Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

What if you could get the car associated with your childhood memories back? And it was in approximate driving condition? Well, when I went to Conrad’s Black Dirt Days in June, I found someone who did just that.

Two related, but discrete, items from the past week show us the significance of the loss of the Greatest Generation.

First, from Pew Research:

Reflecting on the United States’ actions, 35% of Americans today say using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was justified, while 31% say it was not justified. A third say they are not sure. …

Americans ages 65 and older (48%) are more likely than adults in younger age groups to say the bombings were justified. Adults under 30, meanwhile, are considerably more likely to say the bombings were not justified than to say they were justified (44% vs. 27%).

Second, Roger Corbin, who was originally from Hampton but spent decades in Traer, died last Sept. 20. When I wrote a story about him for my Substack, I included a quote from his interview with the Grout Museum.

“When we left to go to the Pacific I didn’t figure our chances were much better than 50% of ever being back to the States,” he said for the Grout Museum District’s “Voices of Iowa” oral history project. “The invasion of Japan was going to cost a whole bundle of lives, and I’m one of those who can look in the camera and say, God bless Harry Truman for dropping the atomic bomb.”

KWWL found that clip for its story about the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, but something got lost in translation.

Please, somebody teach history — and proofreading.

The Great Eastern Iowa Tractorcade switched sponsors from WMT to KXEL this year, partially because one of the main coordinators switched jobs. The 26th edition of this ride was in June, and for 2025 they started in Mount Pleasant and radiated out each day. I went to Washington to write a story about it.

As of the 4 PM newscast on Wednesday, KCRG has wholly (or 95%?) adopted the graphics package used by all the other Gray Media TV stations.

Two words: CALLED IT.

It’s also dropped having a ticker at the bottom in the “A block” of the newscast (before the first commercial). The theme music is, for lack of a better phrase, more aggressive. The voiceover doesn’t say “TV 9” anymore. Finally, the anchor intros are now videos, and Beth Malicki’s glasses are now canon.

Again, consider me un-thrilled by the move away from anything that might be Helvetica, or at least as easily readable as Helvetica. The Gray font is particularly bad when it comes to the letter Q, which is a bit of an issue when your market includes the fourth-largest city in the United States with a Q in its name.

Actually, when looking at KCRG and WHO simultaneously, it seems entirely possible that the Gray and Nexstar fonts are either identical or so close as to be a distinction without a difference!

So now, to the best of my knowledge, graphics packages used by national affiliate owners are baked into every station in Iowa.

AND ALL OF THEM HAVE MOVING PARTS IN EVERY ELEMENT WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO MOVE.