Long before the Iowa DOT began bombarding our senses with messaging tortured enough to ensure that drivers’ eyes stay on the road, travelers along I-380 had just one source of entertainment to liven up their route: the Nesper sign. Cedar Rapids mainstay Nesper Sign Advertising sits just past the Highway 30 interchange, offering northbound drivers […]
Iowa history
Posted inCommunity/News
Bumper Crops: Pinball bans and the Des Moines mafia
There was never an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting pinball, but that didn’t stop some major cities from banning the game from the 1930s through the mid-’70s. In fact, Oakland, California still had a ban on pinball machines as recently as 2014. I first learned about pinball’s checkered history after trying to cajole my mom […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: Storm names coined in the state
It’s probably best not to dwell on what it says about life in Iowa that the names of two fearsome types of weather originated here. But in 1870, a northwest Iowa newspaper attached an already violence-laced word to the most violent sort of snowstorm, and 18 years later, a former UI professor borrowed the Spanish […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: Inside Squirrel Cage Jail, Council Bluffs’ spinning panopticon of misery
A rotating steel drum of pie-shaped prison cells inside a cylindrical cage. On each of three floors, there’s only one way in, one way out. Is this a pitch for a Saw trap? Nah, this is the Squirrel Cage Jail in Council Bluffs. The Squirrel Cage Jail operated as the Pottawattamie County jail from 1885 […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Peak Iowa: Arthur Russell, Oskaloosa’s lost genius
Tape hung like curtains in Arthur Russell’s apartment. The recording devices responsible were powered by an extension cord that ran out the window and down a few floors to Allen Ginsberg’s. Russell left behind 166 feet of tape when he died, only 40 years old, of AIDS-related illness in 1992. And if you’ll let me […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: History’s most prolific book bandit is an Ottumwa man. Librarians helped bring him down.
“Organized crime” usually refers to illegal activity as a collaborative enterprise, involving large networks of people and undertaken for profit or power. That’s too damned bad, really, because there is no better turn of phrase to lean on when discussing the wild work of the Guinness World Record holder for Most Prolific Book Thief: Ottumwa’s […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: 175 years of Cedar Rapids history began with a log-cabin tavern run by an outlaw
Cedar Rapids celebrated its 175th birthday in 2024. Iowa had been a state for barely two years when the new city was incorporated on Jan. 15, 1849. Of course, people had been living in the area for thousands of years before that happened. Archeologists have found evidence of habitation dating back 9,500 years. At least […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Three strange ways Richard Nixon left a legacy in Iowa
Ottumwa Days A month after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II, 29-year-old attorney Richard Nixon signed up to do his part. He left his law practice in Whittier, California for a job at the Office of Emergency Management in Washington D.C. Then in June 1942, he received a commission […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Plain Spoken: Revisiting ‘Iowa,’ Patrick Moore’s neglected gay novel
This monthly column will explore the long and diverse history of literature’s Midwestern engagements. There is an established canon of American literature in which the Midwest plays heavily, as a both physical and social place.
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Iowa is steeped in cinema history — and historic cinemas. But keeping an indie theater ticking isn’t easy
In Tommy Haines’ and Andrew Sherburne’s 2017 documentary Saving Brinton, Iowa history teach Mike Zahs discovers a treasure trove of old film reels in a farm basement, including rare footage of Teddy Roosevelt and a never-before-seen film by Georges Méliès (A Trip to the Moon, The Impossible Voyage). Zahs then embarks on an international odyssey […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Centennial Iowa Snacks: Palmer Candy Company has focused on one product — the Bing — for 100 years
The Twin Bing is an Iowa icon, handmade in Sioux City for more than a century. What it isn’t, really, is a candy bar, even though the packaging says “candy bar” and it’s made by the Palmer Candy Company. Palmer was trying to break into America’s booming candy bar market when it introduced the first […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Centennial Iowa Snacks: Unlike a certain chip giant, Sterzing’s in Burlington has put quality over quantity since the ’30s
Barney Sterzing never meant to get into the potato chip business. In 1933, when he started the Burlington company that produces the iconic chips that bear his family name, it was the Sterzing Candy Company. But summers in Burlington are hot, and keeping a company going in the midst of the Great Depression was hard […]
