Allen
Continued from Page 1
shelf of files concerning University of Ne
braska-Lincoln Chancellor Graham Spanier.
He’s generous with his information; every
few minutes, he presses a button on his phone
and one of a half dozen secretaries enter.
Usually, it’s Rogene, who has worked at Allen’s
since 1965. Make a copy of this, he says, make
a couple of this one.
When she returns, he holds the copy aloft,
tilting his head a bit to see through his half
moon glasses, and reads a paragraph or two to
support his statements. He marks a few lines
with a highlighter, pink, yellow or green —
whichever he grabs first, before handing over
the evidence.
It’s almost a dance, this wheeling and turn
ing. Rogene enters, nods and twirls. And his
voice keeps pace, humming along, keeping
time with the long and twisting conversation.
He answers questions, freely, openly, often
referring to the touchiest subjects before he’s
ever asked. But he never simply replies. He
answers and expounds and moves on. Some
times, he’s changed the subject before the end
of the sentence. He often pulls the conversa
tion back to his pet subjects — teaching vs.
research, the ridiculous costs of university
buildings, Spanier’s mistakes — answering
questions he’d like to address, but was never
asked. In this spoken waltz, Allen always
leads.
Political debut
He begins at the beginning, 1971, when he
first stepped into the political arena at a Hastings
school board meeting. The district had adopted
modular scheduling and his daughter, Kristin,
had brought home her fourth grade schedule
from Hawthorne Grade School. A family mem
ber noticed that the girl spent more than 60
percent of her day in study hall.
Georgene, his wife, asked Allen to go to the
meeting. He didn’t feel like going; it was right
after the Comhuskers had won the Orange
Bowl, and he still felt a little hung over from
free national championship champagne.
When he got to the meeting, he says, he
noticed that most of the people there were
educators. The group of mothers who had
come to protest the modular scheduling felt
intimidated and asked Allen to address the
board..
At the very end of the meeting, he did. He
remembers the superintendent standing up to
shout at him and threatening to sue him.
“It doesn’t phase me to have people shout,”
Allen says, recalling the incident. “I don’t like
it, but I won’t back down.”
Allen joined other parents who wanted to
have the policy changed. He says he found
proof that the district was not meeting accredi
tation requirements; the children were not in
class enough.
After the first newspaper story was pub
lished about the group’s efforts, only Allen and
his wife kept fighting. The others didn’t like
seeing their names in the paper.
oo many peupie uon x wanxpuDiicixy,aon x
want to run the risk of criticism,” he says. “It’s
no fun to be criticized.”
That same fear discourages people from
running for office, Allen says. He tried to
convince others to run for the school board, but
no one was willing. So he ran. Hard. His wife
even compiled a campaign brochure and went
door to door with friends, talking to Hastings
residents about Allen’s plans.
Allen finished first out of 16 candidates, but
he said his tough campaign, in which he criti
cized the current board, backfired a little.
“The board was so mad, I couldn’t work
with them.”
He decided then, he says, to avoid cam
paign criticism of people he may have to work
with after the campaign. It’s a good rule, he
says, that he acknowledges he has broken as a
regent.
Modular scheduling was eliminated while
Allen was on the board. “It was a victory for the
people,” he says.
When his school board term was complete,
Allen decided to take his vision to the mayor’s
office. Hastings was falling behind North Platte
and Grand Island, he says. He wanted for
Hastings what he says he wants for his store
and for the university: He wanted it to be more
modem.
Allen says he wrestled with the city council
every step of the way. City council members
remember the struggle as frustrating and tir
ing. The experience kept council member
Dennis Mvfllen from running for a second
term.
“After fighting with Bob Allen for four
years,” Mullen says, “I was exhausted. I can
look back and laugh now, but for years, I
couldn’t.” .
A memento from one highly publicized
feud hangs on the wall beside Allen’s desk just
to the left of his autographed picture of Tom
Osborne and his 1985 Jaycees’ Boss of the
Year award.
It’s a political cartoon from the Hastings
Tribune depicting Hastings police carrying
city councilman Paul Powers, who has been
caught in the outhouse, to a council meeting.
