Geoff Schumacher

This is the house we are renting starting August 1.

I’ve lived in Ames, Iowa, for four months now. By myself. Next week, my wife and younger daughter finally will join me amid the vast fields of corn and beans. I’ve been living in a townhouse not far from Iowa State University. On August 1st, we will move into a house in an established neighborhood close to the center of the city — half a mile from the high school, a mile and a half from my workplace, the Ames Tribune, in the historic downtown district.

Over the past four months, I’ve learned a lot about Iowa. I’ve driven around quite a bit, visiting various towns and cities. I’ve read the papers voraciously, picking up all sorts of information and history. I’ve gathered a modest collection of books about Iowa and done a little reading in them. What’s most interesting, to me, so far, is how unsung Iowa is. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that has happened here and that is going on today, but you don’t hear much about it beyond the state’s borders. Iowa seems to be easy to overlook, to pass by with an eye on getting someplace perceived to be more interesting.

This appeals to me, actually, because it’s something I might be able to take advantage of. As a journalist and historian, one looks for stories that have not been told, histories that have not been fully explored. If I were to move to Chicago, say, it would be difficult, I think, to uncover some great story there that no one else noticed. Iowa, by contrast, seems to contain a lot of stories that could be told for the first time.

Iowa probably is neglected in part because it doesn’t do much to promote itself. In general, Iowans are modest and don’t seem to feel it’s appropriate to boast, so they go about their lives without a lot of fanfare. This is exactly the opposite of Las Vegas, of course. Everything about Las Vegas says, “Look at me! Aren’t I great?” That can get tiring, especially when reality doesn’t live up to the hype.

The Ames Tribune building. This picture was taken a few months ago, in the early spring before the grass turned green.

But Iowa actually has a lot to boast about, if it were to do so. The economy is strong, resilient. It’s not just the corn, either. It’s manufacturing and wind energy and medical and banking and technology. The schools are very good. In addition to the three fine public universities, the state is full of small, private colleges, some of them very desirable. I’m most familiar with Iowa State, which focuses on the sciences, especially agriculture and engineering. But there’s also the University of Iowa in Iowa City, which has the medical and law schools, as well as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Des Moines, which is 30 miles from Ames, is emerging as one of the more interesting and desirable midsized cities in America. It’s constantly being ranked highly in surveys of the best places to do business or to be a young entrepreneur. At the national level, few people give Des Moines a second thought. They’re thinking about Portland, Oregon, or Austin, Texas, or the Twin Cities, or whatever. But they would be smart to consider Des Moines. It’s on the move.

To be fair, parts of Iowa are in decline. I’m speaking of the small towns that no longer have a good reason to exist. Over the past couple of decades, they’ve been losing their schools, post offices and retail establishments. A good number of them — not all — are dying. It’s sad, but in this age of interstate highways, it’s no big deal to drive 30 or 60 miles to get the things one needs or enjoy a night out. Regional commercial and cultural centers — big towns, small cities — have emerged to take the place of each small town providing all the amenities to serve a small group of people. Driving through some of these towns can be depressing. Lots of empty, rusting buildings suggesting glory days long past.

An old bridge crossing a river in Story City, a small town 10 miles north of Ames.

It’s been incredibly hot and humid the past few days. Iowa is part of an extreme heat wave that has struck the country’s entire midsection. If you combine the temperature with the humidity, it feels a lot hotter than the actual temperature suggests. The “heat index” here is well over 105. Supposedly the heat index is going to hit 115 tomorrow. All I can say is it’s a stifling heat. If you walk out of an air-conditioned building into the moist air, your glasses fog up, as if you’re in a steam room. It’s not pleasant but it’s no worse than an actual 110-degree day in the desert.

This heat wave comes at an unfortunate time for Iowa teens who earn money during the summer by “detasseling.” What the heck is this, you ask? The Des Moines Register summarizes:

“Farmers plant two varieties of seed corn in a field, and the workers remove the tassels of certain rows. That allows one line of corn to fertilize the other, producing a high-yielding hybrid, and prevents the plants from self-pollinating and ruining the hybrid line.”

By law, Iowa kids can start detasseling at age 14. (In Illinois, they can be as young as 12.) It’s a hot, exhausting job, so lots of kids drop out after just a few days. An iPod is recommended.

My wife and I are curious about how farming works. We just don’t know much about it. It’s not that we want to become farmers, but we want to have a certain modest level of understanding of the state’s primary industry. We’re thinking it would be interesting to take a Farming 101-type class, or maybe just spend a little time on a nearby farm and get a basic explanation of what goes on there.

