Oct 14

North Dakota Highway 91

Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2020, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

ND 91 is really short, reports KFYR-TV in Bismarck. (Video un-embeddable.) The route in Harvey, along US 52 between Jamestown and Minot, is signed at 0.28 miles. That is just a hair longer than IA 405 was signed 1980-2003. I found this story because of this last sentence, which has issues:

According to a 2014 report from the Iowa Department of Transportation, U.S. Highway 77 travels over the Missouri River into South Dakota at .31 miles long. That means Harvey’s Highway 91 could be the shortest highway in the United States.

First, US 77 travels over the Missouri River into Iowa at that distance, NOT South Dakota. Second, US 77 is overall an extremely LONG highway, ending all the way down in Brownsville, Texas. The state-specific mileage is irrelevant when considering the total distance of a highway.

Correction-worthy nitpicking aside, it’s neat that there’s a story about North Dakota’s shortest highway, and that the town would like to publicize it.

Posted in Highway Miscellaneous | Comments Off on North Dakota Highway 91
Oct 12

Notes for October 2020 letting

Posted on Monday, October 12, 2020, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Things I noticed about the October 2020 DOT bid letting, scheduled for next week:

  • One sign project is concentrated in two areas: Cedar Rapids and Jones County. The former is replacing a lot of gore signs (the “EXIT” where you take the offramp, now formatted to include a large exit number), plus signs on the lower deck of the 5-in-1 bridge. Many BGSs whose poles snapped during the derecho (as they were designed to do) remain bent over today. I don’t know if they can be restored to their upright and locked position. The latter focuses on US 151 exits.
  • Another is a mass replacement of roadside signs along many highways in southwest Iowa.
  • A stoplight is going in on US 69 at NE 118th Avenue (Polk County name)/NE 54th Street (Ankeny name). You could call this a “pro-active” or “pre-emptive” stoplight because the sprawl has not reached this intersection…yet. This is just a mile south of the junction with former IA 87, the road to Elkhart, and 3 miles north of 1st Street and the pre-1970 extent of Ankeny.
    • Mostly unrelated but not quite: I salute Mr. Daddy Won’t Sell the Farm at the northeast corner of US 69 and IA 160 (Ankeny Boulevard and Oralabor Road) on the other side of Ankeny. A Kwik Star just ate up the east half of the plot — part of that chain’s push into the Des Moines metro — and there’s a Fareway and Pizza Ranch across the street, but that little house and block of timber are there until the very end.
Posted in Construction | Comments Off on Notes for October 2020 letting
Oct 08

A matter of perspective

Posted on Thursday, October 8, 2020, at 10:06 AM by Jeff

Here is an aerial view of most of the town of Gladbrook. IA 96 is at the bottom, 2nd Street at the top, school in the middle.

gladbrook2019

Now here’s an aerial view of the campus for College Community School District (Cedar Rapids Prairie), at the same zoom level. At top is E66/76th Avenue SW. Most of the main school complex, which keeps getting added to, is on the left. There are more baseball/softball diamonds here than in multiple counties combined.

Did I mention that Prairie has approved $100 million in bonds in less than a five-year span?

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Oct 06

Iowa’s 1920 highway system: Waiting for a promotion

Posted on Tuesday, October 6, 2020, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Here are the smaller routes that, in 1926, did NOT get included in the new federal highway system, but were incorporated into it in the next 15 years.

  • IA 25, Winterset to Adel, was a middleman between two long north-south routes in a system that skewed many of those routes in a south-southeast/north-northwest pattern. In 1926, this route was replaced by a rerouted IA 16. In 1930, the segment became part of US 169.
  • IA 26, a short spur to Rock Valley, was replaced by US 18 in 1930.
  • Half of IA 64 (by that time IA 117), about Collins to Colo, would be turned into US 65 in 1940.
  • IA 65, Indianola to Lucas, and 66, a spur to Humeston, were brought into US 65 in 1930.
  • IA 90, Perry to Fort Dodge, was also replaced by a rerouted IA 16 in 1926 and became part of US 169 in 1930 (except the redundant segment east of Perry).
Posted in 1920 Highway Sytem | Comments Off on Iowa’s 1920 highway system: Waiting for a promotion
Oct 04

The sixth seal has been opened

Posted on Sunday, October 4, 2020, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind. The heavens receded like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.
— Revelation 6:12-14 (NIV)

If you’re still looking for signs the end of the world is near, they don’t come much clearer than what happened in Ames on Saturday night.

