The word Lagniappe, pronounced LAN-yap, means “a little something extra”. It’s a small gift, often given by a store owner to a customer, like a baker’s dozen at the bagel shop. I first became aware of the word at a small gift shop called Lagniappe in Valley Junction, West Des Moines.

It was my go-to place for interesting gifts for friends, but I also loved it, because nestled in the bottom of the bag, wrapped in tissue was always a small gift for me, a tangible thank-you note.

In my hometown, Max and Clementine Beavers owned a small grocery about a block from our home on Main Street. When our son Jess came with me to buy groceries, Howie Messer, their butcher, always handed him a “little smokie” after he’d filled my order.

In upscale restaurants sometimes the chef sends out a “taste” of something you didn’t order, an hors d’oeuvres or an after-dinner treat.

At Terrace Hill, the Iowa Governor’s Mansion, we used to leave small hand-painted china hearts beside each place setting for guests who came to Victorian teas.

One of my favorite Mark Twain books is Life on the Mississippi. I had forgotten until I checked my old Webster’s dictionary, and then my Merriam Webster online, that Mark Twain refers to “lagniappes” in his book published in 1883. “We picked up one excellent word, a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word—lagniappe… It is Spanish—so they said.”

The entry in Websters compliments Twain saying he ‘encapsulates the history of lagniappe quite nicely. English speakers learned the word from French speaking Louisianians, but they in turn had adapted it from the American Spanish word la napa which comes from Quechua, the official language of the Incas of the Andes. Twain said that New Orleanians completed shop transactions by saying, “Give me something for lagniappe,” to which the shopkeeper would respond with “a bit of liquoirce-root, a cheap cigar or a spool of thread.”

Today I’m adding an occasional feature to my Substack, Common Ground, which appears weekly on Wednesdays, a “lagniappe” to thank you for your faithful readership. Sometimes there are small stories I want to share, song lyrics, a poem, a photo, a memory that won’t take much of my time or yours. You might find them attached at the end, as a stand-alone or if they’re short enough in “notes”.

My first lagniappe is a story about our six-year old granddaughter, Amelia, who lives next door. Her family has always referred to her as “boss baby.” She has a 16 year-old brother and an 11 year-old sister. She seems undaunted by the age, size and talents of her parents and siblings. She likes to be in charge.

She is a self-proclaimed artist and spends a lot of time in our “art room” drawing, painting, and sculpting. When I make occasional suggestions, her response is often, “Gramma Christie, I have a vision. Don’t mess with my vision.” My job is to wash paintbrushes, find more tape, and deliver snacks.

Last week, it was her mother’s birthday. Amelia had created a special card and present, but she also wanted to plan the usual party, which includes gathering extended family. Her mom said she didn’t want a party. Instead, her parents decided they’d go for pizza as a family-- 6:00 p.m. I said I’d leave a chocolate cake on their counter to enjoy when they got home. Amelia continued to talk about “the party”, but no one listened.

The morning of Kate’s birthday, I got a call from Amelia. Usually when she calls, she’s sitting next to her dad, so when she said, “The party’s from 5:00-6:00 at the pool,” I thought there must be a change of plans. I said we’d be there.

When we arrived at the neighborhood pool just up the road at 5:00 p.m. sharp, we only saw Jess’s truck.

“Where’s the party?” I asked Amelia as she climbed out of the pool.

“Didn’t my dad tell you, the party is tomorrow instead, “ she said. Her dad appeared rolling his eyes. “There is no party, there never was a party,” he explained. He told us she’d also called her Cedar Rapids grandparents to invite them. They had arrived earlier and were now headed back to Cedar Rapids wondering why, like us, they hadn’t questioned taking orders from a 6 year-old.

Amelia had also called her aunt Christina in Urbandale who was making plans to celebrate her husband’s birthday with a steak dinner that evening. She emailed Kate to say that maybe they could rearrange their plans and get to the birthday party by 5:00! That’s how Amelia’s mom found out that her daughter had single-handedly organized a “surprise” party that surprised us all. We were all left shaking our heads. Her granddad and I can both imagine her RUNNING something someday or running FOR something. Oh, my!