I fly back to Las Vegas on Friday, marking the end of my bachelor-esque period in Iowa. Then we drive back to Iowa next week and start our adventure here in earnest. I feel good about it, even with winter not too far down the road.

Geoff at Target Field.

Last week I drove to Minneapolis to take in a baseball game between the Minnesota Twins and the Los Angeles Dodgers. I met my Las Vegas friend Steve Guiremand and his son, Kyle, at their hotel near the Mall of America, and we took the light rail to the stadium in downtown Minneapolis.

The drive from Ames to Minneapolis is a little more than 200 miles. It took me slightly less than 3 1/2 hours. It’s a simple route. You get on U.S. 35 in Ames and take it all the way to Minneapolis. There’s not a whole lot to see along this route, other than green fields.

Barn-themed rest stop in northern Iowa.

Iowa has some amazing rest stops. In a previous post, I discussed one outside Iowa City dedicated to the writing art. The one I stopped at en route to Minneapolis is a two-story structure in the form of a barn. Inside, there are numerous vending machines, and upstairs there’s a coffee shop. It was not open yet when I stopped there fairly early in the morning.

Casino in northern Iowa.

Across the way from the rest stop is another of Iowa’s casinos, the Diamond Jo. I didn’t go inside but thought I’d document its existence anyway for those who are curious about casinos outside the state of Nevada.

Minneapolis’ light rail is very nice and easy to use. It’s clear that it gets a lot of use. Las Vegas really ought to think harder about building one. We joined literally hundreds of others who parked at or near the Mall of America, in a suburb of Minneapolis, and took the light rail to the game, thereby avoiding the hassles of navigating traffic in one of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. It’s also not very expensive: We paid $4 for a roundtrip ticket.

The light rail approaches.

Target Field, just a little more than a year old, is a fine baseball stadium. It seems like there’s a great view from every seat, including ours. The food is good, and the prices are surprisingly decent. I had a brat, of course. I’m eager to see a few more major league stadiums in the Midwest.

Light rail pulls into the station.

After the game, which the Twins won 1-0, and a return trip on the light rail (packed with baseball fans), we checked out the Mall of America, or part of it anyway. I bought a hard-to-find style of baseball cap and T-shirt (Brewers) in a sports apparel store. Wandering over to the Barnes & Noble, wouldn’t you know it, but Sarah Palin was there doing a book signing. Hundreds of people were lined up, or snapping pictures from afar. I managed to squeeze through the hordes to get a decent photo. It wouldn’t have been decent if I didn’t have a great zoom capability on my point-and-shoot Kodak.

Once the family arrives later this month, I could see us taking a trip to the Mall of America, which has every store on Earth, plus many other amenities, including a roller coaster. It’ll make for a long day, but it’s doable.

Sarah Palin, with husband by her side, greets fans and signs books at the Mall of America.

Yesterday, I took a trip to Iowa City. It’s about 135 miles southeast of Ames. This is a trip I’ve wanted to make ever since I got this new job and moved to Iowa. Some might ask why visiting this particular city was important. It’s a fair question with a fairly simple answer. Iowa City is a literary mecca. It’s the home of the legendary Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first creative writing degree program in the country and still regarded as the most important. Faculty and alumni of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop are among the most important writers of the past six or seven decades. Here are just a few:

• Faculty: Nelson Algren, Philip Roth, John Cheever, Robert Penn Warren, T.C. Boyle, Raymond Carver, Frank Conroy, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Yates, John Irving, Barry Hannah and Marilynne Robinson.

• Alumni: Flannery O’Connor, Wallace Stegner, Denis Johnson, Michael Cunningham, Ann Patchett, ZZ Packer,  Jane Smiley, John Edgar Wideman, Steve Erickson, Andre Dubus, Sandra Cisneros, Tracy Kidder, Kent Haruf, James Hynes and A.M. Homes.

Furthermore, I happen to personally know several graduates of the program: Doug Unger, author and chairman of the English Department at UNLV; Richard Wiley, author and associate director of UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute; Vu Tran, a creative writing professor at the University of Chicago; Josh Kryah, a poet and English professor at UNLV; and Amber Withycombe, outgoing assistant director of the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV who soon will be starting a new job at George Mason University. Another alumnus of interest is Glenn Schaeffer, who did not become a writer but instead got into the casino business, where he did very well and is responsible, among other things, for the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas.

