see more images from the Marcus Iowa Fair.
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Saturday, September 09, 2006
October 06 discussion
see more images from the Marcus Iowa Fair.
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The 3rd fireman in picture #27 is Russ Hansen. He and his wife Michelle live in Jack & Alice Dunn's house, across the street to the west from Faith Lutheran Church.
Russ was the first guy on the scene when my husband Michael broke his neck this past May.
This piece from the Cherokee paper, by Margaret Dorr, is appropriate for starting off October.
Claude Grey Makes His Mark
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Gray Matter with Margaret Dorr
After recently urging you to collect old stories, I seem to be taking my own advice.
When the fledgling Marcus Historical Society was offered the use of the vintage wrecker from Grey's Garage for the Marcus Fair Parade, I recalled the story of the truck's original owner. His grandson, Brian Nelson, whose family has preserved the truck, is one of the enthusiastic members of the society.
Claude Grey, who was born near Sioux Rapids in 1899, was destined to grow up with the budding auto industry. He once said he'd seen all he wanted of horses as a young farm lad so, by the age of 18, he had bought his first car -- a second-hand 1914 Model-T. He loved tinkering with these new-fangled vehicles and soon realized this was the way he wanted to make his living..
The industry was setting up training centers for mechanics around the U.S. The two closest were in Detroit and Kansas City. In 1921, right after harvest, he set out to drive to Detroit, but it was one of those "bad" Iowa winters. He was snowbound in eastern Iowa and had to postpone his dream. The following year he headed, instead, to Kansas City. Arriving there after a three-day drive, Claude enrolled in the eighteen-month course that launched his career.
He was employed for a time in a garage in his home town where a man named Joe Martinson was shop foreman, but this wasn't quite what young Grey had in mind. He wanted to "see the world." Convinced that he could get a job anywhere with his newly acquired skills, he was determined to do just that -- until fate intervened.
In 1928 he lost an eye in an industrial accident. Many years later, he told us that people back then weren't very understanding about such matters. Convinced that no one was going to hire a stranger with one eye, he decided he'd better give up and go where he knew someone. That happened to be Marcus where his friend, Martinson, had purchased the Chevrolet garage several years earlier. Though it seemed a cruel fate at the time, it now seems more like destiny.
It was not long until Martinson retired and sold the garage to Claude. About the same time, he met and courted Marcus native Clara Jobst. They were married in 1932 and, in time, adopted Clara's niece, Nancy Ziegler (now Nelson). Their little family was complete.
Grey's Garage became a fixture on Main Street. Excellent service was as dependable there as the sun's rising. The garage owner went out of his way to accommodate his customers. One time, while reminiscing of the days when businesses stayed open on Saturday nights for the farmers' convenience, Claude said, "Every once in awhile a fellow would come in at 5 or 6 wanting an overhaul job. I'd do it, too, just to oblige him even if I had to work 'til 2 AM."
It is refreshing to think of those days, when pride in a job well done was of nearly as much value as the money earned. Claude Grey epitomized that standard.
He passed from this earth in 1980 at the age of 81, having worked at the craft he loved until shortly before his death. This shy, quiet man of inherent wisdom and integrity enjoyed what he did and took pride in doing it well. We are grateful for his example and happy to do our part in preserving his memory.
Max,
Thanks for posting the article on Claude Grey. I try to catch Margaret's articles online, but I must have missed this one. Claude Grey was my great-grandfather, Roger and Nancy Nelson are my grandparents. I guess I don't know much about where he came from, so much of it was new to me.
My parents, Greg and Bobbi (Nelson) Taylor still live in Claude and Clara's house on Locust street. It was a great place to grow up. If anyone has any history on the house I'd love to know (who lived in it before the Grey's, etc.).
Jacob Taylor
Dallas, TX
Sic'em Bears Jacob!
THREE CHORDS AND THE TRUTH
Growing up in Marcus in the western part of the great state, we got to experience music that our eastern Iowa cousins never really got a hold of. They were oriented to sophisticated Chicago but we seemed to take to -- and relate to -- the wide open prairies of the west.