“Everyday people can be powerful advocates,” says Dr. Susan Roberts-Dobie, Professor of Public Health and Education at the University of Northern Iowa. I called Susan after I wrote about my own hairdresser, Kate Ahnen, a cancer survivor who educates about the disease and walks to raise money for research and advocacy.

From 2009-2011 Professor Dobie led a research program in Iowa called Speak UP! using hair stylists to deliver health messages related to reducing unintended pregnancy to female clients in the 18-30-year range. At the time I was Executive Director of the Iowa Initiative, a non-profit organization funded by the Susan Thompson Buffet Foundation created to research how best to acquaint young women with recently developed long-acting reversible contraceptive devices (LARC’s) to bring down the numbers of unintended pregnancies among this age group, which at the time was over 50%.

I had no experience in health care education, but I took the job because I’m a teacher who wants young adults, both young men and women, to be able to continue their educations past high school and make educated choices about when to have their children.

In that capacity, I connected with a network of Iowa healthcare professionals at 18 maternal and reproductive healthcare clinics around the state and health care researchers at the University of Iowa and UNI who were all helping to find the best ways to disseminate information about the new long-acting products which the Buffett Foundation was making available at no or low-cost. The collaborative work we did gave me the opportunity to work with many of Iowa’s leaders in women’s healthcare. I was especially interested in how we could reach young adults in our smallest communities.

Professor Dobie got the idea for Speak UP! from CUT IT OUT, a model she’d been teaching about in her classes for years. CUT IT OUT started in Mississippi and Alabama and was sponsored by beauty-product giant, Clairol. It still empowers licensed beauty professionals, students and community allies to recognize the signs of domestic abuse and support survivors.

Professor Dobie says stylists can see things other people can’t see, like hair pulled out and bruises. Also, abusers were unlikely to follow a woman into a salon, so it became the perfect place to educate women about safety options.

Illinois and Tennessee have passed state legislation requiring licensed beauty professionals to complete up to one hour of anti-domestic violence training at no cost. Now U.S. Senators Tammy Duckworth and Marsha Blackburn have introduced federal bipartisan legislation, The SALONS ACT, that incentivizes domestic violence awareness training for cosmetologists and beauty professionals. Their bill is still pending in committee.

In 2009 Susan Dobie knew the success of CUT IT OUT and used it as a model for her Speak UP! research. She also knew that long term research showed that barbers delivering information about blood pressure reduced the numbers of heart attacks.

“When you use lay health educators as a way to deliver health education to an audience that we don’t have access to, it’s highly cost-effective. It also uses your time well. You are basically training the trainer. It’s a way to use a lay educator to reach communities where they live, have ties and are trusted,” says Susan.

Their follow up after the 3-year Buffett research program ended, showed that 34% of the stylists were still doing unintended pregnancy education without any support.

Susan is surprised at how little research in this area is being done now. She thinks that COVID interrupted a lot of work that was never completed. I commend her for her commitment to women’s health and her willingness to try research that was unconventional.

I visited some of the 93 salons in Iowa participating in the research at the time. During those visits I began to understand the power of touch to create trust, the power of good listening skills and the power of the informal chats that occur so often in beauty salons.

Another experience this year led me to better understand the power of touch, specifically the hairdresser’s touch. My college friend Elaine Weiss came to Iowa State University in March to give a lecture on her newest book, Spell Freedom, The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement. I wasn’t in the state when she had come to the Catt Center at ISU a few years earlier to talk about the role of Iowa’s Carrie Chapman Catt in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and her book called The Women’s Hour.

Elaine told her Ames audience that the book focuses on three women and one man who influenced the Civil Rights Movement who didn’t make it into history books. The messages delivered by Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, John Lewis and Thurgood Marshall would not have spread and become action—registering to vote, becoming informed voters-- had it not been for women like Septima Clark, an informal educator who recruited everyday women to help her teach African Americans to read so they could vote.

One of her recruits and one of the “stars” of the Civils Rights Movement was Bernice Violante Robinson who ran the Glamour Beauty Box salon in Charleston, South Carolina. She didn’t think she was qualified to teach civics and reading. She only had a high school education, she told Septima Clark. Mrs. Clark insisted that she didn’t want a certified teacher to open the school on John’s Island, South Carolina. She wanted someone who would not be considered “highfalutin” who would not be condescending to illiterate adults.

