It’s moderately confusing to have the Iowa DOT release its five-year programs on the fiscal year, but that’s been the case since it formed in 1975. That means that the contracts for 2026 started July 1. I waited until the new state map was released to do my writeup of the 2026-30 plan. Come for the roadgeekery, stay for the fontgeekery.
Community members put on the play “One Stoplight Town” at the Wieting Theatre in Toledo on July 12. It was a good play. Perhaps the most emotional part for me, though, was learning that the lead was played by someone who got back into acting two decades after his last time on stage … when he was a senior at South Tama in 2004.
Two related, but discrete, items from the past week show us the significance of the loss of the Greatest Generation.
First, from Pew Research:
Reflecting on the United States’ actions, 35% of Americans today say using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was justified, while 31% say it was not justified. A third say they are not sure. …
Americans ages 65 and older (48%) are more likely than adults in younger age groups to say the bombings were justified. Adults under 30, meanwhile, are considerably more likely to say the bombings were not justified than to say they were justified (44% vs. 27%).
Second, Roger Corbin, who was originally from Hampton but spent decades in Traer, died last Sept. 20. When I wrote a story about him for my Substack, I included a quote from his interview with the Grout Museum.
“When we left to go to the Pacific I didn’t figure our chances were much better than 50% of ever being back to the States,” he said for the Grout Museum District’s “Voices of Iowa” oral history project. “The invasion of Japan was going to cost a whole bundle of lives, and I’m one of those who can look in the camera and say, God bless Harry Truman for dropping the atomic bomb.”
KWWL found that clip for its story about the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, but something got lost in translation.
Please, somebody teach history — and proofreading.
Orient-Macksburg is dead-but-not-dead. We know that. But did you know that a campaign to save Harrison Elementary School in Cedar Rapids more or less succeeded? Also, Toledo’s historic school is being replaced by a site at the Iowa Juvenile Home.
The Great Eastern Iowa Tractorcade switched sponsors from WMT to KXEL this year, partially because one of the main coordinators switched jobs. The 26th edition of this ride was in June, and for 2025 they started in Mount Pleasant and radiated out each day. I went to Washington to write a story about it.
As of the 4 PM newscast on Wednesday, KCRG has wholly (or 95%?) adopted the graphics package used by all the other Gray Media TV stations.
Two words: CALLED IT.
It’s also dropped having a ticker at the bottom in the “A block” of the newscast (before the first commercial). The theme music is, for lack of a better phrase, more aggressive. The voiceover doesn’t say “TV 9” anymore. Finally, the anchor intros are now videos, and Beth Malicki’s glasses are now canon.
Again, consider me un-thrilled by the move away from anything that might be Helvetica, or at least as easily readable as Helvetica. The Gray font is particularly bad when it comes to the letter Q, which is a bit of an issue when your market includes the fourth-largest city in the United States with a Q in its name.
Actually, when looking at KCRG and WHO simultaneously, it seems entirely possible that the Gray and Nexstar fonts are either identical or so close as to be a distinction without a difference!
So now, to the best of my knowledge, graphics packages used by national affiliate owners are baked into every station in Iowa.
AND ALL OF THEM HAVE MOVING PARTS IN EVERY ELEMENT WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO MOVE.
Here we are, getting close to the end of the P’s. Now, there are some cars I’ve seen recently with letters that are pretty close to the beginning of the alphabet that should have been replaced by this point, but I don’t know the DOT doesn’t flag those in the system.
There’s still no firm date for the closure of the Black Hawk Bridge over the Mississippi River in Lansing, but we have another clue.
The PBS Wisconsin show “Here & Now” has a 4-minute story about the closure and says it will happen in October. (Whoever typed up the story for online publication misspelled New Albin.)
KCRG has a story from the Lansing side and how businesses are worried about what will happen.
At the time construction began, it was expected that the bridge would remain open until the new bridge opened in the fall of 2026. Now, due to repeated stress on the nearly 100-year-old bridge piers as much deeper ones are drilled for the new bridge, the bridge has to close and the new one won’t be open until sometime in 2027.
For more detailed information from the engineering angle, read this story from Engineering News Record.
(Well, it’s state tournament week, so that’s the hook. — Ed.)
On May 14, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced a change that would allow Pete Rose and the Black Sox (but yeah, it’s all about Pete Rose) to enter the Baseball Hall of Fame. That night, I got the cockamamie idea to go to Dyersville and see if I could find anyone at the Field of Dreams the next day to offer an opinion. I was not disappointed.
(I was, however, subsequently disappointed this story did not get selected for the Iowa Capital Dispatch, but it was published right as the Iowa Legislature started a 21-hour day to close out its session. Sometimes the deep ball to center gets caught at the warning track.)
KCRG interviewed a “Ghost Player” who portrays Shoeless Joe, and that story aired the night of May 15, and I published my story the morning of May 16. As far as I know, they and I are the only ones who went to Dyersville for the Iowa angle.
Between my vacation to the Lincoln Highway convention and trips home and the usual severe depression, I’ve been lax in posting links to my Substack stories, so they’re going to be a bit dated. But if you haven’t read them, they’re new to you! It’s just like old-school rerun season!
I better start with the timeliest one: a look at the RAGBRAI route.
