Murder on the Brunner Farm Mason City Iowa

Jennie Brunner

The morning of September 30, 1941, started quietly on the Brunner farm, a few miles northwest of Mason City. By noon, Sam Brunner was dead, and his twenty-two-year-old wife, Jennie, was running for her life.

They had known each other eight weeks before marrying. Long enough for a smile and a dance. Not long enough to see the violence underneath. Within two weeks, the fights began—sharp, fast, unpredictable. Once, Sam pressed a gun to his own chest and dared her to watch him pull the trigger.

That morning, they were in bed. Jennie reached over, teasing him, tickling his ribs. He told her to stop. She laughed. Then he reached under his pillow for the pistol he always kept there. “Quit it,” he said, “or I’ll shoot you.”

Fourth Street Sioux City, Iowa 1910

Sioux City, Iowa. Fourth Street, looking east from Pierce. (circa 1910). Nice view of trolleys and horse and buggies sharing the street with pedestrians.

James D. Bourne First Settler in Clinton County

No one’s sure who got there first. Maybe it was Elijah Buell, who built a cabin on the Mississippi and drifted south before the ink on his claim dried. Maybe it was James D. Bourne, who came up the Wapsipinicon River in 1836 and never left.

The land didn’t look like a place where anyone could stay. The river bent and twisted through low timber, its banks soft with mud and cattails. Bourne stepped onto the shore and decided it would do. He built his cabin where the bend caught the morning sun.

It was a trading post for the American Fur Company at first. Coffee and powder for pelts, tobacco for tallow. A dozen faces came and went each week—trappers with frost in their beards, Native families with venison to trade, river men drifting between towns that didn’t yet exist. Bourne kept a notebook of what each man owed, though sometimes the ledger wasn’t worth the paper. He stayed anyway.

SantaCon Holiday Mayhem on Main Street

SantaCon Davenport isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s for people who wake up in December, pull on a $20 Santa suit, and say, “Let’s do this.”

December 13th, 2025. Seven years running. Seven years of red polyester flooding 2nd Street like a Yuletide riot. Santas with fake beards, Santas with real ones, Santas already drunk by noon and swearing eternal love for Rudolf and the Grinch. They come from Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline, the cornfields— with a thirst and a costume.

 

It started back in 2018. A handful of locals turned downtown Davenport into a North Pole fever dream. Now it’s a full-scale invasion. They move in herds, chanting, ho-ho-hoing, clinking glasses, leaving behind trails of glitter, beer foam, and unanswered questions.

 

Rules? There are rules. Wear the suit. A hat’s not good enough. Don’t die. Don’t ruin it for the rest of the Santas. Be nice to the bartenders—they control the flow of Christmas. Beyond that, you’re on your own.

Belle Plaine Witch Murder

John Geyer killed his mother with his bare hands because he thought she’d hexed his cattle. That’s what he told the sheriff. “She bewitched the herd. The voices told me to do it.”

 

Neighbors said he’d been off for months. Muttering about curses. Watching the barn at night. One man at the feed store told a reporter, “He talked about the cows like they were possessed. We thought he’d just lost money on bad hay.”

 

He was broke. The cattle were dying. His head wasn’t right.

 

One November morning, he took a lamp into the old woman’s room. The farm was quiet and cold. She was whispering spells in her sleep. The light flickered and told him to strike.

 

When the neighbors found him, he was standing over her, calm as Sunday. “It’s done,” he said.

Otto Rohwedder The Man Who Invented Sliced Bread

Otto Rohwedder spent over two decades perfecting
the invention that made sliced bread possible

Otto Rohwedder was a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa. His world was tiny gears, watch springs, precision tools. Then he walked into a bakery long enough to see the problem. Bread was sold whole, hacked into slices at home, crumbly and uneven. He thought, “There ought to be a better way.” Something mechanical that could do the job once and do it perfectly.

Around 1912, he sold his jewelry business to bankroll it, a decision most people called insane. “Bread can’t be sliced by machine,” bakers told him. “It’ll go stale before you can sell it.” Rohwedder didn’t argue. He built it anyway. His wife, Carrie, said, “He wasn’t the kind to quit when he got told no.”

He worked in a basement filled with bread crumbs and cutting tools. He measured loaf dimensions with calipers, built frames of steel, gears that turned too fast, and blades that jammed on crusts. The loaves fell apart. He added holding pins. He invented a mechanism that would slice and then clamp the bread back together until it could be wrapped. “A sliced loaf is like a family,” he said. “It needs to be held together, or it falls apart.”

Inventor Christian Nelson: He Changed The Way We Ice Cream

Christian Nelson

I once read that the best inventions come from an everyday moment of indecision. Christian Nelson saw one of those moments in his candy and ice-cream shop in Onawa, Iowa. A boy walked in, stared at a chocolate bar, then at an ice-cream cone, and said, “I want ’em both, but I only got a nickel.” Nelson thought, why not both?

He was a high-school teacher who ran a candy-shop in the summer to make ends meet. He could’ve stayed in his classroom, and never tinkered with confectionery physics, but he went home and experimented with melted chocolate and frozen vanilla ice-cream blocks. How to coat ice-cream in chocolate so the chocolate would stick, wouldn’t crack, wouldn’t slide off, wouldn’t melt in your fingers before you could enjoy it? He discovered that adding cocoa butter made the difference. He built a dipping machine, produced 500 sample bars, and handed them out at a fireman’s picnic.

He called his creation the “I-Scream Bar.” Then he found a partner, Russell C. Stover, who helped turn it from a summer side-project into something national. They renamed it “Eskimo Pie.” Before long, millions of people were being eaten. Nelson’s invention turned into a nationwide treat.

Downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa Circa 1910

Downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with a birds-eye view of the Quaker Oats plant. (from a vintage postcard, circa 1910)

Washington Street Iowa City, Iowa. Circa 1910

 

Washington Street in Iowa City, Iowa. (from a vintage postcard, circa 1910)

Main Street Dubuque, Iowa Circa 1920s

Main Street, looking north from Eighth Street. Dubuque, Iowa. (cira 1920s, from a vintage postcard)

The Day the Music Died February 3, 1959

Buddy Holly

February 3, 1959. Clear Lake, Iowa. The air felt like glass. You could see your breath in the headlights. Inside the Surf Ballroom, it was — sweat, perfume, and static.

 Buddy Holly hit the stage in a gray suit and black-rimmed glasses. He opened with “Gotta Travel On.” The crowd roared. Ritchie Valens followed with “Donna,” smiling through the flu. The Big Bopper — J.P. Richardson — lumbered across the stage, wiping his brow, booming out “Chantilly Lace.”

 

Carroll Anderson, the ballroom manager, said, “They were in good spirits. Buddy was joking; Ritchie was nervous but happy. Nobody was thinking about the weather.”

 

Outside, the temperature was ten below. Snow whipped across the lot. The tour bus was parked near the back, with a dead heater, iced windows, smelling like old socks and diesel.

Redemption of Herbert Hoover

Herbert Hoover, 1918

Herbert Hoover didn’t leave the White House — so much as escape it.

 Critics said he’d wrecked America and sat on his hands while people starved. They built shantytowns called Hoovervilles, wrapped themselves in Hoover blankets, and cursed his name between bites of government cheese. No president before or since has been so thoroughly damned by public opinion — not even Nixon.

 

FDR came riding in like a smiling messiah with a cigarette holder and a jaw made for the newsreels, while Hoover looked like a disappointed banker in a dust storm. Roosevelt promised hope and handouts; Hoover believed in hard work and human decency. “Blessed are the children of the poor,” he said dryly, “for they shall inherit debt.” Not exactly a campaign jingle for a nation waiting on its next meal.

 

So Hoover went west — back to Palo Alto. The man who once fed Europe spent his evenings pacing the hills above Stanford, wondering how a nation he’d saved could turn on him so fast. He wrote his vengeance on a typewriter: The Challenge to Liberty. The Memoirs. The Problems of Lasting Peace. Books with titles so dry you could light cigars with them — but inside them burned fury. “The New Deal,” he said, “is an attempt to divide men by class and set them to fighting each other. You cannot build freedom out of envy.”

Allie Haradon She Wanted A Baby, But...

In February 1916, Allie Haradon placed an ad in the Des Moines Register saying she wanted to adopt a baby. Ernest and Emma Ohrtman of Bagley, Iowa, answered it. They had a child they wanted to get rid of, and Allie wanted one. It should have been simple a simple exchange.

 It wasn’t.

 

Allie brought the baby home and showed it to her husband, William. He wasn’t thrilled. He didn’t yell or hit her—just said no.

 

The next day, Allie left the baby in a shed behind the Salvation Army home, figuring they’d find it soon enough. They didn’t. The janitor hauled the basket out with the rest of the trash.

 

A month later, a worker at the city dump on Southeast Sixth Street found what was left of the baby.

 

Detectives arrested Ben Dudi and his wife because someone said they had a baby before they moved to Minneapolis. They had to come back to Iowa and watch a coroner dig up their child to prove they weren’t murderers.

Gundale Martindale First Female Sheriff in Iowa

Gunda Martindale

Gunda Martindale became the hero of the Bergen School murder mostly because reporters needed one to sell their papers. She didn’t ask for it, or do anything to earn it. She just had the bad luck to be the only woman sheriff in Iowa. Reporters love that kind of stuff. The headlines write themselves.

They said she led men through the wilderness, hunting a killer across the Iowa-Minnesota line, then outsmarted a lynch mob, all without pulling a gun. None of it happened, of course, but no one ever sold a newspaper by telling the truth.

When they brought Earl Throst in, the town turned mean. A crowd gathered outside the Waukon jail. They wanted blood, or something close to it. Somebody said “string him up,” and nobody argued.

The papers said Martindale “walked in the front door of the jail while her deputies, I. E. Woodmansee and Charles Hall, slipped Throst through the back and locked him up.” Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s half true. Doesn’t matter. It sounded good. A paper out east had her saying —“I have to spring the trap on Throst, and I’ll do my duty.” Nice line, not a word of truth to it.

When it was over, Martindale tried to correct the story. She hadn’t chased anyone, had never faced a mob.She manned her desk, directing the chase from her phone. Nobody wanted to hear that version, so the lie stuck. 

People liked that story. It gave them hope.

Booby Driscoll: Iowa's Forgotten Child Star

Bobby Driscoll

He was supposed to live forever.

That was the point of Peter Pan, wasn’t it? The boy who never grew up. The one who could fly, laugh at danger, and still make it home for bedtime. For a while, Bobby Driscoll every bit of him, from the crooked grin to the sparkle in his eyes.

 

He got his start a long way from Neverland: Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1937. His father sold insulation. His mother kept the house. Ordinary stuff. Then the family moved west, chasing clean air and a little luck. A barber thought the kid had “it” and sent him to a Hollywood agent. That’s how it worked back then. One minute you’re getting your hair cut, the next you’re under contract at Disney Studios.

 

He was nine years old when Walt Disney signed him—the first child actor the studio owned outright. “A fine, sincere boy,” Disney said. Bobby called Walt “Uncle Walt.”

 

Then came the hits. Song of the South. So Dear to My Heart. Treasure Island. Critics called him “a natural.” One said he carried the film “with warmth and genuine feeling.” By thirteen, he had a miniature Oscar, and his face was as familiar as Mickey’s ears.