Her first school was held at night in the back of an African American grocery store, the least likely place for white people to suspect customers might be going to attend literacy classes. Elaine writes: “Robinson’s experience as a beautician outweighed her lack of teaching expertise. Beyond her skill with scissors and combs, a beautician needs to be a good listener, lending a sympathetic ear to her clients’ personal stories confided from the chair. At her Beauty Box salon, Robinson had created a safe supportive space for women to talk and vent; she would need to provide a similar haven for the Johns Island class…Beauticians like Robinson enjoyed the trust and respect of their communities and as an independent business woman with a loyal Black clientele, Robinson would not be subject to economic reprisals from white employers or patrons. She also had the kind of bubbly personality, sense of humor, and can-do attitude needed to steer around the inevitable bumps in the road. As an unconventional choice for an unusual project, Robinson was ideal.”

During the years of the Movement, Bernice traveled all over the south teaching and training others to open underground schools. “Robinson quickly established citizenship classes in Knoxville and another in nearby Oak Ridge. She continued her projects with beauticians many of whom were teaching citizenship classes while also funding and staffing the Tent City health clinic in Fayette County where people who had tried to register were still living as refugees.”

Robinson continued to travel the South educating other educators to teach literacy, handwriting and civics classes. One of her students at a SMCC field organizers training in voter education and registration tactics was a young man, Robert Moses, a Harvard graduate who became one of the many well-known male civil rights leaders that Robinson “educated” about the power of grassroots organizing in small citizenship schools.

When Robinson began to recruit her clients to join the NAACP, they hesitated because white leaders could get access to lists of members and make sure they lost their jobs or their homes. So, Robinson let them use the address of her salon as their mailing address, a place where they could receive mail unnoticed.

Until I read this book I had never heard of Septima Clark although she has been honored by President Jimmy Carter who called her the “Mother of the Movement” and you can find her in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History. Bernice Robinson is there, too.

Writer Elaine Weiss, like these women, follows in their footsteps by bringing them to light for those of us who grew up finding few women mentioned in our history books, certainly fewer African American women.

Hair stylist Bernice Robinson is one of the unsung heroes of the Civil Rights movement. The Movement could not have been a success without her willingness to take that first step, her ability to create and adapt train-the-trainer methods to her audiences, her ability to travel and educate virtually unseen.

The unseen, under-the-radar folks in our country are often the most powerful people in any movement, supporting any cause. We need to seek them out, lift them up, count on them for results.

I love taking walks in North Denver neighborhoods, with dogs, with children or by myself, any time of day, any season. The houses are eclectic: a multi-colored Victorian next to a bungalow, next to a two-bedroom brick beside a recently built minimalist two-story duplex. But what makes the neighborhoods “neighborly” is the right-of-ways, officially called tree lawns or ROWs by the city of Denver. Let me tell you about my family’s right-of-way.

For the past 20 years our son and daughter-in law have lived in various Northwest Denver neighborhoods. For a few years before and after they met, they rented, then bought their first home in the town of Mountain View, population 500ish. A hundred years ago that home was a farmhouse. They were neighbors to the town’s tiny police station and playground. The mayor lived in a modest house across the street. Their neighbor Kathleen turned the stumps of two large trees in her right-of-way into gnome houses. Our grandson loved them. With suggestions from Kathleen, Doug and Janet planted perennials in their right-of-way and vegetables in their front yard.

This was all new to me. Once, on Main Street in Mt. Pleasant, a woman planted a vegetable garden in her right-of-way. I’d never seen it before, and I haven’t seen it since. Now, you must get a permit to plant anything in what is called “parking”. It seems the City of Des Moines just revised their code to allow more planting options in what they call “border areas”. I haven’t seen any veggies growing in “border areas” yet, but I’m going to investigate.

During the pandemic, Doug and Janet bought a Victorian home in the Witter-Cofield Historic District near the Broncos football stadium. They situated their picnic table in their right-of-way, hung a swing for their daughter Ana from a maple, and planted a small vegetable garden. The houses in their neighborhood are close to one another, the yards small, sometime steep. This seemed like such a good use of unused space. What I didn’t realize at first was how these spaces seem to connect people in these very walkable, multi-ethnic, family-oriented neighborhoods.

