Boys Town, Nebraska: There Are No Bad Boys
Near Omaha, Nebraska
On December twelfth, nineteen seventeen, Father Edward Flanagan borrowed ninety dollars from a friend and rented a drafty Victorian boardinghouse in Omaha to shelter five boys, three sent by juvenile court, two homeless newsboys. He called it Father Flanagan's Boys' Home and declared, in a phrase that became his motto, that there are no bad boys, only bad environment, bad training, bad example, bad thinking. He welcomed every boy regardless of race or religion at a time when that was almost unheard of.
The home filled immediately. In nineteen twenty-one, Flanagan purchased a farm outside Omaha that became the independent village of Boys Town, incorporated in nineteen thirty-six. The nineteen thirty-eight film Boys Town, with Spencer Tracy winning an Academy Award playing Father Flanagan, made the story national.
The campus still operates as a residential school and child-care organization serving children of all backgrounds.
