Anne Elaine Mosher 

The Geographer Behind Really Spatial 2

The official stuff . . .  click here.  

The unofficial stuff . . .

 

I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Back in the 1960s and 70s, it was a "small" place–about 110K people.  From the perspective of a kid, however, it was the perfect venue to be a proto-urban geographer.  It was like growing up inside the Burgess Concentric Ring Model.  It still had a viable downtown where people went to do most of their shopping, banking, doctors and dentists and lawyer appointments, etc.  Surrounding that was an industrial/warehouse/railroad zone (where my dad worked–as the superintendent for personnel at Cushman Motor Works).  Beyond that, a zone of "workingman's housing"-the neighborhood my dad's family lived, a zone of bigger houses (some subdivided into apartments like where my mom lived when she first came to Lincoln during WWII), and beyond that an accretion of several suburban layers.  My friends and I explored and learned that terrain–riding our bikes everywhere, and then later going door-to-door selling Camp Fire Girls candy.  We became astute landscape readers:  where it was and wasn't safe for us to be, and where we would and wouldn't be likely to find buyers for our boxes of Russell Stovers Chocolate.  

I also attribute a huge part to my mom and dad.  Dad was actually born in Eugene, Oregon–but both of his parents were from Lincoln (although the family was originally from upstate New York, having arrived in Nebraska in 1880.)  My Grampa and Grammy Mosher followed some other family members out west about 1902.  My grandmother hated Eugene.  She said that living in the Willamette Valley was like living inside of a shoebox.  On cloudy days, she said, "God put the lid on."  It made her nuts.  She lasted there about nine years before she packed up the kids and took them down to San Bernadino, California to her brother's.  My dad lived in this place (where he said you could fry eggs on the sidewalk) for about two years.  Eventually his dad re-joined them from Oregon, but they soon hightailed it back to Nebraska.  Dad was about fourteen when he arrived in Lincoln.  In any case, Dad's formative years were spent fishing, hiking, exploring and living what he made sound like a Tom Sawyer lifestyle, set in Oregon.  For the rest of his life he loved being in the outdoors and being as far away from big cities as humanly possible.   Because of that, every vacation we either went up north to fish in Minnesota (up past Bemidji).  Or, we went out west to the national parks, forests, and monuments.  By the time I was 9 I had been to every state west of the Mississippi and north of Oklahoma.   

Mom loved to travel as much as Dad.  She was born on a farm in north central Nebraska, only one county over from the eastern edge of the Sand Hills.  Her family had been in that area since the 1880s and her grandparents boasted one of the largest and most productive farms in the county.  (Notably, if the KXL pipeline is ever built, the present route has it running right across the gravel road from their homestead).  Her mom, my grandmother, however, had married "down."  My grandfather was only half Swedish, so that was one strike against him right there.  His American mother was from "good New England (actually, Mayflower) stock", but she had been disowned by her family when she married my greatgrandfather, Gus (a 100% Swedish immigrant who worked as a bartender in Denver.)  Gus and Florence took what little money Florence still had (she had been in Denver convolescing from TB) and tried farming in northeastern Colorado near Julesburg for a spell.  Somehow, they ended up in Nebraska, in the same county as my grandmother's family.  They all attended the same Swedish Lutheran Church, but they definitely were not from the same social class.

Thus Mom was born into pretty meager circumstances.  Nevertheless, there were always books and lots of storytelling–so her earliest travels were those of the mind.  She often told me how her dad would send her out with the dog to round up the cows, but she'd sneak a book out with her.  There were some trees down by one of the creeks that ran across the property, and if one of her sisters hadn't already claimed the spot, she'd climb the branches and read.  After she taught country school for two years post-high school, she moved to Lincoln where she eventually met my dad.  One of her first jobs there was as an editorial assistant to a Professor of Education at the University of Nebraska who also happened to be co-authoring a series of elementary school Geography textbooks–the "Know Our Neighbors" series published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.  What Mom learned in that job about Geography, she turned around and taught to me–even before I started Kindergarten.   There were always map puzzles, place picture books, and impromptu geography quizzes in our house.  Clearly, all of that stuff stuck with me.