Last fall, I discovered a fairy garden sure to enchant children along a neighborhood sidewalk and in the next block a “little library” filled with dog treats and complimentary “dog-poop” bags. I noticed lots of raised beds in the right of ways (some with flowers, some with vegetables) porch chairs and benches that crossed sidewalks from front porches extending the front yard into the right-of-way.

DENVER PROPERTY OWNERS MUST MAINTAIN THEIR ROWS

I found out that in Denver, property owners are generally responsible for maintaining the public right-of-ways (ROW’s) adjacent to their property. The city owns the right-of-way because it has utilities located there, but the homeowner shares responsibility for its upkeep. You must walk the neighborhoods to understand just what that public-private partnership means.

Many property owners take the responsibility seriously, and I don’t mean just pruning their trees and making sure their plants don’t obscure the view of drivers. Every family or property owner interprets the responsibility differently. Some fill the area with rocks, other turn them into rock gardens filled with succulents which don’t require much water. There’s not a lot of fertile soil in Denver or water for green lawns. Many families grow extensive vegetable gardens, perennials or fill containers with annuals. As a walker I feel like I get to know the people living here even if I haven’t met them. But I do meet many of them, because to maintain your right-of-way, you must` work outside. Plus, it’s a city. Because Denver boasts 300 plus days of sun, so people spend a lot of time enjoying the outdoors and entertaining on porches and at what I call informal side-yard “story-circles”.

MY FAMILY’S ROW PICNIC TABLE WELCOMES GUESTS

Last week I was pulling weeds in my family’s backyard garden when I heard laughter on the other side of the bushes. I peeked through and saw a mother and her daughter taking a break at the picnic table and enjoying the swing. I went to say hello. “Penny and I like to stop every day for a swing.” They’d met Ana swinging one day, and she let Penny take a turn.

Early next morning, on a walk I spotted a woman about my age digging in the front yard of a house set back from the sidewalk. I stopped to admire her work ,and we struck up a conversation. For the past 18 years Karen has worked on her family’s farm near Fountain in southern Colorado. She has just retired from farming and is spending more time in her remote cabin in the nearby Rockies. Before that, she worked as a doctor in Ethiopia for 17 years. She has come to Denver to help her friend, a former state senator who owns the historic home on the corner and the casita (guest house) where she is digging. With age, it’s become more difficult for the owners to maintain a big garden, so Karen plans to come once a week all summer to help. I admire the black soil. “They’ve been putting compost on it for 20 years,” she explains.

When I walk past again with our granddaughter a few days later, we meet Martha, one of the owners. She tells Ana to go check out the strawberries to see if any are ripe. Five-year-old Ana tells us that the house across the street belongs to “Jonathan”. “Do you know Jonathan?” asks Martha.

I assure her I’ve known Jonathan since he was five years old. He grew up in our small Iowa town with our son Doug, Ana’s dad. They both ended up in Denver. Jonathan is like an uncle to Ana and her brother Cassin. I’d forgotten that Jonathan still owns this small brick house even though he’s moved to another neighborhood. Jonathan was Martha’s neighbor during his first years in Denver. Small world.

We’re flying back to Iowa in a few hours , but I assure Martha that I’ll stop and sit on her porch next time I’m here.

On walks, I carry my phone to listen to audio books, but in Denver, I can’t help snapping photos of creative right-of-ways and extended front yards in so many different styles depending on tastes, resources, and lifestyles of the gardeners. Why does this matter? Why isn’t there more of this where I live?

Because it seems that planting your right-of-way and being responsible for the upkeep creates community, brings people out of their homes away from their screens to grow, to organize, to plant, to trim, to arrange and rearrange, and to visit with their neighbors. As I write, Doug and Janet’s newest neighbor in a small house around the corner is covering her barren yard with artificial turf, lining the edges with white urns filled with red flowers. She’s set up a round table with an umbrella in her front yard to rest before returning to lay a path. She calls to me as I heave a tennis ball for black lab, Nattie, to retrieve. I ask her name and welcome her to the neighborhood.

