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My advice: Soda pop and ice cream

How much pop did you drink when you were a kid? For many of my generation the amount consumed was low… very low. The topic came up over lunch with a cousin and her husband recently. In my parental home we never had pop. On a rare occasion when he went to Everett Thompson’s DX gas station on Saturday night to fill the car with gas and took us four boys along, our father bought us each a bottle of pop IF we behaved. That’s why it was a rare occasion. My wife said they never had pop at her home. My cousin said she and her brother would each get a can of pop with their Sunday night ...

Our State Fair is a great state fair

It's the time of year that we Iowans do our annual celebrating at local community celebrations, festivals, block parties and county fairs. And we're now about in the middle of the queen of them all: the Iowa state fair. It is quite the phenomenon, this traditional celebration of our state. Since we live this close to the state fairgrounds, I suppose almost everyone in our area has attended the state fair at least once. For many of us, going to the state fair is an annual ritual. Although I did go to the fair for a day last year, before that it had been five or six years since I ...

Explosive largemouth

It was almost a year ago last summer that I got to spend a day on the water chasing largemouth bass with Mike Frisch. Some, maybe much of the time, when we think about late summer fishing for largemouth we think weedlines and crankbaits or jigworms. However, throwing artificial frogs in ...

A slow drive through the Coyote State

Until my family moved to Sioux City in 1974 I had never set foot in the state of South Dakota. I knew a few things about the state as a number of East Frisian (my ethnicity) immigrants had moved there in the 19th century. My grandparents and others of their generation would talk about going to “Sud Dakot,” their Low German name for the state. In Sioux City, just across the Big Sioux River, South Dakota is a part of the daily newspaper and television news which was always a mix of news from Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. I was invited to lecture several times at the University of ...

Celebrating cats on their special day

In case you aren’t aware, in just a few days we can all celebrate International Cat Day. Thursday is our chance for a full 24 hours of recognition of one of humanity’s oldest and most beloved pets. Even so, it wasn’t until 2002 that the International Fund for Animal Welfare joined other animal welfare groups to celebrate the most popular pet on the planet. I know there are many dog lovers (I’ve owned dogs) who dispute the popularity of cats, but the numbers don’t lie. I read that there’s an estimated 500 million cats out there living their good life, whether that’s ...

Weed Whackers and Window Cleaner

As part of my work, I visit a lot of small towns around the nation and teach them practical steps to a brighter future. I visited Roscommon County, Michigan and toured a few empty buildings.  On one corner, a major intersection into town, there was an empty building on each corner.  We talked about building possibility, working with the county and the town and hosting a tour of empty buildings like we did in Webster City, Iowa. Next to one of the buildings that needed to be torn down was an old restaurant, still in operation.  There was an old 1950’s neon sign that lit up and ...