Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

In a deep review of the online legal descriptions of Iowa highways, I’ve noticed some quirks in the conventions. A road will often connect or start at/with “an unnamed street”, but in each town that street clearly has a name. Older route descriptions have more information than newer ones. The weird thing is when streets are named, but according to modern maps, that street name does not exist.

One mass renaming that’s known for sure is Denison, which got rid of all its names for numbered streets and avenues.

But there are other cases. Take Earlham, for example. In 1960, the state set IA 232 “Commencing at the intersection of Chestnut Street and Iowa Street; thence northerly on Chestnut Street to the north corporation line.” But there is no Iowa Street in Earlham (PDF). For that matter, there’s no Chestnut Street, but Chestnut Avenue.

The same thing happens in Sully. From at least May 5, 1942, to June 18, 1975, IA 225 went downtown.

Beginning on Fourth Street at the west line of Main Street; thence east on Fourth Street to Park Street; thence north on Park Street to First Street; thence east on First Street to the east corporation line.

But today Sully doesn’t have a Main Street, or a Park Street. All the east-west roads are numbered streets and the north-south roads are numbered avenues.

This certainly makes it more difficult to ascertain where those old endpoints were, even in a place with as few streets as Alta Vista, where  the end of IA 289 in 1980 was “739 feet south of the intersection of Main Street and Water Street” and neither Main Street nor Water Street are on the map today.

So, what gives?

I don’t know his name, but everyone in Iowa has heard his voice.

As the YouTube ad above shows, the man who does the voiceovers for Adventureland’s radio and TV ads has been doing it for a long time.

Last week I heard a radio spot for the opening of this year’s summer season. While it was recognizable, something else was inescapable: The Adventureland ad guy sounds like he’s getting old.

UPDATE: A reader informs me that the “voice of the summer” is none other than Frosty Mitchell, legendary KIOA radio personality who DJ’d the dance party at Veterans Auditorium in the 1959 girls’ basketball tournament blizzard. I had never made the connection.

While going through one of my piles of mail*, I leafed through the Iowa 4-H Foundation’s summer newsletter. It was there that I found out — and this still may be news, considering the only external coverage was a blurb in the Des Moines Business Record — about a change in an old institution.

According to a May 1 press release from the foundation, and an October announcement from the new group, United Camps, Conferences and Retreats is now the manager of the nearly 70-year-old 4-H Center in Boone County. The camp has been renamed Clover Woods, creating an allusion, but not infringement, of the 4-H heritage. The 4-H Foundation announced in late 2016 that it was not renewing an exclusive lease that gave ISU Extension run of the camp. The change allows the camp to be available to all nonprofit groups, with 4-H clubs getting priority.

*My family would give Marie Kondo a heart attack, and she would do the same to us.

This kind of snuck up on me (and perhaps others) in a pair of trips to different Fareway locations recently: I knew the Boone-based grocery store chain is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, but didn’t know that the “Economical Food Stores” logo is on its way out. The “shield of quality” is moving to a secondary logo — though, of course, the chain says the emphasis on quality itself remains the same.

The Boone News-Republican (reprinted at the Ames Tribune) has an interview with the current president that also looks back at the company’s past.

Some time ago, the “Fastco” store-brand label was phased out on everything except pop, and now even that’s gone. It will take a while to get used to not seeing the logo that’s been on storefronts and ads since forever (at least 1984-85, based on a spot check of Cedar Valley Daily Times archives). But the meat department — Fareway’s bread and butter, if you will — still wears hats, and the checkout helpers still walk your cart to the car.

UPDATE: A visual aid, from one of the aforementioned trips (Vinton).