Ralston's early history reads like a movie — 'Twister' or 'Music Man' (2024)

Ralston wasn’t even a village a year old before the 1913 tornado nearly took it off the map.

It could have been remade as Omaha’s answer to Hollywood, Ralston recast as Rialto City.

Ralston survived the storm and the scam. Just as it has through a downtown fire, municipal bankruptcy during the Great Depression, annexation attempts by big brother Omaha and the 1975 tornado.

Seven died and 14 were injured in Ralston in the March 23, 1913, twister that tore through the nine-month-old hamlet before diagonally cutting through the heart of Omaha.

First in the path through Ralston was the store and boarding house of the village’s first postmaster, David L. Ham. The bodies of his daughter, Edith Kimball, and 3-year-old granddaughter Frances, who were visiting from Winnipeg, Manitoba, were found under a pile of debris the next day.

Also killed in the same building were Oscar and Minnie Said, married for eight weeks. He was a polisher at the Howard Stove Works. Rescuers found them crushed in each other’s arms.

Near the destroyed Miller Hotel, Seymour Lake Country Club employee J.J. McDonald was killed.

On the shore of Seymour Lake, at the Cudahy ice house where the tornado peeled off the walls like a banana, foreman Art Moran, his wife and daughter were pinned under the wreckage. The daughter, 14-year-old Mary, was killed by a falling beam.

The seventh victim was Ollie Belle Mote, a mother of three who was swept out of the family cottage, which fell into the Big Papillion Creek, and she drowned under the ruins. A nephew was rescued from the high water.

More lives were saved when the Burlington Railroad station agent flagged down the No. 12 train that was barreling toward a house blown onto the track.

The Omaha Bee’s report had “practically every business and most of the houses in the town either wiped out or severely damaged.”

Other businesses destroyed were the stove works, the Brown Truck Works (lightning started a fire there, too), Cady Lumber, the Ralston State Bank (occupancy had been set for April 1), Omaha Furniture factory, R.T. Propst, Wiig clothing and Hazard Bros. stores, Frank Demke’s saloon, Jake Ewalt’s Meadows rooming house and the Seymour Lake clubhouse.

A case of beer from Demke’s was found on a hill several blocks away.

In the rebuilding, a new fire ordinance prohibited the use of wood in buildings in the business center and an entire block of brick buildings was going up.

Howard Stove, Brown Truck, Danner Varnish and Omaha Furniture were among the factories that were rebuilt larger. The bank, headed by first Ralston Mayor C.M. Skinner, was part of the brick block.

Barely three years after the tornado, a human whirlwind visited.

“Rialto Amusem*nt Co. of Nebraska, America’s Greatest Moving Picture Enterprise. S.E. Schaefer, President, Rialto Realty Co.”

For about two months Schaefer was very much the equal of River City’s Professor Harold Hill, save for 76 trombones.

Schaefer talked big, claimed he was an organizer of Universal City in Hollywood. Claimed he had a deal to buy the entire holdings (about 300 acres) of the Ralston Townsite Co., the founding agency of the village, for $500,000.

He said there would be $500,000 in improvements — movie studios, a 250-room hotel, residences, a 5-cent interurban railway to Omaha. The Rialto City studio was to be 150x600 feet, “where the world’s best films will be manufactured, stamped ‘Made in Omaha.’” Within three months, 500 actors and actresses were to be working in Ralston.

The governor and Omaha mayor backed out — wisely — of the cornerstone ceremony for the studio. The “Rialto Girl,” 9-year-old Hildegard Lachmann, whacked the 2-foot concrete cornerstone with a bottle of wine.

Two weeks later, the man Omaha knew as Schaefer skipped town. The downtown office was deserted, office equipment businesses reclaiming furniture. The option on the property reverted to the townsite company. Unless someone extended credit to him, no one lost money from the failed venture.

Schaefer was an alias. Sigmund Engel had as many assumed names, including “Lord Beaverbrook,” as swindles and marriages. Each numbered more than 50 before his death at 84 in 1956 in an Illinois mental hospital.

Another rebuilding of downtown Ralston followed a fire on Jan. 26, 1922, that destroyed the brick Ralston State Bank building that also housed a drugstore, grocery, meat market and garage. The post office and newspaper office were spared. A defective oil furnace in the basem*nt of the drugstore was pinpointed as causing the fire, which a faulty town water supply prolonged.

In Dec. 1934, the village of Ralston declared voluntary bankruptcy to take advantage of a new federal law. It had $240,000 in outstanding bonds, of which the state board of educational lands and funds owned $173,243, and it was in default to the state for $4,400.

The city coffers were dried up. Seymour Lake was dried up from drought.

But Ralston made it through. Mayor Felix Despecher formed the Ralston Investment Co., with former mayor H.C. Tilford its manager, to sell housing lots. The revenue went to debt payments.

Cudahy gave the lake to the town, which added a bathing beach, and Melvin Bekin donated the former country club land for a municipal golf course. The new improvements were Works Progress Administration federal projects. Within four years, Ralston was progressing toward solvency.

Ralston became more of the residential community Dr. George Miller envisioned when he sold his estate for the townsite and less of the manufacturing center that had been the town’s base.

In 1953, its population reaching 1,000 in the 1950 census, Ralston became a city of the second class. Its new junior-senior high school opened — 11th- and 12th-graders no longer had to finish at Omaha’s South High or Papillion.

Ralston’s oldest businesses in 1953 were the Van Fleet & Sons grocery (dating to Propst), Ralston Bus, Rush Drugs, Liberty Laboratories (one of three serum makers in town), Dominick’s Bar (Demke’s site), Ralston Elevator, Hamilton Bros. Oil, Omaha Brick Works, Ralston Supermarket, Howard Stove Repair, Crown Products, Union Rubber Works and Ralston Toy and Novelty (Ralstoys).

Now I hate to toy with you, dear reader, but Ralston’s story needs a third installment. Come back next week.