An alert reader gave me several column ideas, even hinting that she herself would be a good topic for one of my columns. The Gering Library recently acquired some podcasting equipment, so I set it up at home and interviewed my neighbor, Shirley Weihing.

Last week, Shirley celebrated her 102nd birthday. She was born in Cedar County, Nebraska outside the tiny town of Coleridge. Her father was a farmer, who raised corn and oats. He also had a small herd of registered Hereford cattle.

Shirley said “books were pretty precious” during her childhood. Her aunt, who was a teacher, gave her books for Christmas. Most of these were educational books, like a guide to the night sky, but she remembers enjoying “The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew” by Margaret Sidney. There wasn’t a library in her small town so she and her older cousins exchanged books.

The first library Shirley encountered was in high school. It was located at the back of a classroom. “Golly there was one person who had read every book in the library.” Shirley’s first job was working at Farmer’s Union Store, taking inventory for ten cents an hour. She saved her wages at the post office, using postal savings. “That would be after the banks closed (in 1929), it was a safer place. It was intended for my college education.”

Shirley’s teaching experience started early. She instructed her younger sister Fern in the alphabet, starting with A for apple, B for (Aunt) Bernice, C for Chalmer (her father’s name), D for Daddy and so on.

Shirley’s mother did not graduate from high school, but her father’s older sister attended Wayne State College. Her father graduated from high school in 1917 and he attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln until war broke out. Shirley’s father often wondered what his mother had in mind for him, sending him to college. Her parents wanted Shirley to have an education as well.

Shirley attended college at nearby Wayne State College. With one year of schooling, someone could teach in the country schools, but with two years they could teach in town. Shirley enrolled at Wayne in 1941, but Pearl Harbor happened that fall and everything changed. By the end of her first semester, “the men just vanished.”

She completed two years of college then taught fifth grade in Wakefield. “I was really going places.” She and three other teachers lived with a widow who had four bedrooms. She taught for six years but wanted to further her education. Shirley said “I wanted to get out and see the world” so she started attending summer school through Wayne, but ultimately decided to move to Lincoln in 1947 and attend the university there. “Suddenly we had men on the campus and it was exciting.”

This is where she encountered John Weihing, a veteran working on his master’s degree in plant pathology. After a whirlwind romance, they married in August of 1948. Shirley finished college then raised their four children and supported her husband’s career as they lived in a series of small apartments in Lincoln because housing was scarce due to the war.

Shirley’s teaching experience came in handy when the family moved overseas for John’s job in the 1960s. She homeschooled their children in Turkey, while John was helping to start a land grant college there. The Weihings settled in Gering in 1971, where John worked at what is now the UNL Panhandle Research and Extension Center. She lived two doors down from my grandparents, and they were friends. Always a reader, Shirley is one of the charter members of the Food for Thought Book group at the Gering Library.

When her husband was in the state legislature from 1987-1991, they would check out books on tape from the library and listen to them on car trips across the state. He liked classical music and she liked talk radio, but they both enjoyed listening to books in the car.

Now, Shirley is grateful for the Talking Books program run by the Nebraska Library Commission. They regularly send her books on cartridges she can put in a special machine and listen to. Her favorite genres are nonfiction and books by Nebraska authors.

Shirley advises making “worthy use of leisure time” like reading or crocheting rather than occupying your free time being unproductive. This is about 5% of the chat Shirley and I had. At some point, I will get the interview edited and find a place to post it so others can listen to the many other stories Shirley Weihing shared.