Perhaps that’s why I get such a kick out of country music -- once called “cowboy” or “hillbilly” music. It didn’t beat those wonderful pop standards of the ’30s and ’40s, but there is an honesty about the titles that is priceless. Consider –-
(1) “ I Wouldn’t Take Her to a Dog Fight, ‘Cause I‘m Afraid She’d Win”
(2) ”She Got the Ring and I Got the Finger”
(3) “If the Phone Don’t Ring, You Know It’s Me”
(4) “My Wife Ran Off with My Best Friend, and I Miss Him”
(5) ”I’ll Marry You Tomorrow, but Let’s Honeymoon Tonight!”
And then there’s my all time favorite --
“How Can I Miss You, When You Won’t Go Away?”
The country lyrics of yesterday and today talk of unrequited love, booze, downtimes, and loneliness. They are decidedly and mournfully masculine and, in this day and age, may be offensive to some of the female persuasion (sorry ‘bout that!). The accompanying music is simple, direct, and consists of three chords and the truth. Can’t get much better than that!
The habitués of the Hawkeye (when it was known as Flannigan’s) and the East Side Tavern and McQueen’s were comfortable, back in the ’40s, with those songs on the juke box or swirling in their minds as they nursed a beer .Or stared blankly into an empty glass. In the warm, dark, male sanctuary of my fictitious “He Ain’t Here Pool Hall,” guys were confronted with a handwritten sign behind the bar that pleaded “If You’re Drinkin’ to Forget, Please Pay in Advance!”
Most country songs today seem to belong in a similar safehouse where guys still go to wet their whistle. What are your favorite country music songs -- then and now? Do females relate to them or are they offended? And outside of the radio stations and cable networks where do you hear them in Marcus and elsewhere today?
Bob: Great CW stuff. I was never a big fan until my youngest daughter got me hooked. Her crowd loves it.
I then started listening to some of the local stations and watching some CMT on cable. The Iowa State Fair and local concerts (i.e., college stadiums and local open- air concerts in the summer) are the biggest venues around here (Des Moines) outside of radio and TV. The casinos also draw some big name acts, although I've never been.
I'm partial to George Strait. Probably shows my age. Like the music, love the message.
Some of my favorite titles - not my favorite songs - are:
1."I Still Miss You Baby, But My Aim's Getting Better."
2. "If I Had Shot You When I Wanted To I'd Be Out By Now."
3."It's Hard To Kiss The Lips At Night That Chew Your A** Out All Day Long."
And finally, for the frisky ladies, The Statler Brothers own: "You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith, Too."
Fred
In case you didn't see this on TV last spring, I uploaded this show so you could see it. Larry's father, Everett, was born in Cleghorn and was my dad's brother.
Dr. Lawrence Dorr on ABC's Miracle Workers
For those of you interested in country music, you can go to
http://newcountrystar.com
and listen to a sample of Tom Wurth's music. If you like his more than the others, you can vote for him to be the favorite male new country star. It's simple and only takes a few minutes to show your support for this Marcus native!
anonymous:
That is good stuff by Tom Wurth. What a great voice and look how he is doing in the voting!!! The Wurth family should be proud of this talented family member and Marcus should be proud to call him one of our own. Would someone back home make sure they try to get him to perform at the Marcus Fair next year if they can afford him!
Marcus Iowa takes on Wall Street!
Again, you'll have to cut and paste this link -- sorry just no time to get the computer lingo down.
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/061010/20061010005513.html?.v=1
An interesting story about a stock (that was doing great today accordig to my husband) and its connections to Little Sioux Processors of Marcus...
I agree! I think it'd be great to have a Tom Wurth concert at the Marcus Fair!!! He's really good! I want a chance to get my CD signed!!!
Speaking of Wall Street, not sure if this has been posted on here before or not but the Chairman, CEO & President of Sysco Corporation (a food service company with over 32 billion in sales annually) is none other than Richard J. Schnieders from Remsen, Iowa! I don't know what they put in the water in NW Iowa but whatever it is, it's working!!
