Knecht Ruprecht Santa's Not So Nice Helper

Knecht Ruprecht didn’t come to Iowa breathing fire or dragging chains. He came the way most serious ideas do, riding along in a trunk with winter coats and hymnals, carried by people who expected children to behave and winters to mean business.

German immigrants brought St. Nicholas with them. They also brought the understanding that December wasn’t just about treats. It was about judgment. Somewhere in the old country, St. Nicholas had a helper whose job was to remember the bad stuff. His name was Knecht Ruprecht.

In Iowa, the name didn’t stick, but the job did.

Old Iowa newspapers talk about St. Nicholas visiting schools and churches. Kids lined up in their good clothes. Songs were sung. Candy was handed out. Then, tucked into those cheerful little reports, something uncomfortable crept in. A rod. A switch. A warning that not every child would be pleased with the visit.

Advertisement for Drake vs Cornell Football Game 1923

 

This advertisement for the Drake vs Cornell football game appeared in the Des Moines Register on September 30, 1923 Tickets were $1.00.

Rita Bell Iowa City Actress

Rita Bell was born Marguerite Hughes Bell in 1893, back when the Midwest still believed it could raise children who would never leave. Iowa City was orderly and calm, a place that expected people to fit. Bell didn’t.

She sang her first part in an amateur performance in Iowa City while she was still a little girl, dressed in pinafores and wearing pigtails, standing on a small local stage and learning what it felt like to be seen.

 

She changed her name to Rita Bell because the old name belonged to classrooms and expectations. The new one fit on a program and was easy to remember.

 

This wasn’t a movie story. Despite later guesswork, Rita Bell never worked in silent films. Her career lived where voices mattered and mistakes were public—stages and music halls, where you either held the room or you didn’t.

 

By the early 1920s, she was working professionally. In 1922, she played the ingenue role in The Spice of Life, produced by John Murray Anderson. The role demanded charm without softness and confidence without arrogance.

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.

Francis J. Herron Iowa Civil War General

General Francis J. Herron

Francis J. Herron looked like he should’ve been selling dry goods instead of commanding men into artillery fire. One soldier remembered him as “slight of build, quick in motion, with eyes that never seemed to stop measuring distance.”

He was young. Thin. Sharp-eyed. The man people underestimated fast and then regretted it later.

He wasn’t born in Iowa, but Iowa made him. By the time the war arrived, he was living in Dubuque, working as a banker. When the first guns fired in 1861, Iowa answered with farms, factories, and young men who barely knew how to hold a rifle. Herron joined the fight. A Dubuque paper said he left “without hesitation, with the confidence of one who had already chosen his duty.”

He helped raise the 1st Iowa Infantry and marched off with them like someone who’d been waiting for the war to start. At Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, his regiment was thrown straight into one of the war’s early disasters. The Union lost the field. Men scattered. Smoke swallowed the hills. A private later wrote, “The air was thick with lead and fear. The trees were cut as with knives.”

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.

The Joye Sisters Betty Ballard and Bobby Jean Lewis

Betty Ballard and Bobby Jean Lewis, better known as the Joye Sisters, were a Des Moines singing duo in the 1920s and 1930s. They headed to Mexico in May 1928, but were forced to turn back after a series of unfortunate events.

While in El Paso, they saw two Negroes lynched for attacking two white girls. That “horrible sight,” said Miss Ballard, “seemed to forecast the nightmare” of events.

They were detained in Juarez, then sent home because of the Revolution. They told reporters, “The queer taste of the Mexican food and a rumor that the revolutionists were poisoning all the food made them refrain from eating anything.”

No matter, the girls didn’t intend to let a bit of bad luck discourage them. They planned to return to Mexico in a few months after things cooled down.

Killing of Des Moines Policeman Ollie Thomas

Policeman Ollie Thomas

Nobody agrees on the number, but the official count says seven. Seven shots cracked through the humid August night like the city itself had snapped.

August 21, 1925, near Fourth and Grand.

Some poor bastard heard the first few go off and thought it was just a car backfiring. Then two shots boomed louder than the rest, the kind that don’t lie about what they are. Gunfire always has a signature. Anyone who’s heard it knows when the lie ends.

Moments later, a bareheaded man came flying out of an alley and tore east down Grand Avenue like hell had suddenly remembered his address. The witness said the build looked right. The speed looked right. The panic looked right. Bootlegger energy, all of it.

By the time the echoes finished bouncing off brick and glass, Patrolman Ollie Thomas lay dead.

They found him crumpled at the bottom of a stairway landing, soaked in his own blood. Two bullets did the job. One through the abdomen. One through the head. Both traveling downward. That detail stuck with the detectives like a splinter in the brain.

Will Higgie Dances the Charleston Atop the Des Moines Register & Tribune Building

(from the Des Moines Register.
 August 26, 1925)

In August 1925, Des Moines got a rooftop performance no one forgot. Will Higgie—one of the original creators of the Charleston—strutted onto the roof of the Des Moines Register and Tribune building alongside his partner, Dorothy Ryan, and turned the city skyline into a dance floor. Below them, crowds looked up as the pair showed off the fast-kicking, rule-breaking dance that was sweeping the nation.

Later, Higgie let everyone in on a little secret. That famous “naughty wiggle” everyone loved? It wasn’t part of the original dance at all. It didn’t show up until after the Charleston was already loose in the world—proving that even America’s wildest dance craze was still evolving, one rooftop at a time.

That Charleston Band Davenport Iowa 1925

That Charleston Band were the featured entertainers at the Coliseum in Davenport on December 19, 1925.

(from The Daily Times. December 27, 1925)