It refers to a time that Allen sent police to
bring Powers to an important city council
meeting. The council needed quorum to de
cide whether Second Street would be widened.
Powers abstained.
When Bill Welton-ran against Allen in
1980, he said he was running against contro
versy, dissension and confrontation. In the
primary election, Welton received twice as
many votes.
Allen was discouraged. His political troubles
were joined by business troubles. A large
company had brought scanning to a Hastings
grocery store, and Allen’s lost one-third of its
business.
Allen withdrew his name from the ballot,
only to organize a write-in campaign days
before the election. Welton won with 5,523
votes, but 3,296 Hastings residents wrote in
Allen’s names.
“I’m glad I didn’t win,” Allen says. “I think
Bill did a good job.”
And the break from political life allowed
him to fully remodel his store.
From his office at the top of Allen’s Shop
ping Center, Allen says he is not a good
retailer.
Sales, says this 1994 Nebraska Retailer of
the Year, do not come natural toiiim. Yet the
store he started in 1963 has stayed alive, even
grown, while other family stores have folded
trying to compete with store like Wal-Mart.
A good retailer knows prices, Allen says,
but he doesn’t. He has a knack for display, he
says, for form and presentation. He never even
intended to join the family self-service drug
store business.
He wanted to be an actor. After two years in
the U.S. Navy Air Corps and four years at UNL
studying business administration, Allen went
to Chicago, where he worked at Montgomery
Ward. But business wasn’t where he belonged,
he says.
He longed to be on stage. Once at the
Omaha Community Playhouse, a man had
approached him and asked him to read for a
part. His nerves forced him to decline, but he’d
regretted it later.
While working as an assistant buyer at
Wards, he started looking into the New York
Academy of Dramatic Arts. But something
kept him from the theater — stage fright.
He’d experienced it before on the basket
ball court. If he made a mistake, he’d dig a hole
in the back of his head, persecuting himself.
He knew this tendency would hold him
back, but he was determined. He went to visit
a psychologist, looking for a way to relax. The
psychologist listened to his story and told him
he’d be crazy to leave his job at Wards. “Do
you always call people crazy?” Allen asked
him. Allen tried another doctor and books on
motivation before he gave up on acting.
Family matters
Back in Hastings, his mother was sick and
his father had just bought his own self-service
drug store. Allen came home.
“I was forever trying to come back and help
them out,” he says. “ ... I was forever after my
dad and brother to modernize.”
His father and brother were good retailers,
but they weren’t good with buildings and fix
tures. Whereas, Allen had a gift for making
things look good and modem.
“I’m ready for a change, I’m ready for the
modem ways,” he says. “If I have a fault, I’ll
try to go too fast.”
His aggressiveness upset his brother, he
says, and they didn’t get along until they
stopped working together.
Throughout his career, he’s researched other
stores and then copied their successes.
“If I see something’s working, I’ll swipe
that in a second,” Allen says. “It’s so much
easier to borrow from success.”
This is what he did when remodeling the
store, when building the new entrances and
putting in a trendy espresso bar.
But his greatest regret is letting his dream
die. You shouldn’t do that to dreams, he says.
At 68, he still thinks about entering the theater
world. He has an idea for a Broadway play
about Pearl Harbor. But he’s happy with his
life offstage. “It’s just one of those things,” he
says.
Family came first back then, Allen says. He
felt responsible for his his parents, his brother
and sister. He says he feels the same responsi
bility today for his children and his wife.
It was a cold night, and Georgene remem
bers that the foursome had made a late start.
There was no time for dinner before the double
daters went to the drive-in movie. She sat in die
front seat with a fellow she’d been dating off
and on. She could hardly make out the faces of
the couple in the back seat, but the tall young
Above, Regent Robert Allen balances his duties as a father, a regent and onddf
shopping center in Hastings Saturday. At right, Allen talks with John Atchity at
man had caught her eye. When she got home
that night, she told he mother, “I couldn’t see
too well, but I think we double-dated with the
best looking guy.”
