Now that the Corner Bar is gone, Sue Leininger says she is just piddlin’ around.

Just piddlin’ around is hard for her to take after operating the Corner Bar 365 days a year for 37 years.

Sue and her late husband Richard took over management of the Corner Bar in 1972. Richard’s father had run the place since 1936.

Sue has never been a pool player herself. She said that few women set foot in the place when she was in her high school years and later. It wasn’t until she and Richard took over the operation that a few women began to play pool.

Sue said she has seen some pretty fair local pool players in her day. The good ones started out playing three ball and then moved up to the snooker game.

Sue said that a few hustlers came in from out of town and tried to take advantage of some of the Kimball boys.

She said, “Sometimes it worked the other way. The Kimball players let the visitors win a game and then raised the old ‘Would you like to bet a little money on the next game?’”

She spent her childhood in the country north of Scottsbluff where she attended the Lake Alice country school. Her mother taught school and her father was with the Soil Conservation group.

Leininger’s mother had been a Hastings College classmate of Kimball High School Superintendent Ed Young. When Superintendent Young offered mother a job teaching fourth grade, she took it and the family moved to Kimball.

Dad transfered with the Soil Conservation group and Sue entered Kimball High School in 1956.

She graduated in 1960.

Richard Leininger was a year ahead of her in school. In the senior class will, Richard bequethed his ability to play pool to Sue.

But, as Sue said, girls didn’t go into the taverns and pool halls in those days.

Sue said Budweiser products had been the Corner Bar’s best seller over the long haul. Schlitz had a following.

She said, “The railroad workers from back east liked Pabst Blue Ribbon.”

Those are names you don’t hear anymore.

She certainly misses the Corner Bar. She said sometimes she will find her self crossing the street towards it, and then stops, realizing the building isn’t there any more.

Sue said she will find herself “getting ready for work” in the morning for duty that no longer exists.

“It was mine and now it’s gone, “ she said.

Sue says she has no plans for the Corner Bar location. She is waiting for the basement crater to be filled.

The debris from the demolition of the Corner Bar was taken to the city landfill the morning of the fire, for safety  reasons and so the streets were passable.

The stones that made up the building are part of a pile of rubble, waiting be sorted out of the pile of wreckage that was once a historic landmark.

Safety concerns rule out anything being done with the wooden shell on the west end of the property until the basement crater is filled.

The wooden portion was added on after a fire damaged the west end of the old stone building years ago. The west wall had to be torn down and the wooden addition was built to fill in.

The steel beams that supported the structure have been made into heavy duty bumpers now mounted on some trucks in the area.

The Kimball community joins Sue Leininger in regret over the loss of  this historic building which was a central part of the character of Kimball.