Reported by Bill Ganzel,
STATEWIDE Correspondent

[Sen. Jerry Warner] Well, that's me. I had curls to my shoulders until I started school. I still got them. They're down at the farm. They're in a cedar chest down there.

Jerry Warner was the second son born to a family interested in education, farming, and politics.

[Sen. Warner] Dad was born in 1875, and he went to what was then Wahoo Academy. This would be a picture of dad in the university. He graduated in 1899. There's my mother. This is her teaching school out at, I think, it was Maywood, Nebraska. When dad and mother when they bought the C.B. land, most of the cash was what mother -- it was $5,000 mother had saved teaching. That was most of the cash.

Charles Warner was 25 when he was first elected to the legislature in 1900.

[Sen. Warner] But I grew up with it, you know. I was used to -- dad never come to watch basketball games. He was always at something else. He was gone a lot. Mother would run the farm. But we didn't -- none of us thought anything about it. And it didn't hurt me any. Looking back, it was probably good. It was good.

Charles Warner was in the legislature 26 years. He was speaker of the first unicameral legislature in 1937. In 1949, he was elected lieutenant governor. It was assumed in the Warner household that one day Jerry would follow his dad.

[Sen. Warner] There was a presumption that I was going to do it. The last summer he was alive -- he died of cancer in 1955. He knew it was terminal. He would sit out in the front yard down at the farm. I would come in on a tractor, and I would walk over, he'd always have something to tell me. He says, you're going to be in the legislature some day, and then he would give me some advice on something that I should or shouldn't do.

But it wasn't until 1960 that Jerry thought the time was right when the incumbent senator from Waverly retired. Warner lost, but he thinks that was a good thing.

[Sen. Warner] The next morning I found out my mother still liked me, my dog still liked me, my neighbors still liked me. They didn't expect me to win in the first place. And it didn't really make a difference.

Two years later, he ran again and won.

[Sen. Warner] My first day of the session, Melvin Scott gave me this little Edmund Burke quote that I used to carry for years. Your constituent is your judgment, and you should not sacrifice your judgment t their wishes. Chances are they'll be wrong. They don't hear the arguments.

[Sen. Warner legislature footage] Again, we have continually heard the need for this...

[Sen. Warner] What they should want me to do is use my best judgment. And if my judgment is lousy, then you should throw me out.

Warner was re-elected 10 more times. He learned early on in a school reorganization fight that it's critical to explain to voters how he arrived at his judgments.

[Sen. Warner] Once we developed a plan, then I would have to sell it. I went to meetings after meeting after meeting. This had been going on for two years. I remember one of them last meetings we had before that election, a guy stood up and wanted to know how come all this was coming up so fast that nobody had knew anything about it which told me if you wanted to get change, you want to educate people, you needed an abyss amount of repetition.

It was during this time that Warner began working long hours with Betty Pierson. She was a former reporter who had been hired as the legislature's sole research aid.

[Sen. Warner] There's a couple of things I could tell. Why she ever married me a couple of times, I really don't know.

A shared commitment to the legislature and shared capacity for hard work blossomed into romance. Jerry and Betty were married in 1970, and Warner later adopted Betty's two children from an earlier marriage.

I got to put the air vent in there, and it's ready to go.

Warner's sense of integrity began at home. He loved farming, but he would often vote against what were perceived as the interests of agriculture.

[Sen. Warner] Farm groups get angry at me. I mean, I just simply don't believe that's my role. It bothers me when I see people vote their interest. It's not my job. It's to represent everybody.

[Sen. Warner legislature footage] As I am well aware in agriculture if you do not replace your equipment as it begins to wear out, eventually you have a tremendous price to pay...

But we all exhibit contradictions. Warner practiced honesty and integrity on the floor of the legislature, but he also loved the proverbial smoke-filled room.

[Sen. Warner] Well, if I had to choose between being in the legislature between 9:00 in the morning and 4:00 at night or 4:00 at night and 12:00, I will pick 4:00 to 12:00.

At 4:00, the legislature adjourned and many of the senators adjourned to the old Cornhusker Hotel. That was when more of them lived alone at the hotel and before lobbying groups began organizing functions almost every night.

[Sen. Warner] Then there was cocktail hour at 4:30. That was room 200. Then you went and ate. You may or may not go with the lobbyists. There wasn't that many of them. Then you could come back and then you went up to room 735. That was the card room. Yeah, we played cards and gambled and played poker.

[Tim Hall] Well, I didn't say that I didn't like those kinds of things either. The problem was I was born about, you know, 20, 30 years too late.

[Sen. Warner] You could play all night and maybe lose $3, 4, 5 if you really had a bad night.

[Tim Hall] I think I could have fit in with that crowd real well.

[Sen. Warner] What happened at those meetings was they were informal meetings. We talked a lot about issues. That's what you talked about.

[Tim Hall] You build collations. You make changes legislatively because of personal relationships that you have with individuals.

[Sen. Warner] But only because you generate understanding. I knew where you were coming from. When you look at the total of the tax picture of the concern of increase in reappraisals, the impact of inflation, then that impact on the cost of government, it's not unreasonable that people have become concerned and look for lids or limitations to reduce their cost.

During his career, he lead almost every committee and served as speaker of the legislature. His ideas, bills, and amendments have had an impact on every major piece of legislation in the last three decades.

[Sen. Warner] Everybody assumes you get something out of it. I mean, how many times I've heard that that they can't visualize, you just do it because you want to. Betty had sat and figured, I mean, we assume that it's cost me somewhere between 30 and 50,000 a year to be in the legislature which was my choice and that stpers with hiring one more hired help that we wouldn't otherwise have plus loss that occurred.

Warner was not an ideologue. It was sometimes hard to pin down exactly what he did believe in. He did not put principles above good public policy.

What determines good public policy?

[Sen. Warner] In my case I rely very heavily on gut feeling. It's right. It feels right.

His abiding belief was in fairness.

[Sen. Warner] I'm not near as concerned, I don't think, about giving somebody an unreasonable advantage as I am concerned about boxing somebody to an reasonable disadvantage. You know, I mean, I get very annoyed with people who -- like with the petition people who want to suspend the constitution because the majority of the people vote in some fashion. The Court should abide by the majority. From my viewpoint, the strength of the constitution is minority rights not majority rule. That's kind of incidental.

Jerry Warner liked jazz. At his funeral Thursday, it was his request that his friends and family sing "Amazing Grace" to a jazz beat. {note} Amazing grace {note}... {note} how sweet the sound {note}... {note} that saved a wretch like me {note}...

In all of the interviews we did, the only regret he ever expressed was that he couldn't play an instrument.

[Sen. Warner] The thing that surprises you is the time. When I came into the legislature being there from 9:00 to 12:00 and 2:00 to 4:00, and that was six hours a day -- or five hours a day. It was a part-time job. You know, I was going to take organ lessons. My mind was all made up. I got an organ downstairs. I had always talked about it so Betty bought me an organ for Christmas once thinking that might be the motivation. Here's 34 years have gone, and I have still to take my first organ lesson. I'll pass that one by, I guess.

Amazing grace, indeed.