(I still hate it when we don’t wear cardinal and gold.)

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Oct 02

‘Symphony of Iowa’ scavenger hunt

Posted on Friday, October 2, 2020, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The Cedar Rapids Gallery of Art has selected 125 works to be on display for a 125th anniversary exhibit, reports the Gazette. That will go through mid-January.

Among the works is a big one I didn’t know about, “Symphony of Iowa 1833-1933” by Mildred Pelzer. It is a view of Iowa from above, depicting the state’s natural beauty and people who lived here past and then-present. There is a high-resolution view available. It reminds me of the collages that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s that cities would make as fundraisers, depicting businesses, important buildings, and landmarks.

Some of the most visible features in the work, the bridges across the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, bear little resemblance to those of the time, especially those that opened in the early 1930s and may have been just a little too late. The big cities have some recognizable buildings, but most of the small towns have generic church steeples.

Tama County is represented, as usual, by the Indian settlement. Grundy Center has Herbert Quick and Vinton appears. Beyond that, look for the following:

Muscatine button factory, Clinton lumber mill, three components of the Spirit Lake Massacre (Inkpaduta himself, the massacre site, and men “to the rescue”), Dillon’s Furrow (the original trail between Iowa City and Dubuque), Mormon handcarts, Mormon Trail, early stage route, Lincoln Highway, Abraham Lincoln, Fort Atkinson, Fort Peterson, ISU Campanile, “Slovak-Bohemian Peoples”, “Wakon”, “Wappelo”, a sailboat, Chicago & North Western Railroad, and the P.E.O. Sisterhood organization.

Posted in Iowa Miscellaneous | Comments Off on ‘Symphony of Iowa’ scavenger hunt
Oct 01

Casey’s had dropped hint on brand redesign

Posted on Thursday, October 1, 2020, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Here’s a screencap from an ad during the Kansas State-Oklahoma game on Sept. 26:

caseys_ad_box

I immediately wondered, is Casey’s changing its logo? I was holding off on a blog post to get the Oklahoma game stuff out. I didn’t know I was sitting on a scoop of sorts.

Because, surprise, the new logo rollout began today with the opening of a new Casey’s station in Ankeny. The Des Moines Register has more.

It’s going to take a while for the familiar logo to be phased out of every gas station around, from those in Gladbrook and Dysart with the old shed-style to the one that’s been around about a year in southwest Cedar Rapids, and all across the Midwest.

UPDATE: This image isn’t showing up in Chrome and I don’t know why. Here’s a direct link.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Casey’s had dropped hint on brand redesign
Sep 29

The first time*

Posted on Tuesday, September 29, 2020, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

There’s going to be a first this week for Iowa State football: A Saturday night game on ABC with a nationwide audience. All it took was a plague and sidelining 40% of power-conference football teams to make it happen.

Now, there are some caveats for each part of this “first”, and I’m going to walk through them with help from this 2017 blog post.

  • The every-game-televised era is around a decade old. For certain teams, it began September 1, 2007. For Iowa State, it didn’t start until a few years later.
  • The first night game at then-Cyclone Stadium was October 20, 1984. Musco portable lights were brought in. The Cyclones lost to the Sooners 12-10. It was ESPN’s game of the week. Iowa State has not had a Saturday night regular-season game on ESPN since.
  • The 2006 Nebraska game was a night game on ABC. It was the main game of the night, since the top broadcast team was in Ames. It was not shown to the entire country, as Oregon-Cal was given priority on the West Coast. The Cyclones lost to the Cornhuskers 28-14. Iowa State has not had a Saturday night game on ABC since.
  • Iowa State has had two Saturday night games on Fox. The first was a 49-28 home loss to Baylor in 2014. The second was last year’s 42-41 loss to Oklahoma in Norman.
  • The 2015 game at TCU, a 45-21 loss, was a night game on ESPN2.
  • In a normal year, this time slot would be one of the two main contenders for “ESPN College GameDay”. But of course, this is not a normal year, and after the cascade of events in and following the 2019 Iowa game, it’s probably better this way. (Auburn-Georgia, the night game on ESPN, gets the fan-less version instead.)

