Cartoonist sticks to the drawing board

By Nick Shinker Contributing Writer

Jeff Koterba recalls his mother, Helen, sitting with him at the kitchen table when he was a child. Though she had no formal training in art, she used How to Draw books to instruct him and his siblings in the basics of shapes and styles, drawing right along with them.

Later, when he started copying Snoopy from the newspaper comics, it was his father, Arthur, who gave him a firm instruction that seemed harsh at the time but would prove its value later in life. “Don’t copy Snoopy,” his father commanded. “Come up with your own dog; your own character.”

Koterba recalled his father as a creative person. A Union Pacific employee, jazz drummer and TV repairman, the elder Koterba never let Jeff forget “how important it was to be unique, original.”

The lessons were often difficult for a boy to understand. Jeff grew up with his father’s drum set in the tiny living room of their South Omaha home. When his father insisted he learn to play those drums and Jeff didn’t want to practice, he wrapped his hands around Jeff’s and forced him to use the drumsticks. Though resentful at the time, Jeff secretly loved music, and later taught himself to play guitar, mandolin, bouzouki and Irish penny whistle.

“In retrospect, I’m grateful he made me play those drums,” Koterba said. “Without that, I never would have started a successful swing band,” the Prairie Cats.

The same could be said about his father’s insistence upon being unique in his drawing. A fan of the comics in the Sunday Omaha World-Herald, Koterba started drawing political cartoons for his school paper and taking cartooning classes from Ed Fisher, then the World-Herald editorial cartoonist. In college, he drew for The Gateway, the student newspaper at UNO. He freelanced cartoons and worked other jobs but didn’t give up on his desire to be an editorial cartoonist. In 1989, the World-Herald gave him a unique opportunity, one he knew was too good to waste.

He stayed there at the newspaper’s drawing board for 31 years.

If God were to put a very odd mix of talents and characteristics and experiences in a blender, out would pour Jeff Koterba.

Koterba’s father had Tourette’s Syndrome, a condition of the nervous system that causes sudden twitches or tics, movements or sounds that people cannot stop their body from doing. Jeff inherited Tourette’s from his father. “His was never actually diagnosed. He grew up during the Depression and joked that he couldn’t afford a syndrome,” Koterba said. “Like with him, when I sing, the tics go away.”

When Koterba was 17 years old, just after showering he was standing barefoot in his front yard when from above came a lightning bolt. “It wasn’t a direct bolt,” he recalled.

--Cartoonist continued on page 8.

In recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and in anticipation of Black History Month, several dozen residents of the area recalled what it was like being a kid, a teenager and a young adult growing up on the near north side, a rambling cluster of adjoining neighborhoods roughly bordering 30th Street to the Missouri River, Cuming Street to Ames Avenue.

This was an era punctuated by racial divides, discrimination, violence and ultimately the demise of once safe and flourishing neighborhoods.

Their stories were peppered with touching anecdotes – often positive and hopeful – about family life, community togetherness and eking out a living in a Whitedominated society.

These were bittersweet tales – bitter because of the collective memories of the daily obstacles, challenges and prejudices they faced; sweet because of the intense – but evaporating – sense of family, community togetherness and solidarity.

A sense of place, the feel of a self-sufficient, close-knit community, is perhaps what stood out most with the participants.

“North Omaha was a commu- nity,” recalled Sharon Green, who moved to Omaha with her family in 1954. They settled in what was once called “the projects,” a series of public housing units built and managed by the Omaha Housing Authority in North and South Omaha. “Back then the projects had a whole different meaning. You were taken care of. You didn’t have to worry about anybody coming in to bother us.”

“We had everything on the corner. You had the lawyer, the baker, the dentist.” Green said.

“You didn’t have to go outside this community for anything.” In addition, “all the neighbors looked out for each other.”

Phyllis Mitchell Butler agreed.

“This community was self-contained. Because they didn’t want us past 30th Street. They didn’t want us past 40th Street, and they sure as hell didn’t want us past 72nd Street.”

Butler, who was born and raised in Omaha, added, “White communities thought they were keeping us away, and thought they were hurting us. But let the world know they helped because they drew us closer together. We were a wealthy community. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had each other.”

Close-knit, interconnected, intergenerational families were the moral fabric of North Omaha. Pauline Terry said large families were the norm.

“We had one of the smallest families in the neighborhood, and that was five children,” she said.

--Omaha continued on page 9.