June 18, 2015: The school in Viola closed in 1998. Open image in new tab for larger version.
After 20 years of a slow then accelerated decay, the school in the unincorporated Linn County town of Viola is coming down. Demolition began Aug. 16, the Anamosa Journal-Eureka reports. The property’s owners gave lots of consideration to restoration, but by the time they got a hold of it the 1922 building and later addition were too far gone.
“Do not annoy the squirrels” didn’t make the cut.
Here is the conservationists’ side of why the US 65 “Marsh Kink” exists on the diagonal highway northeast of Bondurant. Deciding what to do about this wetland delayed construction of the four-lane. The old road mostly exists, except for a crucial piece in the middle.
After fears the bridge across the Mississippi River at Sabula wouldn’t be open until Thanksgiving, construction on the overflow finished last week and it opened Friday (Aug. 31), the Quad-City Times reports. (Also WHBF, with a warning of autoplay video and the absence of a station identity on the website.)
(In lieu of playing “Sports Song” again.)
The intersection of Franklin Street and First Street just to the north of downtown Waterloo is going to have major work done on it, the Iowa DOT says in a press release. That starts the day after Labor Day and is related to the project turning the US 63 railroad underpass into an overpass.
Franklin Street was the pre-freeway route of US 20 through central Waterloo, and after some bridge shuffling, the intersections with First and Mullan Avenue became 63’s intersections with 20. For a couple years after the freeway opened the spot was the east end of IA 57, which had taken over 20’s route. All of that is in my Waterloo/Cedar Falls Highway Chronology.
I need to refresh photos in the Waterloo area, and probably should have in 2016 before the signs that were left at this intersection came down, but that’s going to need to wait until work like this is finished up.
How about that. I’ve never been to the Old Threshers Reunion, so I’m looking forward to it.
The “lifehack” is: Bring a column of address labels to put on entry forms.
Danville, near Burlington, forfeited half of its football games in 2016. Last year, it did a last-minute deal to participate with West Burlington/Notre Dame (itself one of the weirder sharing setups in Iowa). Despite only having 27 players out for football last year, overall enrollment is too big for the Bears to go 8-player.
Last school year, Danville looked for a future participation partner — but neighboring New London is doing 8-player near the upper limit. Danville had to set up a deal with Mount Pleasant instead. KILJ radio covered the December 2017 school board meeting when that deal was agreed to.
(As an aside, New London’s football district area is huge, covering every 8-player school south of I-80 and east of US 63. All of them except New London spent time in a district with North Tama in the 2000s, including five of the ten in 2004-05 Class A District 5.)
Also last December, Clarksville and North Butler set up a football sharing agreement. This is advantageous to both schools because North Butler had to forfeit some games late in the season because of player injuries, and now the combined team will be able to play 11 again, in Class 1A.
The Clarksville Star story says the team will be North Butler/Clarksville. That’s right, NBC … while, if they’d done it 15 years ago with Allison-Bristow, it would have been ABC.
September 12, 2015: C.J. Beathard (16) runs the ball for Iowa, one play before a 48-yard pass. Iowa State was the only team in the 2015 regular season to lead Iowa in the second half. It ended with what the Gazette has dubbed the 82nd-best win of the Kirk Ferentz era.
You may have heard that Kirk Ferentz is going to become the winningest coach in Iowa football history. He has 143 wins with the Hawkeyes in a coaching record that sources say dates back to the 20th century and started closer to the launch of the space shuttle than the present day. (Sources are sketchy.) Coincidentally, his 144th win — Northern Illinois on Saturday — would bookend the first, Northern Illinois on September 18, 1999, his only win of that year.
How many coaches do you have to go back to get the same number for Iowa State? Technically, seven. It was September 14, 1985, the season opener against Utah State, when ISU was coached by Jim Criner. To get 143 wins, you have to go through Criner, Chuck Banker (interim when Criner was fired, one win against a pre-Snyder Kansas State), Jim Walden, Dan McCarney, Gene “5-and-19” Chizik, Paul Rhoads, and Matt Campbell.
Iowa has conducted one search for a football coach since Disco Demolition Night. Iowa State has conducted … more than that.
High school football season starts Friday (for most of us, anyway) and while there are new districts, one thing is the same from 2016: North Tama is the smallest public school playing 11 instead of 8.
The BEDS numbers (total grades 9-11) remove a previous qualifier — Le Mars Gehlen is now larger than NT. Of the nine teams with a BEDS under 120, the new cutoff for 8-man football, four of them are private schools. Two, NT and GMG, both in Class A District 7, are the only teams in the Iowa Star Conference playing 11.
Oh, and North Tama has a new football coach, who was a previous football coach, and it was a comparatively last-minute thing. Mr. McDermott — er, Tom McDermott — is back in the director’s chair after being inducted into the Iowa Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame last year. Former coach Austin Pink, who was only at NT for two years, bolted (cough) for a school that has much newer and way way way fancier facilities. (Liberty’s BEDS alone is two-thirds of Class A District 7 combined, and that district is one of the two with seven teams instead of six.)
The 8-man Districts 2, 3, 4, and 5 are peppered with teams North Tama played at some point in the past 20 years — including Midland, which had a Week 0 opener, has its 40-yard line at center field, and was my excuse for polishing off serious chunks of IA 38 and IA 64 in 2007.
District 5 is where Gladbrook-Reinbeck will experience its first year at 8, along with Baxter and Collins-Maxwell who now get official status and will have to play each other. It was almost geographically compact except that Twin Cedars and Melcher-Dallas are involved, and there seriously is no good way to get from Ackley to Bussey. There’s a gravel gap of S62 in Marshall County that would make it straighter, but still not a picnic.
IA 346 in Nashua is going to get new pavement markings that turn it from a four-lane road, with two lanes in each direction, to a three-lane road, with one lane in each direction and a center turn lane, from old US 218 eastward about eight blocks.
It’s a minor item in the DOT’s contract lettings, but interesting if similar projects should expand.
