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.

Gunda 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.

Rise and Fall of Rock Island Gangster John Looney

John Looney

John Looney ran Rock Island like a man conducting an orchestra of crooks, cops, and terrified politicians who couldn’t tell whether to bribe him, arrest him, or beg for a job. He wasn’t one to hide in the shadows—he built his pulpit and screamed into the microphone. In 1912, the Rock Island Argus said, “Mr. Looney has taken leave of his senses,” but they were wrong. He hadn’t lost them. He’d sold them to the highest bidder.

He was born in 1865 or 1866, the son of Irish immigrants who believed America rewarded hard work. It didn’t. It rewarded nerve, and Looney had a surplus of that. He studied law, passed the bar, and by 1889 was prowling the Rock Island courthouse in a cheap suit that somehow made him look dangerous. People remembered the eyes—too bright, too still. You could tell he was thinking of angles, leverage, a thousand and one ways to make a buck.

The newspapers described him as “ambitious and fearless,” which was code for ruthless. He practiced law for a while, but law was just another racket. He wanted something bigger, something that could make or break reputations. So he created the Rock Island News, a scandal sheet dressed up as journalism. It was a blackmail factory disguised as a printing press. For a fee, your name stayed out of the paper. Refuse, and the next morning your sins were spread across the front page. “The people of this city are being held hostage by a madman with a printing press,” the Argus wrote, and they weren’t wrong.