Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Calvin: Dad, how do people make babies?
Calvin’s Dad: Most people just go to Sears, buy the kit, and follow the assembly instructions.
Calvin: I came from Sears??
Calvin’s Dad: No, you were a blue light special at Kmart, almost as good, and a lot cheaper.
— “Calvin and Hobbes,” April 18, 1987

I am barely old enough to remember when K-Mart (note hyphenation) was a main place to shop in the Crossroads area, even with a blue light special or two. That location closed in 2003. Now, after 25 years of Wal-Mart and about 10 of the Internet eating its lunch, the last Kmart in Waterloo is closing by the end of March. Dubuque and Sioux City are also losing their Kmarts, within 18 months of the stores in Clive, Ames, and Ottumwa closing.

Of the dozen stores that will be left in Iowa, five — Algona, Charles City, Oelwein, Red Oak, and Webster City — are in towns with fewer than 10,000 people but, more importantly, don’t have a Wal-Mart. In fact, the one in Algona is the only big-box store in a 40-mile radius.

(It’s a slow news week, folks.)

September 30, 2015: The Akron Casey’s is behind the signs for the IA 3/12 intersection and relocated end of the Loess Hills Scenic Byway.

The northwest Iowa town of Akron is getting a new Casey’s, the Le Mars Sentinel reports. This has only a thin string of relevance to this blog as it is the westernmost in the state (and yes, I have stopped there). A new gas station will be built on the southeast corner of the IA 3/12 intersection shown above. This is possible because the Iowa DOT closed the Akron maintenance shed/snowplow garage four months ago, along with Sabula (the easternmost site), Rock Valley (also in northwest Iowa), and four other locations. The DOT garage will be demolished.

Mother Nature decided to get the demolition under way a bit early by peeling off the top of one of the DOT sheds on Christmas Day, the Akron Hometowner reports.

The Sentinel article also mentions something about the convenience store chain’s history: The Casey’s style that was typical until about a decade ago dates back to the late 1970s.

AP story via WCCO.

Residents of some towns are scrambling to hold on to at least a few places where people can still get together. It’s not just bars but groceries, cafes and other stores.

They don’t expect to turn around their communities’ prospects, but after watching so many businesses shuttered, they feel they had to draw the line somewhere.

DirectTV and Hearst are at an impasse on retransmission fees, and as a result, both KCCI and KETV went off the satellite system as the calendar moved to 2017. That means southwest Iowa DirectTV customers had to switch to antenna to get the Outback Bowl (and for those who can’t get it that way … well, it may have worked out for the best).

Mediacom, meanwhile, just threw another $1.61 in “local channel surcharge fees” at its eastern Iowa customers.

First, there was this tweet:

who the hell is jeff pic.twitter.com/UlKVBbBLgw

— Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) December 31, 2016

(I will neither confirm nor deny that I have fewer than 10 nuclear warheads.)

And, as Twitter is wont to do, the responses wound around to this VERY old “Saturday Night Live” skit:

That’s supposed to be Dunkerton, Iowa. That had to have come about from one of the skit’s actors, Gary Kroeger, who is from Cedar Falls, was on SNL for three years, and most recently attempted to run for the state legislature. Julia Louis-Dreyfus also appears. She had a slightly more successful post-SNL career.