The run to Rescue, a ghost town and a small town meet
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PRAGUE, NEB - 7/1/12 - Tony Wirka, the only resident of the ghost town Rescue, NE, stands in front of the old general store on Sunday, July 1, 2012. Wirka now owns all the buildings that made up the town of Rescue. "Run to Rescue" was created as a race to Rescue from Prague and will help the fire and rescue squad in Prague get new equipment. (ADAM WOLFFBRANDT/Lincoln Journal Star)
A tractor had fallen on Tony Wirka.
It trapped the Czech bachelor on the sloping lane that led to his house and all the buildings -- the gas station, the dance hall, the grocery store -- that were growing old alongside him.
A passerby spotted Tony that February day in 2008 and called for help.
That was the first race to Rescue.
And that’s when another Czech bachelor hatched a plan for the second.
“The rescue unit went to Rescue,” Prague’s fire chief, Greg Ourada, said Sunday. “That’s how I got the idea.”
The idea is this Saturday’s fundraising run – Race to Rescue -- part of Prague’s Q125 Celebration, three days of kolaches and polka dances, flea markets and history exhibits.
Greg lives in Prague, population 361, settled in the hills of Saunders County.
He was on the crew that freed Tony, a roads maintenance man doing what he often did, giving an old tractor a push start. This time he slipped when he tried to jump aboard and pop the clutch.
He lived alone, the only resident of Rescue, Nebraska.
Or what was left of Rescue.
He’s still there. And Sunday, he walks out his front door with his walking stick, a reluctant historian.
Greg is on his way to the ghost town, four miles north and west of Prague. Two other race organizers, Connie Johnson and Linne Vavrina, are already here, having taken the back route -- an old railroad line turned minimum maintenance road and shortcut for generations of Prague teenagers late for curfew.
It’s the route runners will travel Saturday, moving in and out of shadow, corn fields on one side, a meandering creek on the other, before turning around in Tony’s lane.
Tony is 75, a big man with a heavy step and sharp tongue, softened by his smile.
You can hear the Czech in his voice, a gift from his immigrant grandparents and parents who spoke the language at home with Tony -- Anton -- and his brothers and sisters.
The dance hall is gone, grown to grass, he says, walking between old buildings and rusting hulks of cars and farm equipment.
The gas station is here, says Tony, but the pump is missing. The grocery store is standing.
Raccoons have taken over the beer joint.
Tony goes back inside his house and hauls out a cookie tin filled with photos of a thriving town, Model Ts lining the street for his grandfather’s funeral in 1921.
He's too young to remember much of the place, he says. Rescue reached its peak in the '20s and dwindled away with the advent of the automobile.
But his father recorded its history before he died in 1989, 10 handwritten pages.
Block I: “General merchandise store with post office in it and also living quarters in back …”
He notes Frank Wirka’s house. He notes the two-room house where “Mrs. Ourada lived, she being an old retired lady …”
And Block II: “The house my parents, Anton Wirka family moved in … the Brecka property… up the hill was the saloon and store building. … The Burlington Railroad box car depot ... the Rescue Grain Company.”
The dance hall, built on to the back of the general store, had oak floors, where Mr. Sklenicka held puppet shows and masquerade balls. The store sold phonographs and “Bohemian records.” Passenger trains came every day but Sunday.
There was the machine shop Tony’s dad ran -- and later repaired television sets out of, closing its doors in 1948, the last business in Rescue.
Greg doesn’t know who Mrs. Ourada was, likely a distant relative. Race organizer Linne was an Ourada before she married; Greg is a cousin.
Connie is Czech. A Kratky by birth, her parents still farm the land next to Tony’s.
And Prague is a Czech town, named for the capital of Czechoslovakia.
This Prague is home of the “World’s Largest Kolach,” according to a faded sign outside of town.
Although they all work elsewhere -- Connie and Greg in Lincoln and Linne in David City -- the race organizers love their little town.
Prague doesn’t have a high school anymore. The grocery store has closed, and the Presbyterian church is set to.
They still have a bar, a restaurant, a bank, a beauty shop, a post office, an elevator, an auto repair shop.
And six days before the race, they had 224 entries from as far away as California and Wisconsin -- 121 registered for a 5K, 58 for a 1-mile fun run and 45 who’d signed up to go all the way to Rescue, where an old Czech bachelor still lives.
And where Sunday, another Czech bachelor -- one of 36 rescue squad volunteers -- stands at the turn-around surrounded by the ghost of a town.