CORNERS ARE “LAGNIAPPES” FOR DENVER NEIGHBORHOODS

One of my favorite parts of the ROW tradition is the special attention homeowners pay to their corners. They are stewards of land they do not own. The French word for a “little extra gift” is “lagniappe”. The corner gardens are “lagniappes” for the neighborhood. Some corners are simple, and some people go all-out. My family lives on a corner with a large, sprout-producing box elder tree. When they moved in, our grandson Cassin and I started working together to tame the sprouts, deter the weeds, and make sense of the plant hodge-podge. We also discovered bright blue tiles embedded here and there among the weeds.

Our corner is a work in progress. A yard sign planted there highlights their dual language elementary school, Trevista. I’m reading a book on the porch when two women, two dogs and a little girl stop to ask if we have a child at Trevista. “Yes, grandchildren,” I reply. It turns out Frankie, like Ana, is also a kindergartner there.

In my walks around the neighborhood, as I read on the porch or work in the garden, I am surrounded by a community of flowers, food, languages and cultures. The vibe gives me hope.

The “bully pulpit” with the “barber chair.”

The first time oncologist Susan Beck had to tell my hairdresser, Kate Ahnen, that she had breast cancer 25 years ago, Kate took the necessary steps to recovery- a lumpectomy and radiation. She marvels at the compassion Dr. Beck showed her during that tough conversation. In remission, Kate decided to walk in her first local Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, and she’s been walking to support cancer research ever since. She’s found a way to combine her job as a hairdresser with her cancer activism. In the process she’s educated many clients, including me.

She’s found a “bully pulpit” with the “barber chair” in her one-person salon, where she has a captive audience for an hour every month. Healthcare research has shown that the “laying on of hands” while we get our hair cut, colored, or styled creates an intimacy that allows us to confide and trust the person shampooing, snipping or blow-drying that differs from our relationship with other service providers and casual friends. Most important Kate, and her fellow barbers and hairdressers are good listeners.

Cancer does not distinguish between Democrats and Republicans, white people or people of color, old or young. Prostate cancer comes for men. (They talk. Kate listens.) Breast cancer comes for men and women both. All the cancers steal our friends, our siblings, our parents, often before they have time to know our children or grow old gracefully.

I should know. In May of 1968, I lost my mom to breast cancer. For two years, as I was becoming a young woman, I watched my mother lose one breast, then the other, her uterus, her lungs, her life. Cancer also took my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law in their early 50’s, later in his life my dad, and then it started on my friends.

Because of research which drove early detection and innovative treatments, many of them, like Kate, survived. Lobbying efforts across party lines meant insurance covered more mammograms, information reached more Americans at risk for the disease, and treatment improved. “Look how far we’ve come!” is Kate’s mantra.

I sold daffodils for the American Cancer Society. I got yearly mammograms, sometimes walked in the October Komen Race for the Cure and contributed to cancer memorials instead of flowers. Small stuff.

The Cancer Jar

During the pandemic, I had to find a single practitioner to cut my hair. A friend steered both Tom and me to Kate, who is part of a hive of other hairdressers at The Studios in Urbandale, each operating independently. Just outside her salon only big enough for two, is her “bake sale”: cookies, small bags of chips, a book written by a survivor friend. If you want something, you leave money in the jar. There’s another jar in First Street Antiques, her mom’s shop in Greenfield. Friends, colleagues and clients donate jewelry and vintage stuff culled from closets, to sell there. The money goes in the cancer jar, sometimes more than $400 a month between the two jars. Her clients also make generous pledges for the big 3-day, 60-mile Komen walk she now participates in every year with family and friends in cities around the country.

Her fundraising efforts for cancer research began with the local Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure 15-20 years ago in Des Moines. At the time, the annual October event was a unique way to raise money for a healthcare issue. Now there’s a walk to support healthcare research every weekend.

Going Flat

Last week Kate and I met early one morning to walk the Clive Greenbelt Trail near her salon so she could get in some training and talk to me about her journey. I was sitting in her chair that day in January 2025 when her cell phone rang. Dr. Beck’s office was calling to give her unwelcome tests results. She had breast cancer again, not a recurrence, something new. She needed to come in to talk to the doctor about treatment.

