Rex German

Born ≈ 1935

Rex German, aged 22, was teaching school in 1957 when his father, Milo German, owner and founder of Nebraska Plastics was killed in an airplane crash. The Cozad firm played an important role in the history of irrigation in Nebraska and the Midwest after World War II, introducing plastics into irrigation when aluminum was in short supply. German took over the firm after his father's death and re-educated himself as a businessman, attending and sometimes teaching in Harvard University's Business School's Executive Education Program. Nebraska Plastics, working with the Dow Chemical company developed the first above ground weather resistant PVC pipe while inventing above ground PVC gated irrigation pipe, again to replace metal pipe. Gated irrigation pipe itself was invented by Paul Hohnstein of Hastings. Nebraska Plastics also brought PVC to hog containment and in the 1970s introduced the first vinyl fencing products, when German adapted materials manufactured by the company for fence on his own farm.

German, long-time supporter and sometime officer of the Dawson County Historical Society and the Dawson County Historical Museum is co-author with Russ Czaplweski of Battle of the Bridges: Community Rivalry in Dawson County Nebraska. The book is a broad account of the desperate exertions of rival towns to bridge the Platte and bring life and prosperity sustaining railroads through their communities. This is the wider context for some of Nebraska's most famous violent episodes, including the violence and a killing perpetrated by John Cozad, founder of the town of Cozad and father of the great Nebraska born artist Robert Henri.

On German's career see: Cozad Chamber of Commerce, "Nebraska Plastics: 70 years in Cozad," at lexch.com, posted 08-02-2015, and the chapter on "Irrigation Invention and Innovation," in Jody L. Lamp and Melody Dobson, A History of Nebraska Agriculture: A Life Worth Living,, 2017.

dsc

Places Lived

Cozad, NE

Author Of

Nonfiction

Keywords

Bridges; Dawson County, Nebraska - History

Associations

Dawson County Historical Society Board of Directors, Member

Bibliography

Battle of the Bridges: Community Rivalry in Dawson County Nebraska. 1988. (with Russ Czaplewski)

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to NebraskaAuthors@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.