Voices from the Praire Nov./Dec. 2009

www.humanitiesiowa.org 1

A publication of Humanities Iowa • Nov./Dec. 2009

voices from the

Join other Iowans and support Humanities Iowa!2

HI Board of Directors President Neil Nakadate, AmesVice-President Fiona Valentine, Sioux CitySecretary Barb O’Hea, PeostaTreasurer Tim Johnson, WashingtonPast President Rosemarie Ward, Okoboji/Des Moines

Directors Michael Carey, FarragutJudy Combs, BloomfieldSue Cosner, PanoraThomas Dean, Iowa CityKate Gronstal, Council BluffsJanell Hansen, Elk HornJeff Heland, BurlingtonKen Lyftogt, Cedar FallsMoudy Nabulsi, Fort MadisonDick Ramsay, Spirit LakeSteve Siegel, OttumwaDorothy Simpson-Taylor, Iowa CityRalph Swain, Sioux City

HI Staff Christopher Rossi, Executive Director

[email protected] Hotchkiss, Managing Director [email protected] Walsh, Grants Director [email protected] Mimick, Program Officer/Media Specialist [email protected] Semken, Voices from the Prairie [email protected]

vol. xii no. ivoices from the Prairie is published three times a year and distributed to the friends of Humani-ties Iowa and interested Iowans. To subscribe please contact us:

humanities iowa University of Iowa Research ParkN310 Oakdale HallIowa City, Iowa 52242-5000 phone: (319) 335-4153 fax: (319) 335-4154 [email protected] www.humanitiesiowa.org

Mission StatementThe mission of Humani-ties Iowa is to promote understanding and ap-preciation of the people, communities, cultures and stories of importance to Iowa and the nation.

Humanities Iowa is a non-profit organization funded by the National Endow-ment for the Humanities.

Join other Iowans and support Humanities Iowa! Donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Humanities Iowa also accepts gifts of stock or securities. To make a donation or receive more information please contact our office at 319-335-4153, at [email protected], or through our website at www.humanitiesiowa.org

Contents

3 Introducing Humanities Iowa New President Neil Nakadate.

4 Kurt Vonnegut and the Iowa Connection.

9 Meet Loree Rackstraw.

10 Aldo Leopold and his Iowa Roots.

11 New HI employee and board members.

11 Upcoming Events.

About the Cover: Ted Bohstedt in Office, Bohst-edt Elevator, Victor, Iowa © David Plowden

David Plowden is known for his historical documentary photography of urban cities, steam trains, American farmlands, and small towns. His Humanities Iowa traveling exhibit, A Sense of Place, is a collection of 50 mounted black and white photographs of rural and small town Iowa dating from the mid-1980s. They document the disappearing face of the rural Iowa landscape.

Plowden has produced 20 books. He now lives in Winnetka, Illinois. His next book is about railroads, entitled Requiem for Steam, due out from Norton in late 2010.

Follow Humanities Iowa on twitter! Go to http://twitter.com/humanitiesiowa and get regular updates on news and happenings at HI!


them. Our ongoing need is to provide resources to make sure the stories of Iowa and Iowans—and American stories gener-ally—have a voice and an audience. Our immediate challenge is to keep the humanities going through the current recession. Hard times are particularly hard on the arts and humanities. But then, the irony is that the arts and humanities often give us our deepest understanding of how hard those times really are—take the writing of John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison, for example, or the photography of Walker Evans.

Q: What’s something people would be surprised to know about you? About HI? I’m a Midwesterner by birth (Indiana). I’ve been at ISU for over 30 years. I’m a member of the Sport Literature Association and have written and published some sports-related poetry.

HI’s primary focus is the public humanities and support of grass-roots community projects rather than the kind of highly specialized projects usually associated with academic programs and institutions.

Q: What inspired your interest in sports literature?I played baseball as a kid and on into high school, and grew up in Oregon fishing for salmon and trout with my father and my brother. And I grew up reading Sports Illustrated, and once thought I might enjoy being a sports writer. As a reader and teacher of literature, I’ve always appreciated the way sport litera-ture and film offer us insights on individuals and cultures—in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, for example, and Mark Harris’s baseball novels, especially Bang the Drum Slowly.

