Issuu

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his issue features a profile story about Anne Marie Kenny, a local Francophile who is the president of Alliance Française d’Omaha. Her story touches upon the 100th anniversary of Alliance Française in the city. Mark and Vera Mercer, and Nicholas and Jane Bonham-Carter, are honorary chairs of the cultural organization’s centennial celebration. The gala also recognizes the legacy of another prominent Francophile in Omaha—Sam Mercer.

Gwen Lemke Contributing Editor, 60PLUS In Omaha

We lost a pillar of Omaha’s cultural landscape when the 92-year-old Mercer passed away at his home in Honf leur, France, on Feb. 5, 2013. Omaha Magazine’s sister publication, Encounter, ran a tribute to the man in its May/June 2013 edition. Here is excerpted text from the tribute, written by Leo Adam Biga, who is also the writer responsible for Anne Marie Kenny’s profile.

Gwen “SAM MERCER:

The Old Market’s Godfather” excerpted from the 2013 story by Leo Adam Biga

ontinental bon vivant Samuel Mercer, who passed away in early February, was not a typical Nebraskan. Though he grew up to become the Old Market’s undisputed godfather, he started life as the son of prominent Omaha physician and landowner Nelson Mercer. Young Sam was born and raised in privileged circumstances in London, England, and educated at Oxford and Yale. After living in Washington, D.C., he based his law practice in Paris, where he mostly lived the rest of his life, holding dual citizenship. In Paris, Mercer cultivated relationships with avant-garde artists. A watercolorist himself, he made artist Eva Aeppli his second wife. On his handful of trips to Omaha each year, Mercer cut an indelible figure with his shoulder-length gray hair, his trans-Atlantic accent, and his waxing on far-ranging subjects. He spoke perfect French. With the death of his father in 1963, Mercer took charge of the Mercer Management company here. He appreciated the century-old brick warehouses—some Mercer-owned—comprising the wholesale produce market just southeast of downtown. By 1968, Mercer moved strategically to gain control of a collection of buildings in what is now the Old Market. It was Mercer’s idea to make the ground-f loor space of the former Gilinsky Fruit Company into a French restaurant—the French Cafe. More anchor attractions followed—Homer’s, M’s Pub, Mr. Toad, Spaghetti Works, Nouvelle Eve, the Firehouse Dinner Theater, the Bemis.

Samuel Mercer (center) discusses the Old Market with Bob Cunningham and Mark Mercer (right). Photo by Vera Mercer.

The Mercers created one of the Old Market’s most distinct features, The Passageway, and later opened their own distinguished enterprises—V. Mertz, La Buvette, and The Boiler Room. The rest is history. SEPTEMBER // OCTOBER • 2017 / 179 / BESTOFOMAHA.COM

60PLUS | NOSTALGIA STORY BY MAX SPARBER // PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILL SITZMANN // DESIGN BY MATT WIECZOREK

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Strange Flavors While Americans have long eaten sweet food, our tastes have changed over time. As an example, the first popular chewing gum in America was made from tree sap. Called “The State of Maine Spruce Gum,” it was invented in 1848 and tasted of sweetened spruce trees. Spruce isn’t the only unusual flavor used for gum. Black Jack gum, which was developed in 1871, had an anise flavor and was produced until 2013, when the machine that made it was destroyed. Fans of the gum still buy old packs of it online. Admittedly, American tastes never got as avant-garde as they did elsewhere. As an example, in Australia, musk is a popular flavor for confections, and LifeSavers even manufactures a musk version to suit tastes Down Under. Historically, Americans have demonstrated a limited taste for floral candies. In fact, the still-popular Jujube candy included lilac, violet, and rose flavors when it debuted in 1920.

e? m i fT

The Weird, the Trendy, and the Local MERICANS HAVE A taste for sweet foods. According to the American Heart A ssociation, the average American consumes three times the daily recommended intake for sugar.

We’ve been eating sweets for quite some time, due both to the prominence of sugarcane in the Americas and our tendency to mask unpleasant f lavors with sweetness, which Americans did with both substandard food before the era of the Food and Drug Administration, and with cheap liquor during Prohibition.

