Silly Hall No More

The mayor of Omaha donned hip boots and waded manfully out into the icy currents of the Missouri River. His purpose: to get a firsthand look at the hundreds of tons of offal that Omaha's $700 million-a-year packinghouse industry dumps into the river each day. Besides making his stomach-turning inspection tour, the mayor recently called a special $6.2 million bond election for May 10 to finance, among other projects, a sorely needed sewage-treatment system to help clean up the polluted river.

Omahans have come to expect such activist involvement from Mayor A. V. (for Alexander Vergman) Sorensen, 61, who has bestirred and revitalized Nebraska's largest city (pop. 350,000) since he moved into City Hall last May. Says Fred Jacobberger, city council president: "No one else could have brought order out of chaos in such a short time."

Until Sorensen took over, Omaha had experienced four of the stormiest years in its political history. Under James J. Dworak, a bow-tied mortician before he became mayor in 1961, the city's pressing problems, from slum housing to rotting sewage pipes, were left to marinate in what the Omaha World-Herald called a "swamp of stagnation." Dworak's reign was marked instead by feuding with the police department, the mayor's indictment on charges of soliciting a $25,000 bribe (he was acquitted), an unsuccessful recall movement, and such ludicrous controversies as a hassle over the size of a G string worn by arrested Stripper Robin S. Hood. The Omaha Chamber of Commerce took special pains to see that delegations considering locating businesses in Omaha did not meet Dworak, and Omaha City Hall became known as "Silly Hall." The public coffers were virtually bare when Sorensen took over.

Changed Climate. A millionaire electrical-equipment dealer, Sorensen served a stint as president of the city council from 1957 to 1961, then dropped out of politics. He was persuaded to come out of retirement to oppose Dworak in the city's nonpartisan mayoral election, handily won with 62.5% of the vote. One of Sorensen's first actions was a dramatic and symbolic one: he sold Omaha's crumbling, 75-year-old City Hall to the Woodmen of the World Life Insurance Society, moved city workers into an abandoned Elks building, and launched plans for a new $7.5 million civic center that he hopes to have built by 1968.

The Woodmen firm, which had considered leaving Omaha before Sorensen took over, then decided to erect on the old City Hall site a new $20 million building that, at 28 stories, will be Omaha's highest. A savings and loan association followed with a decision to put up a 15-story building. Both companies cited "a changed climate in the mayor's office" as a major factor in their decisions to put up the largest downtown offices built in the city since the 1920s. Sorensen also attacked discrimination in Omaha (10% of the population is Negro) more determinedly than any previous mayor, personally canvassed white neighborhoods to find housing for a Negro he had appointed to head the Human Relations Board.

School Dropout. Clearly, some of Omaha's troubles are not susceptible to easy solution, notably the decline of the city's vital packinghouse industry, biggest in the nation, which last year suffered a 17% drop in receipts over the previous year. A gifted salesman, Sorensen nonetheless has busily tried to persuade officials of Swift and Armour to rebuild their outmoded plants in the city instead of closing them down, as they have threatened to do. He also hopes to attract new industry to offset a startling decrease in manufacturing jobs. Two encouraging signs: a spanking-new Kellogg Co. dry cereal factory and plans by Nashua Corp., a New Hampshire copying-paper manufacturer, to open an Omaha plant. One enticement to industry may well be the city's school-construction boom. The public school system, the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Omaha and Jesuit-run Creighton University are separately engaged in building programs totaling $64 million.

Yet it is as much the style of Sorensen's administration as any concrete accomplishment to date that betokens a brighter future for the city. Example: in the face of the voters' present refusal to approve an urban-renewal program, the mayor characteristically used his personal credit to obtain federally insured loans for new housing projects that he hopes will eventually replace Omaha's 16,000 substandard homes. A school dropout, who founded his firm in 1935 with $900 in savings and built it into one of the largest such businesses in the U.S., Sorensen recently sold out to his employees to concentrate on running the city. And he has turned over his $17,500-a-year salary to a group of Omaha boys' clubs.

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