So, Iowa City is a place closely identified with writers and writing. My interest was further fueled last year when I read a great memoir by Tom Grimes called Mentor. Grimes, a Workshop graduate, writes movingly about the late Frank Conroy, who is probably the Workshop’s most famous director.

Naturally, Iowa City has quite a few highly regarded new and used bookstores, so those were my primary destination. I was not disappointed. Here is a rundown on my trip:

Bruegger's Bagels on Lincoln Way in Ames.

1. I started the trip, as I do many endeavors, with a visit to the bagel shop. I don’t like Bruegger’s quite as well as Einstein’s, which dominates Las Vegas, but it’ll do.

Kum & Go store on Dayton Avenue in Ames.

2. Next stop was the convenience store to stock up for the trip. What is noteworthy about Kum & Go (besides the jarring name) is that the soda-dispensing machines offer either cubed or crushed ice. It’s nice to have the option.

3. It rained much of the way down to Iowa City. Not a heavy rain, thankfully. On a recent trip to Des Moines, I ran into a heavy rainstorm that suddenly turned to hail. I, along with most (not all) other drivers stopped on the side of the road because we couldn’t see five feet in front of us. Not fun, but mercifully brief.

Marshalltown courthouse

4. I stopped in Marshalltown, which is about an hour east of Ames. It’s population is about 27,000, but it feels bigger. It has an old downtown that I want to explore further. The county courthouse (1886) is just amazingly interesting. Marshalltown has quite a few other historic buildings to check out down the road.

Indian casino near Toledo, Iowa.

5. I didn’t go in, but I had to take a picture of the Meskwak hotel-casino, east of Marshalltown near Toledo. Iowa actually has quite a few casinos.

Tanger Outlet Center, Williamsburg, Iowa

6.  I had a little business to conduct at the Tanger Outlet Center, which is a big, busy outlet mall on Interstate 80 at Williamsburg, Iowa.

7. I am saving the Amana Colonies for another day. They are arguably one of the most interesting attractions in all of Iowa, worthy of a full day trip.

Each covered picnic table has a quotation from a writer associated with Iowa City.

8. One of the most interesting stops on my trip was a rest stop on the approach to Iowa City. It is completely writing-themed. Here is what the state’s website says about it: “Entitled ‘It Has Iowa Written All Over It,’ this integrated public art installation speaks to the importance of writing in Iowa and its significant contribution to literature throughout the world.”

Public art at the rest stop near Iowa City.

It’s about the coolest thing I can imagine: a rest stop dedicated to writing and writers. Of course, the large majority of visitors to the rest stop just want to stretch their legs and use the restroom, but still.

9. Prairie Lights Bookstore is one of the nation’s great independent new bookstores. Many book tours have Prairie Lights on the schedule, though nobody was signing on Saturday. A fine store.

10. The downtown area of Iowa City is incredibly cool and beautiful. Classic pedestrian-friendly urban environment.

Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City.

11. The Haunted Bookshop is an excellent used bookstore just a couple of blocks from Prairie Lights. It’s a very good used store, with sophisticated and well-organized stock.

The Haunted Bookshop in Iowa City.

12. I was even more impressed by Murphy-Brookfield Books, which, again, is just a few blocks from Prairie Lights and Haunted. This converted two-story house has to be a place frequented by writers and faculty of the Workshop, as it has the largest collection of literary criticism I have ever seen in one place.

Downtown Iowa City.

I didn’t stroll around the campus, unfortunately. Seems odd, I know, but by the time I had hit the three bookstores, it was getting late and I knew I wanted to get back before it got too late. Next time.

13. I had a late lunch at Bennigan’s at the Coral Ridge Mall. Decent burger.

Bennigan's bar and grill at Coral Ridge Mall outside Iowa City.

On the way home, I made a pit stop in Newton, which is where they recently held a NASCAR race. I could hear cars racing around the track, which was at least half a mile from the convenience store where I stopped.

Ironically, I don’t have any pictures of the scenery along the way between Ames and Iowa City. That, of course, is because I was driving. But what is so striking to me — someone who has lived in North America’s driest desert for more than 30 years — is how incredibly fertile this place is this time of year. It’s ALL about growing things right now, and it makes for beautiful landscapes. The cornfields are turning green, the trees are leafy green, the rivers are flowing with purpose. The cows and sheep in the fields look like they are enjoying the spring weather. There’s a lot to be said for a fertile land — for plants, animals and writers alike.

AMES, Iowa — I’m still in recovery.

