October 13, 2006: Eastbound IA 22 at old north end of IA 405.
Throughout the 45 years that the intersection of IA 22 and the road leading into Lone Tree was a state highway (IA 405), 22 was always the through road. Now, though, the Iowa DOT is going to convert the intersection into a four-way stop. That’s going to happen next week.
IA 22 has one other four-way stop, with IA 1 at Kalona. I would have to do some digging to find a four-way stop with a state-maintained highway at a county road that did not involve the highway turning. (UPDATE: IA 13 at E34/County Home Road in Linn County is a four-way stop, so there’s one.)
The Baby Boom-related expansion of high schools in Iowa began in 1967, when Iowa’s two largest cities opened new buildings.
Des Moines Hoover celebrated its anniversary last week (above). Herbert Hoover, Iowa’s only native son elected president, had died three years earlier.
A half-century after those two opened, Iowa City Liberty High School started classes, this time as a sign of urban sprawl. Hoover and Kennedy remain among the ten newest high schools to open in Iowa that were not a reconfiguration or relocation of existing ones.
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KMEG Channel 14 in Sioux City, a CBS station, is the only such affiliate in Iowa on the UHF spectrum. The switch to digital has largely rendered the VHF/UHF distinction obsolete — as has the random channel assignments cable companies do nowadays — but keeping the “classic” identification is a tie to history.
In back-to-back games eight months apart, Iowa State went toe-to-toe with college football royalty and blinked. Or, alternatively, the college football gods noticed what was going on and engineered a snap recalibration.
December 27, 2001, Purgatory Shreveport LA
The year after Iowa State’s first bowl win and only nine-win season since Oklahoma became a state, the Cyclones went 7-4. Two seasons removed from (and one season ahead of) 10-win campaigns, Alabama was 6-5. The final game for both was, as so many bowl games are, in SEC country — Iowa State’s first time down there since playing at Vanderbilt in 1983.
Iowa State led the game until an Alabama touchdown with under five minutes to go. But the only thing anyone remembers happened with 51 seconds remaining, when Tony Yelk kicked a 47-yard attempt over the right upright.
Over.
The ruling on the field was “wide right.” The video board at the stadium did not show the replay. Alabama 14, Iowa State 13.
In the decade-long interregnum between Gene Stallings and Nick Saban (1997-2006), the Crimson Tide had three 10-win seasons and went 67-53 on the field (setting aside NCAA adjustments). Alabama fans unironically refer to this era as “the dark ages.” After going 7-6 in Saban’s first year (2007), Alabama has posted double-digit-win seasons since. Oh, and won four national championships, thanks in no small part to Iowa State, and a “missed” field goal. You might have heard a little about that.
August 24, 2002, Kansas City MO
Through a preseason-game exemption and a calendar that opened an experiment to extend the schedule, Iowa State had a 13-game regular season in 2002. The season opener was the Eddie Robinson Classic on a warm night in Arrowhead Stadium. The opponent was Florida State, which had posted double-digit-win seasons every year from 1987 to 2000, coached by legend Bobby Bowden. The Seminoles, before going 8-4 in 2001, had been in the national championship game three years in a row, winning one; another one was more than a decade in the future.
The Cyclones trailed 24-0 early in the second quarter, then started clawing back, until the Seminoles only led by 7. With 21 seconds remaining in the game, on the second-to-last play, Seneca Wallace did what he would do so well that season and take off, both metaphorically and literally, holding the ball over the pylon in the corner of the end zone.
Over.
August 24, 2002: Still frame from family video of Seneca Wallace’s run toward the end zone in the fourth quarter of the Iowa State-Florida State game.
Instant replay for official review in college football did not start until 2004 in the Big Ten Conference and 2005 elsewhere. For what it’s worth, the official right there made the call right away, and even a touchdown would have required a good PAT and overtime. But officially, the ball was not in, and, FSU kept Wallace out of the end zone on the last play. Florida State 38, Iowa State 31.
Florida State finished the season 9-5, winning the ACC and losing the Sugar Bowl to Georgia Tech. Iowa State won its next six games, earning the first AP Top 10 ranking in program history, then suffered a loss to Oklahoma so brutal and traumatic that the Cyclones lost all but one remaining game by double digits.
From August 24, 2002, to September 1, 2017, Alabama lost 46 games and Florida State lost 55. Iowa State lost 118, more than the two of them combined. Tomorrow night, the Crimson Tide and Seminoles will play the first college football game in Atlanta’s new stadium. Tomorrow night, Iowa State will be on its fourth coach since 2002 and is widely expected to finish third-to-last in a 10-team conference.
Would things be different if the ball moved just a little bit on either of those plays? Probably not. But for a fleeting time, a rising Iowa State intersected the lines of two well-known teams, and the next step was tantalizingly close.
To reach West Broadway from I-29 (which you can’t do now), traffic will have to exit at 9th Avenue (NB) or Avenue G (SB). Frontage roads with intersections will run the whole way between those streets. The ramps at Avenue G and 35th Street will be closed.
The one true exit from I-480, formerly signed as “Dodge Park”, currently signed as “Riverfront”, and recently given the Exit 0 designation, will be moved slightly eastward to 41st Street. This will also be the exit for Broadway; mainline I-480 will split into exits to NB and SB 29. There will still be a Broadway running under I-29 where it currently is, but to the west it will merge into I-480 instead of the other way around.
