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Opinion

Different strokes for different folks

Local Columns

Recently I ran into a childhood friend who is a lifelong (and successful) farmer. “How’s life in the big city?” he asked, referring to my home in the Des Moines suburbs. I get this query occasionally from rural friends, some of whom cannot imagine living in the city or suburbs. ...

Four dead in Ohio

Local Columns

The year I was a junior in high school, four college students were shot on a campus in Ohio. The setting was Kent State, a public university. On May 4, 1970, a rally protesting the expansion of the United States’ involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia went sideways; 28 National Guard ...

Leadership is listening. Listening is empathy.

Local Columns

As I have stepped into this role of leadership, I have come to realize that I quite literally had no idea what I was getting myself into. What I thought the position was when I declared my candidacy to now is a complete 180 turn. No one really knows what goes into a respective position until ...

Words we no longer use

Local Columns

“Jeepers Creepers, where’d ya get those peepers?” Now there’s a phrase you probably haven’t heard for a while. Perhaps you’ve never heard it. The line is from a song recorded by Louis Armstrong in the late 1930s. At the time of the recording, the word jeepers was quite common but ...

The value of remembering

Local Columns

Reflections on the 9/11 tragedies are vivid in most of my friends' and families' memories. It might be hard to understand if you did not live through it, but it haunts most of us. My parents compared it to the way they felt when Pearl Harbor was bombed during World War II. It was ...