Nov 17

The Crimson Monkey: Endgame

Posted on Wednesday, November 17, 2021, at 10:01 AM by Jeff


November 3, 2012: Iowa State’s Shontrelle Johnson (in pile) scores a Cyclone touchdown late against Oklahoma. ISU lost to the No. 12 Sooners 35-20.

For a decade I have charted the Sisyphean task of Iowa State’s football team playing Oklahoma. Then Sisyphus won in Norman for the first time in more than 25 years. And then, for the first time in 60 years, during a plague, won in Ames.

I’m not saying this is why Oklahoma is running away to the SEC, but I’m not not saying it. I will say it would be nice if Iowa State could get stabbed in the front once in a while.

Either way, at some point in this decade, the original rationale for the page will expire. This isn’t to say I won’t figure out some way to keep updating those charts. (By the way, Oregon State beat USC in Los Angeles this year, so Kentucky at Alabama takes the top spot in away-game non-win streaks for probably forever or five years after Nick Saban retires, whichever comes first.)

If Oklahoma and Texas stay in the Big 12 through the 2024-25 academic year, there will be at least one more home game for everyone. But, if they decide they can’t live with “S!-E!-C!” ironically ringing in their ears that long, there could be an interesting silver lining.

If Oklahoma does not play a football game in Ames again, its first and last visits (1928 and 2020) will have been losses. How’s that for monkeyshines on the way out?

(More monkey jokes? More monkey jokes. Monkey jokes for everyone!)

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Nov 15

Iowa’s 1920 highway system: The Great Truncation

Posted on Monday, November 15, 2021, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


September 7, 2006: IA 128 in Clayton County is an orphan segment of IA 56 created in November 1924.

In the 1920 highway system, only one non-spur route (IA 29 in Plymouth County) had an endpoint that was not in a community. This created a lot of redundancies. On November 3, 1924, and then also on January 6, 1925, the IHC took a knife to these. At the time, the markers were painted on poles, so the real-world efficacy of what I call the “Great Truncation” may be debatable. It did, however, set a new standard.

Despite there being more than a dozen changes to route termini, only two new numbers were needed to cover orphaned segments, and both are around today.

IA 39 (I) had around half its route cut. It had started in Mondamin, rather than to the southeast where the route met IA 12, went to join the Lincoln Highway at Logan, used the Harrison County stairsteps, then went east to Harlan.

The route between IA 12 and Logan, which had a pronounced arc through Magnolia, was cut from 39 and became IA 127. The rest of 39 got cut in half again at Portsmouth when IA 64’s route was changed in 1959. In the Great Renumbering, it became the westernmost part of a new IA 44 running all the way to Grimes.

IA 56, on the other side of the state, lost its connection to Guttenberg. It was cut to the corridor we know today, connecting two county seats but not touching any other town. The bottom leg of a triangle formed with IA 13 and then-IA 20 (now US 52) turned into IA 128 in the heart of Clayton County, passing through only the unincorporated village of Clayton Center.

IA 101 was also approximately cut in half, and contained to Benton County, but it retained concrete in the Cedar River bottoms that by 1924 was already more than a decade old. That concrete was lost in later route modifications, and the number itself was dropped in 1984 when I-380 made a long stretch of IA 150 redundant and the DOT had to figure out what to do with the latter.

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Nov 10

Mainline northbound I-29 shutting down at I-480

Posted on Wednesday, November 10, 2021, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Next week, for the first time since the interstate system was constructed, there will be a way to get from I-29 to eastbound Broadway in Council Bluffs. It just comes at the expense of everything else, including the interstate itself.

According to an e-mail from the Iowa DOT, summarized and diagrammed at KETV, the northbound lanes of I-29 will be shut down between 9th Avenue and Avenue G. A frontage road will operate between those two places with a stoplight at Broadway. However, traffic is constrained to 35 mph, at least, officially and theoretically.

The easiest detour is probably taking old IA 192 — South Expressway, Broadway, and 16th Street — through Council Bluffs, since both ends intersect I-29. The official all-interstate detour will be much longer.

