A good line of sight

I will try to paint a picture of the setting for you if I can. It will be hard to picture if you haven't been there. Especially if you are from Tucson. It is very different than Tucson.

Main Street, which they call Norris Avenue (after the Senator who lived in McCook), goes down at an incline throughout the downtown, all the way down across "B" Street, which is also the highway, to "A" Street, which is the last street before the tracks. They have removed it in the years since then, but they used to have a foot bridge over the railroad tracks that you can walk up and over. I think someone finally realized that the other end of the bridge dumped out into the rail yard, so what was the sense of having the bridge there.



This picture is a picture of the train depot. Couldn't find one of the bridge. But, you could see the depot from the bridge. You could also see most of downtown Norris Avenue as it marched up the hill.


Downtown McCook had two pastry shops. One was Ivanhoe's. Ivanhoe's was mostly a donut shop that had the best apple fritters and also hosted the Methodist Youth Group for a time on weekend nights. The other was Sehnert's Dutch Oven Bakery. Sehnert's used to cook Runza's until the chain known as Runza said you couldn't sell Runza's, because that is what they sold. Sort of like saying you couldn't sell hamburgers because their is a restaurant called restaurant.

In one of the odder incidents in McCook's history, a woman decided to await her husband's exit from the Dutch Oven Bakery one morning from atop the railroad walking bridge, with a rifle.

I remember the picture in the McCook Daily Gazette which showed Ike and some other cop running up the walking bridge with their guns up and a woman slumped down on the bridge. After she shot her husband after he had his morning pastry, she apparently waited around for Rex, the department sniper, to shoot her. She probably realized, a little too late, that the bridge didn't really go anywhere.

That's it. Not as good as the story that my friend Jeremy told today, about an active shooter in the store in his hometown of Macomb Illinois. Especially since I have no idea why the woman thought she should shoot her husband or any of those sort of details. That would definitely make for a better story.

Oh well. My next foray into the history of the McCook police department I will tell you about the tactical team that never was.