I should just do this at the start of every season.
It could be a long season for both North Tama, which has a new coach and is coming off the first winless season in 75 years, and Iowa State, which has a new coach after going 8-28 the last three years.
UPDATE: What happened to the statewide scoreboard show?
August 19, 2016
The week before this year’s Winding Stairs Festival (Aug. 12-14), the old message sign on the side of the Traer Memorial Building (the manual removable-letter type) was replaced with a red-LED marquee message board.
Chelsea Savings Bank put an LED sign on its pole a few months ago (I think), and of course Farmers Savings Bank & Trust has had its scroll at the corner of Main and Second for approximately forever (but hasn’t carried birthday messages for 15 years 🙁 ).
I knew the old school building in Schleswig was on borrowed time, but I hadn’t paid much attention beyond that, and it’s a long way over there. I finally got the chance to pass through Schleswig earlier this month (Aug. 8) and…
Skunked twice in a month on opposite ends of the state!
Prairie Rivers of Iowa is a nonprofit group promoting the Lincoln Highway as a Heritage Byway. It’s in the last year of developing a “Corridor Management Plan, or a long-term plan for the entire byway.” A meeting in State Center on Wednesday (Aug. 24) is open for the public to see plans relating to the corridor in the State Center/Colo area. I wonder how the Iowa DOT’s proposal for an at-grade intersection at the Reed-Niland corner (see also this blog link) factors into it.
(Link via Tri-County Times, which had a website redesign along with the Ames Tribune last Thursday and FOR THE LOVE OF TIM-BERNERS LEE DESIGNERS NEED TO STOP PUTTING PHOTOS WITH EVERY LINK ON HOMEPAGES.)
July 25, 2016
I need to get a picture of the 1912 Urbana school building sometime, I thought to myself. I pass it a lot, but usually at night, and it looks in fine shape, but you never know…
oops
August 14, 2016: The new concession stand/restroom building at Dennis Field in Traer replaces two separate buildings. New cable wiring between the bleachers and the football field, and also some turf care, have eliminated nearly all traces of the track that used to go around.
The renovations to Dennis Field in Traer — new concession stand/restrooms, new scoreboard, and a concrete walk around the north end zone to the bleachers — are very near completion. Tonight there will be a ribbon cutting and “kickoff night” with sports awards. A bit more information, along with a photo that shows the cutout word “Redhawks” above the scoreboard better than it appears when you see it from the bleachers, can be found here. (The article is really a repurposed press release from Chelsea Savings Bank, in probably its most prominent sign of competition with Farmers Savings Bank & Trust.)
North Tama’s first home football game of 2016 is Sept. 2 against BCLUW.
At the end of a summer that saw both softball and baseball state qualifiers from Collins-Maxwell-Baxter, a three-decade sports relationship has been severed.
Baxter voted unanimously to end the sports sharing agreement after the upcoming school year, report WHO and the Newton Daily News. This follows months of bitter talks about moving into whole-grade sharing, which Collins-Maxwell rejected when it became clear Baxter would have the high school.
The decision to end the partnership, in my opinion, is likely to end with both districts suffering (hence the “mutual assured destruction” in the headline). Each district separately has a BEDS number just above 100, meaning they’re too big for 8-man football and extremely small for 11, and rosters for other sports will be short. The decision to end the partnership in summer 2017 instead of 2018 also throws football schedules into disarray. One or the other has to come up with its new team names and uniforms (or call back what they had in the early ’80s) — or seek sports sharing arrangements with a different school.
Baxter is one of the very few rural districts in Iowa that had higher enrollment in 2015 than in 2001. The CMB area is in a bind because many surrounding districts are bigger enrollment-wise. I can’t imagine Ballard, which C-M will be sharing a superintendent with, giving terms as favorable as any Baxter had to offer, and even if they were, the shared history won’t be there.
The Iowa DOT wants to do a complete reconstruction of US 52/IA 3 east of Luxemburg, and a roundabout at County Road Y13. The presentation shows a lot of accidents from cars turning left at that intersection. Some residents aren’t happy about the plan.
Detailed PDFs of the project are on the DOT’s website. Aside from the roundabout, a paved shoulder is added and there are a few places where a curve is lengthened. Construction is planned for 2018, while work on the Southwest Connector in Dubuque continues — and when that happens, US 52 will be rerouted onto IA 136 and US 20 permanently.
August 16, 2013: Lego Iowa at the Varied Industries Building.
When I got my advance State Fair ticket on the last Saturday in July at a Cedar Rapids-area Fareway, the cashier said it was the first one she’d sold. The fair was still about two weeks away — and the advance ticket isn’t quite the discount it used to be — but it made me wonder.
The fair isn’t invisible in the eastern part of the state — the Gazette had a story last week and I’ve seen a billboard or two. But it seems…less.
Omaha, apparently, is drowning in promotions for everything-on-a-stick. That makes sense because the Nebraska State Fair was relocated to Grand Island in 2009 and it is to the Iowa State Fair what the Tama County Fair is to the Clay County Fair. (This also explains the rise in Husker-branded things in vendor stands.)
The fair has 4H projects, fair queens, and ag producers from every corner of the state, but many Iowans don’t have such connections. It’s possible I’ve misjudged the situation, but to me a year without the fair is unfathomable, and I want every Iowan to share the same love.
