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A whirlwind of a weekend for a community newspaper

5/30/2019

Charles City Press, 5-30-19

Yesterday, a very nice person found out I was a writer who worked as a reporter for the Charles City Press, and she seemed unusually excited about that.

“Wow! A newspaper reporter!”

She seemed like it was a big deal to her, and had all kinds of questions for me. She was very interested.

I guess that reaction surprised me because that’s not typical. These days, when I tell people that I am a journalist or work in newspapers, I often get a sneer and snide comment along the lines of “fake news” or “liberal media.” These people don’t know how close they are to getting punched in the face or kicked in the groin when they say things like that to me.

And I’m not kidding. It’s remarkably close. Fortunately for everyone, including me, I was raised to not kick or punch (or shoot) people unless there is no other alternative. So I don’t do those things. It isn’t nice. I try to be respectful and kind, always, even when I’m personally offended.

Anyway, this equally kind and respectful person, who was adorably thrilled to talk to a newspaper reporter, asked me what my favorite newspaper to read is. She was probably expecting me to say the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, or maybe even the Des Moines Register or the Waterloo Courier.

I didn’t have to think about it for more than a minute before I told her.

It’s the Charles City Press. And not just because I’ve written for it for the last year or so (although that helps), but because it’s a darn good local newspaper. It should be your favorite paper, too.

Of course, it was an awfully busy weekend at this community newspaper, and that was fresh in my mind when I was talking to this interested person.

It was Memorial Day weekend, of course, and also the Class of 2019 held commencement ceremonies. A couple candidates running for president of the United States showed up in town, at nearly the exact same time. I knew we would be covering those things here at the Charles City Press well in advance.

I didn’t see the tornado coming — and I guess no one did, not even the National Weather Service.

The message came out over the scanner that a tornado had been spotted on the ground west of the fairgrounds at about 12:20 p.m. Monday. Even though I know we’re all supposed to do the intelligent thing and take cover, newspaper reporters (even us “liberal” ones) do the far less intelligent thing and rush out to our vehicles and speed out to see it for ourselves, camera in tow.

Halfway there, the National Weather Service was finally repeating what the weather spotters had reported a few minutes earlier — tornado at the fairgrounds.

By the time I got there — in what couldn’t have been much more than five minutes — the tornado was gone.

The mess left behind was heartbreaking. So many buildings down, one couldn’t tell from the scattered wreckage how many buildings had been up.

My heart sank, but my spirits were lifted by the thought that it didn’t appear that anyone was killed, or even hurt. I thanked God for that, and took as many photos as I could of the devastation before me, until the emergency personnel started to shoo me out of there.

I said to myself that the people of Charles City will come together and fix this. In my short time here, I’ve found the people to be tough, kind and resilient. Charles City residents persevere. Much like the folks in my original home town, long before I moved to “America’s Home Town.”

I’m not from Charles City originally, I grew up in Oelwein — not too far away.
Of course, Oelwein and Charles City share a common date in their collective history.

May 15, 1968.

The worst day for tornadoes in recorded history. One of them hit your home town, while at the same time, one was hitting my home town. Both of them were absolutely devastating, and they changed the course of history, for both of our cities.

I wrote about those tornadoes when I wrote my very first column for the Charles City Press a little over a year ago, but I think what I wrote then bears repeating now, because of the tornado that hit the fairgrounds this weekend, and also because you might not have read that column.

I was just two months old when the twin tornadoes hit Oelwein and Charles City, so I don’t remember a thing about them.

But I grew up with a whole bunch of people who were born the same year the tornadoes came. One old friend and teacher once told me she thought our class — the Class of ’86 — was strange and unique because when we were all babies, either in the womb or just out, we’d been “all shook up.”

There may be some truth to that, but I also think that we were strange and unique because we all grew up in the aftermath of that tremendous shaking. We were told about the tornado persistently. We saw the concern in our parents’ gazes as they watched thunderstorms approach in the western sky. Our entertainment came from nursery rhymes, Sesame Street, and storm safety handouts.

The city we grew up contained an eclectic mix of tired old buildings that had survived the tornado, brand new buildings that replaced the ones destroyed, and heartbreaking stories of wonderful buildings, now shadows of spirits, that no longer stood. We were forced to learn to love the old, embrace the new and appreciate what once was.

And it seemed like we had a tornado drill every week at school. With each drill came important lessons:

Know where the strongest structure is, with the sturdiest walls.
Get there, as fast as you can, as orderly as you can.
When it’s an emergency, it’s OK if you’re a boy and the strongest structure is the girls’ restroom, and vice versa. Just get there.
Keep track of all your friends and classmates, and make sure they get there, too.
You have a buddy. Even if he’s not usually your buddy, he’s your buddy today. Don’t lose track of him. Look out for your buddy. Trust that your buddy will look out for you.
Stay calm, stay low, listen to your teacher, and huddle together.
It’s OK to be scared, it’s OK to cry, it’s OK to laugh, it’s OK to sing, and it’s OK to pray. It’s also OK to do none of those things.

