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The Elks Club is woven into our lives

Local Columns

I know Webster City is still on the radar of so many people whose lives intersected in this small, marvelous Iowa town. I know because I hear from them. Heck, we hear from them. Just last week, we heard from Debbie Long Hatz, whose father once managed the Elks Club before the membership became insolvent. She had returned for her 55th class reunion, a graduate who moved on and created a beautiful life, but whose memories are firmly rooted in a town that has hovered in the 8,000 population category for most of my lifetime. Her letter to the editor appeared on this page last ...

The number to call is 988.

Local Columns

We hear a lot these days about mental health, most often tied to news reports in which someone has ended up dead. But mental health isn’t a topic that should be limited to a post mortem discussion; it’s a very alive reality we must all face in one way or another, sometimes daily. A conversation with the living, a trained voice to defuse a crisis and therefore reduce the number of tragic outcomes, is now accessible through a new national crisis line that went live Saturday. The number to call is 9-8-8. Perhaps someone in your family struggles with depression, or post traumatic ...

Far too close to home

Local Columns

I guess I wonder what we are waiting for. Permission to be fed up? Permission to act? We watched, didn’t we? One after another, mass shootings took down innocent people — CHILDREN — at Sandy Hook, in Uvalde. We listened, didn’t we? To the attempts to soothe. To the attempts to convince us the victims were in the prayers of politicians who then failed to act. We waited, didn’t we? For something, anything, that would stop the killing of innocent people. We wondered, didn’t we, how our elected officials could go through a single day without moving towards a ...

A little exercise in paremiology

Local Columns

Proverbs — little statements of wisdom — fascinate me. Proverbs are cultural truth handed down from one generation to another over hundreds, even thousands, of years. There’s actually a body of study involving proverbs and it’s called paremiology. I’m not a paremiologist; I just enjoy discovering new proverbs and am fascinated by how the truth of proverbs transcends ethnic, national and cultural lines. A proverb from Africa, Scandinavia or Latin America, properly translated, conveys wisdom understood universally. Did your mother ever tell you to just be yourself? There are ...

‘I am going to keep asking questions’

Local Columns

Friday morning I woke early to a text from a close friend. Two women had been murdered Thursday night at Cornerstone Church in Ames, in the mega-church’s parking lot. My youngest daughter was involved in youth group at Cornerstone, years ago. Since then, she has been through more than one violent relationship. The shooting took me back to a dark place. This was personal. The shootings happened in my hometown. Where I ought to feel safe. I don’t feel safe. I feel angry. I grew up in Ames, went to school here, went to church here, fell in love here, got married here, went to ...

About those AR-15s

Local Columns

After reading some of the recent round of stories about the final passage of Senate File 581, I’m pretty embarrassed. As a reporter, you’re supposed to tell the reader what happened, who it happened to, how it happened, where it happened and, if known, why it happened. I’m anold school ...