Pop Culture Trends Omaha Regional Sweets Aside from odd There were local candies as well, often with their own f lavors, American local spokespeople. Council Bluffs had its own company, candies have a habit of Woodward’s Candy, which made butterscotch and pure latching onto popular sugar sticks, among other items. trends and taking names from culturally significant Woodward’s used two former vaudeville performers as figures. Baby Ruth candy is spokespeople, Jean and Inez Bregant, who met when a terrific example, although it performing at Coney Island. The Bregants were “little was not named, as most suppose, people,” and according to their bio on findagrave. after baseball player Babe Ruth. com: “Jean, age 35, was 46 inches tall and weighed Instead, it was allegedly named 66 pounds; Inez was 18 years old, 43 inches tall, after President Grover Cleveland’s and weighed 45 pounds.” daughter Ruth. The Bregants spent years hawking the candy Once-common candies include wax around the Midwest, especially in Omaha, where bottles and lips, Necco Wafers, baseball they were frequently seen lauding Woodward’s cards with gum in the packaging, and other at J. L. Brandeis and Sons. current rarities on the market. Those longtime favorites began losing favor in the late The Bregants eventually went on to own a 20th century. grocery store in Council Bluffs, living in a tidy little house on Fourth Street. The house was Many pop culture references are shortadded to the National Register of Historic Places lived, likewise for the candies that in 2013, and can still be seen today. borrowed from them. As a result, we can no longer buy Domino’s Pizza brand bubble gum (which came in a pizza box); The Real Ghostbusters Slimer gum; candyWant to rediscover nostalgic candies? Try filled plastic Max Headroom heads; Super Hollywood Candy (hollywoodcandy.com) and Mario Chocolate ’n’ Crisps; or Punky’s Old Market Candy Shop (oldmarketcandy.com), collection of “ugly tangy speckled candy both in the Old Market; Candy Wrappers bites,” inspired by the punk rock movement (omahacandy.com) in West Omaha; and (and produced by Willy Wonka’s). Candyopolis (in Oak View Mall and Westroads Mall).

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e l i h p o c n a r F

Story by Leo Adam Biga * Photography by Bill Sitzmann * Design by Matt Wieczorek

Anne Marie Kenny's Linguistic Love Affair

60PLUS | PROFILE

ago, while attending Merc y High School, Anne Marie Kenny cultivated a Francophile passion. At 21, she followed it to realize a dream of being a cabaret artist in France. She went from singing in Paris streets to headlining chic venues.

As the current president, she has overseen preparations for the Omaha chapter’s centennial celebration in 2017. Alliance marked the milestone with the August launch of its illustrated history book, along with an upcoming centennial gala at K ANEKO on Sept. 9.

After that yearlong taste, she returned to Omaha hungry to maintain French ties. Her conduit became Alliance Française d’Omaha, a chapter of an international organization dedicated to promoting French language and culture. She departed again, this time a married woman, to study voice and ply her craft abroad.

Alliance events often feature French food, wine, and music. But the centennial bash is going to exquisite extremes with an elegant feast of authentic cuisine and entertainment. French dignitaries will be among the special guests. Kenny will emcee and lead the attendees in singing France’s national anthem, La Marseillaise.

Kenny and her husband settled in the south of France—commuting to their beloved Paris. They lived there for more than a decade, during which time she also became a successful entrepreneur in the Czech Republic.

The events also honor the legacy of the late Sam Mercer, who divided his time between Paris and Omaha. Mercer opened the French Café and helped reactivate the city’s historic Old Market district (inspired by his exposure to French urban planning). Mark (his son) and Vera Mercer, along with Nicholas (his nephew) and Jane Bonham-Carter are the gala’s honorary chairs.

ALF A CENTURY

Since returning home permanently, she’s served as an Alliance board member and president. “It’s been my lifeline to French-going. I so missed the excitement of Paris—the language and all that,” she says, adding that when members of the local organization asked her to serve, “I felt I owed it something because it gave so much to me.”

