Despite the headline on this KWWL story, Dubuque’s Southwest Arterial is going to take a little while longer.
City officials had been hoping for completion of the road by the end of this year’s construction season. But the wet, cold still-winter that Iowa has had this year (which is only turning around this week) put a dent into timing.
The first sentence from a Dubuque Telegraph-Herald story says the road isn’t likely to open for another 13 or 14 months, with construction going into next summer.
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Added to the DOT’s five-year plan last year, for work this year, is a resurfacing project for IA 21 from IA 8 to US 20. It’s your typical hot-mix asphalt, flaggers ahead, etc., but the December letting packet had a special surprise — a reminder that once upon a time this was going to be Waterloo’s superhighway.
The secret history of IA 402 was my first deep dive for this website, looking heavily into newspaper articles of the time. Much, much later, when the construction documents from 1968 were posted online, I saw that the plans had gone so far as to include the centerline for the never-built southbound lanes. Now, the 1968 plan has been included with the resurfacing project as a reference, but with “Future Improvement” lined out (above) (the file is 39 MB for who knows why).
The two-lane segment was contracted out as 402, but it would not be signed that way. It opened in the summer of 1969 as an extension of IA 21. Waterloo would have to wait more than 15 years to get a freeway connection to the national system. In fact, the time the complete I-380 has existed isn’t much longer than the time Waterloo waited between being told a superhighway was coming and its arrival.
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“The Everly Cattlefeederettes won the sectional tournament at Hartley last week. Members of the squad are Jeanette Olson, Vicki Birchard, Cindy Fliss, Janet Scharnberg, Jo Scharnberg, Connie Selk, Lynda Nordstrom, Jan Scharnberg. Judi Walton, Jean Cadwallader, Linda Nath and Sua Morfitl.” — Hartley Sentinel, February 29, 1968, confirming that the feminine version of the name was not unheard of. And, yes, that 1968 team, though the gold of 1966 outranks the silver of that year.
The Everly Cattlefeeders have been gone for three decades. Now the place they called home will be empty.
Two months ago, the Clay Central-Everly school district, which started sharing in 1990 and consolidated in 1993, announced it would be discontinuing its high school and closing one of its two campuses. A month ago, Everly found out it was the loser. Stories: KIWA, Spencer Daily Reporter.
It was not inevitable but it was very likely this would be the case, since Royal already had the elementary facilities and the playground, and that would cause the least disruption.
It is not too common that a district small enough to be in this situation still had multiple sites. The next most recent case would be Harmony, which did the opposite of CCE and closed its elementary while moving all students into the former high school.
By my count Everly is the fourth town this year and tenth in the past three years to lose its only school, not counting two rural buildings (North Winneshiek also closes up shop this month).
(Didn’t look at the right time for an update, I guess. — Ed.)
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August 5, 2016: The restored Union Pacific depot in downtown Cheyenne WY has an inlaid map of the eastern portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. However, it marks Omaha as the terminus.
A century and a half ago today, the United States was connected in a way it had never been before. The Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads hooked up at Promontory, Utah, to complete the Transcontinental Railroad across the western half of the nation.
Iowa played a role in that, of course. Council Bluffs was chosen by Abraham Lincoln to be the east end of the Union Pacific Railroad. Between 1865 and 1869, the Chicago and North Western Railroad rapidly built track from Boone to Missouri Valley to hook up with north-south trackage that parallels I-29 today. The final, true transcontinental connection wasn’t quite a done deal until a railroad bridge across the Missouri River opened in 1872. (See “How Omaha Railroaded Council Bluffs,”Omaha magazine, March/April 2017.) The C&NW route, the first east-west railroad completed across Iowa, would serve as the basis for the nearly all of the Lincoln Highway and US 30, and itself become part of the Union Pacific in 1995.
August 1, 2000:Golden Spike National Historic Park, Promontory Summit, Utah. (Yup, been there.) A significant segment of the railroad was bypassed in 1904 with a causeway over the Great Salt Lake and the rails were pulled up for scrap in World War II.
More Transcontinental Railroad-related pictures can be seen in my trip reports from 2016 (Day 1, Day 4).
One hundred years and seventy-two days after the United States was united by rail, that nation landed men on the moon. We’ll reach half of that time span this Aug. 25.
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Here is the 2008 presidential election by National Weather Service CWAs! I've also included a 2008 to 2016 margin change map and the original 2016 map again. Despite Obama's decisive win in the Electoral College and popular vote, McCain picked up a healthy majority of CWAs. pic.twitter.com/FAchXHdUSW
The first time I saw it, I did a double-take. It was a black muscle car with two white stripes across the center from front to back. On the back, instead of the standard Iowa license plate, was a white-on-black one. It seemed that this driver was a long way from Dordt College, whose specialty plate is white-on-black. Indeed, the driver had covered up the college-specific features with a frame and sticker. Then, last week, I saw a black Jeep that had done the same thing.
Turns out this is so common that the state is going to offer that “look” as a custom plate July 1. The WOI story makes it sound like it’s a fait accompli, though KIWA Radio says it depends on the governor’s signature on the appropriations bill (so, yeah, fait accompli).
It’s like, how much more black could this be, and the answer is none. None more black.
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My EyeTV programming subscription expired today — but it died the evening of Feb. 5.
I was away, so I didn’t know it happened until I came back and found an empty screen where the TV listings were supposed to be. The thread about its unexpected demise is the longest in the discussions forum for EyeTV.
I suppose I should consider myself lucky to have had it as long as I did (a month short of nine years). The EyeTV hardware was discontinued four years ago and all product stuff and software was sold. Since then it was a case of renewing a subscription through the European subsidiary of a Chinese company for something specific to North America. One thing or another was bound to come along. And everything I said about streaming in 2015 is an issue today, only many times more so.
Users have looked for other ways to populate the TV listings, but all of them involve deep work in Terminal and other fiddling with things. There’s a workaround that requires minimal effort to set recordings, using the TitanTV site, although I have to have the EyeTV application open to realign the channel it’s looking for. The downside of this is that stumbling upon new shows is pretty much non-existent, so I didn’t find out until Wednesday that “The Amazing Race” was back.
The search for answers shows how much this service was still used. But the abruptness of the service termination (it’s looking for a TV Guide server) and the non-communication from the company was disgusting.
There are better ways to save $22 a year.
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