Last week was St. Joseph Catholic Church in Chelsea’s 100th annual fall festival with chicken and ham dinner. The Homegrown Iowan website has a writeup about the event, held the Sunday of Labor Day weekend.
I don’t think we went to this often — if at all — and it sounds like we’ve missed out on a lot.
This started as a very different blog post.
In all the early speculation about “College GameDay could come to Ames!” — see here, and here, and here — I was certain that there was no way it could possibly happen.
I was wrong. It just required a massive confluence of events.
The research I did is still good, but the conclusion has to be modified to take into account new data. So, rather than how “GameDay” was never coming to Ames, here’s just how unlikely it had to be.
Of all the college football fan bases out there, Iowa State’s should be one of the most understanding of a 21st-century sports maxim: ESPN programming exists to support “the ESPN family of networks.” That also means talking about the College Football Playoff, and when not talking about the College Football Playoff, asking, “What about this team that might make the College Football Playoff?” (This guy gets it.)
With the help of the NCAA’s list of College GameDay sites crossed with lsufootball.net’s comprehensive TV schedule archive (in God’s Own Time Zone, of course), I set to work compiling a spreadsheet of every GameDay site, matchup, and network in the 2010s.
Statistics are for nine years, 2010-18.
The complete list of “College GameDay” power-conference games, 2010-present, not on the ESPN family of networks not involving a top-10 team:
Congratulations, “College ‘Ames’ Day.” See if Jim Walden is bringing the Washington State flag.
CORRECTION 9/27/20: One game has been on ABC prime-time this century. It has been noted above.
The untold millions (it is millions, right?) of Rutgers football fans will be turning their eyes toward Iowa City soon.
For the second time in Big Ten Conference history, and the first time in Kinnick Stadium, the Hawkeyes will play the Scarlet Knights.
And they’ll be back. Starting in 2022, for six years, Rutgers will be Iowa’s every-year crossover opponent. This was, reportedly, “random”.
Iowa fans will console themselves over this turn of events with many 28-3 victories in a bath of television revenue money, while complaining about having to play Iowa State.
August 24, 2013: A Lincoln Highway marker on Johnson Avenue NW in Cedar Rapids. US 30 used Johnson on its first alignment.
In an ode to a 102-year-old “Queen of Johnson Avenue” in Sunday’s Gazette, the writer mentioned this nugget:
Dorothy was very proud of the four-foot stone Highway 30 marker — one of the last ones of its kind in the area — located at the edge of her yard. It stood for decades and only came down recently when Johnson Avenue was being widened.
I realized I likely had photographed this very marker when I spent multiple days traveling the Lincoln Highway in Iowa in 2013.
Consulting a lost mystical text of the ancients called a phone book, I found what I was looking for. Dorothy Gongwer (listed, as is not uncommon among women of a certain age, under her deceased husband) held on to this piece of transportation history.
Johnson wasn’t widened, per se; it got turned into a two-lane with bike lanes and roundabouts. I hope that wherever the marker is, it will be taken care of as Dorothy took care of it.
On Friday, North Tama will be playing in its fourth college stadium this decade.
The first, of course, and the one everyone’s always trying to get back to, is the UNI-Dome. The second was Wartburg College in Waverly in 2013. The most recent two, though, were unplanned.
Last year, North Tama played Wapsie Valley at Upper Iowa University in Fayette because Wapsie’s field was flooded out. More special attention came as it was named a Game of the Week, and the Redhawks came out on top. (The T-R‘s description is wrong; it was a district game.)
This year, Lisbon’s football field is under construction after passage of a bond issue, so this “home” game for the Lions against the Redhawks will be played at Cornell College in Mount Vernon. (The KWWL story said Lisbon would be playing at Coe, but more recent information changed that.)
August 16, 2019: Bob Dorr (left) performs “Elvis in Paraguay” with three Elvis impersonators who crashed the concert at the MidAmerican Energy Stage at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.
My Iowa State Fair day(s) have typically ended with hypnotist Ron Diamond (except last year) and a shuttle ride around the campgrounds. But this year, when I looked at the schedule, I noticed Iowa music legend Bob Dorr was down for a gig at the end of the night.
I know of Dorr, and that his Blue Band officially wrapped up a 30-year-plus run in 2018 but he appears to be plugging along (when a couple old bandmates appeared, “we call it Deja Blue”). But I had never seen Dorr, and I figured that this would be a good a chance as any.
I was not disappointed.
A rotating group of more than a dozen musicians rocked the free stage for an hour and a half, including a 16-year-old who played about a quarter of a song behind his back(!). And then the Elvis impersonators showed up (top).
Bob Dorr (drum set) plays with some of a 16-person rotating set at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.
It may not have been a concert geared toward the young. But then, the Grandstand that night was someone who is more bro country than not, and I’ll take the talent Dorr and his crew showed off over that.
Football? Football!
It’s Week 1 for high school and college football seasons.
