In 1982, the inaugural My Waterloo Days Festival was held as a celebration of the beginning of the summer. Replete with a parade, laser light shows and hot air balloons, it was a special event seeking to foster community bonding amid economic strife. John Deere was seeing mass layoffs, the Rath Packing Company was on its way out, and the rising unemployment rate was pushing people to move away from the Cedar Valley.
In collaboration with the festival, the Waterloo Chamber of Commerce commissioned a song and music video dubbed “You’re My Waterloo.” (MTV had just launched the year before, after all.) It wasn’t a take on ABBA’s Eurovision-winning hit, but an original soft-rock ode to the Waterloo, Iowa metro, set to nostalgic, very late-’70s-coded imagery: schoolkids reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance,” blue-collar workers assembling a Deere tractor, dancers at a disco, an old man selling tomatoes, a very small boy riding a mechanical bull at the fair, a hayride, various sports games, a rollerskater outside the JCPenney at Crossroads Center, kids tossing the morning paper, a large group of people taking hands and walking through a grassy park Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad style, and much more.
“You’re My Waterloo” was written by Bob Jenkins, Joe Pundzak and Des Moines musician Susan Oatts, who provides vocals (and continues to perform to this day). The lyrics are fawning: “You’re a cool breeze on a summer night / There’s a warmth in the glow of your city lights / You’re my friend and my home, my work and my pride / You make me feel so alive!”
“You lift your head high for the world to see,” Oatts continues. “The beauty of the morning sky, always there for me … You’re my Waterloo / And you’re growing up to be a lady / Don’t you know you’re the neighbors I come home to?”
The video ran as a TV ad, the song on the radio, and both resonated with locals. The Chamber of Commerce had 1,000 45’’ vinyl records pressed, which sold for $2 each. Merchandise, including sheet music, was available in stores, and the song played frequently in the very JCPenney featured in the video.
And it’s still remembered fondly; a Facebook upload of the “You’re My Waterloo” video by retired KWWL-TV anchor Ron Steele in 2023 garnered a wave of wistful comments. Recognizing the power of the song 40 years later, the tourism board Experience Waterloo, which now oversees the My Waterloo Days Festival, put out a new video recreating most of the clips in a modern context, maintaining Oatts’ original vocals.
Still, the ’80s version has an unmatched charm. As dated as it all may be, it’s also timeless. After all, “You’re my Waterloo / And you know I’m always gonna need you.”
This article is from Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
