Here’s something you don’t see every day: a new documentary in which the people of Nebraska and the Omaha World-Herald are the heroes.
“Scrappers,” an 82-minute film about a 1942 scrap-metal drive that revitalized the American war effort, will have its premiere at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center, 202 S. 20th St.
“Scrappers” will get screenings in six more Nebraska cities through May 24. The two Seton Hall University professors who made the movie will accompany it across the state, taking questions from each audience and selling DVDs of the movie.
Ironically, one of those producers is a Nebraska native who had never heard of the scrap drive until he stumbled across it in a Duke University archive in summer 2004.
Jim Kimble, 43, who grew up in Bloomfield and Norfolk, Neb., was intrigued. His area of expertise is mass persuasion how to get a large body of people to take up a new behavior or cause and he is particularly interested in World War II. Not only was this subject right up his alley, it took place in his childhood backyard.
Kimble wrote an academic paper about the drive, then suggested to faculty colleague Thomas Rondinella, a Seton Hall film teacher, that it would make a fine documentary. Rondinella insisted they make it together.
The story begins Dec. 7, 1941, when the attack at Pearl Harbor caught the United States unprepared for war. President Roosevelt challenged the nation to begin assembling the munitions needed to defeat the Germans, the Japanese and their allies.
Making guns, tanks, planes and ships takes steel. About half the American steel produced at that time came from scrap, and the nation’s scrap supplies were next to nothing.
Ironically, demand for steel scrap was so low before the war that American scrap had been sold ... to the Japanese.
The federal war office sent out a call for scrap metal, but there was little response. World-Herald Publisher Henry Doorly read about the problem in his newspaper and fretted about it to his wife.
“Well, Henry, what have you done about it?” his wife fired back.
Doorly’s response was to use his newspaper to plan and promote a statewide competition on who could gather the most scrap metal in summer 1942. County competed against county, in pounds per resident. Individual and group prizes were offered, too, totaling $2,000 in war bonds.
The drive caught on as the newspaper posted daily totals, shaming straggling counties into getting onboard with messages of patriotic urgency. The contest lasted three weeks. Public enthusiasm mounted with the piles of scrap. The total gathered statewide: 67,000 tons, 104 pounds for every man, woman and child in Nebraska.
The drive made national headlines, and soon the war office asked Doorly to spread the word to publishers in other states. A national scrap-drive campaign, modeled on The World-Herald’s Nebraska drive, pitted state against state and collected 5 million tons of metal that fall.
For its efforts, The World-Herald won a Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Kimble said stumbling on the story was like opening a Pandora’s box. He learned about filmmaking on the fly as he and Rondinella made “Scrappers.”
“I’m used to writing academic articles,” Kimble said. “The moviemaking business is extremely visual. You have to think about what the audience will see and what impact it has intellectually and emotionally.”
They turned to the Douglas County Historical Society and to The World-Herald for visuals, including scrap-drive posters, articles, newspaper ads and photographs. The World-Herald donated more than $9,000 worth of materials for the film.
Kimble and Rondinella drove from New Jersey to Nebraska five times to interview about 70 people who took part in the scrap drive. They filmed about 25 of these people, visiting Gothenburg, Lexington, Cozad, Arnold, Valentine, Thedford, O’Neill, Norfolk, Lincoln and Omaha plus other states along the way where former Nebraskans had moved.
Others interviewed for the film included University of Nebraska at Omaha historian Harl Dahlstrom, former Creighton University historian Dennis Mihelich and Historical Society board member Barry Combs.
“It was so impressive what these people did, so inspiring,” Kimble said of the scrap drive. “The scrappers talked a lot about national unity, what our responsibilities as citizens are. Today we seem to have lost that. The film is a challenge, to learn lessons from these people and what they did. We hope the movie starts a lot of conversations.”
For filmgoers in Omaha, a suggested donation of $2, tax-deductible, will benefit the RiteCare Language Disorder Clinic through the Scottish Rite Foundation of Omaha.
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