Mainline I-29 will not reopen in this area until summer 2023.

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Nov 08

Eating your way down the Lincoln Highway

Posted on Monday, November 8, 2021, at 10:10 AM by Jeff

WHO’s Roger Riley drove Iowa’s eastern half of the Lincoln Highway for a feature story. This means he got PAID to eat prime rib at the Lighthouse Inn near Cedar Rapids, an omelet at the Lincoln Cafe in Belle Plaine, a Maid-Rite at Taylor’s in Marshalltown, and tenderloin at Niland’s Cafe in Colo.

Who said there are no good jobs in journalism anymore?

The story sadly reveals that the Ced-Rel Supper Club, which had its neon restored not that long ago, closed after it was damaged in the derecho. The King Tower is mentioned too, but it closed from a combination of pandemic and derecho, not the Tama bypass.

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Nov 05

Texas football as Kelsea Ballerini songs

Posted on Friday, November 5, 2021, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

What song, or at least song title, best describes Texas football, or Texas athletics in general? The obvious answers — “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” or “Take the Money and Run” — got used plenty in June. That was when Texas and Oklahoma decided it would be better to serve in football heaven than reign in hell and set off a chain of events that now has Conference USA looking at adding Liberty. But for a surprisingly full list that works, I’m turning to pop-country singer Kelsea Ballerini, who IMO is very underrated, probably because she is a woman in country music. (“homecoming queen?” is softly powerful, especially with the video, but enough with the lowercasing.)

In no particular order, here’s how Ballerini plays on the field:

“xo”
You’re still in love with your ex, oh / And I ain’t one to be nobody’s second best, no / Stop holding onto me when the truth is you can’t let go

(They can’t let go of A&M, and yes it will anger everyone to say that.)

“Peter Pan”
Always gonna fly away, just because you know you can / Never gonna learn there’s no such place as a Neverland

“Sirens”
The warning lights were flashing like lightning / I should’ve listened to the, I should’ve listened to the sirens

(I will never say the Traitorous Four did the right thing.)

“Get Over Yourself”
I’m over you and everything that we used to do together / My Saturday nights are brighter, I’ve never felt better / I didn’t miss a beat when I heard you were seeing somebody else … So get over yourself

(OK, so I’m not going to be over it any time soon. But this song has an amazing chorus.)

“High School”
He’s still showing up twenty late, finding hearts and rules to break / Why would he wanna change when every memory still bows to him?

(For when Texas fans, instead watching yet another loss to Georgia, or Mississippi State, or hopefully Vanderbilt, watch a replay of the 2005-06 national championship game. Again.)

“love and hate”
We used to be so happy, didn’t we / We used to say that forever’d be easy / But the day that you lied, I felt it all change / I crossed that thin, thin line between love and hate

(As sung by Bob Bowlsby at the karaoke bar.)

Finally, in honor of one ISU fan on Twitter, “having a hysterectomy” shall now be known as “unsubscribing to the Longhorn Network.”

Last-minute non-Ballerini emergency add: “Hey Hey We’re The Monkees” (if you know, you know)

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Nov 03

North Tama volleyball in state semifinals

Posted on Wednesday, November 3, 2021, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The North Tama volleyball team lost multiple small leads in their state quarterfinal sets Tuesday against Le Mars Gehlen, but pulled it out in the fifth set to win the match and advance to the state semifinals. It was a bracket upset, No. 7 beating No. 2. (Story: Cedar Rapids Gazette)

In 2019, NT swept Gehlen and lost to eventual state champion Sidney in the semifinals.

On the other side of the lower bracket tonight is Springville, NT’s 2017 state tournament opponent. Springville defeated Gladbrook-Reinbeck, who beat North Tama twice in the regular season. This is Springville’s seventh state tournament appearance.

The Class 1A semifinals are another case of “private bracket vs. public bracket”, as three private schools were among the eight teams and Springville’s two rounds are the only public-vs.-public matchups. The Springville-North Tama winner will face the Burlington Notre Dame-Fort Madison Holy Trinity winner.

