Greetings from Waterloo, Iowa
Maiden column voyage for Columbus Sailor alum
As Edward R. Murrow said on the initial “See it Now” TV broadcast after a career in radio, this is like teaching an old dog a new trick.
But I’m not Murrow. In fact, given the credentials of folks participating in Iowa Writers Collaborative, I kind of feel like a minor league baseball player moving up two classes to the big time.
It also feels like the first time I stood on the high diving board at the Byrnes Park swimming pool in Waterloo as a kid. Can’t go back, too windy to stand up here forever. Might as well take the plunge.
Since leaving the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier in the spring of 2018 after nearly 34 years, and almost 40 years in journalism counting my earlier stints at the Ames Tribune and elsewhere, I went to an appropriate place for ancient artifact like me -- a museum.
I’ve been at the Grout Museum District for the past 4 ½ years, most recently as an oral historian, but also did some fundraising for the museum. I interview Iowa military veterans for the Grout’s Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum as well as individuals who were witnesses to or participants in local history for the adjoining Grout Museum of History & Science.
But I missed writing and kept my hand in it, freelancing for the Courier and other organizations and outlets, such as the IowaWatch.org. I also do a blog for the museum at groutmuseumdistrict.org.
I also found myself spending lot of time on Facebook humoring myself -- and it turns out, others -- with stories about my mom constantly whipping me at Scrabble. With impunity. And smack talk.
I even had a high school buddy from Arizona mail me a deck of cards and suggest I take up a different game.
Let’s put it this way: I was to Mom in Scrabble what the Washington Generals were to the Harlem Globetrotters. Or what district attorney Hamilton Burger was to Perry Mason in the old TV series.
I was asked during a talk at the Cedar Valley Rotary Club, with my mom in attendance, why I kept submitting myself to almost certain defeat.
Instinctively, I responded, “She makes REALLY good goulash.”
I was born and raised in Waterloo. I’m as “Waterloo” as “Waterloo” can be. My dad worked at John Deere and the Waterloo Street Department. After my folks split, my mom got a degree from Young Cosmetology College and converted our dining room into a beauty shop which she operated from 1970 to 2001. Yes, the frequent smell of permanent wave solution permeated a portion of my teen years – along with firm rap of Mom’s comb on the door between the kitchen and the beauty shop to get us younger kids to stop cutting up when she was working.
I was the middle child of five kids, in a family that produced a highway inspector, a manufacturing supervisor, a health care administrator and educator, a sociology professor -- and me, one of those scoundrel journalists.
I was raised Catholic and my dad also imparted an appreciation of our Irish heritage upon us. When I was very young, Dad would rock me and sing the Irish anthem “Wearin’ O’ the Green” along with “Home on the Range.”
And when we learned our prayers, at first I thought the Catholic Act Contrition began with “Oh my God I am PARTLY sorry…” instead of “heartly sorry.” And at age six I first thought our grade school was named “SECRET Heart” rather than “SACRED Heart.”
I graduated from Waterloo Columbus High School in 1975. I was cut from the baseball team but played in the band as I had in grade school – and took journalism and wrote a sports column for the school paper.
I continued on in journalism the summer after high school graduation. My sister-in-law knew the lifestyles editor of the Cedar Falls Record, a smaller sister paper to the Courier, and told me there was an opportunity write for them as a sports “stringer” or correspondent.
The first night, the sports editor sent me out to Ackley, about an hour’s drive west of Cedar Falls on rough old two-lane Highway 20, to cover a baseball game between Northern University High School from Cedar Falls and Ackley-Geneva.
Back in the Record newsroom, as I was agonizing over the first story I was ever to write on deadline after two hours’ round trip on the road, I looked up to see a young woman standing over my typewriter and smiling at me.
“Hi!” she said. I said “hi” back cautiously.
“Would you like to buy some candy?” she asked.
“Who for?” I said suspiciously.
“The Unification Church,” she said – whose members were colloquially known at the time as “the Moonies,” and known for their fervor, initiative and persistence. The editors informed her solicitations were not permitted in the newsroom.
Things got a little more predictable after that. I wrote for the Record through two years as an undergraduate English major at the University of Northern Iowa. UNI had great general education classes with many colorful teachers, but no journalism major. I transferred to Iowa State University and continued writing sports for the Ames Tribune, which would later become my first full-time employer. I was hired there the last term of my senior year at ISU in the spring of 1979.
I loved the Tribune, and Ames, and worked there five years until it was probably past time to spread my wings. With no full-time opportunities back home at the Courier, where I worked as a summer intern, I took a job with the Quad-City Times in Davenport, working in their Clinton bureau.
After a very active and sometimes wild four months, covering a quadruple-fatal industrial accident, a triple fatality auto crash, a very acrimonious primary election for county sheriff, a school closing and some very nasty small-town school board and city council meetings on the firings of a school superintendent and a police chief, the Courier called me home.
It was timely. Shortly before I left Ames, my dad had been diagnosed with lymphoma, in the lacrimal gland around his one good eye. After an initially optimistic prognosis, well, It was time for me to come home. I do believe some things happen for a reason.
That was in 1984. Now, after all those years and all that living in between – two kids, a divorce, the passing of both parents and two older brothers but a lot of great experiences, memories and love – here I am again, staring at a blank page, just like that 18-year-old nerdy kid in the Record newsroom 47 years ago.
And I don’t need any candy, but thank you; I’ve had a lot of sweetness in my life to offset the salty.
As the aging Bilbo Baggins said at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, “I think I’m quite ready for another adventure.”
Let’s see where the road leads.
Wonderful piece.
Welcome to you! Thanks for thr background. Favorite line: “Oh my God I am PARTLY sorry…” Same!