Out in Greene County, Iowa

The inspiring Lied Lodge in Nebraska City is a must-see, and you can come with us!

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
September 1, 2003
STORM LAKE, IOWA

A swing last week through Nebraska City, where I once again meandered the grand Lied Lodge and its grounds, has reaffirmed in my mind – you’ve just got to get on board for the Offenburger.com Tours’ fall excursion.

Our Oct. 3-5 adventure is “On the River and in the Hills with Lewis & Clark,” an exploration of the heritage of western Iowa.

We’ll take you by comfy Windstar tour bus to the most picturesque point in the Loess Hills – Preparation Canyon – where we’ll talk about the fascinating geology and history of the bluffs. We’ll explore the Missouri River stops made 200 years ago of Lewis & Clark. We’ll be eating in a legendary restaurant in Sioux City, the Green Gables. And we’ll experience two of the most exciting economic development projects in the region.

All, of course, amidst the splendor of autumn color.

The first of the two economic development projects we’re excited to show you is the beautifully restored and renovated, 75-year-old Orpheum Theatre in downtown Sioux City.

It is now in its second season after $10 million worth of work. Its variety of concerts and other performances are drawing crowds from 150 miles around. Talk to those in the audiences and you learn that many hadn’t been in downtown Sioux City in decades. But they’re driving in again now for events at the Orpheum.

There’s no show the evening of Oct. 3 when we’ll visit, but that’s all the better – we’ll be the show. We’ll have our desserts and coffee there as we get a tour and hear the story of how Sioux Citians did it.


The 9-year-old Lied Lodge at Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City. Photos are from the Internet site www.liedlodge.com

But the stay Saturday evening, Oct. 4, at the Lied Lodge in Nebraska City might well turn out to be the highlight of this tour.

The grand lobby with its 50-foot high atrium.

The lodge and conference center are built in the handsome “Adirondack” style of many of the great lodges at National Parks, with wood interior walls, lots of natural stone and huge timbers for support beams. The fireplace stretches nearly 60-feet high from the lower level, up through the grand lobby and on to the top of the atrium.

It is the most environmentally-friendly, energy-efficient facility of its kind that I have ever seen, and that’s appropriate since it is located on Arbor Day Farm.

The farm is 260 acres of woodlands, orchards, arboretums and museums that promise “a dynamic conservation education experience.” It has been developed through the years on the country estate of pioneer Nebraska newspaperman, government leader and environmentalist J. Sterling Morton, who lived from 1832 to 1902. He began the movement to plant trees on the barren Great Plains, and that movement became today’s Arbor Day Foundation.

That foundation in the late 1980s and early ’90s attracted the attention of Christina Hixon, administrator of the Las Vegas-based Lied Foundation, which focuses its philanthropy on education and the environment.

Ernst Lied, who died in 1980, was an Omaha native who built a very successful Buick dealership in that city, then moved to Vegas in 1950 and made a fortune in real estate development. Hixon, a native of Clarinda, Ia., was Lied’s secretary, accountant and friend.

She has distributed millions of dollars in western Iowa and eastern Nebraska – for example, endowing 100 scholarships a year at Iowa State University, building the performing arts center at the University of Nebraska, building the “Lied Jungle” indoor rain forest at the Omaha zoo and an IMAX theater in Hastings, Neb., among other projects.

I have never seen a dollar amount reported on the Lied Foundation grant for the lodge and conference center in Nebraska City, but it has to be millions – and it helped attract a large grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

The lodge was completed in 1994 with 96 guest rooms. A couple of years later, I got my first look when we stopped in for dinner one evening – and the food is outstanding. I remember wondering then if a 96-room hotel, and a grand one at that, could survive in the town of about 7,000, which already had a couple of smaller motels. The nearest metro area, Omaha, was nearly an hour away. Who’d come to the Lied Lodge?

Well, in 1999, another 48 rooms were added.

State, regional and national conventions are booking the facilities, particularly those relating to the environment, education, agriculture and economic development. Groups of up to 400 can be accommodated, and there’s now talk of enlarging the conference center to be able to handle more.

Meanwhile, State Highway 2 and U.S. Highway 75, which cross in Nebraska City, were both expanded to four lanes – north-south all the way to Omaha, and east-west from Interstate Highway 29 to the capital city of Lincoln, all the activities there at Nebraska U and a linkage there with Interstate 80.

Three other motels with national chain affiliations – Super 8, Best Western and Day’s Inn – have also been built in Nebraska City since the Lied Lodge opened in 1994. The town is popping.

