Samaritan Mission in Des Moines Iowa

Bread & soup line at Samaritan Mission in Des Moines

The line outside the Samaritan Mission on East 5th Street often began forming before the sun was up. Men, women, and children waited quietly for a bowl of soup and a piece of bread. Major Leroy Howver, who ran the mission at 308 E. 5th, promised they would keep feeding people all winter if that’s what it took. And by the look of the crowds, it was going to take a lot.

That first day told the entire story. Some people were so hungry they didn’t take time to carry their soup home—they ate it right there in the mission. Others brought whatever they could find to hold enough food to share with their families: big kettles, dented buckets, even old lard pails. One elderly woman arrived with two tiny tin cups. She filled them, and sat down, too tired and hungry to wait. A young child in ragged clothes carried a kettle almost as big as himself.

The Samaritan Mission was undenominational and survived entirely on donations. In a winter when so many had nothing, the mission gave out more than soup. It offered a place where people could stand together, warm up, and remember they weren’t forgotten. On good days, the mission had food, clothes, and coal it could send home with needy families.

Picture and storyline from the Des Moines Register. December 21, 1924.

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs Maysville Iowa Turkey Farmer

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs and some of her turkeys

Mrs. Gus Freiderichs didn’t set out to build the largest turkey farm in Iowa. She just had an idea, one of those quiet, stubborn ideas that settles in your chest and refuses to leave. Her friends and neighbors near Maysville tried to talk her out of it. “Turkeys are impossible to raise,” they said. “They die if you look at them wrong.” But she didn’t budge. She bought a book called Hints for Amateur Poultry Raisers, propped it open on the kitchen table, and started anyway.

The early days were rough. The first twelve eggs gave her one bird—one tiny, lonely turkey. The rest hatched and died as if trying to tell her: “Turkey raising doesn’t pay. We told you so.”Anyone else might’ve quit, but she tried again. The second batch—twelve demanding little birds—felt like the universe giving her a reluctant nod.

 

From there, it snowballed. She added more birds until by November 1930 her farm was home to nearly six hundred turkeys. She built four sheds, fenced in a long run, that protected her flock from thieves, coyotes, and every other creature that thought a turkey looked like lunch. By spring, she planned to top a thousand birds.

Italian Boxer Primo Carnera in the Tri-Cities

Primo Carnera (left), Al Singer (right)

Primo Carnera hit the Tri-Cities like a runaway circus elephant that suddenly decided to walk upright and take questions. People had whispered about him for months—the giant from Italy. He was built like a locomotive—six-foot-eight, two-eighty-five, wearing size-23 shoes that looked less like footwear and more like state-issued pontoons.

The papers printed a photo of Carnera looming over Al Singer, the Bronx firecracker who usually strutted into a ring like he owned the joint. Next to Carnera, he looked like some doomed newsboy drafted into mythology by mistake. Singer was coiled and ready. Carnera looked like he was debating whether to punch, or simply let gravity do the job.

He wasn’t here to fight. Just an exhibition match on July 10, 1930, at the Palmer School’s open-air arena. A chance for the locals to gawk at something their brains refused to classify as normal. Crowds swarmed him. They wanted to touch the hands, measure the shoulders, stare at the monstrous shoes and swear they weren’t hallucinating.

For a few days that summer, the Tri-Cities felt wired with electricity—like the whole place had been plugged into some great brutal engine. Carnera wandered through town, enormous and unhurried, and people followed him just to make sure the giant was real and not something conjured out of heat, rumor, and American hunger for spectacle.

Mrs. Kenneth Bowman Saved Her Children From A Barn Fire

Mrs Kenneth Brown and her children

Maquoketa, Iowa. July 9, 1930. It started like any other morning. Mrs. Kenneth Bowman was doing her chores when she realized her three boys and her little sister, Cora Beth—had climbed into the hayloft to see a baby pigeon.

