In 'Midwestern Strange,' A Tour Of The Utterly Bizarre And All-Too-Human
On Feb. 21, 1995, the Weekly World News, a supermarket tabloid, published a story about my hometown of Broken Bow, Neb., population 3,800. Or, rather, about a hermit who supposedly lived in a remote cabin several miles north.
"Man famous for horn on his head is dead at 67," the headline claimed. His name was Horace Easterwood, and none of us — not my friends, not my family, not the manager of the local radio station, who quickly inquired on air — had ever heard of him. But apparently he was "a real gentleman" and now he was dead, and what was merely a bump on his head at birth had since grown into a 40-in. horn "made upquoted an unnamed "longtime friend," who claimed Easterwood "used to walk around in that old straw hat with a hole cut in the top so his horn could stick through."