And so, after all those lessons in my formative years, I’m big on strong walls, doing your own thing, staying calm, huddling together when it’s necessary, and looking out for my buddies.

Some buddies are buddies for life, and some are just buddies at the moment. Either way, it’s important to look out for them.

I’m big on understanding that sometimes events lead you to places you never thought you’d go. Sometimes that’s the opposite-sex restroom. Sometimes it’s a tornado at the Floyd County Fairgrounds. When the time comes, don’t worry about it. Just get there, as quickly and as orderly as you can.

I’m also big on listening. And in my year of working here in Charles City, I’ve gotten the opportunity to listen to a lot of your stories. Happy stories, sad stories, interesting stories. And yes, a lot of stories that were none of the above, but still needed to be told. I’m happy to do my best to tell them to you.

Hopefully, there will be many more to come. I’ve worked and lived in a lot of different places, but Charles City has felt like home to me quicker than any of the others.

Thank you for helping me keep track of you, and helping me learn to love the old, embrace the new, and appreciate what once was, here in Charles City.

More storms will come. Let’s keep looking for the sturdiest structure together.

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Appreciate a teacher this week, and every week

5/9/2019

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Charles City Press, 5-10-19

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week. So it’s time for me to appreciate a teacher.

Grandpa Grob. He’s not been around awhile. He passed on several years ago, and he retired from education many years before that.

He was never my teacher, although he was my grandfather, and there were things he taught me. Things that grandpas teach grandkids. Lessons I wish I could listen to again, because I didn’t appreciate them at the time.

It’s unfortunate that we don’t get to spend more time with our grandparents. They’re our first best friends.

As a young man, my grandfather taught in a tiny little one-room schoolhouse in Wisconsin.
He was the only teacher for a group of kids of all ages, from first grade through high-school age. He taught all subjects.

He used an appropriate balance of stern discipline and gentle kindness to efficiently coax, awaken and mold the young minds in his charge.

Actually, I have no idea if that last part is true or not. I wasn’t there. It’s entirely possible that my grandfather was an awful teacher who did more harm than good. But hey, it’s my grandpa we’re talking about — and I loved him — so I choose to believe he was a wonderful, fabulous teacher. I’d bet you’d do the same for your grandparent.

I do know this — he was committed to the fine art of education. He sometimes walked to school before dawn through biting Wisconsin blizzards to stoke the furnace and warm the schoolhouse before the kids arrived.

His dedication to teaching is apparent in his legacy. Inspired by his example, the overwhelming majority of two generations in his family after him — his children, his grandchildren — have chosen to become educators. A lot of them married educators, too.

There weren’t any fancy buildings or fancy equipment with Grandpa’s little schoolhouse, but you can bet that he would have liked there to be — and he would have used it if he would have had it.

As soon as my grandfather saved enough money, he went back and furthered his own education. He found another teaching job in a more modern school, and eventually became a principal at a school that was even more up-to-date than that one.

And he built a reputation as a principal who fought tooth-and-nail to give his teachers every modern advantage available. He knew how tough it was to work a one-room schoolhouse. He’d been there. He knew there was a better way.

Sometimes I wish I could travel through time and watch my grandfather as he taught in that little shack. I’d like to see him go to work and explain how to break down fractions. I’d watch him as he explained why a whale was not a fish, but a mammal. I’d like to hear his take on old Abe Lincoln and listen to his thoughts about “Huckleberry Finn.” It’s my favorite book — and I’ve been told it was Grandpa’s favorite, too.

I’d bow my head as he led his class through a recitation of “The Lord’s Prayer,” and watch with interest as he carefully taught them all how to properly handle the American flag.

You know, as long as I’m wishing, maybe I could get Grandpa to teach me the right way to throw a knuckleball. I’ve heard people say that he knew how to throw a good one.

I’ve also heard people who knew my grandfather all those decades ago express their appreciation for how hard he worked to make sure the kids who he taught got the best education possible.

I wonder sometimes if my own kids will have that same kind of appreciation when they’re my age.

Will they recall the wonderful teachers they had in their home town? Will they understand the important arguments the good people of their home town had when they were kids, all about them and their school?

Will they be thankful for what some good people in their community tried to do for them? Will they, in turn, try to do the same for the generation that follows them?

When all is said and done, I’ll be hoping that the answer to all those questions is a simple, “Yes.”

Respect teachers. Occasionally, listen to them. Give them the resources they need. Pay them well. They’ll pay it back, and they’ll pay it forward, guaranteed.

My grandpa would’ve agreed. And I bet yours would’ve, too.

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The view is always scenic up on the teeter-totter

5/2/2019

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Charles City Press, 5-2-19

“Oh, come on. Papa! Just try it!”

It was like peer pressure, only my peer was a 4-year-old girl.

It was a beautiful Saturday before Easter, in a park in a small town, and the issue at hand was the teeter-totter — and whether or not Papa James should get on it and do a little teetering, perhaps even some tottering.

The red-headed 4-year-old girl is a charming and persuasive individual, but the teeter-totter was tiny, and Papa James is — well, he’s not so tiny.

