Patricia Barry Davenport Iowa Actress

Patricia Barry was born Patricia White on November 16, 1922, in Davenport, Iowa. She learned early that talent wasn’t enough. You had to show up ready. Those lessons followed her east to Northwestern University, where she studied drama with the seriousness of someone planning a career, not a fantasy. By the time she headed west, she wasn’t chasing fame. She was chasing work.

Hollywood in the 1940s was crowded with hopefuls and ruled by contracts. Barry signed with Warner Bros. She played intelligent women, professionals, wives, secretaries with spine. An early reviewer described her as “cool, composed, and believable in every frame,” a compliment that followed her for decades.

Her early films came one after another, never flashy, always solid. She appeared in thrillers, dramas, war pictures. In The Window, she helped anchor a tense story without pulling focus. In O.S.S., she brought calm authority to a wartime world built on suspicion. Then came The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, a film that leaned into spectacle while Barry did what she always did—grounded the chaos. Critics noted she gave the film “a human center amid the destruction,” a reminder that even genre pictures needed actors who could sell reality.

Samuel Ryan Curtis Iowa Civil War General

General Samuel Ryan Curtis

Samuel Ryan Curtis didn’t look like a war hero. He looked more like a county surveyor who wandered onto the battlefield by mistake and never quite left. Thick sideburns. Heavy jacket. A man built for long walks and paperwork, not cannon smoke and screaming horses.

But the war didn’t care what men looked like. Curtis had been a West Point engineer, a congressman from Iowa, and a man who believed in the Union the way farmers believe in fences. When the shooting started in 1861, he quit politics and picked up a sword at age fifty-six. Most men that age were done charging at anything. Curtis was just getting started.

Missouri was the problem. Torn in half. Bushwhackers in the trees. Guerrillas in the shadows. Everybody armed. Everybody angry. Confederate armies wanted it back. Union generals wanted to hold it. Civilians just wanted to survive. One Missouri paper called it “a land where every fence rail hides a rifle and every road leads to ambush.”

Curtis was sent in to clean it up.

In early 1862, the Confederates made their big gamble. General Earl Van Dorn gathered an army and marched north into Arkansas, aiming straight at Curtis. Win the fight. Take Missouri. Threaten the Mississippi. Shake the whole Western war loose. Southern papers bragged that Van Dorn intended “to march through Curtis as through dry leaves.”

Curtis saw it coming and didn’t blink. He planted his army along Little Sugar Creek near a place called Pea Ridge and waited. Ten thousand men. Cold ground. Wet boots. No retreat planned. If the Confederate army came, they would come straight into his teeth.

Charles Grilk Davenport Lawyer Iowa Attorney General

Charles Grilk (from The Daily Times. 
April 4, 1924)

When Charles Grilk ran for Congress in 1906 as a young Republican lawyer out of Davenport, the party brought in its heaviest weapon to carry him across the line: Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt arrived like the weather. Loud. Electric. Unavoidable.

That morning, he took breakfast at the Davenport home of novelist Alice French—known to readers as Octave Thanet—one of the most powerful literary and political voices in the state. The table was crowded with influence. Words were chosen carefully. Futures were weighed between coffee cups.

Then, Roosevelt and Grilk went to Central Park.

Thousands packed into Central Park in Davenport. Roosevelt spoke. The crowd surged. Grilk stood beside him, absorbing the force of borrowed gravity. It was a public anointing. A signal that this young Davenport lawyer had entered the bloodstream of national power.

He lost that race, but the door never closed again.

Guy Gillette Iowa Senator

Guy Gillette (The Courier. May 29, 1924)

Guy Gillette came to Washington in 1936 while the country was still bleeding from the Depression. Iowa farms were drowning in debt. Banks were collapsing. The New Deal promised rescue. Gillette arrived as a Democrat, but he never arrived as a loyalist.

He didn’t trust party machines. He didn’t trust Wall Street. He especially didn’t trust men who spoke softly while reaching for control.

Washington wanted obedience. Gillette offered scrutiny.

He backed farm relief because Iowa was starving. He backed soil conservation because the land was breaking. He backed rural electrification because darkness still ruled whole counties. Those votes earned him enemies in corporate boardrooms and quiet allies in farm kitchens.