Q: Who are some Iowans now, or in the past, that you think serve as role models for the Humanities in Iowa?I think there are role models in communities all over the state who provide the time, energy, and venues that keep local and regional humanities organizations vigorous and productive. Of course, we are very fortunate in having former Iowa Rep. Jim Leach at the helm of the NEH—he’s a well-informed, longtime advocate of the humanities.

Q: What are you writing/working on?I’ve just finished revising my 1999 book on Jane Smiley, and I’m getting back to work on a book about my family in the context of Japanese American history and culture. h

Neil Nakadate was named the new president of Humanities Iowa re-

cently. Neil took time out to share a few of his thoughts on the humanities. As University Professor of English at Iowa State University, he teaches courses on American literature since 1914, contem-porary fiction, U.S. minority literatures, rhetoric and writing. Dr. Nakadate is the author of seven books, including Under-standing Jane Smiley (South Carolina, 1999); Writing in the Liberal Arts Tradi-tion: A Rhetoric with Readings (Harper & Row, 1990); and Robert Penn Warren: Critical Perspectives (Kentucky, 1981).

Q: What caused you to become in-volved with Humanities Iowa (HI)?Well, over the years I had become ac-quainted with Humanities Iowa pro-grams and projects. Then, several years ago, a former colleague of mine had en-joyed being on the board and mentioned it to me, and that’s when I was given the opportunity to serve.

Q: What are the challenges for HI? Well, the challenges inevitably have to do with being presented with plenty of good ideas and not enough money to fund

Introducing Humanities Iowa New President

Neil Nakadate


Word has it that there are some Kurt Vonnegut fans in Clinton. I hope

that’s true, because I’d like to share some thoughts about him today, given that my memoir about him is why I’m here. And I’d also like to share some personal expe-riences about our beautiful state of Iowa, and how great it is for writers to live and work here.

When I was thinking back on my life for this talk, one of my earliest memo-ries was about being in Miss Fahr’s kin-dergarten class in Forest City, Iowa. She read wonderful stories aloud, and occa-sionally set aside time for us to tell sto-ries of our own. I’d thought a long time before I got up enough courage to tell

a story in her class. I’d been read one about how young Native American boys were taught by their elders to create a canoe by hollowing out a sea-soned log with fire. That summer my dad had taken me out in a boat for the first time, so I figured I could make my story really exciting

by pretending I’d been raised by a real Indian grandfather who’d taught me how to create a fishing boat out of a tree. I got way over my head telling that story, until dear Miss Fahr rescued me with some kind of closure. I suffered weeks of guilt before I understood that most stories really were fabrications, and not considered lies. I never did get over wanting to tell stories and eventually, even to write them.

That was during the Great Depression, when my dad lost his job and my mom got really sick after my baby sister was born, so we finally had to move to Mason City to live with my grandma and my Aunt Lola. To get to my new school I had to walk several blocks along River Heights Drive past a big woods that grew between the street and the limestone bluffs along Willow Creek. There was a huge castle made of stone in those woods, built on the bluffs overlooking the Creek. In those days we all thought the Castle was haunted, but it turned out real people lived there and the house was a famous one designed in

Kurt Vonnegut and the Iowa Connection

by Loree RackstrawThe 10th Annual Iowa Writers’ Celebra-tion: Voices from the Prairie event featured Loree Rackstraw at the Curtis Mansion in Clinton, Iowa. She is pictured here with her friend of 40 years Kurt Vonnegut.

The following article is an edited version of Ms. Rackstraw’s pre-sentation on October 17, 2009.

HI's Writers’ Celebration

(Photo, Leslie Wilson)


1912 by Walter Burley Griffin, a student of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the spring, I would often walk home through those woods, carefully avoiding the Castle, often to pick a bouquet of wild flowers to take to my mom. By then my dad had built a room onto the back of my grandma’s house, where mom could live in a quiet, sunny place until she got well.

The woods were great for exploring. Sometimes I would slide down a path by the foot bridge that spanned the Creek. Once down by the water, I could walk along the edge to a lime-stone cave I’d discovered, almost directly below the Castle. That shallow cave was a secret I never told anybody about. I could sit inside it and watch the flowing creek and fantasize about ancient times when fish and other wild animals lived here, and then later, when early pioneers built the old mill downstream to grind up grain for making bread. It was a kid’s paradise.

