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Add to My Group(s)
Add to My Group(s)
By Mike Palecek (about the author)
Become a Fan -- Page 2 of 4 page(s)
I waited on their back porch for somebody to get home while the mastiff-rottweiller-pit bull-rhinoceros over in the neighbor's yard kept me firmly planted in place.
Kevin got back from his workout at the "Y" and gave me a ride back down to the Old Market and took a wire hanger to let me back into my car.
There ya go.
Thanks.
We went back into the 13th Street to have coffee.
A long time ago our families lived together in Omaha. We called it a resistance community, Greenfields, named after the irish anti-war song The Greenfields of France.
We went to jail, federal prison, things like that.
One million FBI agents stormed the front porch one day to take Kevin to prison. I think that time he served one year in the federal prison in downtown Chicago, for trespassing at Offutt Air Force Base, stepping over a line, a misdemeanor.
For the past twenty years Kevin has been running the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker soup kitchen on the outskirts of the downtown Omaha area. Every morning he gets up at four-thirty or five to take the pickup down to make soup for a several dozen homeless men.
Kevin's a tough guy. He's an Irishman from a farm in northeast Nebraska. He worked on a fishing boat in the waters off Maine. He did a lot of construction work as well, after seminary, after Creighton law school.
During the 1980s he spent time in the Omaha and Council Bluffs county jails for civil disobedience, as well as the federal prisons at Chicago, Leavenworth, Kansas, and El Reno, Oklahoma.
And now he basically lives with the poor, every day.
Laura Loughran and Kevin McGuire have been friends of mine for a long time. I was Kevin's worst man.
"To long lives and short sentences." That was my toast at the after party.
I met them when I came to Omaha in the '80s in search of a way to "live out the gospels" is how I would put it.
They have raised three children since then, all phenomenal students and musicians. I heard today that Clare, the oldest, will graduate this spring from the University of Michigan. I remember when she was toddling around the living room with all the oldsters sitting around planning the revolution.
Become a Fan -- Page 2 of 4 page(s)
Kevin got back from his workout at the "Y" and gave me a ride back down to the Old Market and took a wire hanger to let me back into my car.
There ya go.
Thanks.
We went back into the 13th Street to have coffee.
A long time ago our families lived together in Omaha. We called it a resistance community, Greenfields, named after the irish anti-war song The Greenfields of France.
We went to jail, federal prison, things like that.
One million FBI agents stormed the front porch one day to take Kevin to prison. I think that time he served one year in the federal prison in downtown Chicago, for trespassing at Offutt Air Force Base, stepping over a line, a misdemeanor.
For the past twenty years Kevin has been running the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker soup kitchen on the outskirts of the downtown Omaha area. Every morning he gets up at four-thirty or five to take the pickup down to make soup for a several dozen homeless men.
Kevin's a tough guy. He's an Irishman from a farm in northeast Nebraska. He worked on a fishing boat in the waters off Maine. He did a lot of construction work as well, after seminary, after Creighton law school.
During the 1980s he spent time in the Omaha and Council Bluffs county jails for civil disobedience, as well as the federal prisons at Chicago, Leavenworth, Kansas, and El Reno, Oklahoma.
And now he basically lives with the poor, every day.
Laura Loughran and Kevin McGuire have been friends of mine for a long time. I was Kevin's worst man.
"To long lives and short sentences." That was my toast at the after party.
I met them when I came to Omaha in the '80s in search of a way to "live out the gospels" is how I would put it.
They have raised three children since then, all phenomenal students and musicians. I heard today that Clare, the oldest, will graduate this spring from the University of Michigan. I remember when she was toddling around the living room with all the oldsters sitting around planning the revolution.
www.mikepalecek.com
Author, former peace prisoner, journalist, candidate.
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