I second the post by Jacob Taylor. My grandparents are also Roger and Nancy Nelson.
I very much enjoyed the information about Claude. I remember riding in the wrecker so many times at the Marcus Fair and throwing out the candy!
Ben Nelson
..son of Brian and Paula Nelson
I talked to Ken Ogren at Farmers State Bank yesterday. He told me that a senior writer for Fortune Magazine was in town recently. He visited to do a story on how ethanol is impacting rural Iowa/America. That visit was followed by a free lance photographer out of New York City who came to Marcus to shoot pictures for the article.
Sounds like it all went well. Ken thought the article would run in November. Watch your Fortune Magazine for an update on Our Hometown.
Thought blog readers might be interested in watching for this.
Ken: If you read this and I missed anything, feel free to correct.
Fred
This is a great blog community! So engaged, so informative.
Listen, I am trying to find one of your members, Philip Dorr. I saw him this weekend at Baylor Homecoming in Texas. He said something that was very intuitive; and I want to know how he derived his conclusions.
Thanks, and let me hear from you, Phil!
Sharon:
U can email me at Baylor1980@aol.com and/or call me at 773-755-0239.
BTW, it was a blast being in Waco for homecoming this past weekend. The best part of all was that I got to see my cousin "Derek Hansen" son of Chuck and Karen Hansen and grandson of Ray and Peg Hansen who are all originally from Marcus. Derek is from the Des Moines area and a freshman at Baylor. Another extremely bright kid and handsome to boot with roots to the Marcus community!
Side note......saw a young lady on campus and she was wearing a University of Iowa Hawkeye sweatshirt.....asked her if she was an Iowa girl? Well she was from West Des Moines and a "VALLEY GIRL" who happened to be best friends with my niece while going to high school at Valley. My niece is the daughter of my brother Fred and his wife Linda. Small World!!!!
Sic 'Em Bears!
To Margaret Dorr,
The Cherokee ChronicleTimes arrives several days late here in Mesa so we just read your article about NASA on Oct. 23. It was very informative. You asked for any other Cherokee Co. connections. There is another Marcus connection. Brian Leavitt, son of Steve and Sheila Leavitt, and grandson of John and Donna Leavitt just moved to Houston to work at NASA. I'm sure his grandparents would fill you in with what he does there.
Pat Ducommun
Pat:
U can get the Cherokee paper online. That way you can read the paper in a more timely manner!
Phil,
Thanks. I do read it online but they are very slow at updating. I read your Mom's article in my paper and then the same day it was online when I looked.
Have a good day.
Pat
There is a considerable archive of Margaret Dorr's Chronicle Times columns available online. See http://www.chronicletimes.com/columns/gray-matter
This from Margaret Dorr, who reports that she is having problems in posting on this site.
To Pat Ducommun: I have been told about Brian Leavitt and also have another NASA related connection, but will wait a few weeks to do the story in case any others surface.
By the way, you and Galen are missed here on the Historical Society front. Still, you can keep talking it up with all the Marcusites down there. We need all the memberships, contributions, and ideas possible.
There will be more on the Blogspot soon, in fact, you will be hearing a lot about it if we "computer dummies" can figure out how to get posted. Our meeting last night posed more questions than answers, but I expect identifying the crucial questions is the first step in the right direction!
Msrgaret Dorr
Margaret,
Thanks for your reply. We'll be looking for the posting about the Historical Society. We heard about some of the meeting last night from Dr. Wiese.
Pat
Thank you, Baritone Bob, for posting the Cherokee paper online address. I don't subscribe to that paper and enjoyed catching up on Margaret Dorr's column. Bonnie Morgenthaler
Testing
xlbihfpn For crying out loud ! My problem seems to have been that I put a space between my first and last names. So I'm trying once more after my "test" message went through. Pat, I just wanted to report that Elaine Leavitt tells me it is Steve's son, Greg, who is in Houston, not Brian. I will get all the info and do that story soon. Margaret Dorr
McCain's farm flip
The senator has been a critic of ethanol. That doesn't play in Iowa. So the Straight Talk Express has taken a detour.
