James Young and Family Jackson County Iowa

James and Amanda Young and Family

James Young was born in Pennsylvania in 1841. Two years later his family headed west to Jackson County, Iowa. His father built a mill and a log house beside it, and James grew up working in the mill.

He stayed there until 1867, when he married Amanda Pierce. The next spring, he and his brother David bought land in Jones County. They worked it until they split the acres and went their own ways. James stayed and farmed his share.

In 1882 he moved to Madison Township, bought more land, and raised seven children. He served two terms as justice of the peace and backed the Prohibition Party, believing liquor was the country’s worst evil.

Jacon Eldridge Early Pioneer Scott County

Jacob Mullen Eldridge learned early that survival meant motion. His mother died when he was four, his grandfather when he was thirteen, and from then on he worked for everything he had—hauling freight, saving his pay, buying his own wagon team. By twenty-one, he’d heard enough about the new town of Davenport to risk it all on the promise of the frontier.

 He left Philadelphia in the fall of 1845 and rolled into Rock Island two months later, tired and broke. Davenport was just across the Mississippi then—a rough little settlement with muddy streets and big dreams. Eldridge bought land northeast of town for $1.25 an acre, planted an orchard, and built a house. Thirty years later, he sold the same land for $125 an acre and named the ridge after his home state—Jersey Ridge Road.

 

He was part dreamer, part salesman. One of the first land agents in eastern Iowa, he spent the 1850s advertising farmland in New York and Washington newspapers, urging readers to “Go West, young man.” That line would later be pinned to Horace Greeley, but people in Davenport knew who said it first.

Glenn Miller: The Band Leader Who Went To War And Never Came Home

Born in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1904, Glenn Miller came into the world wired tight and slightly out of tune—a man already chasing the rhythm no one else could hear. He wasn’t some dreamy jazz poet. He was an engineer in a suit, obsessed with sound the way gamblers obsess over dice. “A band ought to have a sound all its own,” he said. “It ought to have a personality.”

By the late 1930s, Miller had wrung that sound out of America’s nervous system. It wasn’t raw jazz—it was something slicker, faster, built for motion. You could hear it bouncing off jukeboxes in hotel lobbies and bus depots from Chicago to New Orleans. “In the Mood” didn’t ask you to dance—it commanded it. “Moonlight Serenade” wasn’t a love song; it was anesthesia. A New York critic said his music was “too perfect, too polite, too damn smooth.” Another said, “You can’t fight it. It gets in your bloodstream and stays there.”

Miller didn’t conduct—he controlled. Every arrangement was dissected, cleaned, and polished until not a single breath was out of place. “You’re sharp by a hair,” he told a trombonist. “Shave it off.” His musicians swore he could hear a wrong note through a hurricane. They feared him, respected him, maybe even loved him, though no one dared say it out loud.

Mamie Doud Eisenhower: The First Lady Who Kept The General Standing

Mamie Doud Eisenhower

Mary Geneva “Mamie” Doud Eisenhower was born in Boone, Iowa, in 1896. Her father was a successful meatpacker; her mother believed in good manners, good friends, and never running out of cake. Mamie grew up cheerful, social, and full of energy. “I was a chatterbox from the beginning,” she liked to say, and no one who met her ever disagreed.

She met Dwight Eisenhower in Texas in 1915, when he was a young Army lieutenant with big ears, a friendly smile, and zero money. “He had the nicest smile I’d ever seen,” she said. He was equally gone on her. “I’m walking on air,” he wrote after their first date. They were married that summer and spent the next fifty years in a love story that was half war zone, half road trip.

Army life was no picnic. They moved constantly—Panama, the Philippines, Washington, Denver. Over two dozen homes in thirty years. “The only thing we ever owned that wasn’t government issue,” she joked, “was our dog.” She learned to make a home out of whatever walls the Army handed her. “Home,” she said, “is wherever Ike happens to be.”

She turned chaos into order with a smile and a clipboard. Other officers’ wives adored her. “She was tiny but commanding,” one said. “You just wanted to do what she said.” Her secret was charm and discipline in equal measure. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you Mamie wasn’t tough,” an aide once said. “She was steel in satin.”

Conrad Nagel: Iowa's First Hollywood Star

Born in Keokuk, Iowa, in 1897, Conrad Nagel was one of Hollywood’s original leading men. He wasn’t the wild or brooding type. He knew where the exits were and how to use them.

Nagel got his start in silent films, where his calm confidence stood out against the flailing theatrics of the era. In The Mysterious Lady (1928), he held his own opposite Greta Garbo. Critics called him “the actor with the thoughtful eyes.” One said, “Nagel brings sincerity to roles that would collapse under a lesser man’s charm.” Another dubbed him “Hollywood’s gentleman.”

 

When sound arrived, his low, clear voice made him one of the few silent stars to easily transition into talkies. He starred in The Divorcee (1930) with Norma Shearer, a role that earned him an Academy Award nomination. MGM used him wherever they needed moral steadiness: the lawyer, husband, and suitor who  seemed too honorable for his own good.

 

In the 1930s and 1940s as movie roles disappeared, Nagel moved to radio. He hosted and acted in dozens of radio dramas. His voice became a familiar presence in living rooms across the country. He co-created and hosted The Silver Theatre, a prestige anthology that ran nearly a decade. He loved radio because “you could play any role and never worry if your hair was in place.” It was steady work, too, as younger stars crowded him out of Hollywood.

Eerie Iowa Booke Review

 

Iowa looks calm. Cornfields. Church bells. Pie contests. Then Eerie Iowa comes along and says, “Sure, but have you met the monsters?”

Michael McCarty and Bruce Walters take you down the gravel roads of the Hawkeye State and into the dark. They find a winged thing glowing over Van Meter in 1903. A lake monster curling under Okoboji. Bigfoot, naturally, tromping around Calhoun County like he owns the place.

 

It’s not just stories—they dig up history, too. Facts. Names. Newspaper clippings. All the little details that make you wonder if maybe it really did happen.

 

There’s a Kafka inspired sculpture that looks like it might start whispering to you if you stare too long. And Black Angels straight out of Hell that portend death if you look at them wrong.

 

The writing? Sharp. Weird. A little wicked. The kind that makes you smile right before the hair on your neck stands up. And the pictures. Bruce Walter’s drawings are haunting. Somewhat scary.

Robert Ray: The Iowa Governor Who Chose People Over Politics

Robert D. Ray was born in Des Moines in 1928. After graduating from Roosevelt High in 1946, he joined the army and served in occupied Japan with the military police.

When he came home, he went to Drake on the G.I. Bill, earned his law degree, and married his college sweetheart, Billie Lou Joyce. They settled in Des Moines, where Ray built a small law practice and a reputation for honesty and staying calm under pressure.

Politics followed. He became chairperson of the Iowa Republican Party in 1963, modernized it, raised money, and recruited new candidates, earning respect from both moderates and conservatives. Reporters called him “unflappable” and “impossible to dislike.”

America was a mess in 1968—Vietnam, protests, assassinations. Iowa Republicans needed someone calm. They picked Robert Ray. He won. Then he won again. And again. Five times. Fourteen years as governor.

People called him “the conscience of Iowa.” Others called him dull. He didn’t care. He governed like a man tuning an engine—carefully, quietly, and with purpose.

Then he did something that took real guts.