For Your New Economic Miracle And Evangelic Zeal, Dial Omaha

01/08/1998

Eric Ellis arrives in Omaha, Nebraska, and finds a town with no unemployment.

When the Pentagon's Strategic Air Command decided in 1948 on Omaha as the base to wage global nuclear war, it left a delicate issue for locals like Mike when the Cold War petered out four decades later.

Sixtyish, confirmed bachelor Mike had a problem many in Nebraska can sympathise with. That's not the usual problems associated with men in their "second careers" in isolated rural cities like Omaha. Mike's problem was dealing with outsiders in his new career as a telemarketer in Omaha, the 1800, or freecall capital of North America.

Mike worked on the freecall line for TV evangelist Rex Humbard. To have your soul saved telephonically by the fire and brimstone-breathing Rex required dialling 1800-REX on the US telephone keypad.

Problem for Mike was that the `S' is on the same number, 7, as the 'R' as in Rex.

"They'd call up looking for a breathy blonde. I tried to be nice to people but sometimes it was very difficult. I would tell them they couldn't be further away from sex when they called Rex," Mike said over a hot coffee at the downtown StageRight Cafe.

No matter for Mike. He simply got another job, a commodity not in short supply in Omaha.

John Howard would like Nebraska's economic difficulties. Thanks in large part to its military legacy, no place in the booming US cranks out jobs like this heartland State, an unlikely setting for a new economic miracle.

Since 1948, when Harry Truman based the SAC at Offutt Air Force Base, south of town, Omaha thrived on military largesse.

When the SAC was downgraded to STRATCOM in 1992, taking thousands of jobs and millions of dollars with it, Omaha was left with a dilemma, the pullout coming as the Omaha Stockyards, since the 1960s the world's biggest livestock exchange, was in decline.

But it was also left with an extraordinary communication system. Low-cost Omaha, the home of fabled investor Warren Buffett, transformed itself into Freephone City, an uncharacteristically national role for a town the very image of white insular backwardness.

Unemployment in Nebraska is between 1-2 per cent, full employment in most economic glossaries. "The unemployment figures we're reporting are the lowest recorded since the Labor Department began publishing seasonally adjusted estimates in 1978," said Labor Commissioner Fernando Lecuona III.

In fact, job creation is so buoyant that the Omaha Chamber of Commerce has a "Labour Availability Council" that keeps a close eye on corporate lay-offs elsewhere and lures workers to the city.

"That 1 per cent are the guys in bars who don't wanna work," says Carl E. Hatcher, general manager of the Omaha Stockyards.

The stockyards themselves are a study in the New Economy. In the mid 60s, the 250-acre site adjacent to the downtown was the biggest livestock exchange in the world, usurping Chicago as the US CowTown when the Windy City got strangled with traffic.

Today, as farms and buyers and processors consolidate into massive combines like ConAgra, which is based in Omaha, the grand 12-storey exchange, once full of commission agencies, is just 40 per thrived on military largesse, now it's tele-marketing. cent full. Across the rural US, downtown stockyards are closing, their prime real estate where Texas Longhorn and Herefords were auctioned now sold off by out-of-towners and transformed into tech parks and shopping malls. Hatcher's yards remain open but just. It operates on just 15 acres of the original site.

The grand 10th floor ballroom where not long ago ranchers waltzed in ten-gallon hats is now rented out to Ecstasy-fuelled Saturday night teen ravers.

But the thousands of unskilled livestock handlers and packers have quickly found work in the burgeoning tele-marketing industry.