A Blog Along The Lincoln Highway

We leave the fort, drive a few blocks north to reconnect with Route 30 and turn left to head westward out of North Platte. Not a half mile down the road, I see a ramshackle used bookstore on the left, and Bob says “Look at this!” There’s a guy riding a gray horse westbound on Route 30. “How about we get a shot? We’ll go up ahead and be ready when he comes by.” OK.

We pull into a cemetery on the right, and Glenn grabs the tripod. Bob sets up quickly on the sidewalk, and horse and rider walk past, oblivious to all the atttention. I look at the rider and he nods at me. Very cowboy.

But Bob wants a shot of a neon Western Motel sign too that we passed about a block or so back. OK. So I go up to the motel office to see if I can talk to anybody there, but it’s locked up tight. Not closed for good, but no one there.

So, I say, You get the shots you want, and I’m going to check out the bookstore over here. The Western Motel is next to the bookstore I saw. You can’t see into the shop because there are books piled up to the top of every window. Oh, it looks like heaven.

There’s a yapping dog who greets me when I enter. A black pomeranian. “Peanut, Peanut! No, no! Come here.” The woman behind the counter comes to get the dog off my leg.

“No problem,” I say. “That’s OK.” I reach down and pet old Peanut and all is well. The dog settles down immediately.

The place is crammed full of books. On shelves. In stacks. In cardboard boxes on the floor. There are books on the counter. Books to the ceiling. Books on both sides of very narrow aisles. There are also several crystal chandeliers providing light into some of the dark corners of the place. Lots of paperbacks. Romance novels. But also plenty of science fiction, classics. This place has a very high “funk factor.” I tell the woman that I love this kind of store, and she agrees. She’s from New York, but she bought the business a year or so ago, and she loves it. I explain that it’s the kind of place I can’t pass up when I’m driving down the highway. She understands.

Then I start explaining what we’re doing, and I ask if she’d talk to us about the store if I can talk the guys into coming in here. Sure, she says, “I love to talk. And it’d be good publicity.” Glenn and Bob say OK. None of the we’ve-got-to-keep-moving grumbles I expected. I know Bob has trouble resisting a used bookstore too, so I suspected it wouldn’t be a hard sell.

It works out great. We get an interview, shots of the store, close-ups of books, pictures of Peanut and the other dog who’s sleeping inside one of the glass counters at the front of the place. And the woman, Kim Perkins, seems comfortable on camera. Good stuff.

Of course, there was the moment we’ve come almost to expect: “Now, where are you guys from?” “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” “Get out! I grew up there! In Sewickley. My dad still lives there!” Pittsburghers are everywhere. And they all seem to have a fondness for the place. I thought she was from New York. “I lived lots of places, but I went to Quaker Valley High School,” she tells us. “The Quaker Valley Quakers!” She then starts yinzing us and talking with a classic Pittsburgh accent.

Before we know it, we’ve spent about two hours there. We ask for suggestions on places to have lunch in North Platte, and Kim sends us to the Depot. It’s on the way back to I-80 and we decide we will have to get back on the interstate because we’ve spent so much time in North Platte. We’re still in Nebraska!

But I’m really happy to have a bookstore story. Bob says, “Even last year you always said you hoped to find a bookstore beside the highway.”

When we get back in the van after lunch, I pick up the Butko book and read about North Platte, and I realize that that stretch of 30 — where we shot the horse, the motel sign and the bookstore — is not vintage Lincoln Highway. The old route actually cuts north through town to go past the Bill Cody Museum and mansion, so technically the bookstore was not on the original Lincoln Highway, but it’s right on 30, and that’s good enough for me.