A year later, that guy called her. She prob
ably wouldn’t remember him, he said, but his
name was Robert Allen.
“I remember,” Georgene replied.
Robert and Georgene Allen have been mar
ried for 36 years. She tells the story of their
meeting much better than he. He can’t quite
remember where they went on their first date.
She comes into his office to look for a Band
Aid and assures him that it was dancing at the
Veterans of Foreign Wars club.
Georgene, who once taught music and
drama, works in the store, usually in the gift
department. The Allens’ two sons, Erik and
Bryant, also work in the store. Kristin works
for a financial company in New York City. The
children’s faces hang frozen in time on the
wall behind Allen’s desk. As he refers to them,
he motions backward.
When Erik pops into his father’s office,
Allen introduces him with pride. Shorter than
his father, with strawberry-blond hair, Erik has
stopped by to show his dad a news clipping that
he might find interesting.
It was tough, balancing business with poli
tics with family, Allen says. In the store’s early
days especially, he worked all the time. The
store was open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and he
didn’t ffust anyone else to close the business.
He was tired and often sick.
“I had a lot of colds, runny noses,” he says.
“I subjected that family to a lot of germs.”
When Erik was 2-years-old, he came down
with an extremely bad cold. A few weeks later,
he swallowed a bunch of children’s aspirin and
was taken to the doctor. The doctor noticed
some abnormalities in the boy’s system. He
had developed chronic nephritis, a disease that
would destroy his kidneys.
Allen traces the disease back to the cold,
which this father blames on germs he brought
home because he didn’t take care of himself.
“People say don’t blame yourself,” Allen
says. “It doesn’t keep me up at night...”
But, he says, he was dumb then. Erik, now
33, has had two failed kidney transplants. The
first was in 1991; the last was in December.
The Allens were scheduled to board a plane
chartered by the university to fly to the 1995
Orange Bowl. Kristin was home for the holi
days, but she was getting ready to leave, too.
Robert and Georgene Allen decided at the last
minute to stay in Hastings and skip the big
game.
That day, Dec. 29, a doctor from the Mayo'
Clinic in Rochester, Minn., called. They had a
match for Erik, a teen-ager’s kidney. The
Allens immediately chartered a plane to take
themselves, Erik and Kristin to the clinic.
Erik’s body rejected the kidney within min
utes. The Allens watched the Orange Bowl
from a hotel room in Rochester. Georgene hid
her head under a pillow until Nebraska started
to win.
“We had a good time,” Allen says, “except
for the rejection.”
Erik is lucky, Allen says, to have had the
opportunity to have two transplants. Allen
describes die transplants as “the biggest high
and the biggest low.”
“You think at last he can have somewhat of
a normal life and then — bang.”
The doctors say that next time, it will have
to be a family member’s kidney, but Erik will
need at least a year to heal. In the past, Allen
has has worried that his controversial reputa
tion would hurt Erik’s chance at a transplant.
When the University of Nebraska Medical
Center brought their proposal for a new trans
plant center before the regents, Allen was the
only regent to vote against it. He voted for it
twice, but it just kept getting more expensive.
“When I vote against a transplant building
in Omaha,” Allen says, “I think, ‘Am I signing
my own son’s death warrant? Will they never
call him now?”
But, he says, he had to do what was right for
the people, and the people do not need a $52
billion, three-building complex.
“Being idealistic gets pretty old,” he says,
“trying to be honest, forthright and doing
what’s right for the people ...”
When the Allens returned to Hastings, some
one told them a stewardess claimed she’d been
given $10 to make this announcement on the
Orange Bowl plane, “We’ll all have a good
time now that Regent Allen decided to stay
home.”
Allen pulls out a copy of a letter he wrote to
the airline, demanding an apology. “Graham
Spanier was on that plane,” Allen pauses and
smiles, “but I don’t think it was his $10.”
Higher education
Allen became regent in 1988, a time, he
says, when much resentment hung over the
board because some of the regents were upset
with NU President Ronald Roskens. But Allen
was optimistic and excited to be back in the
education world.
