Tag: autobiography

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Writing

Newspaper Writing

An autumn morning.

Oct. 17 was an anniversary of sorts.

My first freelance article appeared in the Iowa City Press Citizen Oct. 17, 2014. In the first year I wrote 76 articles for the newspaper, which when added to my previous work for the Solon Economist and North Liberty Leader brought the total to 100 before moving on to other writing. At least I think that’s how it went.

Freelancing for a newspaper paid a flat fee per article published. The income was dependable, if low at $50 each.

The best part of newspaper work was meeting so many people in the community. It opened a window to the work and attitudes of young people and entrepreneurs. I also got chased away from a splash pad by someone because I “looked suspicious.”

Some of my favorites include Trevor Owen, who gave up culinary school to cook as he knew how and opened a restaurant in Wellman; interviewing local icon Willard Boyd; interviewing Scott Koepke about his visit to the White House garden; the bridal shop at Iowa River Landing; interviewing Ellen Buchanan; and learning about Iowa’s child mental health problems from Tammy Nyden. It’s hard to pick a favorite because every one of them was engaging at some level.

I’ve taken to writing letters and opinion pieces in newspapers and for the most part get published. There is no pay for that. I don’t have much interest in writing for money, although I created a Patreon account, just in case I lose the ability to pay for this website.

I kept paper copies of most of the printed articles. The differing sizes of the clippings makes them difficult to store. I suppose I’ll transcribe some of them into digital format and include the most significant ones in an appendix to my autobiography.

At least I had the opportunity to write for newspapers. I wouldn’t call sitting through school board and city council meetings fun, exactly. But it is a common experience I’m glad to share with others that had it.

Categories
Writing

Postcards from Iowa #9

“In All That Is Good, Iowa Affords the Best”

Reverse side: “In All That Is Good, Iowa Affords the Best.” Iowa was admitted as a state Dec. 28, 1846. The Capitol was built 1873-1886 at a cost of $3,296,256. The domes are plated with 22-carat gold. The mural “Westward” hangs at the head of the grand stairway. “Iowa, Her Affections Like The Rivers Of Her Borders, Flow To An Inseparable Union”

We don’t pick the circumstances of our birth. Because life has been tolerable in Iowa I stayed. I had experiences elsewhere: in the military which took me to South Carolina, Georgia and Germany, and a work transfer to Indiana. Both times I returned to my home state. If I had found a place more suitable for living I would have moved there. A person gets used to what they know.

I graduated from the University of Iowa twice yet I don’t consider myself to be a “Hawkeye,” the nickname for graduates. I don’t even follow the sports teams despite large sums of money the state invests in them. I don’t farm or work for someone any longer. As a pensioner I could live anywhere. So far I continue to choose Iowa.

It is not bad living here… yet. Despite growing coarseness in society, where personalities rage at one another, denigrate liberals and intellectuals, and do dumb things, I’m still here. We are a place where Qanon members and dark money lobbyists are close to the governor while I am not. The postcard is not clear about “all that is bad” yet we have plenty of that in Iowa. At the point where there is concern for personal safety I might leave. Where would I go? To a place where my pension dollars would stretch further. Perhaps outside the United States.

The designer of this card was a publicist and an optimist. I recognize the objects on the front side and have been in the state capitol and historical building many times. The idea we are an “inseparable union” is ridiculous in 2021. It would be fitting to mention the two bordering, polluted rivers flow to the Gulf of Mexico where they contribute to a large dead zone. Hardly stuff to be used in promoting the state. The card is undated but is a product of the 20th Century. We are so past that now.

We make the best lives we can. We are handicapped by education, social status and physical attributes. Those handicaps can be overcome. In Iowa I’ve always been able to find work enough to own a house and pay the bills. Emblematic of our financial circumstances is I drive a 2002 automobile. It is low mileage and serves basic transportation needs. I wouldn’t want to make a trip to New Jersey in it.

There is a migration of young people leaving the state. Why would they stay? Drawn to large cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, they also move to Colorado where Denver has become a gathering place for young professional people. Florida used to be a destination until Governor Ron DeSantis came along. Now there is an ongoing exodus from Florida as well. Iowa’s governor seems resolved to follow DeSantis’ lead. It’s another reason young people leave the state.