By Jon Birger, Fortune senior writer
October 31 2006: 12:42 PM EST
(Fortune Magazine) -- John McCain has a problem with alcohol - ethyl alcohol, to be precise.
Ethyl alcohol is the fuel better known as ethanol, and over the years, the Arizona senator has made a habit of ripping ethanol subsidies as corporate pork for agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland (Charts).
McCain has argued that government support for ethanol actually raises gasoline prices. He has claimed ethanol does nothing to make the U.S. more energy independent. He has even questioned the science behind making fuel from corn - contending that ethanol provides less energy than the fossil fuels consumed to produce it.
Those may be reasonable positions for a senator from a nonfarm state like Arizona. They may even fly for a presidential candidate running as a straight-shooting maverick, as McCain did in 2000.
But for a front-runner - one presumably interested in getting his as-yet-undeclared 2008 Republican presidential campaign off to a winning start - opposing ethanol is political lunacy.
Iowa, home to the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus, is the biggest corn-growing state in the country, and in Iowa ethanol isn't just another campaign issue. It's the cash cow, the golden goose and the fountain of economic youth all wrapped up in one.
Mike "Heckuva Job" Brown would stand a better chance of winning an election in New Orleans than an anti-ethanol candidate would of winning Iowa's caucus.
Ethanol saves a sleepy town
Spend a little time in the Hawkeye State, and it's apparent why. Everywhere you go, sleepy little farm towns are being transformed. Marcus, a community in northwestern Iowa, is a case in point.
A hamlet of 1,100 people surrounded by a sea of corn and soybeans, Marcus was once a town in decline. Young people had to move out to find work, and locals fretted that the national economy was leaving farm communities like theirs behind. "Nothing was happening," says Marcus's affable mayor, Darrell Downs. "We were at a standstill."
Today, Downs wheels more deals than many of his big-city peers. One morning he's attending the ribbon-cutting of the new truck stop he helped get built. By afternoon he's calling on prospective tenants for the town's new business park. And in the evening he's off to a planning session for Soy Energy, a new biodiesel plant expected to be built in town.
Downs says Marcus's revitalization started in 2003 with the opening of Little Sioux Corn Processors, an ethanol plant owned and financed primarily by 650 local farmers and businesspeople, Downs among them. (ADM bought a minority stake.)
With ethanol sales booming, the plant has paid some $10 million in dividends to local investors this year - money Downs says is being spent locally on big-ticket items like new cars and kitchens.
And it's not just the dividend checks pumping money into the Marcus micro-economy. Thirty-five jobs have been created at Little Sioux, and an expansion is expected to add another dozen. All the new truck traffic has been a boon for the new truck stop as well as for local auto mechanics.
The daily lunch crowd has doubled at The Marcus Bowl, the town's combination burger joint-bowling alley, says manager Gary Husman. The town's first-ever pharmacy just opened. Bob Leavitt, owner of Marcus Lumber, says sales at his hardware store are up 15 percent.
And, best of all, Little Sioux has been such a good customer for local farmers' corn that farmland prices in Cherokee County, where Marcus is situated, have risen 35 percent this year, according to the Iowa Land Sales Report.
State-wide expansion
What's happening in Marcus echoes all across the state. Iowa's unemployment rate fell to 3.4 percent in September from 4.5 percent a year earlier. In 2005, business investment grew at the fourth-fastest rate in the country, according to Ernst & Young's U.S. Investment Monitor. All told, Iowa boasted $1.8 billion in new capital spending.
The money just keeps pouring in. Ernst & Young reports that another $3.1 billion was invested in Iowa through the first nine months of 2006 - $200 million more than New York, a state with six times Iowa's population.
ADM, for example, is spending $280 million on a bioplastics plant in Clinton and $540 million on an expansion of its ethanol plant in Cedar Rapids. Overall, there are now 25 ethanol plants operating in Iowa, according to the Iowa Corn Growers Association, with another 22 either in construction or on the drawing board.