The real fight came during World War II.

The Senate was flooded with emergency bills. Weapons contracts. War industries. Spending without ceilings. Gillette voted for the war, but he fought the money behind it. He questioned contractors, challenged cost overruns, and warned that corporations were growing fat while soldiers bled. As he told the Senate not long after America entered the conflict, “We said that they went over there … not to prove the prowess of America … but to see to it that there never was such a war again.”

Chancy J. Stevens Montour, Iowa Mayor

In 1927, the Des Moines Register profiled Chancy J. Stevens of Montour, Iowa, believed to be the oldest mayor in America at age 94. Stevens had served as mayor for 18 years.

He came to Iowa from New York as a young man and first settled in Indiantown, two miles north of Montour. He supported prohibition, equal rights for women, and the woodshed as a corrective measure for wayward youths.

(picture from the Des Moines Register. December 25, 1927)

Oscar Heline Iowa Congressman Farmers Holiday Association

Oscar Heline erupted out of the farm crisis like a man done waiting for permission. He wasn’t polite. He wasn’t polished. He was the human bill collector for every bad policy and blind bureaucrat that helped wreck the countryside. He’d watched neighbors lose everything, and he wasn’t going quietly.

In the early 1930s, Iowa farmers were getting chewed to ribbons. Prices tanked. Land vanished. Entire communities folded like cheap card tables. The entire system felt wired for failure, and the people running it acted surprised every time it blew up.

Heline didn’t bother with committees or measured tones. He helped form the Farmers Holiday Association—a movement that felt less like a meeting and more like a pressure cooker ready to pop. They blocked roads, shut down markets, and stared down sheriffs and bankers with the dead-eyed resolve that makes a man rethink his job. Critics screamed “radical.” Heline shrugged. What else do you call trying to stay alive?

Washington started hearing the noise. Soon Heline was advising the Roosevelt administration, stomping through the halls like someone sent to collect a debt. He didn’t deal in jargon. He talked about farm auctions that felt like funerals and families smothered by bank notices. He pushed for anything—price supports, production cuts, whatever—if it kept farmers from being scraped off their land like roadkill.

Alice Finn Miss Popularity Winner 1927

Alice Finn of Des Moines, Iowa, won the 1927 popularity contest hosted by the Publix Theaters. She played several parts in the theater’s shows, and appeared on stage in, “In Dutch.”

Pencil drawing of an image published in the Des Moines Register on July 8, 1928,

Clara L. Brandt Muscatine Iowa Philanthropist

Clara L. Brandt grew up in the wooded country outside Muscatine. She and her sister Emma spent their childhood exploring those rock formations along Pine Creek, so when people started chipping at the stone and hauling off souvenirs, Clara took it personally. She bought the land to keep it safe.

She kept things simple. She hired a watchman, fixed what vandals damaged, and let scientists explore the ravines. She wasn’t trying to build a park; she was just doing what made sense to her.

When Iowa set up its Conservation Commission, she and Emma donated the land—first the main 67 acres, then the family homestead beside it.

Those donations became the core of Wildcat Den State Park. The cliffs, the quiet trails, the cool shadowed canyons—they’re still there because she paid attention when most people didn’t think places like that needed saving.

Her generosity didn’t end with the land. In her will, she supported her church at New Era, helped Moline Lutheran Hospital, and provided for people she cared about. She used the income from her Chicago property to keep those gifts going.

Clara Brandt died in 1930.

Charles McKinley Saltzman Army Chief Signal Officer

Charles McKinley Saltzman was born in Panora, Iowa, in 1871—skinny, serious, and wired like a man who already heard radio static no one else could pick up. He graduated from West Point just in time to catch the Spanish–American War, where the Army still fought like it was 1864. Saltzman rode with the 1st Cavalry, and earned two Silver Stars for keeping his head while everything around him smoked and rattled. Officers said he had “the calm of a telegraph pole in a lightning storm.”

While other men were polishing sabers, Saltzman was climbing poles in the Philippines, stringing wire across mountains and jungles, keeping messages alive in places where nothing stayed alive for long. A Manila paper said he “could coax a signal through a brick wall and across a typhoon.” He took the compliment and kept working.