When I was ten, I got a bike of my own, so I could ride across the wooden foot bridge to the beautiful new library overlook-ing the Creek. On Saturdays the Children’s Reading Room had a story hour where we gathered on the semi-circle of window seats overlooking the Creek to listen to stories. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, and I loved being able to bring home new books to read each week.

There were a number of the now-famous “Prairie School” homes and buildings near the Library in the Rock Glenn area where my friend Doady lived. Doady’s mom was a beautiful opera singer, and her dad was a doctor who still had his old uniforms from the War. They had a maid named Aletza who told us great stories about her life as a child in Germany before her parents were killed in the War, and how Doady’s parents had helped her escape and get to the United States when World War II started.

Doady and I got to dress up in some of her dad’s old Army jackets to play war in the big grassy lot between my grandma’s house and the railroad tracks. We called the tracks the “M and Saint L” for the Minneapolis and Saint Louis railroad—and sometimes we climbed the huge old box elder tree that grew in that field to watch for pretend Nazi soldiers trying to blow up the train.

Toward the end of World War II, my dad had a house built for our family right in that big vacant lot, not far from the big tree. I got to use leftover lumber scraps to build a nifty tree house. It was my private hideaway and reading place during the summers, with a shelf for my books and a ship captain’s helm I built from a bike wheel for fantasy sailing ventures. It

was in that tree that I made my first at-tempts at writing stories just for fun.

And it was from that tree that I first spied the hoboes’ encampment less than a block away down the railroad tracks. I must have been in seventh grade when I first heard them one fall evening at dusk. I could see the light of their campfire where they were cooking something and having a great time singing and laughing. One of the early stories I wrote was about a hobo’s scary life traveling the world in an M and St. L box car. I’d known about these poor homeless men for quite a while, because every time my grandma made doughnuts they would knock on the door, especially when we first lived with her during the Great Depression. My grandma called them “tramps.”

Once, when I was little, Grandma took me on an early morning walk along Carolina Avenue to where the M and Saint L tracks crossed the street, so we could watch a visiting circus crew un-load all their animals and gear from the train before the big parade later that day. The huge elephants waved their ears and snorted steam into the pre-dawn air as they pushed the heavy loads and animal cages at the bidding of yelling men who worked for the circus.

As I got older, I was allowed to ride my bike down Carolina Avenue across the tracks to Roosevelt Junior High School, where I got to read a lot more stories, es-pecially some in Miss Oliver’s Mythology class. We read about ancient gods and goddesses of the Greek people who lived even before Jesus. By then my sister and I shared an upstairs bedroom in our new house, and I used to tell her about some of those Greek myths and I even made up stories of my own to tell her at night if we couldn’t sleep.


But in the sum-mers when school was out, we all looked forward to the annual band festival when marching bands from high schools all over Iowa would have their parade down Fed-eral Avenue with splendid floats each carrying the most beautiful girl from their school. The high point of this event was the beauty pag-eant on Saturday afternoon in City

Park downtown, across from the court-house. That’s where “Miss Iowa” was chosen from all the contestants to be the queen, and was crowned by the mayor with a sparkling tiara. I was breathless with excitement about this event, which I got to observe from a high window in the courthouse, where my Aunt worked as the county recorder. (Sometimes she also let me play with the typewriter in her office, where I could pretend I was a real writer.)

My most exciting band festival oc-curred the year when my best friend, Nancy, invited me to her house to see a famous writer who came to see the Fes-tival and meet the queen. Nancy’s dad was the editor of the Mason City Globe Gazette newspaper, and was a friend of Meredith Willson who wrote music and plays in New York City. Mr. Willson was born in our town and was writing a story about the festival that eventually became a famous Broadway musical called The Music Man. That’s when I learned he had

been born in a house just across the street from our library.

And now, the old wooden footbridge, newly transformed into a modern ce-ment structure, has been named in his honor. And a splendid new Meredith Willson Museum has been built near the library, across the street from the house where he was born, along with a mock-up of Mason City’s main street, where you can get a sense of what they say the town was like even before I lived there.

So what, you might well ask, does all this have to do with Kurt Vonnegut, and the humanities? Well, everything, in a way. Humanities Iowa says it best: “The humanities are our cultural and intellec-tual heritage—the sum of human experi-ence, thought and expression. They give us knowledge of the past, insight about the present and wisdom for the future. They teach us about others and help us to know ourselves.”

