Apr 17

Traer shaker gallery featured on WHO

Posted on Tuesday, April 17, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Ruth Rasmussen’s massive salt-and-pepper-shaker collection was shown on WHO last week, along with some footage of the Winding Stairs.

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Apr 16

Prelude to a deluge

Posted on Monday, April 16, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Snows in very early April are routine enough. Anything on or after the first day of Iowa Spring (April 15), though, is something to record. Dad did that.

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Friday, April 16, 1993 … Last night we had an inch to two inches of snow, 30, 40 mile an hour winds … A lot of it melted because it’s been raining all day yesterday, raining the day before that, it’s been a miserable, muddy, wet spring. The sun is almost ready to come out; we haven’t seen it since Tuesday.

Twenty-five years ago, no one knew that a wet early spring and mid-April snowfalls were setting the stage for the Flood of 1993.

(That’s the Red Car in front, the one that a decade later was stolen in Omaha.)

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Apr 13

HMS bond issue passes

Posted on Friday, April 13, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

In a close to a mini-saga I’ve covered before, voters in the HMS school district finally approved an elementary school attached to the existing high school in Hartley and new classrooms/gym in Sanborn (story/schematics: KIWA).

This was the FOURTH vote on the bond issue. HMS said it would close Hartley Elementary if it passed and, after the third failure, went ahead and announced a 2019 closure anyway, as more extensively covered in the N’West Iowa Review.

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Apr 12

Two-year project maintains IA 122 one-ways

Posted on Thursday, April 12, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

I’m not quite sure why this isn’t listed on the DOT’s public information page, but this construction season is the first part of a two-year project to rebuild IA 122 in downtown Mason City.

The KIMT story has views of the map, whose most notable nugget is that the east end of the one-way will have the turn softened to a more gradual curve. But the one-way system stays intact, while recent projects in some cities intend to get rid of one-ways.

The Mason City project will take two years, and after that, here’s a question: Why should the state hold on to IA 122 east of downtown? Its current east end is the east city limits; the rest was peeled away in 2003. While it makes sense to keep the four-lane running east from I-35, which was US 18 until the Avenue of the Saints freeway was completed, I think the part running east of downtown would be a good urban decommissioning candidate. Even a partial truncation to, say, Illinois Avenue/Mason City High School still would get 3 miles off the books.

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Apr 11

Webster City to absorb Northeast Hamilton

Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


May 28, 2012: Northeast Hamilton completed a major construction project at the beginning of the decade, and then began sending high school students to Webster City in 2015. Now what happens to the Trojan?

The Northeast Hamilton school district formed in 1962 with an enrollment of 685 students. Fifty-five years later, it’s under 200, and near the end of the line as an independent district.

Only 15 voters out of 424 in the Webster City and NEH districts (out of 6742 registered) opposed consolidation effective in 2019, reports the Daily Freeman-Journal. NEH gave up its high school three years ago. The school in Blairsburg will remain as a K-6 site named, uh, “Learning Center at Northeast Hamilton”.

The combined district will span the northern half of Hamilton County (plus Duncombe). Since Stratford’s 7-12 students also go there, Webster City is the 11th-largest single-high-school area in the state.

(Thanks to a reader for alerting me to this vote, which I had forgotten about.)

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Apr 10

Tama County next to kiss its ash goodbye

Posted on Tuesday, April 10, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

A two-fer on the emerald ash borer front: Sites near each other in Le Grand served as the confirmation of the bug in Marshall and Tama counties.

Strictly speaking, Traer and Dysart are not within the treatment radius from this most recent discovery (see map, which will likely change at the next EAB find), but the southeast half of the state has enough infestations that it’s only a matter of time before the EAB shows up.

Cedar Rapids is taking out ash trees on Edgewood Road after the EAB was found there, reports KCRG.

(Is this from two weeks ago? Yes. Did I post this for the headline? Also yes.)

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Apr 09

Arnolds Park school to close … eventually

Posted on Monday, April 9, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The Okoboji school district approved a bond issue for a new middle school Tuesday (story: Spencer Daily Reporter). The district covers the Iowa Great Lakes area south of 175th Street, with Arnolds Park, Milford, Okoboji (yes, there’s a town of that name), Wahpeton, and West Okoboji, and down to include Fostoria.

