Kearney Visitors' Bureau President Retires After 39 Years of Service

Last week we celebrated the retirement of our dear friend and colleague, Roger Jasnoch.

Jasnoch has been the Director of the Kearney Visitors' Bureau for the past 38 years and will retire officially at the end of June.

Here's an insightful perspective on Roger's immense impact on Kearney, as told by local columnist Mary Jane Skalla.

Thanks to practical dreamers like Roger Jasnoch, I’ve seen Kearney elbow its way into becoming one of the state’s premier cities since I arrived here in 2012.

He didn’t do it alone. City, county, business and civic leaders helped. But as I interviewed Jasnoch for today’s story on his June 27 retirement, I realized that in the past 25 years, Kearney has boomed like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

First, some background. When I first arrived in Kearney in June 2012, I felt like a lost sandhill crane.

I’d had a rewarding journalism career in my hometown of Cleveland until newspapers sputtered, and finally, reluctantly, I took a buyout.

I was too young and antsy to retire, so when my Kearney friend Lori Potter suggested I come to Kearney, I did. Living in a small Nebraska town sniffed of adventure.

Since then, my eyes have been opened. Adventure was an understatement, and that “small Nebraska town” is long gone.

In my first month here, the World Theatre re-opened. In my second year, the city celebrated the Lincoln Highway’s 100th anniversary with a Central Avenue parade that included antique cars that drove 1,733 miles from each coast.

Kearney has since added a new hospital, two cancer centers, a second Catholic church, expanded MONA and the Rowe Sanctuary and new buildings at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. New hotels stand as tall as silos on the city’s edges down by I-80.

For me, coming from a city spiraling into decline, I watch with curiosity.

Back in the ‘50s, Cleveland had 970,000 people and thriving steel and manufacturing industries. Now those industries are rotting. In the late ‘60s, people fled to the suburbs when a judge ordered the schools to launch cross-town busing to integrate the schools. Suburbs boomed, but the city sputtered. Too bad Roger Jasnoch couldn’t lend his talents to Cleveland, too.

I urge my friends back home to visit me in Kearney. “There’s nothing to see in Nebraska,” they say. But there is, thanks to Jasnoch.

I’ve known Jasnoch for a decade. His motor runs constantly, like people who leave their cars running while they dash into Casey’s for a carton of milk.

Jasnoch was tireless. He didn’t like email; he preferred phone calls, and when I called, he always called back quickly with facts, figures, dollars from tourism, whatever.

Jasnoch believes in Kearney. Bring people in, he said. Give them something to see and enjoy. Watch the city blossom. He was right.

He loved sharing Kearney with outsiders. During sandhill crane season, he brought in travel writers from around the nation and the world. I joined them one evening. He and his staff put together a breathless itinerary: out in the blinds till 9 p.m., boxed dinners back at the hotel, back out to the blinds at dawn, then to the Classic Car Collection or the Archway.

He’s proud that Kearney turned its back on casinos and instead built a new SportsPlex that’s bigger than Texas. He told me that will boost Kearney and pay off for decades to come.

I’ve realized that Jasnoch and Kearney are intertwined.

When I arrived in Kearney and was assigned to cover Kearney City Council, I expected testy three-hour meetings with a bit of public squabbling, like back home. That never happened.

In fact, the meetings were so brief and streamlined and so darn civil and polite that my big-city mind suspected they must have been hiding something behind closed doors.

Not so Cleveland. Right now, Cleveland is fighting over a new Cleveland Browns stadium. Club owners want to build it in a rusty suburb. City leaders want to keep it downtown. Lawsuits are flying. That’s typical of Cleveland.

If Cleveland were Kearney, city leaders would convene behind closed doors, squabble privately, and come out with a consensus and get moving.

People in Kearney have it right. Someone like Jasnoch has a bright idea and they figure out how to accomplish it. Not everything works, of course, but many ideas do. They all feed off each other.

At Thursday night’s retirement reception, one attendee told me how much she appreciated what Jasnoch has done. “I don’t see Kearney’s energy, determination or chutzpah in Hastings or Grand Island or North Platte. Just here. I’m glad I live here,” she said.

When I moved here, I wanted Kearney to remain a small, rural town. Don’t become a city, I pleaded silently. I was outvoted. Thanks to Jasnoch, it has zoomed beyond that. It’s exciting to watch.

Read the article here