It’s always interesting to note what happened to newsmakers of the past, so it was enjoyable to catch up with Barbara Roorda Basemann in today’s Ramblin’ column in The Gazette. If you read that column, you know Barbara was the one and only police officer in Center Point from 1981 to 1987. She was one [...]
My sump pump’s been pumpin’ since Thursday.
The ground ’round my house isn’t thirsty.
I’ve had enough of these darn April showers.
And the flood that’s been drownin’ the flowers.
Somewhere, let’s hope, there’s relief from this pain.
But I keep on wonderin’, who’ll stop the rain?
While Todd Dorman makes valid points for local television stations keeping the public informed about impending and sometimes life-threatening storms in his Gazette column Tuesday (April 22), I must take issue with what often appears to be overkill.
“Blowhards who make angry complaint calls when TV stations break into programming for tornado warnings need to get [...]
Spotted on the back of a dark blue SUV the other day as I rushed home for supper:
NOWIML8
Ah, the joy of license plates foretelling the future. Or recalling the past. Or putting you in the present.
I love personalized license plates and keep my eye out for them all the time.
Sometimes I can figure then out [...]
Singles have been told that a good place to meet the love of your life is in the produce aisle of a supermarket. You can exchange knowledge about fresh vegetables and maybe telephone numbers. But it’s not often you hear of a couple exchanging wedding vows among the lettuce and watermelon.
Alison Marek and Chris Price, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native, didn’t [...]
It had been years since I last talked to Bertha Peck, but I was still saddened by her death Saturday at age 80. I always remembered stopping to chat with her a dozen years ago, in 1996, as I drove by her very modest northwest Anamosa home where she was doing early spring yard work. Our conversation resulted [...]
It takes a little chutzpah and a lot of effort to ask people for money, even when it’s a good cause like the $1.75 million campaign under way to help with an $8.1-million project to renovate and purchase equipment for Virginia Gay Hospital in Vinton. (See today’s Ramblin’ column in The Gazette.)
So it was enlightening to hear campaign [...]
You can learn a lot about life from golf. One is, don’t take everything, especially the game, too seriously.
Two friends - Joe and Moe - were playing golf one Saturday morning when they decided to pretend as if they were on the professional tour. That meant adhering strictly to all of the rules of golf, including not improving the [...]
The Illinois earthquake that shook people awake shortly after 4:30 a.m. Friday as far away as Des Moines, reminded me of my experience with the 1989 earthquake that halted the San Francisco Giants-Oakland Athletics world series. I wrote about it when an earthquake hit the Los Angeles area. Here is that Ramblin’ column from Jan. 18, 1994.
When I [...]
Through the years I’ve written about several youth centers that opened in Eastern Iowa, only to close in a year or two because the kids quit coming or enough volunteers couldn’t be found to run the place.
Today’s Ramblin’ in The Gazette takes a look at another attempt at establishing a place where kids, sixth grade to [...]
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