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The results of the 1946 Cedar County school census was reported in the Advocate of Aug. 7. Census takers counted 3,958 children between the ages of five and 21 regardless of whether they attended school or not. This was five more than the number recorded in 1945 and the first wave of Baby Boomers had not yet reached school age.
Actual enrollment figures showed a total of 2,365 children – including 1,218 boys and 1,147 girls – attended school during the 1945-46 school year. By comparison the enrollment figures for the 2024-25 school year showed a total 1,640 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade.
Of the 119 school buildings in the county in 1946, 104 were of wooden construction, 10 were brick, three were stucco, one was stone, and one was concrete. Serving the students were 163 teachers of which 153 were women.
Laurel High School coach M.L. Christensen previously announced plans to start a midget softball league for boys up to age 14 if enough interest was shown. A total of 36 boys signed up. That was enough to make a four-team league. The names chosen were Cardinals, Red Sox, Yankees and Pirates.
Players for the Cardinals were Jim Flynn, Bob Dalton, Jon Ericson, Richard Cook, Dick Rimel, Dan Cook, Donnie Tangeman, Bill Crombie, and Jackie Fennell.
Red Sox players were Wayne Benjamin, Andy Crombie, Gary Coonrod, Charles Fleer, Dick Andrews, Gene Church, Larry Bass, Wally Loeb, and Skipper Bullock.
The Yankees were Darryl Wacker, Gene Collins, Gary Tuttle, Cleo Karnes, Leroy Hansen, Dick Dolph, Frances Sudbeck, Eddie Peabody, and Loy McNabb.
The pirates were Bob Hirschman, Dick Flynn, Eugene Anderson, Harry Peabody, Donald Casey, Dean Karnes, Jerry August, Leroy Stayton, and Ronnie Jensen.
Two games were played each Wednesday and Saturday through the month of August. One game was played at the ballpark and one on the school grounds.
The Laurel town team defeated Pleasant Valley, 7-1, in the last home game of the season.Outstanding players include Dutch Urwiler, Bob Anderson, and Ding Carmen. Urwiler came up to bat four times and got four hits.
Football practice started two weeks before school began. Twenty-nine boys checked out equipment. They were Harry Huddleston, Harold Sudbeck, Pat Mallatt, Mac Chederquist, John Maloney, Jim Tolles, Neil Smith, Kay Curtis, Vernon Joy, Jim Hansen, Duane Lukes, Tommy Dempster, Dean Johnson, Carroll Hirchert, Herman Vollersen, Paul Huddleston, Gary Johnson, Jim Linn, Wayne Benjamin, Mert Swanson, Norman Sullivan, Gene Schutte, Darryl Wacker, John Maxon, Bob Dalton, Bob Hirschman, Jim Flynn, Andy Crombie and Kenneth Lipp. The paving project which got underway in June was so popular that more property owners petitioned the Village Board for paving. The first petition was to pave five blocks from Elmer Christensen‘s corner south to Highway 15. The second was to pave Second Street from the Highway to the top of the West Hill. Another petition asked that the paving on Elm Street be extended from the intersection of Third to the intersection of Fourth.
To save money it was proposed that any paving outside of the original project be laid five inches thick with no steel reinforcing. The original project called for six inches of concrete with wire mesh reinforcing. Five-inch paving could be laid for $2.35 per square yard while six-inch paving with steel reinforcing would cost $2.60 per yard.
There was some controversy whether five inches of concrete could withstand heavy loads. The contractor assured the Board that 80 percent of all municipal paving in the state of Nebraska since 1932 had been five inches unreinforced.
Water Commissioner R.B. Michels advised people interested in connecting to the city sewer to do so before the paving was laid. “It would be a great expense to have to break up the new paving to dig a sewer connection,“ he said. Hard to imagine that there were still people in Laurel who did not have indoor plumbing in 1946.
Not everyone had given up farming with horses either. Alva Olson who farmed east of Hartington was fatally injured while loading bundles of grain onto a hay rack on a farm west of Laurel. Olson‘s team of horses bolted and ran. Olson held onto one of the horses in an attempt to stop it, but lost his grip and was run over by the loaded hay rack. Olson was a brother of Glenn Olson who later farmed north of Laurel.
According to the Nebraska State Tax Commissioner, 20,440 acres of Cedar County farm land were sold in 1945 at an average price of $57.26 an acre. In Dixon County 7,061 acres sold at an average price of $50.37 an acre.
Two midget purebred shorthorn calves were exhibited at the Cedar County Fair. A small charge was made to see the unusual calves and the proceeds were donated to Duane Kastrup, a 13-year-old Laurel boy who was suffering from osteomyelitis.
Duane, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Kai Kastrup, developed the rare bone infection following a leg injury in 1942. He spent the next three years in a hospital in which time he had 13 different operations with more to follow. Kastrup was the first Nebraskan treated with penicillin, a new antibiotic that had just been developed and had been used exclusively on soldiers in World War II. Duane Kastrup is now 93 years old and living in California.
The national news section of the Advocate told of trouble brewing in a place called Palestine and the nation of Israel had not yet been created. It seems an underground Jewish organization known as Irgun had issued a call for all Jewish resistance movements to unite in a terror campaign against the British Mandatory authorities and the Palestinian Arab population. A month earlier, Irgun instituted the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which contained a number of offices of the British authorities. The blast killed 91 people.
The British government had been trying to create a homeland for displaced European Jews by dividing Palestine between immigrant Jews and the native Arab population.
The Jews, however, wanted all of Palestine and parts of what is now Jordan as well.