In 1912, he was in London, sitting among diplomats and radio wizards at the International Radiotelegraph Convention. The world was trying to agree on how to talk through the air without stepping on each other’s transmissions, and Saltzman showed up like the one man in the room who actually understood how the equipment worked. One observer said he “handled radio law the way a pianist handles a keyboard—precise, patient, and deadly.”

Willis “Bill” Glassgow Iowa Fottball Standout

Iowa Stadium in the late 1920s wasn’t a cozy field. It was a cold, bruising arena built for impact, and fans packed the place to watch Willis “Bill” Glassgow deliver it. He treated every carry like a personal accusation. When he lowered his shoulder, it wasn’t grace or style. It was force, and people in the stands felt the shock of it.

He arrived in Iowa City in 1927 looking like a kid who had taken a wrong turn. He came from Shenandoah with no bulk and no shine, but he carried something in his eyes that earned him a place. He survived practice the same way a man survives a riot: by staying on his feet and refusing to back up. Teammates said he worked like someone trying to break out of a locked room. He didn’t juke or dance. He pushed forward because that was the only direction he trusted.

By 1928, the Big Ten knew Iowa had something dangerous. Glassgow made third-team All-American not because he tricked defenses but because he rushed through them. Football then was closer to open-air combat. Helmets were thin leather, pads barely existed, and every snap felt like someone’s bad idea of a street fight. Coaches tried traps and shifting fronts to catch him, but he hammered through whatever they drew up.

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs Maysville Iowa Turkey Farmer

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs and some of her turkeys

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs didn’t set out to build the largest turkey farm in Iowa. She just had an idea, one of those quiet, stubborn ideas that settles in your chest and refuses to leave. Her friends and neighbors near Maysville tried to talk her out of it. “Turkeys are impossible to raise,” they said. “They die if you look at them wrong.” But she didn’t budge. She bought a book called Hints for Amateur Poultry Raisers, propped it open on the kitchen table, and started anyway.

The early days were rough. The first twelve eggs gave her one bird—one tiny, lonely turkey. The rest hatched and died as if trying to tell her: “Turkey raising doesn’t pay. We told you so.”Anyone else might’ve quit, but she tried again. The second batch—twelve demanding little birds—felt like the universe giving her a reluctant nod.

 

From there, it snowballed. She added more birds until by November 1930 her farm was home to nearly six hundred turkeys. She built four sheds, fenced in a long run, that protected her flock from thieves, coyotes, and every other creature that thought a turkey looked like lunch. By spring, she planned to top a thousand birds.

Mrs. Kenneth Bowman Saved Her Children From A Barn Fire

Mrs Kenneth Brown and her children

Maquoketa, Iowa. July 9, 1930. It started like any other morning. Mrs. Kenneth Bowman was doing her chores when she realized her three boys and her little sister, Cora Beth—had climbed into the hayloft to see a baby pigeon.

Then the loft burst into flames. No warning, no time for panic. She just ran—pulled Warren Lee, Owen, little Neale, and Cora Beth out of the smoke one by one, moving on instinct while the heat snapped behind her.

People tried to make sense of it afterward. Investigators said someone had used dynamite to break apart the tightly packed hay so it would burn faster. It sounded impossible until you saw how fast the fire moved.

By the time the flames died, seven buildings were gone. Only the farmhouse, the separator shed, and a barn across the road were still standing.

Neighbors called Mrs. Bowman a hero. She probably didn’t feel like one, but those kids are alive because she didn’t stop to think.

Elsie Swender Pushed for the Death Penalty

Elsie Swender

In the fall of 1920-something, when most people did everything short of faking typhoid to avoid jury duty, 24-year-old Elsie Swender marched into the courthouse like it was opening night on Broadway. She told the Register she “wouldn’t have missed jury duty for the world.” Not even for a date, a promotion, or the promise of free chocolates at Younkers.

She got the Joe Williams murder trial—one of the most closely watched cases of the year. It was her first time on a jury, and she took to it with a kind of fervor usually reserved for revival tent preachers and championship wrestling fans. From the moment the jurors filed into the deliberation room, Elsie planted her feet and fired her opening salvo: death penalty.