As a kid growing up in Iowa, I was downright wallowing in the cultural and even intellectual heritage of my commu-nity, as well as the gorgeous surround-ing nature and its history, which I was absorbing and exploring with consider-able passion as a kid. After high school, I had the good fortune to attend Grinnell College in Iowa, and again I took advan-tage of every opportunity I could glom onto—the courses, the great teaching faculty, along with the diversity of my classmates who came from many states as well as countries. I majored in psy-chology, but took every course I could manage in writing and literature and the visual arts, along with philosophy and history, sociology and French. I submit-ted stories I wrote to Arena, the creative writing magazine the College sponsored. I loved Grinnell, and got a sense there of how lucky I had been so far in my life—to have had so many opportunities, to

Loree Rackstraw, professor emerita at the University of Northern Iowa, taught fiction writing, literature, mythology, and humanities for 30 years. She also served as fiction editor and reviewer for the North American Review. Since retiring she has been working on a number of writing projects, including her recently published memoir based on her long friendship with Kurt Vonnegut, Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him (DeCapo, 2009). She studied with Vonnegut at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa prior to joining the UNI faculty.


learn how to think and write, even though my mom had been sick and the Depression and the War had made us all have to learn how to be thrifty, and help each other out. Most of all, I think living in Iowa in those times helped me understand how rich life is with adventures and opportunities, even though one might not have lots of money or power. For sure, I learned the importance of avoiding choices that might interfere with new chances for exploring and learning.

After Grinnell, I opted for marriage and had two beautiful children, while working several years as the news director for College Relations at Iowa State Teachers’ College in Cedar Falls. I took some college courses in poetry and fiction writing on the side with Professor James Hearst, a poet who encouraged me to take writing seriously. It was he who introduced me to Verlin Cassill, an outstanding novelist who had been born in Cedar Falls and by then was teaching in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in Iowa City. With their encouragement, I applied, and in 1964, my kids and I moved to Iowa City where I entered graduate school. Writing was still pulling me where it seemed I needed to go: into the humanities, the dynamic processes of human experience, thought and expression, as they are revealed in stories and novels. As Mr. Cassill famously said, “Writing is a way of coming to terms with the world and oneself. The whole spirit of writing is to overcome narrowness and fear by giving order, measure and significance to the flux of experience con-stantly dinning into our lives.”

And of course, I landed right in the middle of some of our country’s best writers, both faculty and students, who are cen-tral to my Vonnegut memoir.

Mr. Cassill, who wrote a splendid non-fiction book called Writing Fiction, in addition to many novels, was an extraor-dinary teacher about the nature of the story and its form. He helped me understand the profound intimacy of how the life choices and language of characters can shape the richness of any work of literature. Richard Yates, with whom I also studied, was not that kind of teacher, but his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was. And it was also the brilliant runner-up for the National Book Award in 1962, as well as a quite splendid movie released just this past year. I also took other, more academic literature courses in history and theory. For groceries, I worked halftime for the University News Service, interviewing faculty authors and professors about their programs which conveniently gave me a second liberal arts education.

My next year at the Workshop, with new faculty and courses, provided approaches to writing almost palpable in their rich differences. Robert Scholes, a scholar and critic who is still

writing at age 80, helped us examine, from a more scholarly distance, the many diverse ways in which the com-plexities of life can be viewed through language and literature. My fiction writ-ing teacher who replaced Verlin Cassill was Kurt Vonnegut, whom neither I nor any of my fellow students had heard of, let alone read. If Cassill believed the proper goal of fiction was “at any time to go as gently, deeply, savagely as possible into life as life really is,” Kurt Vonnegut believed a story could reveal life’s reali-ties as the absurd accidents and bizarre contradictions they often really are. One of his goals was to create novels whose characters can survive painful paradox with the power of naïve audacity or even clownish whimsy.

This was something he knew about very well, since his experience of the Great Depression was a lot different from mine. His wealthy parents had lost their family fortune and his mother commit-ted suicide on Mothers’ Day, just a few months before he was shipped overseas as a young soldier to fight in the Battle of the Bulge during the last days of World War II. There he and his buddies were captured by Nazi forces and imprisoned in the beautiful, open city of Dresden. And it was there that he experienced how it feels to lose all opportunities, and face death in an underground prison—an actual meat-packing slaughterhouse

—when the city of Dresden was fire-bombed by the massive Air Forces of his own countrymen. Kurt Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were among the few survivors of those firebombs. (One heckuva way to learn about paradox!)