I arrived home around midnight on May 1. I was very tired, worn out from my three-day trip to the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. But when I got into the condo and dropped my things, I decided for some reason that it was time to take out the kitchen trash. I tied up the bag and walked to the dumpster, which is only about 40 feet from my front door. As I reached for the dumpster’s lid, I had a sensation — one of those sensations that novelists always have trouble describing, a feeling that something isn’t quite right, that what I’m doing might not work out exactly the way I expect.

Indeed. As I lifted the lid to throw in the bag, there was a noise, the frantic scrabbling of a beast within. I was startled — okay, I freaked out briefly. I let go of the lid and leaped backward with a shout as what turned out to be a raccoon scooted through the space between the dumpster and the descending lid. All would have been fine except that in my haste to back away from the animal, I tripped and fell awkwardly to the blacktop.

I tore up my left elbow, as well as the palm of my right hand. I also bruised my hip. Nothing serious, but the row of scabs on and around my elbow is a hindrance to getting dressed and such.

My wife thinks this is pretty funny. “Watch out for Ricky Raccoon!” she’s said several times since. My younger daughter thinks I’m a wuss for being afraid of a little raccoon. She’s right and wrong, of course. She’s right that there’s no reason to be afraid of a raccoon. He’s more afraid of me than I of him. But she’s wrong in the sense that I didn’t know what was in that dumpster. Having moved to the Midwest just a couple of weeks before, I wasn’t familiar with the notion of wildlife of this sort rooting around near your house. It’s very unlikely that anything other than a sad human will be found in an apartment dumpster in Las Vegas. Plus, it was past midnight, dark, and cold, and I was tired as hell.

Anyway, I’ve been leery of that dumpster ever since. I’ve opened it trepidatiously probably five times since then, and no raccoon has jumped out. It probably won’t happen again, but that experience will come to mind every time for a while.

Keeping with the animal theme, let’s talk about the armadillo. You read that right. Armadillos are commonplace in the South, but it’s unusual for them to make an appearance this far north. But it happened this week in the small town of Cambridge, about 15 miles south of Ames.

According to a story in today’s Ames Tribune, a man named Wade Kahler noticed some sort of roadkill on the shoulder of his driveway. He called a city maintenance employee, Dale Hennick, who came out and discovered it was a dead armadillo. He tossed it in the back of his pickup.

Apparently, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources receives “a couple of armadillo reports a year . . . but they are always roadkills.” It’s not clear how the armored creatures get to Iowa, but I would speculate that they somehow end up here by catching a ride on some sort of vehicle, kind of like roof rats in Las Vegas. Otherwise, it’s an awfully long walk.

For the record, it’s illegal to transport an armadillo into Iowa. I don’t know why. (I wonder if Nevada has a similar law.)

Here’s the kicker, from the final two sentences of the article:

“Hennick has no idea what he will do with the curious carcass. ‘I guess I’ll just put him in the refrigerator for now,’ he said.”

Wait: Why does Hennick think the thing to do is to put this dead animal in a refrigerator? Why would he do that? When you don’t know what to do with a dead animal, your plan is to put it in a refrigerator? That would only make sense if he . . . he . . . planned to cook the thing and eat it!

Surely that’s not what he intends to do. Surely.

Go here for a piece I wrote on the Las Vegas Review of Books website about the British writer Geoff Dyer.

The acquisitions.

The annual pilgrimage to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books featured a little twist this year. The usual routine has been for Steve, Scott and I to pile into a car in Las Vegas on Friday morning and drive to L.A., munching snacks and stopping at a Chili’s along the way. This year I was in Ames, Iowa, so I flew to L.A., and Steve and Scott picked me up at the airport.

From there, things got back to normal. We ate, scoured various bookstores and enjoyed the booths and panels at the festival. Another change this year: Instead of being held at UCLA, the festival was on the USC campus. All things considered, UCLA is a better venue for this event, but USC is all right.

I ended up acquiring quite a few books this year. Nothing unusual about that, but I’m particularly pleased with some of them. A few highlights:

- The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class by Sen. Bernie Sanders. Nation Books had a cool idea here. It’s amazing that on Dec. 10, 2010, the Vermont senator spoke continuously for eight and a half hours on the Senate floor, criticizing President Obama’s compromise with the Republicans on tax cuts as part of a wide-ranging discussion of how the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.

- Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia by Frank Westerman. Scott and I heard Westerman, a Dutchman, talk on a panel, and his thoughtful comments prompted both of us to buy this book. It’s brand new, and when Westerman signed my book, he said it was the first copy of the U.S. edition that he had signed. The book is about how the Soviets hired writers to basically rename everything to conform to the communist version of history and life, and to write eloquently about mundane things such as a dam on a river. It sounds really interesting.

- The Professor: A Sentimental Education by Terry Castle. This is an essay collection by a Stanford professor that got rave reviews last year but was impossible to find in the chain bookstores. Didn’t have any problem finding it at Vroman’s in Pasadena, of course.

- What?: Are These the 20 Most Important Questions in Human History — or Is This a Game of 20 Questions by Mark Kurlansky. This is a small tome that promises to be a very interesting essay about life’s big questions.

- Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer. Dyer, a Londoner, is one of my new favorite writers, and this is probably his most celebrated book. He set out to write a serious study of the great English writer D.H. Lawrence. But this book isn’t what he originally intended to write. Instead, it’s a memoir of sorts about his inability to write a serious study of Lawrence. Dyer was on the panel with Frank Westerman.

- Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir by Marc Cooper. Cooper, a well-known journalist, is a friend, and Scott, Steve and I spent several hours with him at dinner Saturday night. He’s a journalism professor at USC these days, so he gave us a tour of the Annenberg school, and then we hung out in a semi-secret bar and grill on the campus. Anyway, this is Cooper’s memoir of the period in the early ’70s when he worked as a translator for Chilean President Salvador Allende when he was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet.

- A Heartbreak and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears by Antonino D’Ambrosio. This is the story behind Cash’s protest album called “Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian,” which faced censorship and a backlash from country radio stations. This is an enticing piece of cultural history.

- Zeroville by Steve Erickson. I picked this up in a great used bookstore, Book Alley, in Pasadena. Erickson is an interesting writer and this novel promises to be a good entry point to become more acquainted with his work.

Among the panels and talks, the highlight for me was Vincent Bugliosi. He’s a lawyer and best-selling writer whose most famous book is “Helter Skelter” about the Manson family. His new book, which I intend to get but haven’t yet, is called Divinity of Doubt, and it’s an investigative piece attacking both the Christian faith and atheism. Bugliosi is an agnostic, and he explains why in his usual careful, detailed way. He outlines all the inconsistencies in the Bible, and exposes the fact that some common Christian beliefs aren’t even in the good book at all. But Bugliosi is also critical of atheists, who, he says, fail just as badly as believers to make a persuasive case for their cause. “God should only be a question,” he said. Fascinating talk.

I had to leave the book festival a little early on Sunday to fly back to Ames. I caught at taxi about 2 p.m. and soon embarked on the long flight home, my new books in tow. It was late when we landed in Des Moines. As the wheels touched down, I of course turned on my BlackBerry to find out if I had missed anything. It just so happened that I had missed something big: the breaking news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. I had at least three e-mail alerts about it, which I shared with a few people sitting around me on the plane.

I wonder if some big news event will break while I’m at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books next year?

I thought the Trib staff did a nice job on this issue.

Vu Tran

I conducted a long interview with the writer Vu Tran last summer in Las Vegas. He is now teaching creative writing at the University of Chicago. Click here to check it out on the Las Vegas Review of Books website.

Louis Sullivan building in Algona, Iowa.

The famed skyscraper architect Louis Sullivan designed this building in Algona, Iowa. It is known as the Henry Adams Building, or the Land and Loan Office Building. It was designed in 1912 and opened in 1913.

Although it was never a bank, this building is considered to be one of Sullivan’s “Jewel Boxes,” a series of banks built in the Midwest between 1909 and 1919. There are at least two others in Iowa. This building has many windows, drawing natural light into the workplace.

The Algona Chamber of Commerce occupies the building today. When I visited Algona last week, I didn’t get a chance to go inside, but I’ve been promised such a visit in the future. I’m told the interior is very cool.

Sullivan, a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, is the guy who coined the phrase “form follows function.”

I’ve been in Ames for two weeks now. Although I miss my family terribly, I enjoy living here. Iowa is interesting. It’s not chaotically interesting like Las Vegas, or exotically interesting like some other locales, but I’ve enjoyed learning about the history of certain places and institutions, and about the economic, political and social happenings and trends in this part of the country.

