Santa Claus Delivering Toys

This image of Santa Claus and his sleigh appeared on the front page of the Des Moines Tribune, Christmas Day, 1925. (I colored and touched up the black and white artwork)

The Doo Dads Reach Candy Land

Does anyone else see the beginnings of Dr. Seuss in this image and story?

The Doo Dads reach Candy Land

The dudes had to leave the land of the long-legged Doo Dads without finding any reason for their long legs. They scrambled back into their machine and started in the quest of new adventures.

They were chattering away and laughing merrily when they began to wrinkle up their stubby noses, and altogether they said, “What is that I smell?

(Colored image from the Des Moines Tribune. February 25, 1922)

Iowa Congressman Oscar Heline The Man Who Refused to Shut Up

Oscar Heline erupted out of the farm crisis like a man done waiting for permission. He wasn’t polite. He wasn’t polished. He was the human bill collector for every bad policy and blind bureaucrat that helped wreck the countryside. He’d watched neighbors lose everything, and he wasn’t going quietly.

In the early 1930s, Iowa farmers were getting chewed to ribbons. Prices tanked. Land vanished. Entire communities folded like cheap card tables. The entire system felt wired for failure, and the people running it acted surprised every time it blew up.

Heline didn’t bother with committees or measured tones. He helped form the Farmers Holiday Association—a movement that felt less like a meeting and more like a pressure cooker ready to pop. They blocked roads, shut down markets, and stared down sheriffs and bankers with the dead-eyed resolve that makes a man rethink his job. Critics screamed “radical.” Heline shrugged. What else do you call trying to stay alive?

Washington started hearing the noise. Soon Heline was advising the Roosevelt administration, stomping through the halls like someone sent to collect a debt. He didn’t deal in jargon. He talked about farm auctions that felt like funerals and families smothered by bank notices. He pushed for anything—price supports, production cuts, whatever—if it kept farmers from being scraped off their land like roadkill.

Alice Finn Miss Popularity Winner 1927

Alice Finn of Des Moines, Iowa, won the 1927 popularity contest hosted by the Publix Theaters. She played several parts in the theater’s shows, and appeared on stage in, “In Dutch.”

Pencil drawing of an image published in the Des Moines Register on July 8, 1928,

Boone Iowa High School Class of 1890

 

Boone High School class of 1890.

Back row: John Goeppinger, Omar Mann.
Third girl from left: Mrs. C. Canfield.
Bottom row: W. W. Goodykoonts, Mrs. H. T. Cook, Arthur Crary, and Fred Crary.

(Photo from the Des Moines Register. April 24, 1927)

Book Review: Murder & Mayhem in Scott County

You pick up Murder & Mayhem in Scott County, Iowa expecting a tidy little history lesson—maybe some musty courthouse trivia, a harmless stroll through the polite past. Instead, the thing hits you like a warm Schlitz can lobbed from a moving pickup. Scott County isn’t the wholesome Midwest postcard you were promised. It’s a long, low scream under the polite small-talk.

Grace Reed on Utica Ridge Road? That story crawls under your skin and refuses to pay rent. Margaretha Nehlsen poisoning her own kids with chocolate—chocolate, of all things—makes you want to interrogate every candy dish you’ve ever seen at a church potluck. And Harry Hamilton, the ex-cop who decided law enforcement was more exciting when you were shooting at it—he’s the kind of character you expect to find at 2 a.m. in a tavern that claims it closes at midnight.

The book doesn’t guide you so much as shove you down a gravel road at high speed, shouting facts at you through the open window. There’s a feverish energy to it, the sense that the author has been living on gas-station coffee and county-archive dust for far too long. Each chapter feels like it was pulled from a file drawer that local officials swore didn’t exist.

The Union Brewery and Iowa City Beer

Workers outside a brewery in the 1860s

The Union Brewery in Iowa City felt like a place that survived on nerve alone. Built in 1856 by Simeon Hotz, a shoemaker turned brewer, it grew into a brick stronghold at Linn and Market, a place the Iowa State Register said operated with “a confidence that must be admired, considering the temperance sentiment now fashionable in the Capitol.”

The brewery didn’t just sell beer — it sold identity. Hotz and Anton Geiger were German immigrants who brought their lager brewing with them, and Iowa City drank it up like a man who’d been wandering the prairie too long.

 

By 1868 they expanded into the big building — three stories, beer cellars underneath, steam heat, the whole industrial symphony. Locals wandered in and out of the taproom, leaving footprints in the sawdust and carrying home gossip hotter than the kettles.