Also, teeter-totters have changed since the day when Papa James was tiny enough to frequent them. This teeter-totter was for four people, somehow, and it was made of plastic.

It looked kind of like two colorful, state-of-the-art boomerangs placed across from each other, and from what I could see, gravity and weight ratios had absolutely nothing to do with the operation. It was also very small, apparently designed only for children under 6 years old.

Back in the day, a teeter-totter was pretty much a long, narrow, hardwood board, placed on a single pivot point made out of some metal piping of some sort.

It took two to teeter — one of you sat on one end of the board and your buddy sat on the other — and you hoped that you were near the same weight, because if you weren’t, one of you was destined to spend all his time up high teetering and the other would be down low, in perpetual totter.

Eventually, the totterer would get off, and the teeterer would come crashing down to earth. Often times, stitches would become necessary.

Usually, before we began a see-saw session, we called ahead to the emergency room to make reservations, just to give them a heads-up.

“We’ll be going to the playground in a few,” we’d say. “Have someone on call.”

So all this was on the mind of Papa James as this little girl attempted to sweet-talk him into participating.

“Just try it, Papa,” she said, in a tone that implied she believed that Papa James had never tried a teeter-totter before, and this would be his first experience with one. “It will be fun,” she said.

So spending a sunny Easter weekend with three grandkids had come to this — the oldest of the three issuing her version of a double-dog dare to Papa James.

She was insistent, although the other two didn’t seem to care all that much.

The boy is 2 years old, strong-willed and a bit mixed up about things, but he’s focused.

I watched him take a small plastic shovel no bigger than a soup spoon and methodically unload every grain from a wagon load of sand onto various places in the yard. I assume he had decided that all those spots needed a spoonful of sand, so he undertook this landscaping project on his own initiative. The boy is his own boss.

I know this to be true, because several people who think they are the boy’s boss very clearly told the boy not to remove any more sand from the wagon, because once it’s all unloaded, there would be no more sand for him to play with. He heard these directives, but chose to ignore them, and none of the so-called bosses reprimanded him for his blatant insubordination.

Sure enough, once the landscaping project was complete, the boy realized that, indeed, he had no more sand to play with, and he was very upset. Instead of blaming himself, however, he blamed all the people who had warned him that this would happen. He cried and yelled and screamed at all of them.

This is the exact behavior of almost every boss I’ve ever had. This kid is going to be the CEO of a major corporation.

The boy is talking now, although he speaks only in nouns and verbs, with an occasional adjective — usually a color. There are no indefinite articles or determiners in his sentences. Every time he talks to his gramma on video chat, he has two questions. They seem to be the only things he’s concerned about. He asks them, then he goes away.

“PapaJamesWork?” (“Is Papa James at work again?”)

“GrammaOrangeCar?” (“Do you still have that orange car, Gramma?”)

I told his gramma that this is pretty much the way he’s going to be into adulthood. Sure, he’ll learn a lot more words, but his chief concerns right now, at age 2, will be the same when he’s 22, 52 and 92.

The first questions on every man’s mind when he meets somebody are 1) “What do you do for a living?” and 2) “What kind of car do you drive?” To a guy, they are the only questions that really matter. The kid already knows this, and he’s just 2. By the time he’s age 3, he’ll likely be asking the two bonus questions, which are reserved only for people who answer the first two questions satisfactorily.

The bonus questions are, of course, 1) “Do you like to go fishing?” and 2) “Do you have a boat?”

That’s how guys enter the world. The boy is well on his way to manhood.

Then there’s the little one, not even a year old yet, perfecting her three-toothed smile. She bounces around in wagons and strollers, or grips your collar or shirt pocket as you carry her around. She just looks at you, like a cute bug on a white wall, with equal parts wonder and superiority.

She doesn’t know much yet, but you get the feeling she knows a bit more than she lets on. She doesn’t talk, but an array of unique sounds seem to simmer and stew somewhere behind those baby teeth before they erupt from her mouth.

They are loaded sounds, which represent elevated emotions. The sounds she makes have no real form, but if you hear them often enough, you can start to detect a pattern — and it seems she understands these sounds, and doesn’t really care that you don’t.
The 4-year-old, on the other hand, most certainly does talk — and she is understood.

“Come on, Papa! Just try it! It will be fun!”

Back to the teeter-totter.

You know how this ends. Of course Papa James sat down on the tiny teeter-totter, squatted down there like a frog, with his knees up above his ears and a half-grimace, half-smile on his face.

I teetered a little, and I tottered a little, and it was enough to satisfy the little girl. She jumped off with an excited shriek and scampered over to the twisty-slide. No stitches were necessary.

Standing back up from that low spot was more difficult than sitting down, but none of the grandkids noticed the struggle.

And so on Easter weekend, I spent Friday at a solemn church service and Sunday at a joyous church celebration.

Both events were beautiful.

But neither of them restored my spirit like Saturday’s view from the teeter-totter.

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A whirlwind of a weekend for a community newspaper

Appreciate a teacher this week, and every week

The view is always scenic up on the teeter-totter

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