I like this postcard and wish the slogans were true. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Categories
Writing

Postcards From Iowa #8

Reverse side: Abraham Lincoln from New Salem. This bronze statue by Avard Fairbanks was given to the State of Illinois by the Sons of Utah Pioneers in 1954. It is located at the top of the hill in New Salem State Park near the entrance to the village. Published by Color-View, Inc., 208 N. Main St., Rockford, Ill. Postmarked May 17, 1962 in Rochelle, Ill. with a note from Father.

I grew up in Davenport, Iowa. Iowa is not the land of Lincoln. That is across the Mississippi River in Illinois.

Father sent this postcard from Rochelle, Ill. where he presumably attended a meeting for the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America. I don’t recall. I was ten years old. The message on the back was, “I’ll be home before the card gets there so I’m saying goodbye to Rochelle.”

We stopped by Father’s step-mother’s place in Rock Island one time. She wasn’t home. Gladys was grandfather’s second wife after Ina Elizabeth died young of food poisoning. Grandfather died of complications from surgery. According to her obituary, Gladys owned and operated Deaton’s Diner for 35 years. She kept the family name, adding two additional husbands by hyphenation after grandfather died. She told me, in the only letter I have from her, that the marriage into the Deaton family was a business proposition. All three of her husbands are buried next to her in a Rock Island Cemetery we visited decades ago. The cemetery sexton knew “Mrs. Deaton” well.

In high school, we took the bus downtown then walked across the Centennial Bridge to Rock Island where a movie theater was screening a serialized story of The Batman made by Columbia Pictures in 1943. After the television program debuted in 1966, I was all about the Batman. All 15 serial episodes were screened one after another. It was a long walk to see them, but we felt it important to include the serial in our Batman fandom.

On my trip back to Iowa from military service I stopped and stayed with friends in Springfield, Ill. for a couple of days. During that trip we visited Lincoln’s tomb and his house, which had been opened to the public. I recall a number of book shops displaying various Lincoln books in street-facing windows. Many words have been written about the 16th president. He felt more real to me after that visit.

I spent the most time in Illinois when we lived in Indiana. Work took me all over. I got to know Chicago and the suburbs, as well as most other parts of the state. I went anywhere with an opportunity to recruit truck drivers.

I’m lucky to have this postcard. It’s one of the few notes Father sent me. It could easily have disappeared with my comic book and baseball card collections left in Mother’s attic when I moved from home in 1970 to attend college. I don’t think of Father much these days. When I do, it’s comforting to have things I know he touched as well. It is part of making a life in the time of the coronavirus.

Categories
Writing

Lookout Park Barricaded

Riverview Terrace Park, Davenport, Iowa postcard. Provenance unknown.

I played at Lookout Park, which was within walking distance of home, before I attended school. The main features are the view of the Mississippi River depicted in this postcard, a long, steep hill in front of the benches, and a stairway from the bottom to the top.

I liked to take a cardboard box up the stairs and then slide down the grassy hill with neighborhood children. After the slide, we would mount the stairs to the benches, take a rest, and then slide down again. It seemed like endless hours of fun in a time when there were few responsibilities.

The city purchased the property in 1894, then known as Lookout Park, and changed the name to Riverview Terrace around 1900. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Despite the official name, we called it Lookout Park.

Tom Barton of the Quad City Times reported the park had been closed by the city with concrete barricades placed so vehicles can’t get in or out. I knew the neighborhood was in decline, yet it’s sad to think of the after hours drinking, littering, prostitution and drug dealing he reported going on in a place with more positive memories.

“This has been an ongoing problem that ebbs and flows, and it began to flow again” this summer, said Ward 3 Alderwoman Marion Meginnis, who represents the area. “The design (of the park) has made it an attractive nuisance.”

Though closed to vehicles, the three-acre site remains open to the public, Meginnis stressed in the article, and is meant as a temporary measure until city staff can decide how best to address and discourage crime.

Sometime we don’t want to know what is happening in the old neighborhoods. At the same time, bad news triggers fond memories. There are days I wish I could forget about everything and slide downhill like we did. Being carefree is a part of youth we didn’t appreciate as we lived it. There is no going back, just remembering.

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Writing

Attending State University

When I arrived at the University of Iowa campus in fall 1970, the university president was Willard Boyd who officed in Old Capitol. The previous term, the president’s office had been occupied by protesters and the academic year ended abruptly. During my freshman year, Boyd held meetings with students and I attended one in Quadrangle dormitory where I lived. He seemed approachable and that surprised me. It proved to be an enduring character trait.