Kenny emphasizes that the party is “a community event.” Under her two terms as president, the group has increased membership and French language class offerings. She appreciates what French f luency gives her. “Exploring the poetry of a language is an optimal way to not only learn how to speak the language but to understand its nuances,” she says. “It’s a new way of thinking and seeing.”

Learning the French language came naturally to her. Her fascination changed the course of her life when she followed her muse abroad. “I wanted to use French and apply it to who I was,” Kenny says, adding that she values the “global mindset” gained from the experience. Alliance members share a vision of having their own cultural center after a century of borrowed spaces. “We’re not able to offer as many classes as I know the community would like,” Kenny says. She says the lack of a dedicated home hasn’t prevented the Omaha branch from sponsoring “a very successful scholarship program” for students studying French. Community service is at the core of the Omaha group, which she described as “one of the older” American Alliance Française chapters. “We’re very active. After 100 years, we know we’ve got staying power,” she says. “I’m humbled and proud to be part of this lineup of figures in our city who brought French culture to the fore.” Guiding the organization through its centennial, she says, has “been a wonderful labor of love.”

Visit afomaha.org for more information.

Exploring the poetry of a language is an optimal way to not only learn how to speak the language but to understand its nuances. It’s a new way of thinking and seeing. -Anne Marie Kenny

SEPTEMBER // OCTOBER • 2017 / 183 / BESTOFOMAHA.COM

60PLUS | ACTIVE LIVING STORY BY SARAH WENGERT // PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILL SITZMANN DESIGN BY MATT WIECZOREK

The

Flower Lady of Leavenworth

Maureen Borden:

Master Gardener and Wordsmith SEPTEMBER // OCTOBER • 2017 / 185 / BESTOFOMAHA.COM

60PLUS | ACTIVE LIVING

I I

F YOU LIVE in or frequent the Elmwood

“Malka wasn’t there when her beloved died and she’s determined to give someone a proper send-off, so she answers an ad to read to the dying, because hearing is the last sense to go before death,” Borden says. Malka’s journey features Heddy, a dynamic hospice nurse, her zany neighbor, Lily, and Tomas, a kindhearted pawnshop proprietor. Hear I Go also introduces several colorful patients and their families, and Borden’s at her best when drawing these rich, compelling characters. Scott Morrill, who designed the book cover, added the description “A Tale of Life, Death, Bar-B-Que & The Tango,” succinctly expressing the blend of bittersweet and whimsy within. Hear I Go is heavily inspired by Borden’s own experience of losing her “beloved” Micky Metz.

Park area, chances are you’ve seen her. A petite, mysterious figure frequently and fastidiously tending her impressive garden at 57th and Leavenworth streets—her face obscured by a wide-brimmed, straw hat reinforced with duct tape, her skin fully cloaked to protect from the sun. Within her well-tended landscape, sturdy sunflowers jockey for vertical position alongside fragrant, alabaster tuberose, while bright daylilies and zinnias stretch from the devil’s strip like nimble yogis to meet the street and the sidewalk.

“We were together five years, from 1983 to 1988, when he had the audacity to drop dead of a heart attack,” Borden says with witty panache. “The book is mainly fiction, but there’s a considerable amount of truth in terms of myself and the character of my beloved. To get past my grief, I started writing about Micky about a year after he died.”

“Many people don’t know me or my name, but they know that I grow flowers and I wear this duct tape hat,” says Maureen Borden, whose bountiful, 35-year gardening streak began with a single packet of zinnia seeds from Earl May.

“He died, I wasn’t there, and dammit, I had to be there for someone, so that was the impetus for the book,” she says. “I’m very much a believer in the afterlife, but Malka is still coming to terms with the question of ‘Is there really something beyond?’ She desperately wants to believe there is, and she comes closer, but there’s still some doubt.”

A low-key local celebrity of sorts, many of her admirers know her as some variation of “The Lady of Leavenworth” or “The Flower Lady,” but Borden’s much more than just your garden-variety gardener. Though the zinnias will be late to the curbside this year, due to a sidelining springtime shoulder injury, Borden’s literary career is coming up roses since she published her first novel, Hear I Go, in fall 2016 at age 72.