While Cassill believed fiction carries us to the heart of experience as only lan-guage can, Vonnegut believed the heart of experience was often shaped by igno-rance if not absurd or insane cruelty, and


therefore should be taken as lightly as possible with a language of comic avoidance or playfulness. Both approaches seemed true and insightful to me, and I felt they each provided a useful richness of choices and understanding unlike anything I’d un-derstood before. It was a wealth of insight that took me some time to incorporate into my thinking, let alone my writing. In fact, it’s still a challenge even now.

Because I was deeply involved as a single mother, as well as a public relations writer and student of fiction writing, I found myself questioning how and whether writing is actually capa-ble of overcoming the narrowness and challenges I increasingly observed. Is it really possible to give measure and significance to the complex flux of experience invading our lives? To me it was a moral life-question as well as an artistic one.

And now, forty some years later, I find it’s still a major moral question. I’ve been lucky enough to have experienced life’s richness and complexity with more delight than loathing. I taught fiction writing and humanities and literature courses for thirty years at the University of Northern Iowa after I finished my graduate degree at the University of Iowa. I’ve traveled the world and met a wealth of interesting and complex people. I studied and visited first hand the art and artifacts of the earliest upright walking humans we know about, who frequented the caves of France and decorated its walls with their drawings and paintings some 30,000 years ago. They were making stories and pictures about what life meant to them. We’ve been at this task a long time.

And now I’ve come to celebrate the life force of our beautiful planet with growing anxiety about its health and its ability to continue to sustain our lives, let alone that of the plants and animals we depend upon.

So what did Kurt Vonnegut say about all this while he was with us? I wrote a book about our long friendship that grew out of the Workshop experience we had. It’s called Love as Al-ways, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him and it begins with our first class meeting in September of 1966, at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. (Incidentally at this time he’d been work-ing for years trying to write what eventually became his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five)

By the time our first semester with Kurt was nearing an end, we had all come to appreciate the help this remarkable writer was providing—useful and effective writing suggestions, but always tempered with a sense of humor and a kind awareness of how hard it was to make a story work.

Kurt’s career as a fiction writer continued to flourish after he left Iowa in 1968, with a lifetime career total of 19 novels as well

as a number of other collections of es-says and short stories. And he was widely sought as a public speaker throughout the world, including numerous appear-ances in Iowa. He was 82 years old and living in Manhattan when he suffered an accident—perhaps with a benefit not unlike those his characters sometimes suffered: he tripped on his porch steps and fell, receiving a devastating blow to the head from which he never regained consciousness.

Among Kurt’s many achievements “was his ability to show that awareness makes life sacred—not perfect, but sa-cred. To him, that meant life needed and deserved kindness.

“He was not a perfect human being, but one of his intentions as a writer and a person was that kindness to others should be central to life, including kindness to those who were themselves unkind. One of the curious and perhaps sacred things I observed about him was the self-gener-ating joy his kindness made possible, a joy that seemed very much like love.

“Even so, accidents could always turn life on its ear. It always made him feel bet-ter to laugh when that happened. Unfor-tunately, the last accident he experienced didn’t appear to give him time to laugh. But then, he always tried to tell us that time wasn’t what we thought it was. And after all, the ‘will of accident’ may have been stronger than time that day and perhaps even kind to him if not to us.

“It helps me feel better to think he was OK with that.” (Love as Always, p. 260-261)

And he really did like naps. Rest in peace, Kurt. hLearn more about Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him by going to DeCapo Press:www.dacapopress.com

Voices from the Prairie


Q: What inspired your desire to become a writer?Reading more than anything. But I also used to tell stories to my little sister at bedtime (5 years my junior) and her enthusiasm encouraged me. I loved reading and mythology in grade school and often made up stories, especially if I didn’t know answers to questions. Plus, I was alone a lot and had a big imagination—so perhaps storytelling (even to myself) was a form of self-entertainment.

Q: What advice do you have for an Iowan wanting to be a writer? Read! And do not overdo texting! Practice putting your passions into written form on paper or in a saved computer text, perhaps addressed to a real or an imaginary reader—whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. Nurture intellectual curiosity! Ask questions of wise people and write down what they say, and then embellish or argue with them in print ... whether it’s the president or your spouse or whatever. Write down your most secret questions and then try to answer them as though you were a wise person, or a comic, or a child.