The new building, would be separate from the existing high school in Milford but would be on the same land. The existing middle school, which was Arnolds Park High School until a merger, will be closed and sold. (An appraisal of the building and land [large PDF] found that while the almost-lakeside site is a good place for development, it’s worth slightly more alive than dead.)

This is not entirely a typical “pass bond issue, close old school” situation, though. Dickinson County is one of three counties in northwest Iowa that peaked in population in the most recent census. Although a good portion of the population is seasonal, enrollment in the district has been steady to slightly growing (PDF). Milford shares a city border with Arnolds Park, so while the latter is technically losing its school the new one is only four miles away. (Interestingly, while the site for the new one can be seen from the present high school, it’s not currently inside Milford’s city limits!)

Construction of the new facility, according to the article, will take 18 to 24 months, so it could open in the fall of 2020.

Next door, Graettinger-Terril approved a bond issue by a 17-vote margin (story: KICD) to build a new gym, new classrooms, and other things.

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Apr 08

All April in a week

Posted on Sunday, April 8, 2018, at 11:00 AM by Jeff

When Mother Nature gets off the sauce, or as tired of winter as we are, but not without 3 to 4 inches of snow first.

aprilweektemps

Exactly five years ago, it was the other way around.

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Apr 05

Last ride on the first escalator

Posted on Thursday, April 5, 2018, at 10:10 AM by Jeff

IFApril 1, 2018: Through the window on the first floor of Sears at Waterloo’s Crossroads Mall.

The new Sears Roebuck Department Store, twice as big as the old and sparkling with the innovations of a “more modern and fashionable” head office, will open its doors to the public at noon Tuesday, with a grand opening scheduled for the following morning. — Waterloo Daily Courier, March 24, 1969

A full-page inside spread in the Courier showed off the accoutrements of “one of the largest and most modern department stores in the Sears chain.” According to the photos, Sears “will be the first store in the Crossroads Center enclosed mall, the first such facility in Iowa.” It had the first escalator in Black Hawk County.

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The first steel beams planted at Crossroads Mall were for the Sears. It was one of the first 14 stores to sign long-term leases. Fifty years almost to the day that “Shopping Center Building Started” (Courier, March 27, 1968) foretold a massive new development for Black Hawk County, that first store is counting down to its last sale, another data point in the retail apocalypse.

When it closes, there will be four full-fledged Sears stores left in Iowa — Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Des Moines, and Sioux City.

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As I mentioned before, this was “my” Sears. I would put good odds that this was the first place I rode an escalator. (Mom’s was the Des Moines downtown Younkers.) I remember taking detours past the TVs on the way from Bishop’s (closed January 2011) to Waldenbooks (closed January 2010).

Nearly every major appliance for 40 years, including my college fridge, came from here. The demise of the Waterloo store and the long-term decline of Sears in general can be summed up in this anecdote: In the search for a vacuum at the end of last year, Mom tried Sears first. The kind she wanted wasn’t in stock, and she ended up finding one cheaper online.

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Apr 04

50th anniversary of MLK’s assassination

Posted on Wednesday, April 4, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

LorraineWreath
December 29, 2001: A wreath marks the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in Memphis. The building of the Lorraine Motel was incorporated into the National Civil Rights Museum.

Our trip to the 2001 Independence Bowl, like so many vacations both with family and by myself, had a big dose of history involved. My brother was doing a History Day project on the Little Rock Nine, but that wasn’t needed as a hook to visit two key sites in the civil rights movement: Little Rock Central High School and then the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum’s path takes you near the place Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, its significance amplified by everything you’ve seen and heard in the time before.

Then in 2009, in my second and so-far last trip to DC, we went to the Lincoln Memorial at night. Along with a small cluster of students, I listened to the “I Have a Dream” speech — standing at the spot where King gave it. That, too, was very powerful.

I don’t think it’s possible to hear the end of the last speech he gave, the day before he died, without getting chills.

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