“What do you think of this thriving little metropolis?” the fire chief asks.
“I hope this doesn’t happen to Prague.”
It trapped the Czech bachelor on the sloping lane that led to his house and all the buildings -- the gas station, the dance hall, the grocery store -- that were growing old alongside him.
A passerby spotted Tony that February day in 2008 and called for help.
That was the first race to Rescue.
And that’s when another Czech bachelor hatched a plan for the second.
“The rescue unit went to Rescue,” Prague’s fire chief, Greg Ourada, said Sunday. “That’s how I got the idea.”
The idea is this Saturday’s fundraising run – Race to Rescue -- part of Prague’s Q125 Celebration, three days of kolaches and polka dances, flea markets and history exhibits.
Greg lives in Prague, population 361, settled in the hills of Saunders County.
He was on the crew that freed Tony, a roads maintenance man doing what he often did, giving an old tractor a push start. This time he slipped when he tried to jump aboard and pop the clutch.
He lived alone, the only resident of Rescue, Nebraska.
Or what was left of Rescue.
He’s still there. And Sunday, he walks out his front door with his walking stick, a reluctant historian.
Greg is on his way to the ghost town, four miles north and west of Prague. Two other race organizers, Connie Johnson and Linne Vavrina, are already here, having taken the back route -- an old railroad line turned minimum maintenance road and shortcut for generations of Prague teenagers late for curfew.
It’s the route runners will travel Saturday, moving in and out of shadow, corn fields on one side, a meandering creek on the other, before turning around in Tony’s lane.
Tony is 75, a big man with a heavy step and sharp tongue, softened by his smile.
You can hear the Czech in his voice, a gift from his immigrant grandparents and parents who spoke the language at home with Tony -- Anton -- and his brothers and sisters.
The dance hall is gone, grown to grass, he says, walking between old buildings and rusting hulks of cars and farm equipment.
The gas station is here, says Tony, but the pump is missing. The grocery store is standing.
Raccoons have taken over the beer joint.
Tony goes back inside his house and hauls out a cookie tin filled with photos of a thriving town, Model Ts lining the street for his grandfather’s funeral in 1921.
He's too young to remember much of the place, he says. Rescue reached its peak in the '20s and dwindled away with the advent of the automobile.
But his father recorded its history before he died in 1989, 10 handwritten pages.
Block I: “General merchandise store with post office in it and also living quarters in back …”
He notes Frank Wirka’s house. He notes the two-room house where “Mrs. Ourada lived, she being an old retired lady …”
And Block II: “The house my parents, Anton Wirka family moved in … the Brecka property… up the hill was the saloon and store building. … The Burlington Railroad box car depot ... the Rescue Grain Company.”
The dance hall, built on to the back of the general store, had oak floors, where Mr. Sklenicka held puppet shows and masquerade balls. The store sold phonographs and “Bohemian records.” Passenger trains came every day but Sunday.
There was the machine shop Tony’s dad ran -- and later repaired television sets out of, closing its doors in 1948, the last business in Rescue.
Greg doesn’t know who Mrs. Ourada was, likely a distant relative. Race organizer Linne was an Ourada before she married; Greg is a cousin.
Connie is Czech. A Kratky by birth, her parents still farm the land next to Tony’s.
And Prague is a Czech town, named for the capital of Czechoslovakia.
This Prague is home of the “World’s Largest Kolach,” according to a faded sign outside of town.
Although they all work elsewhere -- Connie and Greg in Lincoln and Linne in David City -- the race organizers love their little town.
Prague doesn’t have a high school anymore. The grocery store has closed, and the Presbyterian church is set to.
They still have a bar, a restaurant, a bank, a beauty shop, a post office, an elevator, an auto repair shop.
And six days before the race, they had 224 entries from as far away as California and Wisconsin -- 121 registered for a 5K, 58 for a 1-mile fun run and 45 who’d signed up to go all the way to Rescue, where an old Czech bachelor still lives.
And where Sunday, another Czech bachelor -- one of 36 rescue squad volunteers -- stands at the turn-around surrounded by the ghost of a town.
“What do you think of this thriving little metropolis?” the fire chief asks.
“I hope this doesn’t happen to Prague.”
Read more: http://journalstar.com/news/local/the-run-to-rescue-a-ghost-town-and-a-small/article_4f3d2610-8293-50d2-b269-ef7cbe79e230.html#ixzz20Me8QBJQ
