Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

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).

You’d think there would be some code in GPSs and online direction programs like Apple/Google Maps to override a “shortest possible” path to stay on a highway, or at least a gravel road. All roads aren’t equal, even when they look the same on the phone (ugh). In Los Angeles, Waze treated a steep city street as a functional detour for getting off the freeway.

Now, in Iowa, people are being directed onto a dirt road, KWWL reports. In fact, the word “road” is generous.

I have to argue with the GPS occasionally (current signature in the corner of this blog notwithstanding) because I want to stay on the signed road or just because I know what I’m doing. Take, for example, Google’s suggestion for going between Greenfield and Centerville. Looking at a paper map or atlas, the obvious route is IA 25, US 34, IA 14, and IA 2, but Google hits up some county roads on either end.

If I, the roadgeek, have this issue, what does that mean for the less geographically inclined? Should we treat this as a precursor of the eventual robot uprising? (As one of the remaining map-reading life-forms I’d be useful. Or a target for extermination. One of the two.)