Marshmallows, Rice Krispies, a little butter and your mom’s best 9”-by-13” Pyrex baking dish — the only ingredients needed for that ubiquitous, always-welcome fixture of the Midwestern potluck, the Rice Krispie Treat. The alchemist who helped turn Rice Krispies from a mediocre, snap-crackle-popping milk-sponge cereal into a dessert icon was Iowa State University grad Mildred […]
Peak Iowa
Posted inPrint Edition
Little Village issue 347: Peak Iowa 2025
Competitive marbles and border collies. A video game on I-80. The songwriter behind “Fly Me to the Moon.” A legendary Batman artist. Antifacist firebrands. A bell heist. A hidden crater. An Epstein anecdote. A rock star’s kidnapped kid. Stories of icons, oddities and infamy fill the fifth Peak Iowa issue — an annual bacchanalia of […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Iowa Odyssey: Play LV’s board game and read the stories behind the spaces
Pick up a copy of the November issue and turn to page 40 (the centerfold). You can also download a PDF of the Iowa Odyssey game board, or play the game virtually with friends. Game design by Rodney Arthur. Space concepts by Little Village staff. Visual design by Kellan Doolittle. Play-tested by Nolan Petersen and […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Peak Iowa: Taco pizza, Davenport’s endlessly imitated invention
Crust, beans, taco sauce, cheese, ground beef, lettuce, onions, tomatoes, perhaps some peppers, sour cream and black olives, all topped with crushed taco chips. Taco pizza, a culinary innovation that bemuses taco traditionalists and infuriates pizza purists, is much loved in Iowa. That’s fitting, since Iowa is where taco pizza was born. Probably. It can […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: When Jumbo the geyser put Belle Plaine on the map
At the corner of 8th Avenue and 8th Street in Belle Plaine, there’s a boulder with a bronze plaque put there in 1954 to commemorate “Jumbo,” a well-turned-geyser that briefly made the Benton County city famous almost 70 years earlier. By the time the well that became Jumbo was dug, the Belle Plaine area already […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: 100 years ago, central Iowans embraced gender-nonconforming immigrant and fortune teller Heroda Kaiji
Heroda Kaiji, when he sensed that he was dying, asked his friends to take him from his rooming house apartment in Stuart to a shady hill beside the South Raccoon River near Dexter. He wanted to spend his final moments looking out across Dexfield Park, the amusement park where he had performed as a palmist […]
Posted inRecreation
Peak Iowa: A brief history of cornhole
A slanted board with a hole cut in it. A small beanbag. An underhand toss. Almost everyone knows the game from that basic description. But what’s its true name? Cornhole? Bags? Whatever you call it, it’s been a staple of tailgating, backyard cookouts and beach parties for generations. Tossing a beanbag through a hole on […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
David Lynch’s Iowa odyssey
David Lynch, who was called “America’s first surrealist filmmaker” by actor Dennis Hopper, died in Los Angeles at age 78 on Jan. 16, four days shy of his 79th birthday. Known for films such as Mulholland Drive (2001), he gained a new audience during the COVID pandemic as the internet’s favorite weatherman, streaming daily reports from “Here in sunny L.A.” on his YouTube channel.
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: ‘Meteor excitement’ brought a small fortune to the Amana area in the 1870s
On Friday, Feb. 12, 1875, shortly before 10:30 p.m., “one of the most brilliant meteors of modern times illuminated the entire State of Iowa, and adjacent parts of the States of Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.” “The meteor, in rapidly moving through the atmosphere, produced a great variety of sounds — rolling, rumbling, and detonations […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: Drink deep from the Devil’s Punchbowl at Wildcat Den State Park
Wildcat Den State Park is located just a few miles from the Mississippi River between Davenport and Muscatine. The modern history of the park starts in the year 1848, when a settler by the name of Benjamin Nye — who established Muscatine County’s first store and post office a decade earlier — built the Pine […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: Poet John Berryman’s brief, troubled time in Iowa City
Content warning: Suicide The poet John Berryman’s chance to have a quiet, uneventful life ended early one morning in 1926 when he was 11. It ended when his father walked into the backyard with a gun and committed suicide. John was in his bedroom when it happened. The bedroom’s windows faced the backyard. It wasn’t […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Peak Iowa: A far-out suburban mansion
Sucker for a spiral staircase? Look no further than Des Moines suburb Urbandale and LeMar Koethe’s Spaceship House! A gorgeous one curves around a central pillar rising 35 feet—from the ground-floor garages to the main living area, with an elevator as well—in this stunner of a mansion. Koethke had the home built in 1993, far […]
