Who Remembers Wacky Waters Water Park in Davenport?

 

Wacky Waters was the place where your parents handed you twenty bucks at 10 in the morning and basically said, “Good luck surviving.”

Then they disappeared for six hours.

The park opened in Davenport in 1984, off Interstate 80, and for Quad Cities’ kids it quickly became the greatest place on earth besides maybe Aladdin’s Castle at the mall.

Before Wacky Waters, summer mostly meant sweating in somebody’s backyard kiddie pool while mosquitoes carried off small pets.

Then suddenly there were water slides. Not normal water slides either. These things looked like they’d been designed by a man who hated chiropractors.

The Daredevil and Thunderbolt towers were gigantic. At least they felt gigantic when you were nine and wearing jelly sandals. You’d stand at the bottom staring up while another kid shot out the end like a human missile and skipped across the water face first.

Clifford Samuels 17-Year-Old Des Moines Inventor

 

Clifford Samuels and his machine. (Des Moines Register. November 26, 1911)

Most 17-year-olds in 1911 spent their time thinking about school, baseball, or getting into trouble.

Clifford Samuels of Des Moines spent two years building a wireless telegraph machine.

The whole thing cost him seven bucks.

He became obsessed. His grades started slipping. Friends hardly saw him. Family complained he spent all his time reading, fooling with wires, and staring off into space. Sometimes he got so wrapped up in it that he forgot to eat.

And then he spent a day with a Navy officer learning about wireless communication. When he got home, he started building his own machine.

Then came the big test.

After two years of tinkering, reading, and daydreaming, Clifford fired the machine up.

It worked. On the first try.

Clifford told a reporter for the Des Moines Register that it could send messages up to fifteen miles and pick up signals from as far away as three hundred miles. Not exactly small-time stuff for a high school kid in 1911.

Murder of Marlene "Mickey" Padfield Lisbon Iowa 1959

 

When Marlene “Mickey” Padfield, 17, of Lisbon, Iowa, disappeared on February 18, 1959, it was assumed she’d run away. There was a small notice in The Cedar Rapids Gazette the next day, then nothing for nearly two months. But that all changed on April 29 when the skeleton of a young woman was found on a section of timberland near Roy White’s farm.

White said his dogs walked up to him carrying what looked like bones. When he checked, it was a human hand. He did a little digging and found a skeleton lying on a nearby road. Apparently, the dogs dragged it out of the timber.

Ethel Padfield, Marlene’s mother, identified the remains by the blouse she was wearing and the color of her fingernail polish. More of Marlene’s clothes turned up in May—her purse, a shoe, and her underwear, but none of them helped detectives piece together what happened to her. Her skirt turned up the following February, and pieces of her slip after that.

A pathologist examined the remains but couldn’t determine the cause of death because there wasn’t enough soft tissue left to test. The skeleton didn’t provide any clues—there weren’t any broken bones or other clues to show foul play.

Detectives spent the next few weeks piecing together the girl’s life and last days.

Marlene was described as an attractive, brown-haired girl who tried a little too hard to be popular during her junior year. She had short hair above the ears, with curls up front—stood 5 foot four, weighed 112 pounds, was smart, aggressively friendly, and wanted everyone to like her.

She joined the band and acted in the school play, “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.” And then, six weeks into her senior year, Marlene decided it was too much. School bored her, and she wasn’t learning anything worthwhile, so she dropped out and ran through a string of low-wage jobs, earning $28 to $32 a week. She worked as a waitress at several restaurants, clerked at Mongomery Ward, then got a job as a bookkeeper at J & T Radio and Television Repair.

Ethel Padfield dropped Marlene off at J & T Radio and Television Repair in Cedar Rapids on February 18. She talked to her daughter on the phone several times during the day, and said her daughter planned to take the bus home.

Murder of Edward Stuart At Lone Grave Bluff In Clinton

 

Harold Riggs (The Daily Times. October 8, 1926)

The place already had a bad reputation before Edward Stewart was murdered there.

 

People around Clinton called it Lone Grave Bluff. Legend says a steamboat stopped there once so the crew could bury a dead river pilot. Maybe it happened. Maybe it didn’t. By 1926, nobody cared much either way. The name fit. High bluffs. Thick brush. River fog rolling off the Mississippi. The place kids dared each other to visit after dark, then ran all the way home afterward.

 

It was where Harold Riggs took Edward Stewart.

 

Riggs was young, but the police already knew him well. According to the Clinton Advertiser, officers first arrested him when he was eight for breaking into automobiles. Not long after, they picked him up again for stealing a gun from a local house. He pleaded guilty and was supposed to go to reform school, but got paroled at the last minute.

 

The city watched him grow up mean.

 

Teachers complained. Police hauled him in over and over. Neighbors said he was always looking for trouble. Even as a teenager, he had a bad temper and could fly off over almost nothing.

How Tom Vilsack Went From Small-Town Mayor To One Of America's Most Powerful Politicians

 

Tom Vilsack’s political career almost sounds fake when you line it all up.

Mayor. State senator. Governor of Iowa. Secretary of Agriculture. Then Secretary of Agriculture again under a different president.

Most politicians spend their entire careers trying to reach one of those jobs. Vilsack somehow stacked them together like old baseball cards.

The strange part is that he never looked like a political star. He looked more like an attorney explaining zoning permits at a city council meeting than somebody climbing toward national power.

Vilsack had the personality that Iowa voters trusted. He didn’t sound like he was auditioning for television. He sounded like the guy explaining school bond issues at a town hall while everybody stabbed at pie and drank weak coffee out of tiny paper cups.

Before politics, he practiced law in Mount Pleasant.

Then tragedy shoved him into public life when Ruth Harkin was murdered in Mount Pleasant in 1986. Vilsack helped organize a fundraiser for the family, and people noticed he stayed calm while everybody else looked shell-shocked.

Book Review: Skull In The Ashes by Peter Kaufman

Some true crime books feel clean and organized. Nice little timelines. Neatly explained motives. Detectives heroically solving crimes before dinner.

Skull in the Ashes isn’t that book.

It feels like somebody dumped a shovel full of burned secrets onto the table and said, “Good luck figuring this mess out.”

It starts in 1897 when a general store burns down in Walford, Iowa. The next morning they find a charred body in the ashes, and everybody just sort of nods and says, “Well, guess Frank Novak died in the fire.”

Except… did he?

That question hangs over the entire book like smoke.

Pretty quickly things start smelling worse than the burned building. Novak had life insurance policies. Convenient. 

The body might actually belong to a hard-drinking laborer named Edward Murray. Also convenient. 

Iowa: It's Weirder Than You Think

 

People who’ve never been to Iowa think the entire state is just corn, soybeans, and pork tenderloins.

 

That’s because Iowa has spent decades hiding its weirdness from the rest of America like some kind of agricultural cryptid.

 

This is a state where pigs outnumber people, where sliced bread first showed up and people reacted like cavemen discovering fire. Iowa accidentally helped invent the computer. One town became an island because the Mississippi River basically shrugged and said, “Figure it out, nerds.”

 

There’s a crooked street that looks hammered, the world’s largest truck stop, and a literary city filled with writers wearing sweaters in July and pretending their student loans are part of the creative process.

 

Also, Iowa used to belong to France, which feels impossible after you’ve watched somebody eat a pork tenderloin the size of a hubcap while washing it down with ranch dressing and barbecue sauce.

 

The best part is that Iowans barely react to any of this. They might casually say, “Yeah, we got more pigs than people,” before changing the subject to Casey’s breakfast pizza.

 

It’s deeply unsettling behavior.