," she said.

Both Asian and Hispanic families make wide use of the banquet center for events ranging from weddings to quinceanera, a 15th-birthday celebration for Hispanic girls, Nguyen noted.

"We're looking to team up with (both centers) on many things we can do for the community."

— Bob Reeves