According to the paper, she wasn’t just in favor of it. She was one of the most aggressive jurors pushing for it. She preached. She argued. She held the floor like she had been waiting her whole life for this exact moment. “Our first vote was for the death penalty,” she told the reporter, half proud, half disappointed. “I sure did a lot of preaching.”

Eight jurors strongly favored first-degree murder. Elsie was among them, doing everything she could to swing the remaining four to her side. She tried logic. She tried emotion. She tried whatever it is a 24-year-old uses when she’s suddenly the most forceful person in a room full of grown adults deciding a man’s fate.

Duke Slater Iowa Football Player

Duke Slater came out of Clinton, Iowa, like a walking thunderclap. Big shoulders, bigger presence, a man who made coaches straighten their backs when he walked past. Reporters called him “a human barricade.” Players called him worse. None of it slowed him down.

He grew up in a world that didn’t expect a Black kid to go anywhere. Slater ignored the script. He pushed through it the way he pushed through defensive lines—head down, legs driving, no apologies.

 

His high school couldn’t afford helmets. Most players hesitated. Slater didn’t. He played bare-headed and kept doing it for the rest of his life. A rival said, “Hitting him was like running into a stone wall.” Another said, “I hit him once. That was enough.”

 

When he got to the University of Iowa, everything changed. The Hawkeyes already had a team. Slater gave them a force of nature.

Samuel Freeman Miller Supreme Court Justice

Samuel Freeman Miller grew up in Kentucky, where slavery lay over everything like a shadow nobody wanted to talk about. He talked about it anyway. It made him feel like he was living inside a house with a rotten beam. You could pretend it wasn’t there, but the ceiling still sagged.

So he left.

He went to Iowa, where the towns were young and nothing was settled yet. Keokuk in 1850 wasn’t pretty. There was mud everywhere, steamboats coughed smoke into the sky, and strangers drifted in with the river current. Men trying to become something they weren’t yet. Miller stepped onto the landing with a medical degree in one hand and a law license in the other, not sure which one would carry him farther.

People trusted him sooner than he expected. He spoke plainly. He didn’t pretend to know more than he did. When he knew more, he didn’t make a show of it. One lawyer said Miller “could read an entire library before breakfast,” and maybe that was true. He read because he couldn’t help himself. Books steadied him. They made the world feel a little less chaotic.

Keokuk leaned Democratic, but Miller leaned toward anything that looked honest and open. Slavery had chased him out of Kentucky, and he didn’t plan on letting it creep into Iowa. “A nation cannot be half free and half pretending,” he said once. It wasn’t meant to be a famous line. It was just the truth as he saw it. He joined the Young Republican Party because it seemed to move toward that truth.

Word spread. By 1862, people in Washington were hearing about the sharp-minded lawyer from Iowa who worked like a man trying to outrun himself. Lincoln needed new Supreme Court justices—men who wouldn’t flinch when the war pushed the Constitution to its limits. Miller’s name came up. Lincoln looked at his record, at his steadiness, and said yes.

William Boyd Allison Iowa Politician

 

William Boyd Allison walked into the state like a mild-mannered undertaker with a pocket full of dynamite and a handshake that meant you were already halfway buried.

Born in Ohio, he wandered west, and landed in Dubuque — a city that in those days smelled like wet sawdust and pig fat. Allison set up a law office, wore tidy clothes, spoke softly, and terrified everyone. “You never knew what he was thinking,” one rival said. “Mostly because by the time you figured it out, he’d already outmaneuvered you and sent you a polite note about it.”

 

The Civil War blew half the country sky-high, but Allison didn’t rattle. He slid into Congress like a man taking the wheel of a slow, ugly machine. Lincoln loved him — “steady as a church bell,” he said — which from Lincoln was basically anointing someone with holy oil. Allison wasn’t a firebrand. He was a locksmith. He understood the gears, the tumblers, the secret hinges that kept the Union from falling apart.

 

Washington reporters noticed early. “Allison is the only man in the chamber who reads the entire bill,” one wrote. “Which makes him the most dangerous.”

James W. Grimes Iowa Politician

James W. Grimes landed in Burlington when it was still half frontier, half fever dream—muddy streets, cheap whiskey, and men who argued politics like they were swinging shovels. Grimes fit right in. “This is a place where a man can make something of himself,” he supposedly said. “Preferably noise.”

