Regular visitors to Turner Park in Omaha will notice a new guest hanging around the Midtown space, as Wednesday brought the unveiling of a new sculpture honoring Rev. Livingston Wills, known as Omaha’s “Broom Man.”
According to the Douglas County Historical Society, Wills spent six decades selling brooms on the streets of Omaha despite his blindness, becoming a familiar presence of the city over that span.
“Maybe, just maybe, God sent the Broom Man to Omaha to help us see better,” wrote Omaha World-Herald columnist Michael Kelly in his 2015 book, Uniquely Omaha: 101 Things to Know about the Big O.
“Remembered in city lore for his six decades of walking streets and neighborhoods selling brooms door to door, the Rev. Livingston Wills maintained a blind faith in people. Literally,” Kelly continued. “The ordained minister, blind from birth, was a fixture and an icon, almost universally recognized in his black suit and black hat, broomsticks over his shoulders.”
Wills passed away in 2008 at 91, and he’ll now be permanently memorialized in Turner Park after about a decade of planning and design.
Created by Omaha-based sculptor John Lajba, the statue depicts Wills walking with a cane while whistling and running the fingers of his left hand over his inventory of brooms.
According to KMTV, members of the city’s ad hoc Broom Man Sculpture Committee used snail mail to get in touch with the elusive Lajba, but once they reached him he agreed to the commission rather quickly.
Lajba cast 16 separate pieces of the statue into bronze before assembling and welding them together into the life-size sculpture, according to this documentation of the process.
“I really like everything about him and I think my sculpture represents a lot of things about him,” Lajba told KMTV of the finished artwork, which you can find at Turner Park, near the intersection of Farnam Street and Turner Boulevard in Midtown Omaha.
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