Mary Ethel Emanuel Scholarship
for Magazine Journalism
To many of us across this state, she’s known simply as Mary Ethel.
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Mary Ethel Emanuel 1952-2006 |
Click here for the 2010 Scholarship Application in PDF format
From Scottsbluff to Omaha, when you’re
talking to someone involved in travel and tourism, there’s no need to
mention her last name. As for her middle name, Roger Welsch suggests in his
book My Nebraska that “it should be spelled Ethyl, considering
her endless, explosive energy.”
Mary Ethel Emanuel grew up in Dodge,
Neb., and worked for the Nebraska Division of Travel and Tourism for nearly
20 years as their public relations director. Under the pen name Hannah McNally,
she wrote several editions of her popular book, Nebraska: Off the Beaten
Path. In 2006 she was named a Nebraska Woman of Distinction by the Nebraska
Commission on the Status of Women.
In 1997, Mary Ethel wrote a story
for the premier issue of Nebraska Life, and since then has appeared
in more issues of this magazine than any other writer. The September/October
2006 installment of “Travel Tips by Mary Ethel Emanuel” was her
final column. Shortly after completing it last spring, she was diagnosed with
cancer. She died October 4, 2006, and was buried at Schuyler. She was 54 years
old.
We’d like to honor Mary Ethel’s
work by encouraging the next generation to continue it. Nebraska Life
is establishing the Mary Ethel Emanuel Scholarship for Magazine Journalism.
Every year, a second or third-year college student attending a Nebraska college
or university will receive a scholarship of $1,000 and an internship at this
magazine. Others may contribute to the scholarship fund, in which case the dollar
amount and the number of recipients may increase.
If you didn’t know Mary Ethel,
we wish you could have. She was warm and funny and knew how to tell a story.
Most of our readers know her only through her columns, which show the same qualities.
There was the time, for example, when
a friend talked her into a fishing trip at Long Pine. Mary Ethel didn’t
know much about fishing, but she gamely learned how to tie hooks and cast into
“the tangled undergrowth where the supposed trout lived. I quickly grew
to hate trout and where they lived. Then it occurred to me there was a lesson
to be learned – the Zen of Tying on New Hooks. After two days and dozens
of hooks (and no trout), I felt confident that I was the best damn hook-tier
in Brown County, maybe in all the Sandhills. It didn’t matter if there
were no trout. My task was to keep tying.”
Turned out they were fishing the wrong
part of the creek. “Here was another lesson,” she wrote. “Always
ask the locals.” And she did.
In a column about Nebraska’s
baseball-related attractions, Mary Ethel told of her 92-year-old father, an
avid baseball fan, and how he once took her back to the old home place near
Dodge, to the cottonwood-lined field where he used to play ball with his brothers
and cousins. “I was left wondering about the sense of humor of a God who
gave my dad six daughters,” she wrote. “Not a dang ballplayer among
them!”
And she even wrote about God. In a
column about the Holy Family Shrine, a remarkable glass-and-wooden beam chapel
overlooking Interstate 80 near Gretna, Mary Ethel wrote openly of her long disenchantment
with religion, and of “signs of God that I tried mightily to ignore.”
She told of stopping at the shrine on a whim. Upon entering, “Immediately,
I felt I had entered not only another building but another spiritual dimension.
The Holy Family Shrine blew a hole in my intellectual posturing and created
a space in my soul for forgiveness and reconciliation with God. This was a sign
I could not ignore no matter how hard I tried. Truly.”
When we describe something as “touristy,” we usually mean that there’s something fake or contrived about it, but for Mary Ethel, tourism was always personal, always real. Travel was about making new friends, about discovery, about growing as a human being. “We’re all travelers on this planet,” she wrote, “no matter what route we choose to take.”