June 1, 2015: Mount Union post office.
The Henry County town of Mount Union wants to disincorporate. It would be the fourth Iowa town to do so this decade.
According to records from the Iowa secretary of state, Mount Union was incorporated August 20, 1904.
Aside from today being the last state primaries in the presidential process, it is primary day for Iowa races. In northeast and southwest Iowa, Democrats will pick their nominees to face two freshman Republican U.S. House representatives.
The 1st District has been getting a lot of attention. Pat Murphy and Monica Vernon are again vying to take on Rod Blum, this time head-to-head instead of in a five-way race. Many big names have lined up behind Vernon. The Iowa Democratic Party is not happy (cheesed off, even) about losing out on “first Iowa woman in Congress”, and this year’s 1st District general election is probably the best chance to break the glass ceiling on the House side.
Blum is a freshman representative in a district with more registered Democrats than Republicans that is a lean-R tossup in Cook Political Report and a lean-D tossup in Sabato’s Crystal Ball. David Young, Iowa’s other House freshman, fares slightly better. Although the district also leans D in registration, it’s by less, and the 3rd is a lean-R in Cook but tossup-R in Sabato. Cook judges that only three states have more than one tossup district — Iowa, Florida, and New York.
You have to go back to the 1960s to find the last time a member of the U.S. House from Iowa only lasted one term. In the LBJ/Democratic landslide of 1964, five of Iowa’s seven districts changed hands, but in 1966 four of those winners were ejected (the survivor: Neal Smith). After 1978, as many Iowa congressmen standing for re-election lost in incumbent-on-incumbent redistricting (Dave Nagle and Leonard Boswell) than lost to a challenger (Smith, on the other end of his career, and Jim Leach).
Sabato’s Crystal Ball has a column about the effect of the growing rural-urban split on races. Besides a clean redistricting process, that’s another part of what makes Iowa so competitive: We don’t have enough districts to split those areas up.
The Washington Post’s Wonkblog carries an entry with an ominous headline, “The places in America that already have their best days behind them”. It’s about the counties across the United States that peaked in population decades ago, and it leads with Keokuk County, Iowa. Keokuk County is in red in my map above, one of 33 counties that had the most people it’s ever had in 1900. Keokuk County has issued a rebuttal via the Des Moines Register. (I agree that it’s about quality not quantity, and Iowans are the best quality you can get, but population stability would be nice, too.)
The Post article is topped off with an animated timeline map of peak population years, where you can see Iowa and northern Missouri pop out in 1900, followed by most of the rest of the Great Plains by 1940. Only a third of Iowa’s counties have peaked in 1950 or later.
The Post’s piece is based on census research from Lyman Stone, who painstakingly compiled decade-by-decade numbers for the nation. Stone’s discussion of his research includes a map of 396 counties that hit their minimum population since 1900 in the 2015 census estimates and Iowa has 46 of them, including Tama. His writeup is a good read.
(I’ve had the map made for a while; the Post gave me a hook to put it up.)
I said it before and I’m saying it again: What Michael Bay and his henchmen have done to the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” franchise is criminal. Nearly $200 million criminal, but still. With the sequel rolling around, this time, you can see the effort made to get people like me to show up and endorse those hulking CGI creations.
After the previous movie wasn’t funny enough (how can you not think about humor with TMNT?), they looked around and strip-mined everything from 1987. Bebop and Rocksteady! Krang! The Technodrome, now in the spinning-parts-everywhere don’t-hold-a-focus-point CGI mandatory for every 2010s blockbuster. Yet, for all those callbacks, the mutagen is purple instead of green.
Then there’s what they’ve done to April O’Neil, still played by Megan Fox, and thus another reason I’m not touching this thing with a 39½-foot-pole. When there’s “a scene that gratuitously dresses her up as a schoolgirl fetish object for no reason” and the trailers make a point to include it, that’s not being true to anything. The 2012 Nickelodeon cartoon April is a more well-rounded character — bumped down in age to be a peer and trained in ninjitsu, so effectively a “fifth Turtle”. That’s way cooler than anything Fox could pull off.
While the argument has been made that every TMNT series is “built from the ground up as a rebootable property” (the linked article is basically a rebuttal to my rants), the 2010s movies remain a bridge too far for me.
On Monday, in conjunction with Gladbrook’s Memorial Day service, the Tama County Freedom Rock was dedicated. It’s right beside the All Veterans Memorial. The rock was unveiled Dec. 20.
The front (side facing IA 96) is a procession of soldiers from the Civil War to the present day. The back honors the Meskwaki Code Talkers of World War II (many tribes, not just the Navajo, were involved in such activities).
Students walked out the doors of the Pottawattamie County town of Walnut for the last time last week. Next year it will be part of a fully consolidated AHSTW.
(The population on the town sign mentioned in the story is from 1980.)
The city of Walnut will take possession of the school building and will tear part of it down.
What’s notable in the summer 2016 reduction of Iowa school districts is that all three — Farragut, Prescott, and Walnut — will be losing/have lost their buildings as well.
Vin Scully recites the “Field of Dreams” speech.
People will come, Vin.
Vin Scully recites the most iconic speech from a baseball film ever. #HallofFameTourhttps://t.co/ci59idkKOW
— MLB (@MLB) May 26, 2016
The 511ia.com website now shows that IA 196 is closed until June 24. The road was closed this year in order to finish up shoulder work that was not done before Thanksgiving last year, once projected to open May 7, then the Friday before Memorial Day, and now almost to the end of the fiscal year.
When the road reopens it will be part of US 71.
May 28, 2012: Goldfield cemetery, Memorial Day.
Harmony High School graduated its last class on Sunday. The 21 seniors each received a $2,900 scholarship, reported the Burlington Hawk Eye (if that’s unavailable, AP version). The school distributed the money from two alumni estates. Juniors and sophomores were told they will get $2,450 each if going to community college in Burlington or Ottumwa.
Also last Sunday, Remsen-Union held its final graduation, as did Nishnabotna in Farragut.
Harmony’s last day was yesterday; Nishnabotna’s is today. Remsen-Union won’t dismiss until June 7.
