Year in Review - Hartington mourns loss of Hall of Fame writer, speaker
July 17, 2019
HARTINGTON — Hartington lost a great ambassador Saturday.
Joan Burney, 90, died quietly early Saturday in Lincoln after a long and successful career in journalism and public speaking.
Her writing and public speaking helped to put Hartington on the map.
She began her career late in life, but once she got started, she never looked back, jumping into that career with both feet.
In 1968, after her six children were all in school, she began her 40-year career as a columnist at the Cedar County News.
Those columns did not go unnoticed as soon more than a dozen other publications, including the Sioux City Journal, Norfolk Daily News and Omaha World Herald, also carried her work.
She later became an author and motivational speaker, compiling a three-book series of her columns, co-authoring two books on sharing faith with children, and traveling across the country for speaking engagements.
Throughout her travels, she always seemed to slip in something about, “living in her little red farm house on a hill outside of Hartington, Nebraska.”
Over the course of her career, Burney won several accolades.
In 1991, she was named the Nebraska Mother of the Year. Later that same year, she was named the National Mother of the Year, beating out actor Tom Selleck’s mother for the honor.
In 2015, she was inducted into the Marian Andersen Nebraska Women Journalists Hall of Fame. That same year the Cedar County News honored her with a yearly Joan Rossiter Burney Outstanding Communicator Award for a Cedar Catholic High School graduating senior,
Long-time Nebraska Press Association Executive Director Allen Beerman has known Joan Burney since the 1960s when her father-in-law was campaigning for office, and Beerman was working in the Nebraska Secretary of State’s office.
A special Communicator of the Year award was created in her honor by Cedar County News Publishers Rob Dump and Peggy Year. The award is given out each year to a Cedar Catholic student.
July 24, 2019
HARTINGTON — The 2019 Cedar County Fair is in the books and Cedar County Ag Society President Greg Heine is glad this one is over.
“We are very glad to have 2019 behind us,” Heine said. “Of all my years, this was the toughest fair I’ve ever dealt with. From the flood (in March) and then the weather at the fair made it a little bit tougher to make these events work.”
This year’s Fair opened with boiling hot temperatures and closed out with sizzling hot entertainment.
In between, there was chilly weather and rain, forcing a rain delay at the final grand stand event of the season, the Bush Pullers Tractor Pull.
“Everyone was very patient during the rain delay. We had a good crowd that hung around in the rain,” Heine said.
Heine said fair organizers knew it would be hot this year, and tried to do everything possible to make the best out of a bad situation. “We knew ahead of schedule it would be a hot one. We brought in four extra cattle shades for the livestock shows and for people to sit under to help them keep cool. We brought in a lot more fans. We were handing out free bottles of water. We were doing about anything we could think of,” he said.
The heat was also a factor in the number of livestock exhibitors said, veteran Extension office staffer Mary Lou Steffen.
“The numbers were down quite a bit this year,” she said.
Heine said the heat was a huge factor in attendance on Friday, when temperatures reached a high of 101 here.
He estimated about 2,500 people turned out for Friday night’s headliner, Bret Michaels.
The heat definitely kept people away, he said.
“We had a lot of interest in this concert early, but ticket sales dropped off at the start of the week,” he said
Despite the heat, Michaels put on a fantastic show, Heine said.
“Everyone that went to the Brett Michaels concert said it was one of the best they’d seen at the Cedar County Fair. He was fun and nice to work with — just very down to earth,” Heine said.