I last spoke to Boyd for an article I wrote for the Iowa City Press Citizen on Oct. 22, 2014. He was much as I remembered him. Following is the piece about the anniversary of the legal name of the State University of Iowa.

50th Anniversary of UI name change — or not

Fifty years ago today, the university in town decided to keep its legal name, “State University of Iowa,” but replaced it with the familiar nickname now in everyday usage. It was not the “Hawkeyes.”

Willard “Sandy” Boyd, currently Rawlings/Miller professor of law and president emeritus, was university provost at the time.

“Virgil Hancher (university president from 1940 until 1964) was a lawyer and said, ‘It is named in the constitution, therefore it shall be ever thus,’ ” Boyd explained. “Howard Bowen (who succeeded Hancher as president) said he ‘wasn’t a lawyer, so we’ll leave it,’ suggesting a nickname, ‘University of Iowa.’ ”

On Oct. 22, 1964, the Iowa state Board of Regents passed a resolution approving the usage of “University of Iowa” to describe the constitutionally named State University of Iowa, keeping the original name for legal purposes.

“I believe the change was intended to reduce confusion between Iowa and Iowa State,” said Mark Schantz, who received his bachelor’s degree from Iowa in 1963 and retired from the College of Law in 2013.

There is less confusion and almost no controversy now, but it wasn’t always so.

Early on, university officials attempted to change the naming convention for the State University of Iowa in practical usage.

In a letter dated Jan. 18, 1918 (available in the University of Iowa Special Collections), C.H. Weller, the university editor, requested permission from University President Walter Jessup to use “University of Iowa” on printed invitations.

“I have been trying for several years to accustom people to the name ‘University of Iowa,’ in harmony with the nomenclature of practically all other great state universities,” he wrote. “The legal name, of course, is ‘State University of Iowa’ (not ‘The State University of Iowa’), but the general use of a shorter term in informal usage is nothing unusual.”

In a Nov. 21, 1963, editorial, the Press-Citizen wrote, “The problem in the names of Iowa’s three state-supported institutions of higher education is that there is a law — the one that says the State University of Iowa is at Iowa City, Iowa State University is at Ames and the State College of Iowa is at Cedar Falls. This may be clear to Iowans, although it’s doubtful, but the plethora of ‘states,’ ‘Iowas’ and ‘universities’ seems to be just too much for those who don’t deal with it frequently.”

The newspaper called for the name to be changed to the University of Iowa.

Has the confusion continued?

The answer is yes, according to University Archivist David McCartney.

“It’s correct to say that our esteemed institution has always been named the State University of Iowa,” he wrote in a December 2010 article for the University of Iowa Spectator. “It’s complicated, as they say. To this day, people still occasionally (and understandably) confuse the names of Iowa’s public universities.”

That’s something today’s Hawkeyes, Cyclones and Panthers will be certain to clarify.

~ First published by the Iowa City Press Citizen on Oct. 21, 2014

Categories
Living in Society Writing

Postcards from Iowa #7

The Pine Barn Inn, Danville, Pennsylvania

Reverse side: The Pine Barn Inn — Danville, PA 17821 As Featured in ‘Back Roads and Country Inns’ Photo by C.G. Wagner, Jr.

I stayed at The Pine Barn Inn while director of maintenance for a large transportation and logistics company. For many years we bought Fruehauf Trailers built in Fort Madison, Iowa. I was in Danville to evaluate a Strick Corporation trailer manufacturing plant as prelude to picking a new vendor. By 1993 the writing was on the wall that Fruehauf was going out of business.

A leveraged buyout in 1986 by the company’s management left Fruehauf burdened with debt, and in 1989 the company was broken up and sold, though one segment, the truck trailer unit, retained the name Fruehauf Trailer Corporation. That corporation declared bankruptcy in 1996 and was sold to Wabash National the next year.

Fruehauf Trailer Corporation Wikipedia.

While many in the truckload segment of the transportation business were buying Wabash National plate trailers, the owner of our privately held company was apparently not a fan. We chose Strick for a non-Freuhauf plate trailer build over others I evaluated.

I traveled a lot during my transportation and logistics career. It came to a point where I would wake on an airplane and not know where I was or where I was going. The job had me traveling to both coasts and from Florida to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I had a heavy carbon footprint in those days.

When I supervised a driver recruiting operation I had offices in Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Missouri. We even did driver recruiting in Astoria, New York near LaGuardia Airport. I met people from everywhere and spent a lot of time in transit.

