The Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick Maker
By Chuck Peek
Matt, Walter M. and Walter E. Sehnert—three generations of bakers
ONCE the staple of villages, towns, and urban neighborhoods, butcher, baker, and especially candlestick maker have all come upon harder times. The competition of chain stores has driven many of them out of business—another evidence that often capitalism and community are not mutual admiration societies. And who knows what Amazon drone-delivery of foods will someday do to what is left of local grocers.
Along with the losses of the artisans themselves and their shops is the loss of the security that comes from being able to judge by sight, sound, smell, and constant proximity which of the old shops was clean and capably run and which one might want to avoid. When I was very young, we’d come back from fishing up the Big Thompson and while we scaled the trout, Papa would put out a plate of raw hamburger, sliced onion, and saltines to tide us over to dinner time. He knew where the meat had come from and who had butchered it.
I wouldn’t do that today. I don’t doubt that Swift makes every effort to keep its meat processing as safe as possible and the environment as sterile as it can be made. But I’ve never been inside a Swift plant and wouldn’t know how to evaluate it if I were inside. To trust their meat, I have to summon a certain degree of a kind of faith in Swift’s good will, not always encouraged by their behavior in other areas, such as their treatment of immigrant workers, of which I have some first-hand experience.
Put another way, the loss of local butchers makes me ever more dependent on government inspectors for my assurance that my meat will not be contaminated—and this is an era of Tea Party/Freedom Caucus/Trump forces trying to get rid of any regulation that they claim stops someone from making money by hook or by crook, itself an interesting phrase!
As we are about to switch back from a national pharmacy chain to one of our local pharmacies, I’ve been thinking about the old nursery rhyme, which captured how ubiquitous the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker (not to mention the shoe repair shop, like Eddie’s in Greeley, Colorado) once were. For instance, even in graduate school in the mid-1960’s, my then closest friend’s dad ran the General Store in Bennett, Nebraska.
Occasionally we splurged by going to Lincoln’s Ideal market—also locally owned and run by fellows from Chappell, Nebraska, where Nancy’s family had lots of contacts. Ideal sadly burnt down just a few years ago. But those were splurges. We did most of our grocery shopping at Bob Jensen’s general store in Bennett, and Bob often had to wait until we got our next Fellowship payment before we could pay the bill. And I assure you, we weren’t the only people eating on credit, a credit account that never owed any interest.
Even then, Bob could probably not have lived even his simple small-town life if he hadn’t supplemented his income as a grocer and butcher with winning pretty often at the horse races. Sometimes, Nancy and I would play canasta with Dewey and Peggy Jensen and Peter and Barbara Clark and sometimes Dick and Judy Wood until about dawn, when Bob would dispatch some of us back to Lincoln to get his racing form.
Intriguing as was his betting prowess; however, his local fame was as a grocer and butcher. That and the gratitude of a community that could remember how in hard times he’d virtually run a soup kitchen so people could eat, taking from his meat and grocery inventory to make it go. A couple of times a year, Dewey and I got the job of defrosting his big walk in freezer. It added some extra caution to our work that we never entered the freezer without Bob shaking his head in doubt that he’d still have working pipes after we chipped away at the ice on the pipes, knowing we were fortified against the cold by a fifth of Peppermint Schnapps. And, oh my! the steaks he’d grill for us when he and Pauline would invite Dewey and Peggy’s friends to join in their family dinner! The grill packed with a whole bag of charcoal until it had burned down to just the right white outer ash, as he’d say to one of us, watch those for a minute would you, while I go get another drink.
Bob also bred and trained Vizsla dogs for hunters. His and Dewey’s dogs, father Tonde and offspring Tike, were a joy to be around but never more so than by the grill, when Bob would place a piece of meat on their snout and they would stand still and wait (all-be-it a little cross-eyed) until Bob, seemingly paying them no attention would finally say “Okay,” and they’d toss the meat into the air and catch it in their mouths.
Oddly, I don’t remember any bakers from my very early youth, but I made it a point to make up for that as I grew up! (Oh, the Delice in Old Town Omaha, the shop just down from the Sorbonne in Paris, and most lately the fine bakery in Alliance, but all that is another story.)
When we moved to Kearney in 1977, there was a fine bakery run by Bob and Lois Sehnert. We got to know them through our church and the long friendship that began there with their daughter Jan and her husband Tom Paxson; but we already knew the Sehnert name because I’d grown up in McCook where another Sehnert was the baker, and that bakery (and its Bieroc Café) is blessedly not only still in business but is the hub of a lot of McCook’s social life. Walt and Jean Sehnert from my day and their son Matt now host a lot of music and story-telling events on the stage of the café and we fill our Christmas gift list to friends with a lot of the best Stollen you can find from their bakery.
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As a kid, during my dad’s time as its Rector (1953-1962), St. Alban’s had two weekly youth events, one on Sunday nights which was a lesson in the church followed by a supper in the hall, and the other on Wednesday mornings before school, a one-half hour Holy Communion in the church followed by varieties of rolls and doughnuts and juice from Sehnert’s. I would have once hated for my dad to know how we kids would have ranked those four elements of our upbringing! He probably had an inkling since he started the quarterly dances in the parish hall for grades 7-12, and where my first real date was to meet Corky Billesbach at the dance and pretend I knew how to dance to Rock&Roll 45 r.p.m records. At a class reunion, one of my class mates told me how most of the Methodist kids wanted to belong to St. Alban’s youth group because what we did seemed like so much fun and my dad seemed so cool. Of course, I was growing up as Dad’s son, so it was years before I could look back and see their perspective
Over the years, Walt Sehnert succeeded Fox Theater manager Ray Search as the local historian, and several of his books of McCook stories can be seen for sale at the bakery, stories often shared at McCook events. Walt’s latest book, however, is not about McCook—it is about his time in Korea during the conflict there. It’s entitled Oreo Cookie Man and it’s a fine book, which it pleases me was a gift to us from Walt. I’d given him a copy of my dad’s childhood memoir (Loneliness Is a Train Whistle) that I’d edited from Dad’s manuscripts after he had died and I had retired, and Walt had enjoyed the read because he and Dad had been friends back in the day.
Oreo Cookie Man is comprised of short vignettes that begin with Walt’s inherited interest in baking and go through his entire time of service in Korea, much of it as a baker. I like to savor these, so I read one vignette at a time about three or four times a week, and they are well-told-tales, rich in just the right details and infused with Walt’s own sense of humor as well as his zest for life and integrity, all of which qualities you can still breathe in when your go to the Bakery or Bieroc.
The “oreo cookie” of the title comes from the series of stories that recount the first encounter of a white boy from the Great Plains with African American fellow-soldiers from all over during the Korean Conflict, and how they sized each other up and what those encounters meant to Walt as he matured from boyhood to adulthood. I’d call these episodes close encounters of the very best kind.
Alas, I don’t recall ever knowing a candle or candlestick maker. But because the butcher and baker I know best and longest were the kinds of people who shed a little light on our world and our choices, I think both Bob and Walt could be seen as at least candle lighters. I recall a radio program form my youth brought to the air by the Christophers, and their motto was “Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”
To shed light is to participate in the work of God, summed up in this Epiphany season by the line from Isaiah: the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Bob Jensen and Walt Sehnert, the butcher and the baker, were and remain lights for me. Blessed are those who follow in their footsteps.
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