The Tama County Fair in Gladbrook stood a slightly better chance of not being called off, compared to other county fairs, because it is so small, pretty much 4H/FFA exclusive.
But then both the softball and baseball teams at North Tama had to end their seasons because of exposure to the plague.
Following that, with “a significant climb in positive cases” in Tama County in the past two weeks, the fair was cancelled two days before it was supposed to begin. The press release is here.
Gunder is a map dot in Clayton County with one establishment to its unincorporated name: The Irish Shanti, home of the Gunderburger, a whole pound (post-cooked!) of delicious cow packaged between two slices of bread, served with crinkle fries or cheese curds.
My travels across Iowa weren’t going to be complete without one. I checked it off, along with the Cassville ferry, in fall 2011. Then I checked it off again in 2017, the same year it was on a list of Iowa’s best burgers. There will not be a third.
I have found out, a year after the fact, that the Irish Shanty shut down last year. Yes, there is a spelling change in there: The restaurant changed hands June 1, 2018, according to this article in the Postville Herald, and the new owner modified the name. He lasted precisely 12 months.
The restaurant business is low-margin, fickle and merciless. Had the Shanti/Shanty still been going, the plague stood a good chance of crushing it anyway.
The DOT has an online meeting for a small project on US 169: “installation of traffic signals at the I-80 ramp terminals along with turn lanes.” This is on the north side of the town of De Soto, and based on a quick look, it appears that these are the first stoplights in town.
The turn lane, as seen on the PDF, is mostly about southbound 169 (from Adel) to westbound 80. That would also be the US 6 traffic movement.
Pavement markings and cleanup on IA 58 at the Viking Road interchange in Cedar Falls were to be done earlier this week, a DOT press release says. I was a skeptic that it could be done, even when they said it would be a tight SPUI. I was wrong.
Semi-relatedly, in the northeast corner, the “Doughy Joey’s Peetza Joynt” restaurant, is going to be torn down for a Dupaco Credit Union building. This location opened in 2010 and then became the only site after the downtown Waterloo location closed in 2014, according to the Waterloo Courier. The Courier in April was unable to ascertain the future of the business.
The obvious and inevitable, again. It didn’t help that North Tama softball forfeited the rest of the season less than 36 hours earlier after “potential indirect exposure” to COVID-19.
The Winding Stairs Festival Committee hearts couldn’t be more full due to the outpouring support from our incredible community. The decision to cancel the Winding Stairs Festival in 2020 was a tough one, but a necessary one due to several extenuating circumstances. We are comforted knowing our community is not being put in harms way with COVID-19. We look forward to bringing you a better than ever 2021 Winding Stairs Festival. This SUCKS!
At this point, we have to be looking to find an event that will be willing to be the first to resume … if there are any left this year.
I have in the past rambled about my late 2009 desktop iMac and how I was going to ride it until it died.
Well, at 11:53 PM on June 15, it did. Specifically, the hard drive woke from sleep but the monitor did not. Backups are important, kids.
Since then, I’ve been moderately flailing around trying to figure out how to do things I did every day. This involved buying my first HDTV and my first powered USB hub since 2000 (!). A raft of applications I routinely used are inaccessible* and a handful more do work on the MacBook Pro, but can go no further OS-wise. The iPod will never be synced again, and yes, I still have an iPod and will lovingly cuddle it as long as I can.
Then less than two weeks later I whanged my Fitbit against the car and broke the screen. When it rains it pours.
Traditions are still no match for the plague. The latest victims: Pufferbilly Days in Boone and the Knoxville Nationals. But it’s not just the big stuff.
Let’s look just in southern Benton County in the first half of 2018:
That’s a lot of pancakes. But it’s also a lot of money. That’s money for either support of the entity putting it on or for some local group that may be reliant on it. “Social capital” has been eroding for decades, and having community-building events forcibly interrupted will have consequences.
Have you heard how the Sioux Rapids Boosters slickered the smart guys up at Spencer? Well here is the tale.
Sioux Rapids sent a bunch of boosters out in cars to advertise the Fourth of July celebration. Spencer merchants made a bet with them that when they visited the city, no matter what day or time they would not find enough parking space in the city for all their cars (meaning that the town was so busy that parking space was always all filled).
Well the day the boosters started for Spencer some renegade telephoned to Spencer and tipped them off that they were coming. Every Spencer man that owned a car beat it home, drove his machine downtown and parked it and by the time the boosters from Sioux Rapids arrived, Main street was lined on both sides with cars parked at the curb.
Not to be outdone, the Sioux Rapids men made a straight line of their twenty or thirty cars, down the middle of Main street and they extended from the end of the Little Sioux bridge to the Milwaukee depot. And they left them parked there all the time they were in Spencer too. We’ll claim that Sioux Rapids won the bet.
— Storm Lake Register, July 16, 1920 (paragraph breaks added)
Langland Lands Powerful Blows
(Ames Tri-Weekly Tribune, February 19, 1919)
Ole Langland, editor of the Cambridge Leader, takes some awful wallops at Ames people for wanting the Jefferson highway to pass through Ames in place of making the zig-zag through the hills and curves.
There is just no use in Ole getting all peeved up over the matter. He says the people along the Cambridge route have done all that has been asked of them. That they have cut down dangerous hills, filled ditches, etc. It is perfectly right for the good old fiddler to see that his end of the county is kept in apple pie order, and we do not blame him for boosting away that the Jefferson highway should come his way.
But shucks, what’s the use of wasting good print paper and real ink on the subject as far as Ole is concerned. The improved highway as it comes from Cambridge will make a good feeder to the Jefferson highway as it connects with them at Nevada after passing through Ames.
Ole is candid in his article in speaking of the hills, the curves, etc. that lead from Ankeny and that candidness merely spells that the route is very undesirable. Ole says the stretch of road between Canada and New Orleans is via the route leading through Cambridge and the best in the world. But somebody told Ole that was so and that is as far as he knows about it.
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When the primary road system was established soon afterward, IA 1 went from Ankeny to Nevada via Huxley and Ames instead of Elkhart and Cambridge. The official route of the Jefferson Highway changed to the same in 1921.
Please stand by?
