Editor’s note: This is the first of an occasional series of articles that explore other towns across the United States that share the same name as our hometown.
The unassuming burg of Memphis, named by settlers from Tennessee, attracts more fish and game enthusiasts than its small population would suggest.
Photo by Danny Lairimore.
“No place, in theory, is boring of itself. Boredom lies only with the traveler’s limited perception and his failure to explore more deeply.”
— William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways
As I set out on my quest to visit every Memphis in America, I reckoned I'd start by walking down the gravel roads of my youth. Growing up on a farm just down the road from Memphis, Nebraska, I came to appreciate the subtler shades of beauty. The rising squeal of steel from the rails across the corn, before a train storms by with its mournful horn; the flutter of cottonwood leaves in the summer; the silky mud of roadside ditches where we seined crawdads for bait.
Grammy told me that Pop would walk those roads barefoot as a boy, so by the age of 8, I resolved to do the same. As she egged me on in her gardening clothes, no one would have guessed that, in her youth, she’d left that same farm behind to tour as a vaudeville actress. Yet, like the dusty fields of day giving way to black nights flecked with shooting stars, my family kept a little glimmer of the infinite tucked in our field boots. No one in Memphis was surprised when both my sister and I followed Grammy’s path to New York City.
Known for his literary sketches of life in Nebraska, poet Ted Kooser also does visual sketches, as with his drawing of the road to the Greene family farm (seen above).
Since then, I’ve been rediscovering my homeland throughout my adult life, encountering new facts about Nebraska randomly in my pursuits, long after leaving. Who knew that Omaha was the birthplace of R&B trailblazer Wynonie Harris, one of the “unsung heroes of rock-and-roll”? Who would have guessed that Ted Kooser, that obscure local writer whose books my sister handed out on holidays, would one day become the poet laureate of these United States? Or that Clay Anderson, one of the cool upperclassmen in the Ashland-Greenwood Public School system I attended, would end up living for a time on the International Space Station, making him the most upper classman of all of us?
Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006, stands by the Greene family farm shed that once housed local rural schoolteachers in the 1930s. It now displays iron implements made by the author’s great-grandfather, a blacksmith.
Photograph courtesy Alex Greene.
And then there was motorcycling, another side of Nebraska’s appeal I never would have predicted. I led a sheltered life out on Rural Route 2, somewhere in the triangle marked by the small towns of Greenwood, Ashland, and Memphis. I came to appreciate Nebraska for its flying Vs of geese, for its snowdrift caves and coyote howls in the moon- light. Anything mechanical would make Pop cuss — just steer clear. True, most local Cold War babies like me took pride in the fact that the nearby Strategic Air Command would be a prime target in a nuclear strike. And I could pick up Dr. Who, The Twilight Zone, and Outer Limits on UHF with my custom coat-hanger antenna. I was tuned in. And, being an avid reader of Nebraskaland magazine, I knew my animal tracks.
But the Greenes were too bookish to have any truck with mini-bikes. Little did we realize how many fans of the combustion engine lived around us, or how they shared our love of nature — something I only learned recently, while talking to another old Ashland upperclassman, Steve Tillman. He most certainly did grow up with mini-bikes, “then graduated to vehicles that actually have a clutch in ’em,” as he tells it. Now a seasoned veteran of many a motorcycle tour, he thinks of Nebraska as a two-wheeled-traveler’s delight.
“Nebraska’s known as a flyover state,” Steve says, “but for people that ride motorcycles it’s great, because of the lay of the land from east to west. You’ve got the bluffs along the Missouri River, you’ve got superb roads, and in the northwest, you have the Sandhills. It’s a bucket list item for most true motorcyclists. They just wanna ride through the Nebraska Sandhills. There’s no other place like that on the planet.”
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Sarah Greene gets a ride to Memphis from Zach Stander.
Motorcycle photo courtesy Alex Greene.
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Aerial view of the Memphis Lake State Recreation Area.
Photo courtesy Nebraskaland magazine.
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Hooking a large-mouth bass in Memphis.
Photo courtesy Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.
