Building A Dream and More
Nebraska Stories
Air Date: 04/11/2019
“Building A Dream” What do you do when your small school needs a theater space? If you're Tami Maytum, you organize a barn raising! When the Malcolm High School drama coach won a $10,000 national grant,it kickstarted her plan to build a practice space for her drama students. The Malcolm community rallied around Maytum and her students - raising another $50,000 in cash donations along with volunteering their muscle, skilled labor, and construction equipment. The result is a brand new home for the Malcolm High School drama program. “The Dundee Theater” The Dundee Theater is the cornerstone of Omaha’s historic Dundee district. The Dundee neighborhood is also home to Warren Buffett and the childhood home of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alexander Payne. The neighborhood theater opened in the 1925 and is the last of its kind in Omaha. The theater closed in 2013 and sat dormant until 2017, when Susie Buffet’s Sherwood Foundation restored the building as a gift to Omaha’s Film Streams. The once classic cinema has a renewed urban community design. Today, Film Streams’ Dundee Theater is a fitting place to appreciate international and locally crafted films as an art form. “Winston, Kid Composer” Winston Schneider is a typical fifth grader who likes insects, Legos, and Star Wars. Winston is also an award-winning classical composer who recently won the National Association for Music Education's Student Composers Competition for his piece “Scherzo of the Feather Stars.” Winston says his compositions are inspired by insects and chemistry. “Nebraska's Schindler” During his tenure as president of a prestigious university, Alvin Saunders Johnson worked to save the lives of 184 German Jewish scholars under persecution by Hitler. Born on a farm near Homer in 1874 to immigrant parents, Johnson went on to earn a PhD in economics. He went on to become the first president of the legendary New School University located in New York City. It was while serving as school president that Johnson established the University in Exile where he hired Jewish scholars fleeing Nazi Germany.