Charles and Betty built floats for the Macedonia’s annual summertime festival, Donia Day, and spearheaded the creation of The Grist Mill Theater. They not only produced, directed, and acted in the theater’s plays, they were among the group who helped to create the theater. Housed in the building once occupied by the old John Deere Implement store, inside it looks as if it has always been a theater with its heavy stage curtains and rows of plush, red-velvet seats. The seats had been an exciting find. When one of Omaha’s grand theaters was remodeled, their old seats were discarded, and Macedonians were thrilled to discover them.
Betty was also among the group credited with rescuing the rock quarry, just north of town. Tucked into a forest of old oaks and cottonwood trees, the quarry’s spring-fed lake has been a favorite place for swimmers and picnickers for generations. Many years ago, the owner of the quarry had planned to close it down and fill it but generously agreed to give it to the community when Betty approached him.
Whenever the Raney and Bisbee parents worked together on various causes for their church and community, their kids played together. If it was raining or too cold to be outside, they played checkers or Monopoly or gathered on the floor to watch television—George Reeves in Superman or The Huckleberry Hound Show and Yogi Bear cartoons, all in shades of gray on a small black-and-white TV set.
“I didn’t pay much attention to Mark until junior high school,” Nancy admits. They had no classes together because he was a year older, but when they hit their teens, they became very aware of each other as they passed in the school corridors. They made a point to linger in the halls in the spots where they knew they would run into each other, and at first tried to make their encounters seem accidental, but it soon became apparent they shared a mutual attraction.
Nancy was bashful, unaware of how pretty she was. Dark haired with a creamy complexion and bright blue eyes, she melted Mark’s heart when she smiled—and he knew just how to make her smile! He was the class clown, a daredevil and as outgoing as Nancy was shy. Mark challenged authority and was a mischief-maker, but so charming that the teachers quickly forgave him. He was also an athlete and competed in both wrestling and football, though he was smaller in stature than his teammates. “He was very good looking,” Nancy remembers, “but I fell in love with his personality. He doesn’t know a stranger, and he can take hold of most any situation.”
They went steady from the time she was fourteen through high school. It was the 1960s, and they were drawn to two popular Iowa bands with Beatlesque sounds, The Green Giants and The Rumbles. The Rumbles had started in Council Bluffs as a garage band, and the members of The Green Giants hailed from small towns around Iowa and Missouri. Mark and Nancy’s song, however, was the Righteous Brothers’ incredibly romantic “Unchained Melody.” They often double-dated with other couples, driving long distances to the dances where their favorite bands performed.
After high school, the couple drifted apart when they attended different colleges. Mark studied art in Maryville, Missouri, and Nancy went to business school in Des Moines, Iowa, where she met Dennis “Denny” Farver. “I became infatuated,” she recalls. He was charismatic, quick witted, and handsome. “He always looked put together, no matter the situation or event.” He put his sense of style to work when employed by a clothing store while going to school. Denny’s meticulous grooming was a lifelong habit, and that didn’t change when he became terminally ill decades later. “Even when he got sick, he still dressed immaculately.”
Nancy was only nineteen, and Denny, twenty-one, when they were swept up in the thrill of the kind of love that comes only to the young and starry-eyed, and they married in the misty autumn of 1970. Soon they had two children, Adam born in the summer of 1972 and Cari in the winter of 1974. Cari was named by her father. He chose the name after watching ten-year-old singer, Carrie McDowell, debut on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in October 1974 with her extraordinary performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Carrie McDowell was adorable, talented and from Iowa—all factors that inspired Denny to select the name for his baby girl, born a few weeks after that Carson episode aired.