In conclusion, this week’s game is the first nationwide on ABC on Saturday night, the second in ABC prime-time, the third on Saturday night on a network nationwide, the fourth on Saturday night on a network to a substantial part of the country, the fourth Saturday prime-time major-channel game in Ames, and the sixth Saturday night game in the ABC/Fox/ESPN/ESPN2 group. It’s the third of that group of games that involves Oklahoma.

The next prime-time network win, though, will be the first.

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Sep 28

The last time

Posted on Monday, September 28, 2020, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

It’s Oklahoma week (as of the time of this post, anyway), meaning it’s that time of year again: Time to contemplate man’s and woman’s struggle against an indifferent universe, a story of futility punctuated by just enough hope for the universe to rub it in later. (So, 2020 in football form.)

The last time Iowa State beat Oklahoma at home, 10-6, November 5, 1960…

SPORTS

  • It was 29 years since ISU had beaten Oklahoma. It would be one year until the next, and then 29 more years for the next time after that.
  • Clay Stapleton was the coach. ISU is on its ninth coach since.
  • The football team at Clyde Williams Field would head south “All the Way to Lincoln Way”, which was still US 30 at the time.
  • “Iowa was fumbled off the national pinnacle and Minnesota undoubtedly arose as the new leader,” Gus Schrader wrote in the Cedar Rapids Gazette as the #3 Gophers made the #1 Hawkeyes’ path to a repeat Rose Bowl extremely difficult.
  • The Big Eight had eight teams and the Big Ten had 10 teams.

ELECTIONS

  • The Kennedy-Nixon election was in its final hours. Both candidates gave televised prime-time speeches that Saturday. KCRG’s schedule did not include those, with “Leave It to Beaver” and “Lawrence Welk” followed by boxing. The other stations did.
  • Chuck Grassley was running for his second term in the Iowa House.
  • Tama County’s state senator was born in the 19th century (1899).

OTHER

  • The United States of America had never put a person into space.
  • The name “Iowa State University” had been official for 16 months.
  • The 50-star U.S. flag had been official for four months.
  • Iowa’s speed limit was 75 (day)/65 (night) on interstates and 70 (day) on primary roads.
  • At Montgomery Ward you could buy a “Gold Star Gas Range” for about $200 and get a ham/turkey and 10-piece cutlery set thrown in for free. (Actually, the stove in the ad looks a LOT like the one we used to have.)
  • Younkers was selling girls’ dresses for $5 and boys’ shirts for $2.
With assistance from Iowa Official Register 1959-60 and Cedar Rapids Gazette, Nov. 5-6, 1960.
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Sep 24

Department of Not-Quite-Redundancy Department, Bank Acronym Edition

Posted on Thursday, September 24, 2020, at 10:15 AM by Jeff

The Webster City Daily Freeman-Journal reported last week that a bank from there opened a branch in Tama.

The bank’s name in question is WCF Financial. The initials got me to pondering the name, after a brief moment of wondering why the DFJ would be writing about Tama (aside from the fact that both happen to be Ogden Newspapers towns).

Through a historic Google Street View photo and a website called Bank Branch Locator (sounds handy!), I found the history. The bank was Webster City Federal until 2014, when it bought a bank in Independence, and changed its name to WCF Financial Bank. A new building opened across the street from the Webster City McDonald’s* in 2015.

So that explains the double-F: If we ignore the “letters don’t stand for anything anymore but they obviously used to” thing that many organizations do nowadays, it would be Webster City Federal Financial Bank. It doesn’t change the oddity that this bank has three locations over a wide area, though.

*AKA, the only fast food immediately off US 20 on the entire stretch between US 63 and US 59 without stepping into a gas station, and the only anything between IA 14 and IA 4.
(Obviously, this was supposed to be Friday’s post. Surprise.)
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