DirectTV and Hearst are at an impasse on retransmission fees, and as a result, both KCCI and KETV went off the satellite system as the calendar moved to 2017. That means southwest Iowa DirectTV customers had to switch to antenna to get the Outback Bowl (and for those who can’t get it that way … well, it may have worked out for the best).
Mediacom, meanwhile, just threw another $1.61 in “local channel surcharge fees” at its eastern Iowa customers.
First, there was this tweet:
who the hell is jeff pic.twitter.com/UlKVBbBLgw
— Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) December 31, 2016
(I will neither confirm nor deny that I have fewer than 10 nuclear warheads.)
And, as Twitter is wont to do, the responses wound around to this VERY old “Saturday Night Live” skit:
That’s supposed to be Dunkerton, Iowa. That had to have come about from one of the skit’s actors, Gary Kroeger, who is from Cedar Falls, was on SNL for three years, and most recently attempted to run for the state legislature. Julia Louis-Dreyfus also appears. She had a slightly more successful post-SNL career.
According to the Social Security baby name tracker, in 2015:
If that’s not doom-laden enough, New York magazine’s “best memes of the year” make it hard to argue we don’t deserve it.
October 4, 2016: The sign on US 69 at old IA 179, Main Street into Klemme. County Road B55 is a quarter-mile north.
Compared to nearly all the rest of my final 50 towns or so, Klemme’s population of 507 made it practically a city. It got a day all for itself after I left Algona, taking old US 18 part of the way there. It shares many traits with other towns of its size. The open businesses were the post office, a bar, and a gas station doing double duty as a grocery store. Klemme had lost its bank 11 months earlier. And the school building on the edge of town is abandoned, closed in 2000, a decade after losing the high school to Belmond.
The former bank in Klemme.
I was in town for less than an hour, mostly around the school. When I departed during the noon hour, I was off to Forest City to get a tour of the Winnebago manufacturing facilities.
No fanfare, no selfies, just a note of personal recognition backed up by record-keeping and now this blog post. I have been to every incorporated place in Iowa. I don’t know if anyone else can say that.
October 3, 2016: The Curlew Cannon ranks up with the Coin Overpass in my observations of Iowans’ modest humor.
You can see the regularity of railroad stops along the diagonal from the junction west of Fort Dodge: Clare, Pioneer, Gilmore City, Rolfe, Plover, Mallard, Curlew, Ayrshire, Ruthven. Today, the tracks stop at Mallard, but Curlew remains.
October 3, 2016: The remnants of a baseball diamond on the east end of Greenville, possibly just south of where the school was.
I just missed Greenville, pop. 74, on my spring break 2003 trip, the one that I have used as my starting point for these highway and city-visit timetables. There wasn’t much there then, and there isn’t now. It was hard to find something to photograph, although since it was later in the afternoon I saw something I hadn’t seen all (school) day: Kids playing in a playground. (Yes, a pair of swings and a slide and a teeter-totter comprise a playground.)
The Soviet Union officially came to an end a quarter-century ago today.
As 2016 comes to a close, the E series of Iowa license plates is too.
I have yet to “stand on the corner in Winslow, Arizona.” Some day.
^ So mid-’90s it hurts.
KOKZ-FM 105.7 in Waterloo switched to oldies in late 1996 or early 1997*. That was the station the school bus radio was turned to, and for quite a while there was a one-hit wonder practically on repeat, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. After the format change, the bus driver found a different station, I started driving myself to school, and that was that.
But recently, as I was scanning the airwaves to find something other than bro-country, the dial landed on KOKZ again, and what I heard was “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and then “The Boys of Summer” – definitely not oldies.
So, KOKZ dropped contemporary (1981-96) to play music from 40 to 25 years ago (1956-71), and is now playing music from 45 to 30 years ago (1971-86). At this rate, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” will make its return to the station in about a decade.
(Filed under “The Oldies Station is Playing Van Halen.” Related blog post: 1990s country is splitting into its own genre)
*I wanted to be precise about this and was getting nowhere. I found archives for Duncan’s American Radio, 1976 to 2002, PDFs with searchable text. KOKZ is Top 40/contemporary in fall 1996 and oldies in spring 1997. Perhaps I should also point to NorthPine.com, which keeps tabs on Upper Midwest broadcasting like I do Iowa school districts.
UPDATE 12/13/22: The changeover was in February 1997.
October 3, 2016: Archer, like MANY other hamlets in Iowa, owes its existence to the railroad, but the rails were pulled up when a Cherokee-Sioux Falls line was abandoned in the mid-1980s.
Archer, pop. 131, is five miles from US 18 and six from US 59, so it was far off my radar while going after highways. Since it was the farthest out of my remaining places, you could argue that this was a trip to Archer, surely the first time anyone without relatives there has ever said that.
The siding in the background marks the edge of the demolished original school building and the addition now used as the town library.