The presidential race is heating up, and Iowa is ground zero at this early stage. The Republican wannabes are showing up for events and hiring people to run their Iowa operations. The Des Moines Register is doing a good job of keeping track of their comings and goings. I’ve been talking with our editor at the Ames Tribune, and I think I’m going to write some columns over the next 18 months or so dissecting the presidential candidates. The Ames Tribune will cover the candidates who come through Ames, of course, but we don’t have the manpower to cover the campaign on a regular or statewide basis. My task will be to offer a, you guessed it, voice of reason, separating the nutjob candidates from those who live within this little realm we like to call reality. Should be fun.

You might have heard that some tornadoes rolled through Iowa last weekend. There were between 10 and 27 of them, depending on how they’re counted. One particularly nasty one destroyed a good portion of a small town called Mapleton, which is about 125 miles west of Ames, and also did some havoc in a small town called Early. (On that day, we didn’t have any notable weather at all in Ames.) Nobody was killed in Mapleton, and the worst injury was a broken leg. Register columnist Kyle Munson summarized the effect on the town: “The tornado decimated Mapleton’s west side but spared most of the homes in the eastern half. Mother Nature remains fickle down to a matter of city blocks.” The tornadoes also caused some damage in other towns and areas north and east of Mapleton. Our company owns the newspaper in Algona, and our publisher there told me a tornado was sighted about three miles outside of town. The tornado sirens sounded for hours in Algona, I guess, which tends to prevent people from getting a good night’s sleep.

Here are other some random items I’ve picked up from my travels and reading:

- The Amish have a pretty healthy population in Iowa (seventh highest among the states). Not in the Ames area, though. They mostly live in southern and eastern Iowa. Only one Iowa county saw an increase in population in the 2010 Census, and it was one (Davis) with a large Amish population. The Amish are, as you might imagine, a rustic lot, with their horses and buggies, and machinery operated without electricity, but they’re an economic engine in places like Davis County. But not from farming. Register writer Mike Kilen writes: “Ninety businesses, selling wares from horse collars to bakery rolls, from harnesses to salvage flim-flam of discount stores, dot the gravel roads between tiny Drakesville and the county seat of Bloomfield, nine miles away. Homemade signs advertising greenhouses and country stores stand on the corner with arrows to direct mostly non-Amish to their stores.” The Amish tend to be good businessmen. They keep their overhead low, and they develop relationships with their customers.

- Iowa newspapers seem to be full of little feature stories about charmingly quirky old people. The Cedar Rapids Gazette published a story about a woman in Traer, Iowa, who collected salt and pepper shakers. Ruth Rasmussen, 87, collected 14,500 sets, which is a lot by any standard. They outgrew her house, so she started keeping them in a “milk shed” and a mobile home in her backyard. She recently sold her collection, for $25,000, to the city of Traer, which set up a public display in hopes of drawing tourists. I find this fascinating, but I don’t have any interest in traveling to Traer to look at the salt and pepper shakers.

- A 90-year-old woman in Clear Lake, Iowa, is still working three days a week making beds at a Best Western. “I need the exercise,” Jean Morris told the Mason City Globe-Gazette. “I need to get out. It’s important. I am not ready to sit in a rocking chair.” I hope there aren’t any 90-year-old ladies making beds in Las Vegas hotels, considering the workload I know is expected of Las Vegas hotel maids.

- Have you watched the eaglets on the web? Millions of people have checked in on the eagle cam here. They’re an Internet sensation, more popular than Charlie Sheen. They’re located in Decorah, in northeast Iowa. If you haven’t checked them out, you might want to do so soon, because eventually they will fly away. The three eaglets are expected to start flying around in July, and they’ll leave home sometime around September.

- Back to Algona, where our company owns the Algona Upper Des Moines. I made a trip up there this week, and I came away with a book (naturally). It’s a self-published, stapled pamphlet really, but the content is incredible. It is titled, “A Collection of Memories of the Algona Prisoner of War Camp 1943-1946,” and it was compiled by Wes H. Bartlett in 1994. Basically, it’s an oral history of memories of people, most of them still living in the area, who had experiences with the POW camp where thousands of Germans and Italians were held and worked in local industries. The big hook to the story is that a group of German prisoners created a half-life-size nativity scene and presented it to the people of Algona at war’s end. The nativity scene still exists and is on display in Algona. The figures are made of plastered concrete over wooden and wire frames. I plan to write a column for the Tribune about this, but I haven’t actually seen the nativity scene in person yet.

Looking back at this post, I realize there isn’t much here about my Midwest adventures. I’ll try to rectify that in my next post, but in the meantime I hope this one offers a little taste of the flavor of life in this part of the world.