“I don’t think people here really understood how grand the lodge was going to be when the plans were first announced,” said Erwin Friesen, executive of the Nebraska City Chamber of Commerce for three years now after earlier serving 21 years as the principal of the local high school.

The subsequent expansion and improvements have continued to surprise most people.
Besides the addition of the extra rooms, a new “pavilion and treehouse” were dedicated this year – helping explain the story and importance of trees and other vegetation. That treehouse, incidentally, is built 50 feet up – in the tree tops.

The biggest buzz around Nebraska City now is how the late J. Sterling Morton is making appearances in that pavilion to welcome visitors and talk about what his vision was for Arbor Day.

Huh? That’s Morton, who’s been dead since 1902?

“It really does look like him,” said Friesen. “He appears there and visits with you.”

Actually, what people are seeing is “a 3-D hologram,” as the Chamber’s tourism director Kelly Ogden describes it. It’s a ghost-like vision appearing in the air.

I can’t wait to introduce our tour group to Mr. Morton.

If you want to be part of it, we need to hear from you ASAP. The costs of the tour are $375 per person based on double occupancy, or $450 single, with all meals and two overnight stays included, as well as the special and unique programming we at Offenburger.com Tours always provide.

If you have questions, get in touch with either of us by phone at (712) 732-9617, by e-mail at Chuck@Offenburger.com or Carla@Offenburger.com

LET’S TALK SOME MORE ABOUT COLLEGE LIFE, BEGINNING WITH THE WARTBURG REPORT. Duane Schroeder, our ol’ pal the retired sports information director at Wartburg College in the eastern Iowa town of Waverly, noted my column last week about Buena Vista University getting another school year started here on the lakeshore.

“Sounds like BVU is off to a great start,” Schroeder wrote. “Wartburg also is on a roll. Visit us sometime and see the remarkable changes – a new Student Union, which will be completed before the beginning of the next academic year (fall of 2004) and a completely renovated science building, which will be completed by the middle of the next academic year. All connected by skywalks. On-campus enrollment should be about 1,700.

“Saw our first intrasquad football scrimmage recently. I think we need not fear a let-down at QB. Some fine prospects, led by Reed Hoskins of Grinnell.”

Schroeder’s note served as a pleasant reminder that Jacob Olson, the Wartburg athlete who terrorized opponents in both football and basketball, has now graduated after playing for the Knights for what seemed like 12 years. Alas, it also sounds like Wartburg may have cloned him.

SPEAKING OF REMARKABLE SMALL-COLLEGE ATHLETES. Will Wolper, information director for the Iowa Conference in which BVU and Wartburg both play, has just issued the conference’s impressive new “Directory and Record Book.”

In it, conference commissioner John Cochrane notes that among things to look forward to in this new year of competition is getting to watch the senior seasons of Cornell College’s Matt Ditch.

Cochrane points out that last year, Ditch became “the first individual since 1937” to be named first team all-conference in both football and basketball and to win a championship in track & field – he won the long jump.

MEANWHILE, A REPORT FROM THE BIG TIME IN COLLEGE SPORTS. Larry Happel, another old friend in sports information, is on a year’s sabbatical from his duties at Central College in Pella to see how they do things on the upper levels of college athletics. He is claiming he is “the oldest intern in NCAA history” as he goes about his duties as a “loaner” in the sports information office at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. And you know what? Sometimes they do things really nicely in the big time, as a note from Happel last week illustrated.

“Coming to work early last week, as the Vols were going through a morning workout, the UT marching band – the self-anointed ‘Pride of the Southland’ -- marched down the street and on to the practice field blaring ‘Rocky Top’,” Happel wrote. “QB Casey Clausen stopped in the middle of a drill and raced over to direct the band. Have to admit it was pretty cool. Got this old SID’s juices flowing a bit, which we all need now and then.”

AH, THE MARCHING BAND. This is the fifth fall since Buena Vista U. killed its marching band program, which had been the best marching band in the Iowa Conference.

Of course, it is true that for its last five years or so of existence, the BV marching band was the only marching band in the conference.

Parades, football games and Homecoming haven’t been the same since.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see the band march right into the middle of a Beaver football practice, playing the “Buena Vista Fight Song,” and have quarterback Eric Wiebers drop the ball to race over and direct it?

With BVU as advanced as it is in telecommunication and computer technology – and now that we know how the late J. Sterling Morton is making appearances at Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City – maybe one of these falls we’ll see the BV Marching Hologram Band!