Although Omaha may have had a population of more than 400,000 people at the time of the passing of my father-in-law, I would wager that there were very few of his fellow residents who were more proud of the city than Tom Hauser. Every time my wife and I visited from Texas, Tom would be happy to greet us with the latest news about new developments in his beloved home town. “Omaha is just exploding!” was a phrase he often used.
Although Tom was initially dubious about the new baseball field being built to house the College World Series, by the time the stadium and its surrounding improvements were finished he was very pleased with the results. He was proud to tell us about other local highlights such as Omaha’s “world-class zoo”, the Lauritzen Gardens, the redeveloped parks along the Missouri River and the airport that he felt was designed just about perfectly. My wife and I would listen obligingly to Tom’s enthusiastic descriptions, but we both felt he had gone too far the day that he took us by the character-filled building that used to be the Blackstone Hotel. “Here”, he announced with evident pride, “is where the Reuben sandwich was invented.” My wife and I just looked at one another as we were both thinking that everyone knows the Reuben sandwich was invented in New York. We both felt a little bit sorry for him and hoped he hadn’t told too many other visitors that same story. Nevertheless the image of the Blackstone was etched in our minds together with a fond memory of a man who was very happy to be where he was as opposed to those restless souls who spend their whole lives searching for the “right” place to live.
Several years later when we were visiting Omaha the day before the first game of the 2015 Huskers season, we included a trip to the Blackstone in our plans. After we had stood outside the building and chuckled as we reminisced about the sandwich story that had now become part of family folklore, my wife decided to Google the question of the origins of the famous dish. Almost the first thing she found was the following:
“Reuben Kulakofsky, a Lithuanian-born grocer residing in Omaha, Nebraska, was the inventor perhaps as part of a group effort by members of Kulakofsky's weekly poker game held in the Blackstone Hotel from around 1920 through 1935. The participants, who nicknamed themselves "the committee", included the hotel's owner, Charles Schimmel. The sandwich first gained local fame when Schimmel put it on the Blackstone's lunch menu, and its fame spread when a former employee of the hotel won a national contest with the recipe. In Omaha, March 14 was proclaimed as Reuben Sandwich Day.”
To say we were both surprised would be an understatement, but more than anything we felt ashamed that we had not taken Tom at his word years ago. In another ironic twist, Reuben Sandwich Day falls each year only 3 days before Tom’s birthday. There was only one thing that would soothe our chastened consciences: the next day in Lincoln before the game we apologized to Tom’s memory and toasted him with another invention that he had been proud to inform us that Nebraska had given the world – a red beer.