Against this backdrop, it's obvious why McCain's past ethanol opposition is such an albatross. Fact is, criticizing ethanol is hard even for scientists these days.
At a recent BP-sponsored ethanol roundtable, University of California at Berkeley engineering professor Tad Patzek - whose anti-ethanol research McCain has invoked - so riled Roger Conway, the director of energy policy for the very pro-ethanol U.S. Department of Agriculture, that Conway told the foreign-born Patzek to "go back to Poland." (Conway denies making the remark, but four other participants confirm he did, including pro-ethanol scientist Michael Wang of the Argonne National Laboratory.)
McCain's about-face
For a politician like McCain, the stakes go far beyond a little name-calling. When McCain ran for president in 1999 and 2000, he barely campaigned in Iowa, knowing that his anti-ethanol stance wouldn't cut it in corn country.
Four years later, McCain hadn't changed his tune. "Ethanol is a product that would not exist if Congress didn't create an artificial market for it. No one would be willing to buy it," McCain said in November 2003. "Yet thanks to agricultural subsidies and ethanol producer subsidies, it is now a very big business - tens of billions of dollars that have enriched a handful of corporate interests - primarily one big corporation, ADM. Ethanol does nothing to reduce fuel consumption, nothing to increase our energy independence, nothing to improve air quality."
Even the most slippery politician would have a tough time wriggling away from a statement as unequivocal as that one, yet McCain's Straight Talk Express has been taking some audacious detours during recent trips to Iowa.
In a flip-flop so absurd it'll be a wonder if it doesn't get lampooned by late-night comedians - not to mention opponents' negative ads - McCain is now proclaiming himself a "strong" ethanol supporter.
"I support ethanol and I think it is a vital, a vital alternative energy source not only because of our dependency on foreign oil but its greenhouse gas reduction effects," he said in an August speech in Grinnell, Iowa, as reported by the Associated Press.
"Well, at least now we know he's serious about running for president," quips Brown University presidential politics expert Darrell West, upon being told of McCain's ethanol about-face.
In Grinnell, McCain said he still opposes subsidies but indicated his attitude softened after oil prices crossed $40 a barrel. There's just one problem: in June 2005 - when oil was $60 - McCain's office put out a press release warning that the ethanol mandates in the 2005 energy bill would result in higher gasoline prices for his constituents. (He was right, but lowans don't care.)
McCain didn't respond to requests for an interview. His office sent us a written statement calling ethanol "a competitive alternative fuel for consumers." We wanted to ask the senator whether the realities of Iowa politics forced him to reconsider his ethanol opposition. We were also curious how much of a role two new political advisors - Terry Nelson and David Roederer, both Iowa natives - played in his shifting ethanol rhetoric.
Unfortunately, the most we could get out of McCain press secretary Melissa Shuffield was that the senator hasn't made any decisions about 2008. She also insisted that McCain's ethanol position hadn't changed, noting he remains opposed to subsidies.
There's a word for someone who changes the way he talks about an issue, not how he feels. It's "politician," and McCain's reputation is based on being Not That Guy. Were the Iowa Caucus held today, polls say McCain could win.
Of course, most lowans aren't yet thinking about 2008, and at least one local pundit believes McCain's new position on ethanol creates as many problems as it solves. "The flip-flop is deadly," says Steffen Schmidt, host of the Dr. Politics show on Iowa Public Radio and a political science professor at Iowa State University. "It makes it so easy to undermine McCain's main claim to fame, which is that he's a straight shooter."
Nevertheless, Schmidt thinks McCain was in a pickle no matter what he did. lowans see gold in their fields, and they have little tolerance for anyone who raises doubts about the economic or environmental merits of ethanol production.
"You can't trash ethanol and expect to win in Iowa," says Schmidt. "You can't continue to say the same things McCain said - even if you believe they're true."
The above article was just posted online at CNNMoney.com website.
Margaret,
Thanks to Elaine for correcting my error. I knew better.
Keep warm. We are here in Mesa.
Pat
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