She couldn’t have radiation again, so she decided to get a double mastectomy. She calls it “going flat”, more officially “aesthetic flat closure”. Now there’s an international “Going Flat Day” October 7^th, to call attention to the options that cancer patients and survivors have. Celebrity marathoner Louise Bernadette Butcher ran a marathon six weeks post-surgery and then ran the London Marathon topless to raise support for breast cancer education.

On our walk we talked about the merging of her job, her volunteerism, her religion, and her ability to find common ground with the people in her chair, who do not always agree with her politics. For me, she is the perfect example of the everyday activist that I like to highlight in this column: people who fight for democracy by listening, supporting civility and decency and like Kate, uniting for a cause we can’t tackle alone.

It’s big stuff, this optimism, this activism that drives her to train to walk 60 miles in 3 days. She fits the training in, often on weekends, sometimes before or after work, weaving it into family relationships and friendships. It’s also part of her ongoing commitment to her own health.

“Look how far we’ve come!”

She repeats, “Look how far we’ve come! “ She cites an example, grassroots lobbying in Iowa, around mammograms. “Look again at the letter you received last week about your mammogram,” she says. “By law, it must tell you the fibrous density of your breasts so you can seek additional screenings if you need to. That sentence in the letter is a successful lobbying effort by a few women here in Iowa.”

Last night she listened to a podcast about a clinical trial that will help make advances in curing HER2 cancer which “is taking our young people,” says Kate. She continues to learn the latest innovations so she can share it with people sitting in her chair. At one time she had eight clients fighting cancer. She says she’s glad there are people so smart that they can conduct the research that saves lives. She sees them as heroes. In my book, she’s also a hero.

We reach the turnaround point at a memorial bench with a pink ribbon and a name: Lori Bonacci Reames. 1957-2008. “Ten years ago, when I starting training for the 3-day walk I walked by this bench and I thought, ‘This is why I do this.’ I mean someone lost her life, right?”

So, we talk about the walks she’s been doing for the past 20 years—first the Komen walks in Des Moines that brought 10,000 people together locally to walk for cancer. Once she was the #1 fundraiser and often #2. She says she did it for the sense of community. “I wanted to belong. To belong is one of our basic human needs,”

During the 2008 recession and again during the pandemic, Komen began to re-envision their fundraising efforts. They originally sponsored 15 cities. This year there are 4: Boston, Dallas, San Diego, Tampa. Kate has walked a different city every year, for over 10 years. The first was Minneapolis which she did with her sister Kelly, who lives in Greenfield. Once during training, she’d call her saying I feel like I’m dragging a piano behind me!” Her sister was training with her friend Bridget, so raised money for her $2,300 entry too. Most of the cities attract about 800 walkers a day who stay in a host hotel, but San Diego attracts 1500 walkers because it has a camping option. There are also crew members who can no longer walk but are indispensable in handling the details of registration, hydrating and social gatherings.

Today Kate is training for Boston.

More Steps

As we walk, Kate talks about the importance of religion in her life. Ten years ago, when she started the 3-day walks, she stopped drinking on her own. She joined ALANON and the 12-step program. (More steps!) “I’m so grateful that I’m gaining that understanding of one-day-at-time. It’s a power greater than me. We humans have a history of forgetting that we can’t do it on our own.” This conversation gets us back to our cars. Together we chant the “serenity prayer” that Tom’s mother taught me, laugh when we get it right and go our separate ways.

If Kate inspires you and you’d like to contribute to her Boston walk, here’s her Facebook page. Or, if you support another cancer group, think about contributing to honor all the barbers and hairdressers out there educating their clients about important healthcare issues. But most important, when you wonder what you can do to support our democracy, think like a hairdresser. Learn to be a good listener.

The “bully pulpit” with the “barber chair.”

The first time oncologist Susan Beck had to tell my hairdresser, Kate Ahnen, that she had breast cancer 25 years ago, Kate took the necessary steps to recovery- a lumpectomy and radiation. She marvels at the compassion Dr. Beck showed her during that tough conversation. In remission, Kate decided to walk in her first local Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, and she’s been walking to support cancer research ever since. She’s found a way to combine her job as a hairdresser with her cancer activism. In the process she’s educated many clients, including me.