Like Malka, Borden wasn’t there at the moment Micky passed, after 12 days in the hospital.

Borden has a degree in theater and a teaching certificate from UNO, though she spent much of her career in copy-editing and secretarial roles. Despite her varied career and love of gardening, Borden’s lifelong passion is writing. She’s penned a bevy of poems, short stories, even three screenplays, and says she lives for plucky, impactful passages.

“I think even a single, perfect flower is just as wonderful as a bouquet. Sometimes I’ll just put one flower in a vase and when I walk past and it catches my eye for a moment, it’s sort of like breathing properly,” she says. “It’s the exact same feeling when I read or write a really good line. It’s like an arrow to your intellect, and it makes you come alive.” Borden says that while it’s a great joy to know one’s purpose early in life, it’s never too late to realize your passion and pursue that which satisfies your soul. “I think doing right work is the most important thing in life—probably even more important than having a great love. Loves can end. People die. But if you have something that’s just so deliciously your own, then that’s a great gift,” she says. “I’m a geezer chick at 73, so I say to all the sassy seniors out there: Live your dreams. Go for it.” And Borden’s still going for it. In fact, she’s currently conceiving her next book, Slipped a Micky. “Hear I Go was an introduction to Micky’s rascality, which I hope to explore more in the next book,” she says. “Everyone should be lucky enough to have a Micky in their life. He was quite a rascal, and I’m the keeper of his many stories.” Borden does a lot of thinking in the garden. She says the time spent outside “weeding and pulling hoses around like a retired fireman singing ‘Born Free’ to keep my blood pressure down” can also be fertile ground for contemplating characters and dialogue. “Gardeners have long lives, purportedly because they stick around to see what will happen the next year, if there are successes,” Borden says. “So, I hope readers have long lives waiting for books to come out.”

Visit facebook.com/maureenbordenomaha for more information.

Her debut work tells the story of “Malka,” who’s grieving the loss of her partner alongside the painful fact that she wasn’t by his side in his final moments. As a means to heal, Malka volunteers at a hospice facility, hoping to assuage her guilt and offer a “good death” to her charges. SEPTEMBER // OCTOBER • 2017 / 186 / OMAHAMAGAZINE.COM

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“I’m a geezer chick at 73, so I say to all the sassy seniors out there: Live your dreams. Go for it.”

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-Maureen Borden

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60PLUS | PROFILE STORY BY CAROL CRISSEY NIGRELLI // PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILL SITZMANN // DESIGN BY MATT WIECZOREK

the creighton priEst who prosecuted jeffrEy dahmer, the “milwaukee cannibal” SEPTEMBER // OCTOBER • 2017 / 189 / BESTOFOMAHA.COM

60PLUS | PROFILE

Through a random series of events, O’Meara, 32 at the time and known as Greg to his friends, caught the Dahmer case early. He was among the first to see the evidence. “We had missing persons reports coming in from all over the country,” he recalls. “I wrote the order to get Dahmer’s blood sample so we could separate his blood from blood found at the scenes to determine who he killed.” The blood came from attractive young men, many of whom lived on the fringes of society, kicked out of their homes because of their sexual orientation—easy pickups for a goodlooking charmer like Dahmer.

HORDES OF TELEVISION cameras and news-

paper reporters descended on Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to cover the trial of a 31-year-old serial killer whose depths of depravity defied comprehension. Details of the murders—17 in all, but he confessed to 15—proved so grisly, so grotesque, that many media outlets showed restraint in their coverage for fear of alienating a large portion of their viewers or readers.

Even today, with all the atrocities plaguing the world, the name Jeffrey Dahmer can still send shivers down spines. The terms paraphilia, necrophilia, mutilation, and cannibalism all apply—terms that baffle and horrify most lay people.

