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)
The picture shows Brigadier William Andrews and his wife, giving a dinner basket to an elderly couple.
(from The Des Moines Register. December 25, 1921)
The Doo Dads reach Candy Land
The dudes had to leave the land of the long-legged Doo Dads without finding any reason for their long legs. They scrambled back into their machine and started in the quest of new adventures.
They were chattering away and laughing merrily when they began to wrinkle up their stubby noses, and altogether they said, “What is that I smell?
(Colored image from the Des Moines Tribune. February 25, 1922)
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.
Grace Reed on Utica Ridge Road? That story crawls under your skin and refuses to pay rent. Margaretha Nehlsen poisoning her own kids with chocolate—chocolate, of all things—makes you want to interrogate every candy dish you’ve ever seen at a church potluck. And Harry Hamilton, the ex-cop who decided law enforcement was more exciting when you were shooting at it—he’s the kind of character you expect to find at 2 a.m. in a tavern that claims it closes at midnight.
The book doesn’t guide you so much as shove you down a gravel road at high speed, shouting facts at you through the open window. There’s a feverish energy to it, the sense that the author has been living on gas-station coffee and county-archive dust for far too long. Each chapter feels like it was pulled from a file drawer that local officials swore didn’t exist.
The Union Brewery in Iowa City felt like a
place that survived on nerve alone. Built in 1856 by Simeon Hotz, a shoemaker
turned brewer, it grew into a brick stronghold at Linn and Market, a place the Iowa
State Register said operated with “a confidence that must be admired,
considering the temperance sentiment now fashionable in the Capitol.”
Workers outside a brewery in the 1860s
The brewery didn’t just sell beer — it sold identity. Hotz and Anton Geiger were German immigrants who brought their lager brewing with them, and Iowa City drank it up like a man who’d been wandering the prairie too long.
By
1868 they expanded into the big building — three stories, beer cellars
underneath, steam heat, the whole industrial symphony. Locals wandered in and
out of the taproom, leaving footprints in the sawdust and carrying home gossip
hotter than the kettles.
The first thing you need to know about the
Mason Motor Car Company is that it never should have worked. Not in Des Moines,
not in 1906, not in a state where most people still trusted a good horse over
any contraption that hissed, rattled, and tried to kill you on a dirt road. Yet
for a few bright, reckless years, two brothers with machine oil on their hands
and speed on their minds tried to drag Iowa—kicking, screaming, and
occasionally bleeding—into the automobile age.
Mason Motor Co. ad, 1906
Fred and August Duesenberg weren’t normal. They looked at a peaceful bicycle and thought, What if this thing went 60 miles an hour and tried to shake its rider’s fillings out? The Des Moines Daily News called them “the sort of young men who consider mechanical noise to be a form of conversation.” They were tinkerers, racers, mechanics, engineers—whatever you want to call them—but above all, they were hungry. Hungry for speed, recognition, and the clean snapping sound an engine makes when it finds its rhythm and behaves. So when Des Moines attorney Edward Mason threw some money at them and said, “Make a car,” they didn’t hesitate. They built the Mason, a small, explosive two-cylinder machine that rattled windows, terrified horses, and made its owners feel like they were cheating death—or at least borrowing trouble from it.