Then the loft burst into flames. No warning, no time for panic. She just ran—pulled Warren Lee, Owen, little Neale, and Cora Beth out of the smoke one by one, moving on instinct while the heat snapped behind her.

People tried to make sense of it afterward. Investigators said someone had used dynamite to break apart the tightly packed hay so it would burn faster. It sounded impossible until you saw how fast the fire moved.

By the time the flames died, seven buildings were gone. Only the farmhouse, the separator shed, and a barn across the road were still standing.

Neighbors called Mrs. Bowman a hero. She probably didn’t feel like one, but those kids are alive because she didn’t stop to think.

Elsie Swender Pushed for the Death Penalty

Elsie Swender

In the fall of 1920-something, when most people did everything short of faking typhoid to avoid jury duty, 24-year-old Elsie Swender marched into the courthouse like it was opening night on Broadway. She told the Register she “wouldn’t have missed jury duty for the world.” Not even for a date, a promotion, or the promise of free chocolates at Younkers.

She got the Joe Williams murder trial—one of the most closely watched cases of the year. It was her first time on a jury, and she took to it with a kind of fervor usually reserved for revival tent preachers and championship wrestling fans. From the moment the jurors filed into the deliberation room, Elsie planted her feet and fired her opening salvo: death penalty.

According to the paper, she wasn’t just in favor of it. She was one of the most aggressive jurors pushing for it. She preached. She argued. She held the floor like she had been waiting her whole life for this exact moment. “Our first vote was for the death penalty,” she told the reporter, half proud, half disappointed. “I sure did a lot of preaching.”

Eight jurors strongly favored first-degree murder. Elsie was among them, doing everything she could to swing the remaining four to her side. She tried logic. She tried emotion. She tried whatever it is a 24-year-old uses when she’s suddenly the most forceful person in a room full of grown adults deciding a man’s fate.

How Santa Claus Came to Des Moines in 1923

Santa Claus on his way to the Younker 
Brother store, with acting mayor,
Mrs. C. H. Morris

Santa blew into Des Moines on November 17, 1923, long before anyone expected him. Kids weren’t ready. Parents weren’t ready. Even the weather wasn’t ready. Yet there he was, swooping in like Christmas couldn’t wait another minute.

By sunrise, thousands of children were already downtown, crowding the sidewalks and pressing their noses to the toy-land windows of the big stores. One reporter joked the shelves held enough toys “to fill the bags of 10,000 Saint Nicks,” and judging by the wide-eyed faces in the crowds, most kids believed that was true.

 

The Des Moines Tribune swore that “never in the history of Des Moines has Christmas spirit gotten off to an earlier start than this year,” and they weren’t kidding. There was a Christmas parade, free taxi rides, and chocolate teddy bears—real chocolate teddy bears—dropping out of the sky.

 

Santa made his grand entrance a little after nine o’clock at the Harris-Emery store. He didn’t sneak down a chimney or clomp in with reindeer hooves. He went big. He flew over Des Moines in a high-powered airplane, circling the city like a jolly red barnstormer. Kids pointed at the sky. Mothers shaded their eyes. Fathers muttered things like, “Good grief, he’s actually doing it.”

Davenport Iowa Train Wreck November 1919

Two trains on the Rock Island line collided five miles west of Davenport just after dawn on November 20, 1919.

When help reached the site, the wreck looked unreal. Seven cars were thrown off the tracks—some half-buried in the dirt, others twisted into crooked piles. A cattle car had exploded into splinters. Thirty head of cattle lay dead or dying, their moans drifting across the fields. The Davenport Democrat and Leader said the pitiful sounds could be heard for blocks.

 

How the three-man crew lived through it was a mystery.

 

Engine No. 2529, run by engineer Thorpe, had been crushed into a tangle of iron. The fireman crawled out first on his hands and knees, shaking and scraped raw but alive. A witness said he looked like a man clawing his way out of the jaws of something that meant to kill him.