Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

June 14, 2011: A (non-functioning) wonder of the ancient world in Winthrop. Awfully public for a changing room, don’t you think, Clark?

Another part of a simpler technological life is going away in two large swaths of Iowa.

According to the Des Moines Register, everyone in the 319 and 515 area codes will have to engage in 10-digit dialing for every number by October. (Actually, it might be 11, because of pressing 1 to dial out?) The creation of the national Suicide Prevention Hotline is pre-empting the 988 prefix used in two places: Hudson and a block of Des Moines cell numbers.

Of course, no one dials anymore. Few even mash physical buttons anymore. Storing everyone’s name on your phone eliminates the possibility of being one digit off and having a nice five-minute conversation with a wrong number — the number of a person you also happen to know.

This change will affect Traer’s half of Tama County and much of eastern and southeast Iowa for 319, and then Des Moines and many points north for 515. Toledo will still be able to call Gladbrook in seven digits, because they’re 641.

I’m in favor of area code splits instead of overlays, and Iowa has avoided them, but anyone in a place that got one has been doing 10-digit dialing. The 319 and the 515 are just being added involuntarily.

But might it have been easier to give everyone in Hudson a new prefix?

July 21, 2012: The Iowa flag flies at West Lyon Community School, between Larchwood and Inwood, the northwesternmost school district in the state.

The Iowa Legislature made the Iowa state flag official on March 29, 1921, according to this story from Radio Iowa four years ago that marked when the flag was first designed. The 1917 sketch of the eagle with the state motto, from Dixie Gebhardt of Knoxville, is in the State Historical Society’s Iowa 101 mobile exhibit.

It may surprise you that in some corners, it was not well-received — not design-wise, but its very existence.

The adoption of a state flag by the general assembly was over the protest of Harper Post, No. 79, G.A.R., at Keosauqua, Van Buren County. When the bill was pending, drafted the Daughters of the American Revolution who furnished the design for the state flag, the Post of Keosauqua resolved “That this Post without a dissenting voice is unutterably opposed to the plan or suggestion now pending before the state legislature of Iowa for the adoption of a state flag or emblem of any description. That we believe such a course dangerous in the extreme. That there should be but one flag and that the good old Stars and Stripes, and none other, to which flag allegiance of all citizens of the United State should be required.
— Wright County Monitor, March 30, 1921 (also printed in Winterset News, March 30, and Seymour Herald, April 14)

Iowa’s flag calls back to when the land was claimed by the French in the colonial period, although their influence in the area was minimal (but: “Des Moines”). It ended in 1762, when Spain took control, save for a short period at the turn of the 19th century just long enough for France to retake control and Napoleon to sell it.

Detractors aside, we should all be able to agree on one good thing about the Iowa flag: It’s not a blue background with a state seal in the center.

Excerpted from “Main roads designed as 24-foot pavement,” by Ellen Landon, Ames Daily Tribune, June 9, 1953, with some cleanup:

The bridge design division makes preliminary layouts and final detail design and drawing and bridges or large culverts on a project.

“We have one department which is composed largely of women,” [R.C.] Boyd[, head of the design department,] explained. “It is the general drafting division. These women are very apt at making special drawings and also design smaller standard culverts.”

The final treatment of plans before they go on to the administration department for bidding comes in the blueprint room presided over by Walter Bappe. He has numerous pieces of interesting equipment including a big blueprint machine which operates by a photographic process. Here all plans are blueprinted in quantity so that bidders may have [text missing].

Not all the blueprints are taken away, however, for it is in this department that a file of every project undertaken is kept. Bappe takes pride in pointing to some drawings on file done by Former Chief Engineer Fred C. White when he was still in college.

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This historical excerpt and the previous one have implications for the research I do today. They show that women had a significant role in IHC documentation before computer-aided design (following, admittedly, work done by all-male crews). I am thankful to them for all their work, and of course I’m thankful that the 20th century Highway Commission/DOT is as good/bad at saving everything as I am.

This clip of a blueprint for a project on IA 24 in New Hampton in 1964 is emblematic of the style used in Iowa Highway Commission documents from the mid-1920s to 1970s. Pre-1925 documents have more embellishment of some labels. Notice old US 63 on Pleasant Hill Street; the “oil station” building is there today.

“Women and Girls Help in Commission Drafting Rooms”, Iowa Highway Commission Service Bulletin, July 1918

Nearly twenty young women are in active training to do drafting work in the drafting room of the State Highway Commission. So many of the young men trained to this work have been called to war and so many sent out to do actual field work that it became necessary to take radical means to keep the work of this important department in pace with the needs.

W.T. Ide, of the manual training department of East High school in Des Moines, was secured for the vacation period to train a number of young women to do this work. As soon as an individual shows proficiency, she is given actual drawing work. Many more applications have come in than can be accommodated, showing great interest in this new line of work for women.

The success of the experiment so far has been such that is is freely predicted that much of the work of the drafting room will continue to be done by women.

(Transcribed from the PDF digitized on Google.)