Q: What role do the humanities play in your everyday life?A huge and constant role. My reactions and responses to the morning news on public radio and the New York Times are deeply colored by the values I’ve learned from the humanities, whether it has to do with politics or environmental concerns, or books I’m reading. The humanities deter-mine whether and how I fulfill community requests and responsibilities or undertake volunteer jobs, plus letters to the editors. They shape what I read and what movies and television programs I watch. Certainly the humanities have a lot to do with how, why and when/if I counsel my grown kids and my grandchildren, as well as the community leaders or politicians I support.

Q: If you could invite any three authors over for dinner who would they be and what would you serve? Kurt Vonnegut, Andre Dubus, Joy Williams. I’d serve dry martinis and Berkswell cheese with crusty bread followed by grilled, fresh red salmon and green salad, with excellent chardonnay, or pinot grigio wine.

Q: If your book becomes a movie who would you want to play Kurt Vonnegut? You?How about Elliott Gould for Kurt, and of course, Angelina Jolie, or maybe Helen Mirren, for me.

Voices from the PrairieGetting to know this year’s

writers’ celebration author

Loree Rackstraw

Loree Rackstraw shown at the Curtis Mansion, Clinton, Iowa, during this year’s Writers’ Celebration.

(Photo, Michael Kearney)


Jessica Mimick—in late July we wel-comed Jessica Mimick to Hu-manities Iowa. She is our new program offi-cer and media specialist. She was born and raised in Mar-

shalltown, Iowa. She is a recent graduate from the University of Iowa with two degrees: a BBA Marketing and BA Communication Studies.

Sue Cosner, West Des Moines— is vice president of community initiatives with Iowa Area Devel-opment Group and manages the Ripple Effect pro-gram in partner-

ship with Iowa Network Services. She is the former city manager of Panora with more than 26 years of local government experience includ-ing work in redevelopment, rural and urban planning and association management. Cosner also has taught in the Department of Community and Regional Planning in the College of Design at Iowa State University. Until 2008, she served a 13-year gu-bernatorial appointment to the City Development Board.

Burl

ingt

onUpdates from the Field: HI Grants In Action

Aldo Leopold and His Iowa Roots

Thinking like a mountain was an essay penned by

Aldo Leopold on environmen-tal ethics. Steve Brower and the Leopold Heritage Group of Burlington, Iowa, add, that this type of thinking had its roots in Iowa bottomlands around Burlington when Aldo was a young boy. Aldo Leopold’s childhood years in Burlington were incredibly significant for his future work. Leopold is recognized as the founder of the Wilderness Society, as an educator in the fields of wildlife management and ecology, and as author of A Sand County Al-manac.

The following is from Steve Brower, speaker for the Leopold Heritage Group of Burlington,

Iowa: “The HI grant really helped focus our journey to bet-ter interpret Leopold’s significance on both conservation philosophy and his personal discovery of values. Our re-search focused on finding new expressions to illustrate how close Leopold was tied to the land and home place during his earliest years. The study followed three paths looking for intersections:

1) Tracing Aldo’s hikes around Bur-lington’s natural areas, photographing scenes and details that were mentioned

and valued by him.2) Sifting through Leopold’s

writings and old family letters and materials looking for new insights on how his land connections specifically began as an outgrowth of an early romantic education and a search for dis-covery in the local wild.

3) Studying Leopold’s Southwestern and Wiscon-sin landscape experiences and how these connections may relate back to Iowa.” h

Aldo Leopold (upper, left) with his family in Burlington, Iowa, about the time he was beginning his exploration of Burlington’s wild places.

(Photo from Leopold files of Steve Brower, gift of Marie Leopold Lord)

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Humanities Iowa Events: NovemberAudubon Public LibraryTuesday, November 11 at 7 PMMichael Vogt: Camp Dodge: Home Away From Home, 1917-1918Audubon Cultural Center/Audubon Library401 North Park Place, Audubon, IA 50025

Friends of the Washington Public LibrarySaturday, November 14 at 2 PMLisa Ossian: The Home Fronts of Iowa, 1940-45Café Dodici, 122 S. Iowa Ave., Washington, IA 52353

Friends of the Creston Public LibrarySunday, November 15 at 1 PMGalin Berrier: The Underground Railroad in IowaSouthwestern Community College, 1201 W. Townline,Creston, IA 50801