She’s found a “bully pulpit” with the “barber chair” in her one-person salon, where she has a captive audience for an hour every month. Healthcare research has shown that the “laying on of hands” while we get our hair cut, colored, or styled creates an intimacy that allows us to confide and trust the person shampooing, snipping or blow-drying that differs from our relationship with other service providers and casual friends. Most important Kate, and her fellow barbers and hairdressers are good listeners.

Cancer does not distinguish between Democrats and Republicans, white people or people of color, old or young. Prostate cancer comes for men. (They talk. Kate listens.) Breast cancer comes for men and women both. All the cancers steal our friends, our siblings, our parents, often before they have time to know our children or grow old gracefully.

I should know. In May of 1968, I lost my mom to breast cancer. For two years, as I was becoming a young woman, I watched my mother lose one breast, then the other, her uterus, her lungs, her life. Cancer also took my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law in their early 50’s, later in his life my dad, and then it started on my friends.

Because of research which drove early detection and innovative treatments, many of them, like Kate, survived. Lobbying efforts across party lines meant insurance covered more mammograms, information reached more Americans at risk for the disease, and treatment improved. “Look how far we’ve come!” is Kate’s mantra.

I sold daffodils for the American Cancer Society. I got yearly mammograms, sometimes walked in the October Komen Race for the Cure and contributed to cancer memorials instead of flowers. Small stuff.

The Cancer Jar

During the pandemic, I had to find a single practitioner to cut my hair. A friend steered both Tom and me to Kate, who is part of a hive of other hairdressers at The Studios in Urbandale, each operating independently. Just outside her salon only big enough for two, is her “bake sale”: cookies, small bags of chips, a book written by a survivor friend. If you want something, you leave money in the jar. There’s another jar in First Street Antiques, her mom’s shop in Greenfield. Friends, colleagues and clients donate jewelry and vintage stuff culled from closets, to sell there. The money goes in the cancer jar, sometimes more than $400 a month between the two jars. Her clients also make generous pledges for the big 3-day, 60-mile Komen walk she now participates in every year with family and friends in cities around the country.

Her fundraising efforts for cancer research began with the local Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure 15-20 years ago in Des Moines. At the time, the annual October event was a unique way to raise money for a healthcare issue. Now there’s a walk to support healthcare research every weekend.

Going Flat

Last week Kate and I met early one morning to walk the Clive Greenbelt Trail near her salon so she could get in some training and talk to me about her journey. I was sitting in her chair that day in January 2025 when her cell phone rang. Dr. Beck’s office was calling to give her unwelcome tests results. She had breast cancer again, not a recurrence, something new. She needed to come in to talk to the doctor about treatment.

She couldn’t have radiation again, so she decided to get a double mastectomy. She calls it “going flat”, more officially “aesthetic flat closure”. Now there’s an international “Going Flat Day” October 7^th, to call attention to the options that cancer patients and survivors have. Celebrity marathoner Louise Bernadette Butcher ran a marathon six weeks post-surgery and then ran the London Marathon topless to raise support for breast cancer education.

On our walk we talked about the merging of her job, her volunteerism, her religion, and her ability to find common ground with the people in her chair, who do not always agree with her politics. For me, she is the perfect example of the everyday activist that I like to highlight in this column: people who fight for democracy by listening, supporting civility and decency and like Kate, uniting for a cause we can’t tackle alone.

It’s big stuff, this optimism, this activism that drives her to train to walk 60 miles in 3 days. She fits the training in, often on weekends, sometimes before or after work, weaving it into family relationships and friendships. It’s also part of her ongoing commitment to her own health.

“Look how far we’ve come!”

She repeats, “Look how far we’ve come! “ She cites an example, grassroots lobbying in Iowa, around mammograms. “Look again at the letter you received last week about your mammogram,” she says. “By law, it must tell you the fibrous density of your breasts so you can seek additional screenings if you need to. That sentence in the letter is a successful lobbying effort by a few women here in Iowa.”

Last night she listened to a podcast about a clinical trial that will help make advances in curing HER2 cancer which “is taking our young people,” says Kate. She continues to learn the latest innovations so she can share it with people sitting in her chair. At one time she had eight clients fighting cancer. She says she’s glad there are people so smart that they can conduct the research that saves lives. She sees them as heroes. In my book, she’s also a hero.