For many, the Sandhills are the perfect route to every summer’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, to which up to 700,000 motorcyclists flock in peak years. “Many of us would take the trip,” continues Steve. “We would go to Grand Island, then go north on Highway 2. That would angle you up through the Sandhills, Valentine, and then north to catch Interstate 90 in South Dakota.” Feeling closer to nature is part of the point of riding, in his view — especially if you take that same route in spring, when there’s an altogether different gathering, also with half a million participants. “In spring, you can get those late Nebraska snows, or really bad wet weather,” he says. “But it’s always a bonus if Mother Nature will cooperate and let us see the cranes.”
Those would be Sandhill cranes, hundreds of thousands of them. Nearly all varieties of the species bottleneck through a few miles of the Platte River for a couple of weeks annually, descending on central Nebraska like clockwork every March. I’d first gone to see them in my teens, with my sister Sarah and then-boyfriend Bill, her husband-to-be. Sneaking up on the river-roosting cranes in the frosty night and watching them rise with the sun by the thousands, in glorious, swarming cacophony, is a memory that will stick with you.
Waterfowl swarm above flooded fields in Iowa, near Nebraska City, March 2019.
Photo by Henry Greene.
I didn't visit the Sandhills on my return home this past March, but I thought of the cranes often, driving north through Missouri. Waterfowl were amassed in every field or swollen ditch. Up north, the family farm, covered in snow upon my arrival, would become a lake when the accumulated winter’s snowfall melted under heavy rains in the days to come. Dirt roads went from swampy to impassable, and the blanketing white was washed away, leaving only mud-black fields and the shimmer of water everywhere. For the tens of thousands of geese and ducks migrating in the cranes’ wake, it was paradise.
Our place was a birder’s paradise as well, even this far east of the Sandhills. Driving to Memphis the day after my arrival, as the floods began, I saw swaths of Canada geese spread over the fields, feasting, and realized that most of my memories of the little town, home to a 48-acre lake, involved such fowl encounters of the migratory kind. My late father led many a fishing and camping expedition there and taught me to canoe on that lake. Every time we spied the telltale dotted lines of geese sweeping across the sky, or lifting from a field en masse, his elation was contagious.
As it turned out, the waterfowl and wetlands of Memphis had just made the local Ashland Gazette, as the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission touted its latest improvements to the Memphis Lake State Recreation Area and associated wildlife management zone. The article noted that hunters “are drawn to the area because of its prime location between Lincoln and Omaha. As the wetland conditions deteriorated over time, so did the hunting opportunities.” Locals, most of them hunters as well, were wishing them success.
The Greene family farm turns into a lake as snow melt during the floods of March 2019.
Photograph by Dennis Donohue / Dreamstime.
All natural wonders aside, as I pulled onto State Highway 63 from the soupy dirt road to our farm, I was thankful that the rest of the way into Memphis was well-paved. It resonated with something Steve told me: In his mind, Memphis, Nebraska, would forever be linked to having his first motorcycle. He would often drive there from Ashland. “It got you out on the highway, got a little bit of seat time underneath you when you were younger,” he says. “Maybe you’d ride around the park. The roads were good, so it was a safe ride. When you made it there and back, you felt like you were king for a day. And of course, since you knew people that lived in Memphis, and went to school with them, you were really hoping they saw you ride by. I mean, there is some vanity involved in this, too.”
To this day, Memphis is a haven for motorcyclists, even those not raised in the next town over. Oddly enough, I first discovered this through my sister Sarah. Yes, the sister who loves Sandhill Cranes. e one for whom my other sister, Julie, and I had once composed the anthem, “Ecologist! Biologist! That’s what my sistah’s gonna be-yee-yee,” in celebration of her college major.
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Charlene Cronican Horton and daughter-in-law Jackie Horton (mayor of Memphis, Nebraska) sit at Table 19 in Don’s Bar. Photographs courtesy Alex Greene.
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The Worm Hut offers fresh bait to Memphis fishermen.
