Maynard Zipf

Maynard Glen Zipf, 87, died on July 10, 2024, in Overland Park, Kan.

He was born on March 4, 1937, and grew up in the small town of Fullerton, Neb. He graduated high school in 1954, and then married Bonnie Cleveland in 1955. Throughout his life, he worked for the Union Pacific Railroad and Farmland Industries.

He is survived by his six children: Diana Foster, Maynard Zipf Jr., Julie Mailliard, David Zipf, Leah Jimenez and Elizabeth Leiknes, who thanks to him all know what a bushel of corn looks like and how beautiful a G7 chord sounds on a sunny day.

He was preceded in death by his parents Gertie and Carl Zipf, and his daughter Denise.

There will be no services.

For Maynard Zipf, life was indeed a song. Music was the melody that accompanied him through every season of his life. He turned to music when he was sad, and he turned to it when he was happy. Music was his constant companion, the other half of his life’s two part harmony. Perhaps his love affair with music began when, at 10, his parents scrounged up enough money for a traveling teacher to give him accordion lessons. He really did love the accordion, with its ability to play both harmony and melody, and that childhood instrument seemed to set the tone for his life: always be making music, and never forget where you came from.

Dad’s longtime idol, Merle Haggard, famously sang about being an “Okie From Muskogee,” and while Dad was not from Oklahoma, he fiercely identified with one’s identity being tied to where you grew up. That’s probably one of many things he passed on to his seven children. Dad’s childhood had notes of humble beginnings, a pre-chorus for jokes we would all later make about how driving across Nebraska was a rite of passage — a long, brown, endless rite of passage.

But for Dad, Nebraska was not just a place on a map, but rather a place he called home. To know him was to understand the essence of the Heartland. His love for Nebraska ran as deep as the North Platte River. His blue eyes sparkled at the mere mention of his home state, and he carried the spirit of the Cornhusker state (especially the German settlements) throughout his life, no matter where he resided. But it was not just the vastness of the great plains that captured his heart, but also the rhythm of the rails, another one of his loves. There was a romance about the railroad for Dad. Maybe he loved how railroads represented the interconnectedness of us all, or maybe he just loved the idea of the possibility of an adventure. Either way, he loved how railroads made him feel, and he would later work for the Union Pacific Railroad and look for railroads wherever he went. In our hearts, that’s where he is now — eating Blue Bunny ice cream, playing guitar and searching for the great railway in the sky.