The left-hand exit from NB 29 to WB 480 will be eliminated and turned into a right-hand exit as part of converting the interchange to a Y or directional-T interchange.
The 50th anniversary of the interchange’s original opening will be October 25, 2018. Construction will not begin for at least a year and a half after that. This is a later part of the overall Council Bluffs Interstate System project, which started in 2014.
The trivia question about state capitals not on the interstate system got a different answer in 2012, and now the connection is complete.
The final segment of I-580 running south from Reno to Carson City NV opened Aug. 2. (Interstate pictures: AA Roads) It covered a southeast bypass of Carson City and also carries US 395 and US 50. A northeast bypass was signed as I-580 in 2012 when another part of the new interstate opened to the north.
I-580 is only the second signed child route of I-80 between the San Francisco Bay Area and Lincoln; I-180 in Cheyenne is the other.
Now, of the four states whose capitals aren’t connected to the interstate system, two border Iowa: Missouri and South Dakota. That might be a stretch to get the Iowa angle, but the interstate significance and the final shift of US 50 off the Lincoln Highway through Carson City are both notable.
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The DOT’s “I-80 Planning Study Public Meeting #2” video, about 11 minutes long, is online. It has had fewer than 400 views since being uploaded to YouTube a month ago. Perhaps I can help with that:
For some reason, all the animated maps highlight I-80 following I-235 through the Des Moines area.
The video says that four-laning US 30 and US 34 instead of six-laning I-80 across Iowa would not do enough to relieve traffic on the interstate. The last third of the video diverts to discussion about automated vehicles and their long-term effects on interstate planning.
The sprawl monster has 4,500 more acres of Iowa to feast on. A few months ago, Waukee added twohuge tracts of land* and one smaller one in annexation procedures. The vast majority is undeveloped but that will change. A whole bunch of Dallas County rural street names are likely to change eventually.
The annexations push Waukee’s already-janky city limits farther west and south, without any infill in that Sugar Creek area, and run right up to an extension of Adel from 2009 along US 6. Adel has feared Waukee chewing its way west, and now that has become a reality. The two cities now meet across from each other on US 6 (where the Hickman Road name is likely to be extended) just east of the eastern junction with R16. The southeast corner of that intersection, for now, is a house in daddy-won’t-sell-the-farm mode.
The southwest annexation, land owned by Ruan Inc., pushes Waukee into the Van Meter school district in a huge way. A little bit of the city southwest of the I-80/R22 interchange was already there (the Kum & Go), but this goes to and south of the Raccoon River. It’s worth nothing that neither Waukee nor West Des Moines has made a move to swallow up unincorporated Booneville and nearby existing subdivisions … yet.
The western annexation preceded Apple’s announcement last week of a huge data center at US 6 and S Avenue — closer to downtown Adel than the Dallas/Polk county line (142nd Street). It also happens to be the last intersection heading west that’s still in the Waukee school district.
Besides the data center itself, Apple is going to be pouring money into “quality of life amenities” in Waukee, the Register reports. My thought about that is, while that’s very generous of Apple, I can’t help but think about the hundreds of other communities in Iowa — say, Waverly, Carroll, Keokuk, Fort Madison, Spencer, Oskaloosa, or Boone, all of which Waukee zoomed past in population between 2005 and 2016 — that don’t have a new house going up every day** and could derive greater benefit from outside help.
In Friday’s football post, I remarked about a prediction that Gladbrook-Reinbeck would drop to 8-man football next year. Turns out that is indeed the case, and I was unaware. GR is playing 8 at the junior high and JV levels already and had its final game in a century-long series against Grundy Center Friday. (The print version of the Courier story said it’s the 100th game against Reinbeck, Gladbrook, or Gladbrook-Reinbeck; the online version said 97th, and each had the record tied before GR’s 28-7 victory Friday.) More coverage with much more history at the Grundy Register, including quotes from current GC and former North Tama coach Brent Thoren.
This would be yet another school that, in the last 20 years, was in a district with North Tama and later dropped to 8-man. The nearest opponents would be Meskwaki Settlement, one of the two northernmost teams in a district that goes down to the Missouri line (Seymour/Moulton-Udell), and Don Bosco, the southernmost team in a district that goes up to the Minnesota line (Kee High).
Don Bosco has lost one regular-season game ever since dropping to 8-man. If the Rebels do well this year, they’ll need as many resources as possible in the next.
OK, 2017 is coming, I told myself months ago. Year after a presidential election. I can clear my miles-long backlog of things to read and watch. Certainly August, when Congress is in recess, will be a time to get stuff done.
Now, edging into late August, that pile isn’t any shallower, I’m afraid, and it’s time to switch gears. For the vast majority of the state, tonight is the first Friday night of high school football season. North Tama is predicted by the Gazette’s Jeff Linder to finish somewhere in the middle of the pack of Class A District 5. (See near the bottom of this sports package page.) Linder predicts Gladbrook-Reinbeck to be district champion, on their “last run in Class A”, forecasting either dissolution or dropping to 8-man (!!!). (If G-R is a type to drop to 8, that’s not good for NT. — Ed.) North Tama’s season opener is at home against North Linn, which is also predicted to be a middle-district-finish team.
Now, continuing the new tradition:
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