It all started when Sarah and Julie and I were visiting the family farm a few years ago, talking to Zach Stander, who kept the place mowed and in good repair. With our parents gone, and all the siblings off pursuing careers, we relied on folks like Zach. “We were just standing around admiring the 66 skulls painted on his motorcycle,” Sarah recalls. “We were trying to count them, and talking like timid Nebraskans, like, how would anyone ever get onto that thing? And then he offered to give one of us a ride. Julie wouldn’t, so I opted for it. It seemed very exotic to me. I had only been on a motorcycle once before, with Steve Connor, my first boyfriend, before he went to Vietnam.
“I just remember going around curves on Zach’s bike, slanting left and right. I was really scared — for the first half. But by the second half, it started to seem really fun. Zach suggested going to Memphis, and I thought of Charlene, ’cause I always think of her and her accordion in that bar.”
Charlene Cronican Horton, whose family has owned Don’s Bar in Memphis since 1962, was in Sarah’s high school class. Years later, rolling into town on a boss hawg sporting 66 skulls, Sarah saw Memphis in a new light. “Zach wanted to go because a motorcycle crew was there that day,” she says. “But I didn’t realize how big it would be. There were dozens of bikers with tattoos, all laughing a lot. They were raising money for breast cancer.”
Don’s Bar is a regular stop for many biker charity events in southeast Nebraska. As Steve Tillman described it, “When I was director of the Harley Owners Group in Lincoln, we would have a muscular distrophy event that would attract a thousand riders. We could raise $10,000 in one Saturday. These type of events go on all over the United States for many different charities. You might have a ride that charges $20 for the rider, and a passenger on the back might be another $15. There are different prizes, all donated, of course.”
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Poster for a phonograph exhibition in Ashland, Nebraska, ca. 1895.
Historical photographs courtesy Ashland Historical Society.
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Don’s Bar of Memphis, its ceiling strewn with caps, in the 1960s.
Historical photographs courtesy Ashland Historical Society.
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Workers for the Armour & Co. ice house on Memphis Lake in the 1920s.
Historical photographs courtesy Ashland Historical Society.
I was curious about this contemporary biker/charity scene, so the first stop in my visit was Don’s, its weathered wood front resembling an old saloon, complete with attached bait shop. Though Charlene had sold the place to her son and daughter-in-law, Jackie, she was still working the bar, just as she was the day my sister showed up. “She come walking in the door and she went, ‘Charlene?’” she told me. “And I went, ‘Sarah Greene?? What are you doing here?’ Zach said, ‘She’s not really a biker chick.’ And I said, ‘What the hell are you doin!?’ Total shocker. I think she even had a beer.”
“Charlene thought Zach was my boyfriend,” my sister recalls. “And then I guess I drank a beer to get into the spirit. Back in high school, just being in a bar was so novel to me. It was so astounding then to think of Charlene growing up there, playing accordion for the customers.” Back when The Cronican Trio played polkas every weekend, Sarah had never tasted beer, and Don’s wasn’t for motorcycle clubs.
But daughter-in-law Jackie, who also happens to be the mayor of Memphis, says it’s quite common now. “I’ve actually got three biker groups coming in June. Booked ’em already. They like to ride Highway 6.” The old stereotype of rowdy bikers doesn’t apply anymore, she says. “They’re not as crazy as they used to be, I guess. Some of ’em are nicer than people who come here regularly.
“I’d say we’ve had up to a thousand bikers at some of the events,” Charlene adds. “But it’s not like Sturgis or anything.”
I rely on my imagination to picture the clamor of a tattooed crowd. Though the next evening would bring dozens of customers to Don’s weekly Friday-night fish fry, only three regulars are there as I sit with my lunch. “Hey Kenny,” one says to another at the far end of the bar. “Get through the floods okay?”
“No, I got a lot of water,” replies Kenny. “Wading through water everywhere. It’s everywhere.”
The first regular, an older man in a blue windbreaker, nods. “A lot of water.”
Charlene shakes her head and says, “The weather is just getting more and more erratic every year.” Then she introduces me to the first regular. “Herb, this is Alex Greene. He’s from here but lives in Memphis, Tennessee.”
