In the late fall of 1979, the Iowa Department of Transportation learned that there is nothing simple about installing a 150-foot ditch.

It happened in Highview.

Karen Strunk didn’t mind losing a little business this fall to road construction. She didn’t even raise her voice when traffic was temporarily detoured through her parking lot. But last Monday, upon returning home from a short trip, Karen Strunk found what she had feared — a freshly dug ditch in front of her cafe in Highview — she had finally had enough.

The Department of Transportation had informed her the ditch was going in, despite her requests for different measures, saying it was for “safety” reasons.

“I asked them to put up a guard rail,” related the owner and operator of Karen’s Cafe. “They said it would be too dangerous.”

So Karen Strunk sat down in her cafe and wrote an open forum letter to the Daily Freeman-Journal, chronicling the efforts of the ditch’s first unsuspecting victim.

“Tonight I am watching a truck driver trying to get out of the ditch the state dug in front of my place and the park. It was for his safety that they put the ditch there, even if his truck is about on its side. Two other trucks have stopped now and are trying to pull it out to keep from

having a wrecker bill to pay.”

Outside of the safety factor involved in the ditch-digging incident, Mrs. Strunk says this recent move on the part of the DOT may ultimately put her out of business.

“I have spent the day watching most of my customers go by because it is too hard for them to try and get in and out of my place now, and,” she adds with a note of bitterness, “I have no room for them to park.”

The cafe relies on the farmer’s trade in the summertime, but it is in the approaching winter when her mainstay becomes the over-the-road trucker. She says the United Cooperative across the road did let her and her husband, Sam, use a small part of its property, adjacent to the cafe, for a drive and the Strunk’s backyard has been converted to a parking area, but funds are quickly running out.

“I have taken care of the family,” she answers when asked if the business was paying for itself. The little business, purchased just two years ago this February, had been “a rundown mess” when bought, but her husband had needed a building for his business, Sam’s Refrigeration-Diesel and Auto Repair, housed in a building at the back of the cafe and so, the little establishment was bought with the help of a loan from a local farmer.

It took all their savings.

There was genuine concern that the little diner that seated 31, usually open from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., would succumb to the engineering decree by the DOT.

The ditch, according to Karen Strunk, had reduced her average morning till from $40 or $50 to only $7.76 on the day I was there.

They went to a lawyer and received sympathy.

“Your only thing to stand on is the people,” he told the Strunks.

So they did.

Petitions were circulated.

Farmers and workers at the Co-op elevator, who ate their dinners at the little cafe, were overhead grousing about the ditch. One trucker dropped two wheels into it on the east side one day and “came in screaming.”

Not long after that, a member of the DOT staff visited with Sam Strunk and told him that the 150-foot ditch, which created two driveways where before there existed one large entryway, would be reduced by 15 feet in order to make the west driveway more accessible for his business.

He told the Daily Freeman-Journal that the reason the ditch had been cut in the first place was to control the access onto the highway.

”Common sense should be governing policy.” It was a woman’s voice from the crowd that had gathered a week or so later to confront the DOT at Karen’s Cafe.

The recipient of the comment was Don Anderson, district engineer for the Department of

Transportation. Anderson and the resident construction engineer, Tom Cackler,

were surprised when they were greeted by about 25 patrons. The two had come to the site reportedly to look over work that had been done there recently and review its effects. What they found was a crowd of concerned citizens rallying for what they felt was a worthy cause — the removal of the ditch.

The ditch controversy wouldn’t die.

The problem was created when the intersection at Highview, which then joined highways 20 and 17, was changed from a Y intersection to a T. At that time, the DOT also “regraded the area,” Anderson told the Strunks. “In regrading we had to correct the access.”

He added later: “They’re part of an administrative code.”

That code, it was clear, did not interest the patrons of Karen’s Cafe.

“The access, I think, you’ve cut too small for her business,” commented a Highview area businessman, Grant Anderson.

Don Anderson replied: “I realize you all have sympathy for Karen and her husband — I do.”

“No,” a woman in the cafe — Marian Halliday — said. “We’re selfish — we all want it for our own selfish reasons.” She explained that the little cafe

had been convenient for area farmers as well as truckers over the

past years, though not always under the Strunk’s ownership. Beside the cafe, a small road-side

rest area was also separated from the highway by a similar “safety” ditch. These ditches, many claimed, were going to cause more accidents, they felt, than prevent them.

“We appreciate you here to hear us,” an unnamed man told Anderson, “but we’d really like you to fill the ditch.”

“We can’t do that,” was Anderson’s response.

It was a destructive impasse.

“They (truckers) honk their way by,” Karen Strunk said back then, sighing. She knew a honk and a wave wouldn’t pay the bills.

The thing is, one day the DOT did fill that ditch.

Jane Curtis is interim editor of the Daily Freeman-Journal. She is a 2024 Iowa Newspaper Association Master Columnist.