I grew up in a small suburban town on the southernmost tip of Omaha, where the rolling hills of the Missouri valley meet the flats of the Platte River basin.

To the north of our modest home was the largest city in Nebraska: almost a half-million people in a rapidly expanding matrix of communities gobbling up the unlimited real estate of the western plains. To the south, only a bike ride’s distance over the hill, were majestic cornfields planted in one of the few remaining reservoirs of rich black topsoil on earth.

A Thousand Miles from the Rest of the World

If you look at a map of the United States, Nebraska is about as far away from New York, Los Angeles, Texas, or any foreign country as you could possibly get in the United States. Glitz, fame, and fortune were just things that we saw on TV.