GO REDHAWKS!

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Nov 01

Elk Horn-Kimballton…minus Kimballton

Posted on Monday, November 1, 2021, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


Iowa Department of Education map

A finger of the Audubon school district touches the city of Kimballton. More than half a century ago, that finger tied two K-12 school districts, multiple county school boards, and the Iowa Supreme Court up in knots for more than a decade.

This story starts in the middle, as I waded through archives of the Harlan papers that end in 1969. “High court decisions in Kimballton School,” Harlan News Advertiser, June 12, 1967, had this parenthetical: “(By this time, it’s obvious that Elk Horn-Kimballton Community Schools is a misnomer; the town of Kimballton is not a part of the EH-K district.)”

Whoa, hold on there. Back the school bus up.

In 1956, voters in three township areas plus Elk Horn voted to form the Elk Horn-Kimballton district. The problem is, Kimballton — specifically, voters in the city limits — opposed the plan. The plan was to have rural areas attend elementary classes in Kimballton, which suddenly was not an option. According to the September 21, 1956, Harlan Tribune, opposition was “believed to have come from parents who want their children to go to school in Audubon.” If that finger of 3/16 of Section 20, Sharon Township, Audubon County, had been included, Kimballton Independent would have been left an island and have nowhere else to go.

Ten years later, the situation had not changed, and with the new K-12 school law Kimballton had to go SOMEwhere. I’m not going to go through every step, and you’ll see why in the next few paragraphs.

Kimballton Independent was still around in fall 1966, one of the statewide stragglers looking for a K-12 home. The following year it became a district without a building, but not without another injunction preventing a commitment to “tuitioning out” all students to Audubon (Atlantic News-Telegraph, 8/12/67). Elk Horn-Kimballton and Kimballton finally voted for reorganization in January 1970 (Atlantic News-Telegraph, 1/28/71), only to have Audubon immediately seek an injunction.

The end came in the unhelpfully named Iowa Supreme Court case “Board of Education v. Joint Board of Education,” decided April 13, 1972. It was the fourth time the Kimballton situation had reached the high court. The court allowed the new Elk Horn-Kimballton School District, now actually including Kimballton, to stand.

Four decades later, EHK started whole-grade sharing with Exira, and the two merged in 2014.

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Oct 29

Plainfield school has been demolished

Posted on Friday, October 29, 2021, at 10:10 AM by Jeff

Three years after the last students left the Plainfield school building, the site is now open land.

KCHA Radio says the building was demolished last month. The Nashua-Plainfield School District is trying to decide what to do next. The land could be used for baseball, because the district does not own the diamond it currently uses (as reported by KCHA) and has kept the softball in Plainfield (as reported for many years in my directions booklet).

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Oct 27

Busy week for North Tama sports

Posted on Wednesday, October 27, 2021, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Tonight, the No. 12 North Tama volleyball team faces No. 4 Lisbon in Van Horne. At stake is either North Tama’s third state volleyball appearance in six years, or Lisbon’s first ever. Stories: North Tama Telegraph (covering the regional semifinal win over Montezuma), Cedar Rapids Gazette (with focus on Lisbon).

Friday in state football, North Tama (7-2) plays at Lynnville-Sully (8-1). The winner of that game will play the winner of Earlham at Grundy Center. (Notable in 8-Man: Remsen St. Mary’s and Don Bosco would play each other in the next round if each win Friday.)

In a very important “you know you live in a small town when” item, trick-or-treating in Traer has been moved to Saturday night to accommodate the football game. It’s also an hour later (6:30-8:30 instead of 5:30-7:30), which means it will start after sunset like things used to be before the extension of DST in 2007.

Also Saturday, the girls’ cross country team will participate in the state meet at Fort Dodge as a team for the first time since 2007.

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Oct 26

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it

Posted on Tuesday, October 26, 2021, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Union High School in La Porte City had ONE football cheerleader this year. But she’s being a very good sport about it (story: KCRG), and she was also chosen homecoming queen.

Union went 3-6 this season, but … how can a thousand-student school be in the position of having one cheerleader?

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