Independence Public LibraryTuesday, November 17 at 7 PMDarrel Draper: George Drouillard: Hunter, Interpreter, and Sign Talker for Lewis and ClarkIndependence Public Library, 805 1st St. E., Independence, IA 50644

Friends of the Carroll Public LibraryTuesday, November 17 at 7 PMLayton Zbornik: Juke Boxes, Pool Halls and DucktailsCarroll Public Library, 118 E. 5th St., Carroll, IA 51401

Cottage Grove PlaceWednesday, November 18 at 2 PMBill Koch: Walt Whitman Live!Cottage Grove Place, 2115 1st Ave. SE., Cedar Rapids, IA 52402

JanuaryCottage Grove PlaceWednesday, January 13 at 2 PMGalin Berrier: The Underground Railroad in IowaCottage Grove Place, 2115 1st Ave. SE., Cedar Rapids, IA 52402

Waukee Women’s ClubFriday, January 22 at 1 PMLayton Zbornik: Juke Boxes, Pool Halls, and DucktailsWaukee Woman’s Club, 900 Warrior Ln., Waukee, IA 50263

Kenneth Lyftogt, Cedar Falls— is lecturer in the Depart-ment of His-tory at the Un i v e r s i t y of Northern Iowa. Lyftogt teaches intro-ductory and

advanced courses on humanities, American civilization and U.S. his-tory. He specializes in the American Civil War, and is the author of sever-al books, including: Iowa’s Forgotten General: Matthew Mark Trumbull (2005, repr., University of Iowa Press, 2007), From Blue Mills to Columbia: Cedar Falls and the Civil War (1993, repr., Univ. of Iowa Press, 2007), and Left for Dixie: The Civil War Diary of John Rath (1991, repr., Camp Pope Books, 2004).

Steve Siegel, Ottumwa—is a native of Bettendorf and a gradu-ate of Grin-nell College. He also has an MA in

American studies from the Univer-sity of Kansas and a MSW from the University of California at Berkeley. He works as a union representa-tive for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Em-ployees, Council 61. Siegel also has a strong record of public service. He is currently serving his fourth term on the Wapello County Board of Su-pervisors. He has worked to enhance the Wapello County trail system and worked on the establishment of the American Gothic House Welcome Center in Eldon.

HI w

elcomes a new

employee and three new

board mem

bers

Mini-Grants Awarded Since June 2009

humanities iowa University of Iowa Research ParkN310 Oakdale HallIowa City, Iowa 52242-5000

Change Service Requested

Become a member today!www.humanitiesiowa.org

AmesRecipient: Iowa State UniversityAmount: $2,500Project: From Slide Rules to Computing in Iowa: Cultural & Community Impact of Information Computing

BloomfieldRecipient: Davis County Civil War Guerrilla Raid SocietyAmount: $400 Project: Sixth Annual Davis County Civil War Days and Living History Encampment

Council BluffsRecipient: Bluffs Arts CouncilAmount: $500Project: Black Squirrel Arts Day Camps for Kids

DenisonRecipient: Crawford County Historical SocietyAmount: $2,980Project: Train to Nowhere: Inside an Immigrant Death Investigation

Des MoinesRecipient: Des Moines Art CenterAmount: $3,000 Project: John and

Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park: Educational Guide Brochures

DubuqueRecipient: Loras CollegeAmount: $1,000 Project: Mary Swander: "Farmscape”

GrinnellRecipient: Drake Community LibraryAmount: $1,000Project: Visions of the Universe: Four Centuries of Discovery

LeClaireRecipient: LeClaire Community LibraryAmount: $400Project: 150 Years of Quilts and Quilting: 1850-2005

SheldonRecipient: Northwest Iowa Community College Amount: $1,600 Project: “Discovering Our Diversity”

Sioux CityRecipient: Great Plains Radio Theatre ProjectAmount: $850 Project: Oldtime Radio Drama Theatre

ThurmanRecipient: Green Hollow CenterAmount: $1,400 Project: Hills & Heritage Festival

WashingtonRecipient: Wesley Halcyon HouseAmount: $1,500 Project: Second Annual Buckskinner Rendezvous

WintersetRecipient: Madison County Historical SocietyAmount: $1,270 Project: 40th Anniversary Covered Bridge Festival

Documents

Voices from the Praire Nov./Dec. 2009