The pandemic has claimed Cronk’s Cafe.
The Denison restaurant started in 1929, the WHO-TV story says. That would mean it opened right when US 30 was paved in Crawford County. The cafe is located where the north-south route intersected 30 at the time.
The big dining room at Cronk’s was the site of the closing banquet for the Lincoln Highway convention in 2017.
Through a photo with a Gazette article about two Vinton-Shellsburg seniors who are Certified Nursing Assistants currently in New Jersey, I found out something completely unrelated: No one’s writing for the Traer Star-Clipper right now.
Two years and two months ago, the TSC building in Traer was abandoned and all newspaper functions were relocated to Tama. At that time, C.J. Eilers (who graduated from ISU in 2014) was named “editor” for both the TSC and the Dysart Reporter.
It turns out he has moved east, where he is now county editor for Vinton Newspapers. His introduction column there is from Feb. 9, and the last Traer-specific news articles on the TSC website are dated Feb. 10. Since then, the TSC has been running press releases and countywide news — but that might be hard to notice with the significant lack of events to cover the past two months.
November 27, 2002: The King Tower Cafe on the east edge of Tama.
The Indian head sign/icon/logo outside the King Tower Cafe is being restored. The Tama-Toledo News website reports that Berleen Wobeter is finishing her work this month. You can kind of see the neon on the sign in the picture above, but that is not part of the restoration.
“It was an elaborate sign for its day, with the various colored tubes and an electric transformer for each,” said a 1991 story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette about lighting up the neon on that sign. The story said it was put up around 1950, which would be the right time period for the convergence of roadside cafe, neon and Indian imagery exemplified here.
The King Tower is a part of Tama County/Iowa/Lincoln Highway history, with a strange convergence: It opened the same week in October 1937 that the Belle Plaine cutoff of US 30 opened.
December 12, 2005: South end of IA 144 on the south side of Perry.
According to a story this week from the Perry Chief, Perry is spending $1 million to resurface 60 blocks in town. The last sentence adds another detail: First Avenue is going to be converted to three lanes. IA 144 is First Avenue in Perry. The DOT has been pushing three-laning, and while some cities have fought back, others have agreed to the change.
WHO-TV’s “Iowa Madness” bracket, a matchup of the top 32 moments by Iowans or Iowa teams in sports history, finished last week.
Dan Gable, a wrestler with deep ties to both Iowa State and Iowa, won the tournament for his 1972 gold medal path in the Olympics.
The full, completed bracket is here (PDF). The three other finalists were Kurt Warner, Nile Kinnick, and Shawn Johnson, and that’s not a bad Iowa sports Mount Rushmore (though I would swap Jack Trice for Johnson).
Side note: If I have to hear about the 1985 Iowa-Michigan game again, where the #1 Hawkeyes (a place Iowa State has never been) won by a last-second field goal (something that Iowa State has been unable to do so many times), it will be too soon.
I’m doing a bit of house-cleaning/bug-squashing on my end, and looking for places to add photos that were never uploaded. So far, the most embarrassing issue is that I appear to have duplicated my work on photos from October 2014. That required integrating one folder into two others, and recoding relevant pages.
But, as any programmer knows, squashing bugs often has a side effect of creating new ones. This is especially true when the previous plan has kludges. (I can keep tweaking code when I make new pages, I can break a whole bunch of image links and spend weeks fixing them, or I can smack my 2003 self.) Sometimes something may be nested in a folder that doesn’t show a recent modification date. Thus, if you come across a bad image link, do not hesitate to notify me!
In total, I’ve touched 37 pages to some degree or another. Some were as insignificant as making sure each photo had a date credit. Others were rerouting image links to slightly more organized folders. Here are some of the more substantial ones:
I also noticed that my cropping and sizing has been larger as of, oh, the past three years. It’s not too bad except when a photo from 2003 is being directly compared to a photo from 2018. Live with it? Do ’em all over? Probably the former.
About a month ago, after *gestures omnidirectionally* had really begun to sink in, I noticed that some of the “Jeopardy!” episodes I recorded seemed familiar.
You’d think someone who routinely records “Jeopardy!” would be faster on the uptake, but it took me until this week to figure it out, mostly because the TitanTV schedule hadn’t figured it out either. Because the beginning of the 4 o’clock hour is routinely pre-empted for county health officials’ press conferences, KWWL has switched the new and repeat airtimes for episodes. Currently, new episodes are airing at 3.
The current episodes may have been the ones filmed without audiences, before production stopped altogether. Even though there’s still applause when one would expect, it sounded to me like the contestants’ voices were ringing out on an empty soundstage.
“Jeopardy!” without an audience is one thing. “The Price Is Right” literally can’t be done without one, and as such is in danger of becoming an artifact of the Before Times.
June 22, 2012: The kind of thing at these kinds of things.
From the Gladbrook Corn Carnival website:
The Corn Carnival Corporation Board has made a tough decision based on what we believe to protect our community members, visitors, sponsors, and all who make our annual celebration a success, that we cancel our 2020 Corn Carnival 4-day celebration for June 18-21. Please know that the decision was a difficult one to make for everyone but we also know it is in everyone’s best interest due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
If we can’t have a few hundred people milling around a food line and a bingo tent, be afraid. Be very afraid.
UPDATE 6/13/22: There was a Corn Carnival parade in 2020. It was the only thing that happened that year, but has been deemed sufficient enough to continue the streak.
October 13, 2006: I-80 heading into Illinois, as seen on the I-80 stateline page. Comparatively, I-80 at the Indiana state line is five lanes each way.
After the I-74 bridge is complete in the Quad Cities, the Iowa and Illinois DOTs will be starting to look at I-80.
The I-80 corridor between I-88 and US 61 is perhaps surprisingly undeveloped. At the same time, it probably should’ve been six-laned at least a decade ago. The current bridge has no shoulders and turned 50 years old in 2016, and is going to be around for at least 10 years more even if this project proceeds swiftly.
A video about the “Planning and Environmental Linkage” study is available at the website created for this project. Public comments are being taken through May 6.
The coronavirus is starting to wipe out small-town summer festivals.
KCHA Radio reported last week that New Hampton’s summer celebration, Heartland Days, scheduled for June 12-13, will not be held.
I’m posting this because it is the first festival of its type I’ve seen a notice about. Is there anyone keeping track of these? The weekend after that is Gladbrook’s Corn Carnival…
Pre-post update: “Laura Days” at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Park & Museum in Burr Oak (June 27-28) isn’t happening.
Post-post update: Black Dirt Days in Conrad, also June 12-13.
