The Nebraska Academy of Sciences has awarded high school juniors and seniors the Kubicek Memorial Scholarship in the amount of $500 since 1983. This year, 2024, the Kubicek scholarship has been increased to $1,000. The awardee must be planning to attend a college or university in Nebraska.
To learn more about the NAS scholarships, visit https://neacadsci.org/High-School-Scholarships. Please let high school students know that the deadline to apply is March 1.
Bob Kubicek was very interested in paleontology and his family has not forgotten him. As described in a Daily Nebraskan article at the time of Bob’s death, Robert Kubicek Sr. was born in Crete, Nebraska, on Jan. 8, 1917, and attended UNL from 1936 to 1940. During his time at UNL he worked as a student assistant for the NU State Museum from 1937 to 1940. Echoes of Bob’s time at the University of Nebraska remain. In 1938, Kubicek won a student contest, naming the area east of the Nebraska Union Main Lounge the Corncrib. The prize for the naming contest was an all-expense paid trip to watch the Nebraska-Kansas game in Lawrence, Kansas. A featured February 2014 article online in Nebraska Today touted the renovations to the Nebraska Union and the re-opening of the ‘crib’. Kubicek was also co-founder of the Cornhusker Co-op at UNL. After graduation, he served in the Army Air Corps during the second World War and rose to captain. Former NAS President Bertrand Schultz was a mentor to Bob Kubicek, and relayed to the Kubicek family that Bob made yearly donations to the UNL Paleontology Department, including during the war, which was rare. He worked as a comptroller and cost accountant for a large corporation in Tennessee, New York, New Jersey and Puerto Rico. He studied Paleontology and participated in digs in Nebraska, Kansas, Arizona, New Mexico and New Jersey.
In or around the summer of 1962, construction had begun for a new highway near Hackensack, New Jersey. Two school boys were trespassing on the site when they found an odd looking rock and took it home. One boy took the strange rock to school the next day, and a teacher recognized it as a fossilized tooth from a mastodon. The teacher contacted the state, which applied for and was granted a 90-day court order to stop construction so paleontologists could dig the site. Dr. Whitaker was a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and spearheaded the dig. Whitaker asked for experienced bone diggers to volunteer their time, and Robert Kubicek was one of only 2 or 3 to who answered the call. A large number of college students also volunteered their time. Robert Kubicek Jr. remembers going to the site to help and serve as screeners several times. The site proved to be one of the first known sites where early man hunted, killed, dragged and ate a mastodon. A communal fire, with remnants of mastodon, was found within a couple hundred yards of the kill. A children’s book “The Hunt for the Mastodon” by Georgianne Ensign was written about the archeological find.
Special thanks to Stan and Joyce Kubicek, who made this spotlight possible with their shared memories and photos.
– NAS
Receive future newsletters from NebraskaSCIENCE
Visit this link to subscribe to the email list.
1400 R Street
Lincoln, NE 68588
402-472-7211
Some parts of this site work best with JavaScript enabled.