I don’t remember much about The Pine Barn Inn, except it was clean and met my personal needs. That’s what I wanted during business trips. Today I hope most of my traveling is finished. At least I still have this postcard.

Categories
Writing

Postcards from Iowa #6

Text on the postcard: Stratford, Ontario, Canada The Festival Theatre viewed from across the Avon River is one of three theatres offering an excellent selection of theatrical performances during the Stratford Festival (May to November). Photo Credit: Robert B. Hicks

When our daughter was in middle school we began taking family vacations. They persisted through the summer between junior and senior year in high school.

It began with a week-long trip to Orlando, Florida where we stayed in a motel and made day trips to theme parks, including Walt Disney World, Universal Studios and Sea World. It was our first air travel together. For me, vacationing was participation in a great American adventure. It had one foot standing on consumerism and the other on a job that consumed much of my life. While we had only a brief sampling of what Orlando has to offer that first year, it was a positive experience. We made summer vacations annual.

Next was a trip to Colorado where we visited friends and did some mountain sight seeing. We drove among the 14,000-foot peaks and spent the rest of the time visiting people. After that, it was trips to Stratford, Ontario for the Stratford Festival of plays, and everything around them. I don’t recall how many plays we saw but our daughter insisted on meeting the actors to get the program autographed after each one. Vacations in Stratford became something else.

I didn’t realize it then, yet it became clear later, vacations were a crucible for making a life from the raw materials of society. They transitioned us through releasing our child to college and then to the greater challenges of living a creative life. Upon reflection, there are not many creative communities like the one in Stratford. We were fortunate to have had those trips.

It’s hard to say whether we will return to Stratford as a family, or take any kind of vacation. We will always have those summers to remember.

Categories
Living in Society

Living with Digital Images

Stones viewed through water.

Among things that have become harder to manage in the digital age are images. It is easy to take photographs with my Samsung mobile device today. Because it’s so easy, and has been for a while, the quantity of images on file is huge.

Every photograph is not important. Most are geared toward editing and posting on line in one of my social platforms, including WordPress. It is unclear what I should keep longer term. The cheap availability of storage suggests there is no need to sort through and delete some of them. While that may be the default process, I want change as I transfer files to my new CPU.

In August I captured 186 images, which is a typical monthly amount. Most of them are photos of garden produce, cooking, books, artwork, and things that happened or places I went. The best solution to reducing the quantity of files is to delete originals after cropping them for posting. Another is decide on the story a series is to tell. For example, I have 12 images related to donating my 1997 Subaru to Iowa Public Radio. They could be reduced to four. The best time to do this is immediately after I download them from my mobile device.

As I transfer thousands of images I plan to go through them all. To get this done I put an item on my daily outline, “work on file transfer.” I don’t know how long it will take yet I’ll work until it is done, a bit each day.

I don’t know the provenance of many of my photos, especially those with political subjects. In 2006-2008 I was getting used to a digital camera as my main image capturing technology. I felt little restraint about downloading photos by others when my own at a specific event were sub-par. I work harder to give credit today, but some of the older digital images are fond, and I have little idea who made them. I try to avoid using them outside my computer.

A main use of the files is in story telling. Before I deleted my Flickr account it was a great platform for story telling. The problem is how to translate those types of online stories into something more meaningful inside our home. When Yahoo had the problem with personal information security, I killed all the related accounts and downloaded the text from the stories on Flickr. It’s not the same.

Photos are a significant part of my autobiographical research. While ten years later I don’t care what I had for dinner on a given Sunday, those photos play a role in daily life, one that should be explored and developed for the story. A few will go into the final book yet the rest are best stored by editing, printing them out, and placing in an album. That’s as big a project as working through the transfer. The file transfer project will, in part, be designed to set up an album-making project for later.

There is no denying quality varied a lot over the more than 50 years I’ve been taking photographs. Sometimes a blurry image is all one has and it must be used for the album or story to make a point. I hope the formats .bmp, .jpg, .jpeg, .tiff, .png, and .tif persist yet there are no guarantees. The main issue going forward is there are a limited number of commercial outlets to print photos. We are tied to whatever those technologies are. It is too expensive to make our own prints on a home printer, except for on special occasions.