North Tama (preview here) is expected to do well this year. This time, the team had a full offseason with one coach; Mr. McDermott unretired in 2018 when the previous coach jumped ship to become an assistant at Iowa’s newest megaschool.
ISU is playing UNI, again, but this time the game was optioned for national coverage and this could be the first opening-weekend 11 AM Saturday kickoff.
And the Hawkeyes are playing Miami, not the Miami that nearly upset Florida last week on a drive consisting mostly of pass interference calls, but the other Miami, in Ohio. That team is the RedHawks, with a capital H, something that has caused occasional consternation for those of us who have to remind people that North Tama doesn’t do that.
This is the fifth time Iowa has played Miami (OH). The MAC school is the only non-power-conference team that Iowa has done a 2-for-1 home series with. The game was played there in 2002 (Iowa won). There was an almost-qualifier five years later, when Northern Illinois’ side of a 2-for-1 was played at Soldier Field (Iowa won).
But since then, and especially now that the Big Ten plays nine conference games, Iowa ONLY pays for have-nots/lessers/poors to visit Kinnick Stadium. This is a stark contrast to certain other teams that do home-and-homes and then lose in double overtime at the Glass Bowl.
Go Redhawks, and go RedHawks.
July 12, 2016: The now-former US 54 bridge across the Mississippi River, whose replacement was built right beside it.
My string of unbroken Mississippi River crossings was clipped on Aug. 3 when a replacement for the US 54 Champ Clark Bridge opened at Louisiana, Missouri. Story: St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This is the only crossing between Alton and Hannibal.
The next replacement across the Father of Waters will be an easy one to get, the I-74 Bridge in the Quad Cities. But also by the end of next year, US 63 will have a new span at Red Wing, Minnesota.
It’s debatable among hard-core roadgeeks, or at least me, if one bridge built right beside the other counts as a lost clinch. I can still probably say that I’ve traveled the highways in question unbroken. But when we’re talking major projects, like these — or the $6.4 billion San Francisco Bay Bridge replacement that did slightly relocate I-80 over the bay — there’s a “specialness” factor that doesn’t come into a little concrete span over a smaller body of water.
April 5, 2003: The Janss steps on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, among my minimal photographic evidence of being there.
The Jeopardy All-Star Games are re-airing this week and next. The novelty tournament brought back 15 talented, fan-friendly contestants for what may end up remembered as the last big event before a gambler broke the game.
The 2003 NAQT Intercollegiate Championship Tournament was held at UCLA. Jeopardy All-Star (and team captain) Colby Burnett was there. Jeopardy All-Star (and winning team member) Larissa Kelly was there. Jeopardy All-Star Roger Craig was there.
And a random schmuck from Iowa State who three years later faceplanted at a Jeopardy audition final was there.
(It was my second and most recent visit to California and the last time I used my Discman, since lost to battery corrosion. It also involved walking through the Bel-Air neighborhood after midnight Pacific Time. Uber was not an option in April 2003.)
*Or, for Burnett, times, because about a year later at the Carleton Undergrad Tournament, it was Iowa State Hall Effect 225, Northwestern Burnett 95.
**That game was me and one other person vs. Burnett playing by himself. I was a senior, Burnett a junior. According to my notes and a recap sent to ISU Quiz Bowl record keeper and future Jeopardy Tournament of Champions winner Michael Falk, that day I “drew upon [my] childhood, four years at ISU, tournament/practice knowledge, current events, and the television show ‘Wishbone’ .” The “power” tossups (extra points for early answers) against Burnett were for questions about Howard Dean, ALF, and polygamy.
***But back to the 2003 ICT. Those future All-Stars were playing in Division I, and I was playing in Division II. Same questions, different groups. A tiebreaker loss on the first day resulted in my ISU team being in the third group. That meant the next day we played easier competition and went undefeated. We had the third-most wins in D-II, but because of the pod we were in, it only counted as 17th place.
In the tournament, individual rankings are done by “points per 20 tossups heard.” That accounts for “powers”, regular answers, and “negs”.
I was 16th in D-II with 29.33 PP20TH, or roughly three tossups per match. My two power answers were for Steve Wozniak and Marty McFly, because of course they were.
Burnett was 44th in D-I with 22.98 PP20TH.
Kelly was 57th in D-I with 19.09 PP20TH.
So strictly by overall average score, against differing levels of competition, as individuals in a team setting, I once held my own in comparison with two people who later would win big on Jeopardy. It’s the flimsiest hat rack you’ve ever seen, but it’s something.
Henry Ostermann, the first field secretary of the Lincoln Highway Association, died in 1920 when his car went off the road near Montour.
Earlier this month, an interpretive panel was installed at Montour’s cemetery to honor Ostermann. It is a project from Prairie Rivers of Iowa with a grant from the Tama County Community Foundation.
Here is a story before the unveiling and a photo of the ceremony.
