A note from the donor: "Elmer Francis Hardlannert was my maternal grandfather. He was a high school drop-out who, after working in a South Omaha packing plant for 7 years, returned to school at age 22 in 1914. Two years later, with only a high school diploma, Elmer was accepted into Creighton Dental College where he attended for three years, graduating in June 1919 with his DDS.

Elmer was born in 1892 in Lemont, Illinois, to George Michael Hardlannert and Katherine Vogel. He had two sisters, Eva and Gertrude. The family moved to Omaha and lived at 4745 South 19th Street. George opened up a barber shop near 24th and N.

Elmer completed elementary school at South Omaha Public School in 1907 and started high school at South Omaha High. At some point, Elmer dropped out to go to work in one of the South Omaha packing plants. By 1914 he decided a career in a packing plant was not for him and he enrolled in Bellevue Academy, a high school equivalency program associated with Bellevue College. [Bellevue College was a Presbyterian sister school of Hastings College which folded in 1920 due to financial difficulties.]

While attending Bellevue Academy, Elmer met and fell in love with Helen Andrews from Knoxville, Iowa. Helen was the only girl in her family with seven brothers. The summer after she graduated from Knoxville High School in June 1914, her parents sent her by train to Benson, Nebraska, to live with an aunt until college classes started that fall. She lived on campus in the girls dormitory and received her teaching degree from Bellevue Normal School on June 3, 1916. Elmer graduated the next day from the academy.

When school ended that June, Helen returned to Knoxville and began applying for teaching positions in Omaha and Bellevue, as well as rural Iowa. Elmer applied and was accepted to Creighton Dental School. He spent his summer working at the Holmes Adkins Garage at 4911 South 24th Street as a hired chauffeur, driving instructor, and occasional hearse driver, as well as helping out at his father's barber shop.

Dental school began September 27, 1916, and Elmer made the daily trip on the 24th Street mainlin street car from his South Omaha home to the Creighton campus. Besides attending classes and labs, studying, hanging out at the Forrest and Meany drugstore on the corner of 24th and N, he continued to assist his father in the barber shop and often worked over nights and weekends in the Adkins garage.

As busy as he was, Elmer made time to write Helen several times a week. As often as he could get away, he would ride the train or borrow a car to visit her in Weston, Iowa, about 25 miles from campus and where she lived with a family in town while teaching elementary school. Her second year of teaching she was posted at Kirkman, Iowa, which was about 60 miles away, but still on the train route.

Over the next four years, until October 1920, Elmer wrote more than 500 letters to Helen, which she tied with ribbons in small batches and saved in an old wooden ball bearing box stored in their attic. When my grandmother died in 1983, my mother took possession of the letters, and they remained undisturbed until she died in the spring of 2020 at age 98. As 2020 became the first year of pandemic isolation, I decided to organize and read through the letters, taking a few notes on each to follow the story. There are very few letters in the collection from Helen to Elmer...not, I believe, because she did not write to him, but more likely that he did not bother to save them.

From 1916 to the summer of 1919, Elmer writes of his experiences in dental school-what he's studying, how hard the classes are (especcially perhaps because he only had a high school education), some of the antics of typical college-age boys, joining the dental fraternity, the Spanish Flu epidemic, having to join the on-campus Army unit during WWI and life in the barracks, a cheating scandal he was involved in when taking his state board exams, witnessing the courthouse lynching of Willie Brown in 1919, and what everyday life was like in Omaha during those years.

After graduating and passing his exams in the summer of 1919, Elmer rented a small room to open his practice in a doctor's office above the Forrest and Meany pharmacy at 4841 South 24th. By that time, he and Helen are engaged and he is seeing patients seven days a week to save enough money so they can marry the following year. He writes her about the cost of purchasing equipment and supplies, rent, the patients he sees (he loves extractions, morphine and nitrous oxide), what he charges, how much he's putting in savings, and his dream of the lovely little cottage they will someday have in a nice neighborhood in Omaha. During much of that year, he had been writing to her at Burlington, Iowa, where her parents had moved. She could not teach that year as she got sick from the Spanish Flu and lost her hearing. Also, her mother was very ill with diabetes and Helen was her primary care giver.

Elmer's last letter was written October 6, 1920, a week before their October 12th wedding. Only one of her family, her brother Pete, will be there for the ceremony at Wheeler Memorial Presbyterian Church. According to the last few letters, neither Helen nor Elmer know what they'll be wearing, where the wedding will take place or who will perform it, and if there will be any dinner or celebration after. A woman has rented them her house at 27th and B Streets, not far from the office, where they can live until the owner returns in the spring. From a newspaper clipping in the Omaha Bee, the newly weds attended a show at the Orpheum Theater after the ceremony. According to the article, some of Elmer's friends had arranged with the theater manager to have the performance interrupted so the orchestra could play Lohengrin's Wedding March and have the couple presented with a large bouquet. After Helen and Elmer returned to their new home, the buddies kidnapped the groom and "put him through a series of harrowing experiences before he was finally returned to his bride." (It was a story my grandmother loved to tell.)

When the owner of the rental home returned in the spring, the newly weds rented a few rooms in a house at 27th and Hickory. Soon after, they purchased a lot at 5711 Marcy in the newly developing Elmwood Park neighborhood and built the first house on the block in 1922. Elmer died in 1977, and Helen remained in this house until her death in 1983.

Dr. Elmer F. Hardlannert moved his office from South Omaha to the 15th floor of the newly constructed Medical Arts Building at 17th and Dodge in 1927. During the Great Depression, business fell off and Elmer moved into a 8x10 room in the back of Dr. Milton Margolin's office. Besides the main examination room with his dental chair and equipment, Elmer's office had two small closets - one with a sink and red light for developing x-rays and another that had space for a petite walnut desk and a file cabinet. Elmer handled all his own billing and paper work throughout his career on that tiny desk in that little closet. [I still have his desk.] As the story goes, there were very few patients in the 1930s, and those who did seek out his service often had no money to pay. Since the house on Marcy had been paid off in five years ($5,000 for the lot and $3,000 for construction), the family was not threatened by loss of their home. Elmer continued to ride the street car and later the Number 4 bus down Leavenworth Street to his office every weekday and Saturday mornings until he retired in his late 70s. The Medical Arts Building was imploded in 1999 to make way for the First National Tower.

Time Line - Elmer Hardlannert

1892 - Born in Lemont, Illinois

1907 - Graduated Omaha South Elementary School

1910 - Dropped out of South H.S. to work in packing plant

1914 - Enrolled at Bellevue Academy (High School equivalency part of Bellevue College) 1916 - Enrolled at Creighton Dental School

1919 - Graduated and passed exams

1919 - opened his dental practice

October 12, 1920 - Elmer and Helen get married

1922 - Elmer and Helen build their first house together

1927 - Elmer moves his office to the Medical Arts Building

1977 - Elmer dies

1983 - Helen dies