By Janet Carlson
Alumni News staff
This is a story about promise - about how it was cut short and how it lives on.
It was a late spring day in the mid-1950s. Television, barely out of infancy, was toddling pell-mell into homes all over America. In Lincoln, Neb., KUON-TV Channel 12 was less than two years old.
Norris Heineman, the station’s manager, had risked his neck that day, climbing up and down a rickety ladder to position the studio light just right, high above the set. A lighting whiz, he had climbed up there to create the back-lighting he knew would make the coming shots most effective.
He went into the control room to start directing. It was show time – no time left to rearrange anything. This was the age of live television in all its unforgiving glory.
And there, up on the ladder, was a student worker, busy taking Heineman’s lights back down. Heineman turned to Ron Hull, the producer-director and said, “Hold my hand.”
That’s how Hull, now KUON-TV’s station manager remembers Heineman’s last day at Channel 12. Heineman, barely 25 years old, was suffering from a soon-to-be diagnosed kidney ailment that took his life a few weeks later, on Friday, July 13, 1956.
“We were very saddened by that,” hull says, “because we knew each other very well and worked together very well.”
Withing a year, Norris’ mother, Amanda Heineman, began making annual donation to UNL’s scholarships funds. Then, in 1963, she and Norris’ older brother, Edward Heineman Jr., contributed $2,000 to establish the Norris Heineman Memorial Scholarship for students in radio and television.
“He had talent to have made a brilliant career in the field, but he tragically died at the age of 25 and all that promise was lost,” Edward Heineman says. Edward Heineman’s home is in Kent, Wash.
“My mother and I were very proud of him, and wanted to do something to honor his name and to assist journalism students such as he had been in furthering their education,” he says.
Norris and Edward grew up in Ainsworth, in north central Nebraska. Their father, a cattle rancher, retired earl because of ill health. During the depression, Edward says, the family enjoyed more income than most people because of cattle sales and rental of their ranch.
“Ironically, when times got better as World War II came on, most people’s income increased quite substantially, where ours was pretty flat,” Heineman says. “We were to some extent on the short end when Norris and I got to college. Norris earned a very large part of his college expenses himself both at Norfolk Junior College and at the University of Nebraska.”
The job that helped foot Norris’ junior-college bill was that of news editor at Norfolk radio station WJAG. He inherited the job in 1951 from his life-long friend, Robert Spearman who had just resigned to attend UNL. Norris soon followed, moving to Lincoln radio station KLMS while taking classes at the university. Norris graduated with distinction from the university in 1953 and went on to Syracuse University in New York, where he studied as a Seacrest Scholarship winner. He received a Master of Science degree from Syracuse in 1954.
“Norris’ mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman, and his brother was and is a wonderful guy,” Spearman, a UNL alumnus, says. “It was their mutual decision to establish the scholarship in his name.” Spearman’s home is in Latham, N.Y.
“One of the proudest moments of my life was being able to present that scholarship to one of my students,” Spearman, a former broadcasting department faculty member, says. She was Susan Taylor miller class of 1967.
Over the years, Amanda and Edward Heineman continued to add to the fund. Then in 1992, Heineman and his wife, Mary Gene, were able to increase the fund by $10,000.
Heinman says his former employer, the Boeing Company, helped by providing a partial match.
From the fund, the College of Journalism and Mass Communications now awards $500 in tuition to two students a year. The scholarship is “not one of the large ones by any means, but it is something that I think is would be useful to any student who got the award,” Heineman says.
Current Heineman Scholarship student Michael Johnson echoes Heineman’s assessment:
“I have an internship that doesn’t pa, and this really helps a lot,” Johnson says. “It opens up some time for me so that I don’t have to work at some job that wouldn’t help me in the future.”
Johnson, a Lincoln East high school graduate, is a sophomore majoring in broadcast journalism. His internship with the Nebraska sports Network recently helped him get a job at Lincoln’s radio station KLIN. Johnson says he wants to go into sportscasting. Perhaps he can follow in the footsteps of a former Norris Heineman scholarship student, Kent Pavelka, Omaha radio station KFAB’s “Voice of the Huskers.”
This story is almost finished.
Here in the mid-1990s, countless Americans are toddling willy-nilly down the information super highway. Brilliant young production managers no longer have to climb rickety ladders at KUON to set the lights. In fact, Ron Hull says one of KUON’s light boards is dedicated to Norris’ memory.
Students with promise continue to come along, some of them on the short end financially.
And, by helping those students, Norris Heineman’s family has found a way to help his memory and his promise to live one. The story isn’t finished at all.
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