It just is. I think, you know, Nebraskans are kind of unique in, you know, I mean, they’re, you know, they’re kind of rabid football fans. If you’re going to do something like the jungle or the desert gnome or the (mumbles), that is kind of the biggest and best… Read More
Has it been difficult to do?… Read More
Endowment dollars, endowment dollars are the toughest hardest dollars to raise. What we’ve, what we’ve ultimately figured out and, and have done is that we put an endowment on every new project that’s not going to be a profit center, like, you know, a new gift shop or a new… Read More
Somebody leave you a 40 million in a will?… Read More
Something you didn’t expect?… Read More
Well, Pete, Pete Kiewit, you know, who contributed that quarter of a million when he, in his will, he left us $1 million. We’ve had some other behest in wills. The one thing, you know, the, the Hubbard family donation, as I said, circled around after, after 23 years and… Read More
Yeah. And over the years, obviously, I would say endowments are the gift that keeps on giving. Yep. You’ve been able to increase the endowment. Yeah, substantially, yeah. Read More
Did you ever use the political process to raise money from the state or anything?… Read More
We tried with the state a number of things. I mean, when we first came in, the state was not charging us sales tax on our admissions, memberships and all that. And somewhere down the line, somebody said, hey, there’s nothing that prohibits us from doing that. We’ve tried. And… Read More
And pitching them on a hotel motel tax, which we’ve used for marketing and, you know, a number of things that way. And you know, that, that brings in about $300,000 a year. At one time it was bringing in a half a million a year, pretty regularly. But that… Read More
Were there any surprise donations that just came out of nowhere?… Read More
Number one, cause I had a restaurant on it. She said, I’m not interested in selling hotdogs. Let somebody else build a restaurant. Let somebody else build your greenhouses. You know, she kinda went down down the line. She said, I don’t, you’ve got that big orientation building on the… Read More
And she said, so do you think you can do that boy?… Read More
(laughs) I said, yes ma’am. And she gave us $15 million. And we got somebody else to build the restaurant. And you know, we never did build the orientation building and we, and we built the greenhouse ourselves and, and we brought the project, and Stan Howe did his part. Read More
We staked out the outline of the building and the site, and put up some big tall poles so that she could visualize where it was going to be, how tall it was going to be. We, you know, we put a bunch of two bys in the ground that… Read More
And I can remember, and will always remember, trying to get up enough saliva in my mouth. And I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it for a minute to say $25 million. And, and to say $25 million for the first time in your life. Read More
She said, I’m going to to think about that. She said, why don’t we have breakfast in the morning, and I’ll think about it overnight. And I figured that this whole dang, this whole thing, you know, it was whole 8 1/2 years, it just went down the tube right… Read More
I had my mind made up about what I was going to give. And you asked me for $25 million and I’m just, I didn’t sleep a wink and I’m not going to do it. And I’m thinking, oh, you know, it’s, it’s done, it’s over. It’s down the tube. Read More
If you don’t fundraise, we’ll help you. But, you know, because we didn’t have a development, we’ve got to, you know, we’ve got a foundation now and we’ve got a development, you know, development staff and all that. But if, but in those days we didn’t, that’s fairly recent thing. Read More
So if you had a project and, you know, and it usually required just kind of a cursory head nod from the president or the chairman of the board, that sounds like this was a good idea if you can raise the money. And then you, you know, then you… Read More