Everyone who met him remembered his voice. Not loud, but cutting. It could slice through a crowded saloon and make the piano player lose his place. One editor said, “Grimes didn’t speak; he struck.” Another said, “He had the manner of a man who expected you to be wrong.”

In 1854, Iowa made him governor—a bad idea for anyone who preferred peace. Grimes was built for conflict. Slavery’s supporters tried to push their influence west, and he met them like a brick wall. “If slavery enters Iowa, it will come over my dead body,” he said, and people believed him. He didn’t smile when he said it. He didn’t smile much at all. A Davenport paper described him as “a man who looks permanently disappointed in human nature.”

He became one of the early architects of the Republican Party, back when it was more movement than machine. He didn’t care if he made enemies. “Let them shout,” he said. “I’ll shout louder.” When a rival called him radical, Grimes shrugged it off. “If freedom is radical, the Founders were radicals,” he said, and the line stuck because it sounded like something hammered into metal.

The Cherry Sisters The Best, Or The Worst Iowa Act--Ever

A colorized image of The Cherry Sisters

The Cherry Sisters didn’t arrive on the American stage—so much as detonate on it, like some godforsaken cyclone stuffed with tin pans, bad hymns, and the righteous confidence you normally only see in evangelists or heavily medicated congressmen. Five of them—Effie, Addie, Ella, Lizzie, Jessie—marching into the 1890s like a militia of homemade virtue, certain the world was ready for their greatness.

The world, of course, had other ideas.

 

Their traveling revue, a fever dream called “Something Good, Something Sad,” wasn’t a show so much as a moral crusade welded to accidental slapstick. They sang with the reckless abandon of people who did not know what singing required. They recited poetry like hostile witnesses in their own trial. They dispensed moral lectures with the zeal of frontier prosecutors. And they performed dramatic sketches stitched together like ransom notes.

 

Harry Langdon Council Bluffs Iowa Actor

Harry Langdon was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1884—small, pale, blinking like the sun was too bright and the world too loud. He wasn’t built for noise, so he made his own. Soft noise. Strange noise. The kind that made people lean in.

 He grew up watching more than talking, a quiet kid who turned confusion into comedy. Vaudeville grabbed him early. He drifted into tent shows that smelled like dust and popcorn, where comics fought for dimes and dignity. His act was a man-child stumbling through life like someone had swapped the instruction manual for a blank sheet of paper. “I never knew much,” he said. “That seemed to help.”

 

Crowds loved him. They felt protective, then foolish for feeling protective, then they laughed harder. One reviewer said he looked “one sneeze from disaster.” Another said, “Langdon makes you hold your breath, then giggle at yourself for it.”

 

Mack Sennett signed him in 1924. Hollywood figured he’d break instantly. He didn’t break. He shuffled his feet, and underplayed everything until audiences lost their minds. Moving Picture World said, “Langdon doesn’t hit gags. He drifts into them like fog into a valley.”

Mary Louise Smith Iowa Political Leader From Eddyville

Mary Louise Smith

Mary Louise Smith grew up in Eddyville, Iowa, in a house where the radio never shut up and the news barged in like a half-drunk uncle with opinions about everything. She was born in 1907—late to the suffrage fight, but early enough to feel the leftover electricity crackling through the country.

She wasn’t loud. Not the type who storms rooms or slams fists. She watched and saw the tiny things—how a chair scraped just before someone disagreed, how an entire meeting could tilt off its axis because one person liked the sound of their own voice. She could sort the talkers from the doers in under a minute.

Politics in the 1920s and ’30s wasn’t made for women. It wasn’t made for most men either. It was a noisy, overheated kitchen where everyone was burning something and nobody wanted to clean the pan. Most women stayed out of it. Mary Louise stepped in like she’d been sent to organize the pantry before the entire place exploded.

She started in the church-basement world of Republican women’s clubs. She taught people how to vote, how to read a ballot that looked like it had been typeset in a coal mine, how to stand up without shaking like a loose fencepost. She said politics was something anyone could learn “one stitch at a time,” and she meant it.