“That’s neat. Memphis, Tennessee, huh? Gosh darn!” says Herb with a smile.
"Herb always brings us a Gazette," Charlotte interjects, looking the paper over.“It should be covered with water,” says Herb, grimly.
When I tell him who my parents were, Herb exclaims, “Hank and Helen Greene! They were nice people. Well-respected. You still have the farm there? Well, I’ll be darned.”
In moments such as this, I treasure coming home. Even those who didn’t know my folks personally read articles in the Gazette by my late mother, who had once been a reporter for the Lincoln Journal. But really, most people knew them personally.
It’s a world that wouldn’t seem strange to Tennesseans, for whom the Bluff City has always been “America’s biggest small town.” Most wouldn’t feel out of place at Don’s Table 19, the spot where locals have gathered for years. “Farmers would sit there at that table in the afternoon and play pitch. Just playing for candy bars or pop or something,” Charlene says. And though my father was more likely to be sipping his martini in the garden, he knew the crowd well.
Yet, in the face of all this, and with similar towns withering away all over the Midwest, Memphis, Nebraska has somehow survived, thanks to its lake, its loyal citizens, and more than a few bikers.
But the present was calling. I had to see my sister Susie in Lincoln, to discuss plans for my sister Molly's 70th birthday. It was rumored that even my brother Chris would attend. A big Midwestern family, worthy of a Rockwell portrait: the picture of privilege to many. I mulled over our past and our future as I strolled out of Don’s Bar and over to the lake, still barely frozen over. Out past the shore, I recalled ice fishing excursions there in the piercing Nebraska winters.
Having just read an article in Nebraskaland about the state of ice fishing in 2019, I couldn’t help hearing Charlene’s words about the erratic weather with some alarm. “One thing that has characterized our weather this winter has been extremes,” Don Bauer writes in the article. “We have had cold temperatures ... but those ‘snaps’ have not lasted long. Then we have had exceptionally mild weather. e result of all of that is that you better be very careful wherever you go. Get a spud bar and use it!”
The view across Memphis Lake as winter gives way to spring.
Photograph by Alex Greene.
I wondered if ice fishing will become a thing of the past as this planet continues its warming trend. At one time, the ice fueled a booming economy here. The town, settled mostly by Tennesseans and named in honor of the Bluff City, was incorporated in 1887, when rails from Omaha were laid to service local farmers. The conjunction of railroad and lake made it a prime location for Armour & Co. to build an ice house when the town was only 10 years old. The man-made lake could be drained every spring, converted to pasture, then refilled every fall, making for exceptionally clean “lemonade ice,” as it was known. Before the industry fizzled out in the late 1920s, the ice house employed up to 300 workers and shipped out 24 boxcars of ice per day.
The death of the ice industry prefigured the way agricultural technology, in a longer arc of history, has made family farming nearly obsolete. These days, farming is a game of survival going to landowners who can work the most acreage at once, using the biggest, most “efficient” equipment, chemical inputs, and seed. While smaller organic growers are making a comeback near the cities (and weathering droughts better due to their soil’s health), the landscape is ruled by capital-intensive operations chasing after the latest satellite-guided tractors, covering 48 rows in one pass, led by soil analysis data to precision-drop herbicides, pesticides and genetically modified seeds. Even the big players are in a never-ending competition with weeds and insects. is year’s floods are only the latest in a series of death- blows to smaller farms. Often, with farmer suicides on the rise, that death-blow is literal.
Yet, in the face of all this, and with similar towns withering away all over the Midwest, Memphis, Nebraska, has somehow survived, thanks to its lake, its loyal citizens, and more than a few bikers. As I drove back to our family farm house, stuffed to the rafters with faded photographs and old letters home, there was some solace in the persistence of the wild geese in the surrounding corn and soybean stubble. I could hear my father’s delighted chuckle as he spied them. Caught up in ancient cycles they can never understand, older than humanity itself, generations of those geese keep rising and falling over the same fields, calling to each other, banking on the wind, then moving on to chase the seasons as trains echo beneath them.