“He was actually a nice guy,” says O’Meara, who talked with Dahmer many times, saw him in all his complexities, and came away with a compassion for the man most people would not understand. “He was very smart, he came from a rich family but he was horribly vulnerable [to his impulses]. His co-workers found him charming, funny, and engaging.” The funny and engaging part disappeared pretty quickly after Dahmer lured his victims to his grandmother’s house, or his apartment, and started drinking. In most of the murders, Dahmer sedated his victims by slipping a sleeping agent into their drinks. He raped his unconscious prey, strangled them, and then engaged in various sex acts with the corpses. He dismembered the bodies with a knife or chain saw and disposed of them by stripping the flesh off bones with acid, then pulverizing the bones.

The trail of carnage left by the chocolate factory worker and Army veteran during a 13-year period finally ended in July 1991 when police, alerted by an intended victim who escaped, walked into Dahmer’s apartment. Blood, body parts, a stench, and Polaroid pictures stopped them in their tracks.

He collected skulls and genitalia as trophies. He ate parts of three victims, telling psychiatrists later it was a way he could make them become a part of him. Police reports from the scenes make mention of various seasonings and meat tenderizers. The media latched onto the cannibal aspect of the case, thus coining Dahmer’s nickname.

“We really didn’t know what we were dealing with early on,” says the Rev. Gregory O’Meara, S.J., who as an attorney played a key role in shaping the prosecution’s case against the so-called “Milwaukee Cannibal.” He also assisted Milwaukee County District Attorney Michael McCann during the trial.

Dahmer’s desperate desire to acquire a permanent—and compliant—lover added yet another layer of “bizarre” to his horror story. He drilled holes in the skulls of his last four victims and poured acid into their brains in an attempt to create a sex zombie. It didn’t work.

Before becoming a Jesuit priest, a vocation that brought him to Creighton University in 2013, O’Meara spent almost seven years as an assistant district attorney in Milwaukee. The graduate of Notre Dame and University of Wisconsin Law School found his niche in the competitive world of trial work, where he racked up plenty of wins. Would he follow in his great-grandfather’s footsteps and become a judge? All signs pointed to that possibility.

“Absolutely, whatever definition of sanity we have, ” says O’Meara, echoing the prosecution’s contention that he belonged in a prison, not an institution—the question at the center of the trial.

Was Dahmer sane when he committed these depraved acts?

SEPTEMBER // OCTOBER • 2017 / 190 / OMAHAMAGAZINE.COM

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“He calculated and deliberately planned everything to the point that, when he was leaving a bar, he would never go home with someone who had a car. He would always have a taxi drop them off four or five blocks away from his apartment so no one could trace it.” After a two-week trial in February 1992, the jury agreed with the prosecution. Dahmer went to prison, where he died at the hands of another inmate a few years later. Six months after the trial ended, O’Meara entered the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits.

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“I had actually been thinking about it for a couple of years, but the timing hadn’t been right,” he says, waving off any assumption, as logical as it might sound, that the horrors of the Dahmer trial sent him straight to the priesthood. O’Meara’s good friend since 1985, the Rev. Roc O’Connor, S.J., an Omaha native and the first Jesuit O’Meara ever met, had a sense early on where O’Meara was heading. The Dahmer case solidified his feeling. “As horrible as that case was, Greg showed a lot of compassion. But he also had a lot of care for the victims and their families. He made sure they wouldn’t be lost in the flash of [Dahmer’s] terrible deeds.”

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O’Meara hasn’t thought of himself as a prosecutor for 25 years, preferring his roles as rector of Creighton’s Jesuit community, tenured law professor, counselor to anyone who seeks his help, and a friend who laughs easily. Few parishioners of St. John’s Church on the Creighton campus even know of O’Meara’s involvement in that infamous case, so when he joyously and repeatedly proclaims his belief of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness, they don’t realize he’s drawing from a deeper well than most.

Visit law.creighton.edu/faculty to learn more about the academic and professional background of the Rev. Gregory O’Meara.

SEPTEMBER // OCTOBER • 2017 / 191 / BESTOFOMAHA.COM

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SEPTEMBER // OCTOBER • 2017 / 192 / OMAHAMAGAZINE.COM