As I approach my seventieth birthday I think more about not leaving a large task of image sorting behind when I die. I may want to keep a couple of photos of tomatoes I grew, yet I don’t need a thousand. Likewise, if I can’t remember the name of a person in a photo, there is little reason to keep it. The recycling bin is already getting full.

I’ll be better off by giving this project some measure of thoughtful approach. Now that I’ve started, I hope to persevere until the work is done. The best part will be in actually completing the transfer so I can devote this time to something new. Wish me luck!

Categories
Writing

Outlining

On the state park trail.

I spent a fair amount of Tuesday revisiting the outline of my autobiography. It quickly came into perspective. There will be multiple sections with each drawing on different parts of my life story.

After the dedication and introduction I currently see the following parts.

Part I: Background

It will begin with four historical pieces about Lincoln County, Minnesota; the area around LaSalle, Illinois; Wise County, Virginia; and Davenport, Iowa in 1951. I spent the most time last winter drafting these sections. They each need more work.

Part II: Main Narrative

Next will be a high level narrative of my life from birth until the present. In it I’ll cover the main stories on a time line, from my perspective. I’ll leave out personal information of people who are still living.

This part is subdivided into sections: 1. From earliest memories, moving to Madison Street, school, and my eleven-year residence at the American Foursquare in Northwest Davenport. 2. Begins with college, a trip to Europe in 1974, military service, moving to Iowa City, graduate school, and then marriage. 3. I begin what would become a career in transportation and logistics in 1984. I follow my career from the move to Cedar Rapids; to Merrillville, Indiana; and then back to Big Grove Township where we now live. 4. Next comes our daughter finishing grade and high school, going to college, and then moving from Iowa. 5. Finally, there is empty nest life, community engagement, my first retirement from transportation and logistics, continuing work until the coronavirus pandemic, and the post-work life in which I now find myself. The idea of these sections is to lay out the bare bones of how I spent my life. To research and get the story down.

Part III: Collected Writing

The last part of the autobiography will be a collection of my writing from letters to the editor beginning in 1974, and including resumes, poetry, published writing, journal writing, newspaper writing, and blog writing. The focus will be to reduce the quantity of written work to inform the narrative presented in the second section.

The clarity that came from spending time away from writing as I worked on the garden was a welcome surprise. The outline is not finished. A few days work remains and I’m ready to do it. After that it’s back to writing.

Categories
Writing

Toward Season’s End

Thistle near the state park trail.

Just like that! Temperatures are cooler. It has been in the mid-fifties overnight, with a daily high in the seventies. The shift toward season’s end is happening. Ready or not, here it comes.

This winter I’m again planning to devote significant time to my autobiography. I wrote good pages last winter and would like to move the narrative along. If I learned anything it’s that the task is monumental. Without organization, I’ll never finish.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m upgrading my computer CPU to a new one. As I do so, I’ve been going through countless files to see what is relevant to an autobiography. I printed a few things out. The more I look, the more files I find that can be permanently deleted. A person only has so much time to spend with old things that depart from the narrative that is to be preserved. Best to purge it now and get it done.

I resisted going through all the physical objects last winter. The boxes, albums, photographs, files, books, clothing and trunks are everywhere and need to be gleaned for relevant artifacts. Maybe I’ll spend time on that this year. If I do, the idea is to organize things chronologically instead of thematically. That mean busting up boxes and folders I once thought went together. As I extract and refine what I’ll use, there will be no going back. I’m okay with that. As I proceed with computer files I’m finding my organizational process was more a hodge-podge than orderly.

I stopped work on the autobiography mid February as my attention turned to the garden. If I repeat the cycle, I should be able to get a solid five or six months work done. The document on which I’d first like to make progress is called the “book tree.” It’s an outline of how I currently see the narrative progressing. There is a month or more work improving it. In the end it will make writing the narrative easier. Last winter I got addicted to word count. I need to let go of that for the moment and focus on what will be the story. That’s honest, journeyman work to which I look forward.

There are still things to do in the yard and garden. With the hot, humid weather I delayed until there is no more delaying. The grass is turning green and needs mowing. Before I do that I have to clear what became a weed patch upon which to place the clippings. I also have to pick a plot to plant garlic in four or five weeks. By the way, the garlic came in really good this year.

I don’t know how long the autobiography will take. What I expect is it will make life easier for whoever takes charge of my stuff when I’m gone, if for no other reason than that there will be less of it. I cling to the present life yet realize I need to let go. Upgrading my CPU is as good a metaphor as any for that.