We reach the turnaround point at a memorial bench with a pink ribbon and a name: Lori Bonacci Reames. 1957-2008. “Ten years ago, when I starting training for the 3-day walk I walked by this bench and I thought, ‘This is why I do this.’ I mean someone lost her life, right?”

So, we talk about the walks she’s been doing for the past 20 years—first the Komen walks in Des Moines that brought 10,000 people together locally to walk for cancer. Once she was the #1 fundraiser and often #2. She says she did it for the sense of community. “I wanted to belong. To belong is one of our basic human needs,”

During the 2008 recession and again during the pandemic, Komen began to re-envision their fundraising efforts. They originally sponsored 15 cities. This year there are 4: Boston, Dallas, San Diego, Tampa. Kate has walked a different city every year, for over 10 years. The first was Minneapolis which she did with her sister Kelly, who lives in Greenfield. Once during training, she’d call her saying I feel like I’m dragging a piano behind me!” Her sister was training with her friend Bridget, so raised money for her $2,300 entry too. Most of the cities attract about 800 walkers a day who stay in a host hotel, but San Diego attracts 1500 walkers because it has a camping option. There are also crew members who can no longer walk but are indispensable in handling the details of registration, hydrating and social gatherings.

Today Kate is training for Boston.

More Steps

As we walk, Kate talks about the importance of religion in her life. Ten years ago, when she started the 3-day walks, she stopped drinking on her own. She joined ALANON and the 12-step program. (More steps!) “I’m so grateful that I’m gaining that understanding of one-day-at-time. It’s a power greater than me. We humans have a history of forgetting that we can’t do it on our own.” This conversation gets us back to our cars. Together we chant the “serenity prayer” that Tom’s mother taught me, laugh when we get it right and go our separate ways.

If Kate inspires you and you’d like to contribute to her Boston walk, here’s her Facebook page. Or, if you support another cancer group, think about contributing to honor all the barbers and hairdressers out there educating their clients about important healthcare issues. But most important, when you wonder what you can do to support our democracy, think like a hairdresser. Learn to be a good listener.

BETH HOWARD BRINGS HER DOCUMENTARY TO MY HOMETOWN

Beth Howard, my Iowa Writers Collaborative (IWC) colleague, was bringing her award-winning documentary PIEIOWA, about Iowa’s culture of pie, to my hometown. I wasn’t going to miss it. Through the Mt. Pleasant grapevine, I heard that my PEO Chapter, Original A, a philanthropic education organization founded in Mt. Pleasant, had invited Beth to headline a fundraiser.

I saw the documentary last fall at the IWC weekend retreat in Okoboji, Iowa, but I wanted to see it with the people I’d grown up with, the community of women still alive who had created my idea of what it was to bake and share a good pie with the people you care about.

During the drive to Mt. Pleasant, I thought about my trip to Stover, Missouri to visit my 92-year-old grandmother one summer when I was home from college. When I arrived, she was making a cherry pie to donate to a church supper. “The older ones just give two dollars,” she explained. “Who could the older ones possibly be?” I wondered. But I took visual notes as she worked, her knuckles nearly perpendicular with arthritis.

I remember my Aunt Jessie who was still making the pumpkin pies for our Thanksgiving dinners into her 90’s. The last few years, she succumbed to buying frozen crusts. To her embarrassment, once she forgot to take out the lining before she added the filling. It’s a good thing she made two. I thought of Donna Hoaglin who used to bring gooseberry pies to potluck suppers at the rustic “country club on the river” built on stilts near the Skunk River.

I made it to Mt. Pleasant in two-and-a half hours, just in time to pick up my friend Mary, welcome the filmmaker, Beth, and slip into a pew at the Presbyterian Church beside Melinda, my best friend growing up. There were over a hundred people there. I knew them all. I also knew they’d love the documentary, and they did. It highlighted hundreds of everyday Iowans including the church ladies from Donnelson just down the road. Beth featured The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Boy columnist Chuck Offenburger who has probably tasted pie in every town in Iowa. Ottumwa native, Tom Arnold, co-star of the tv sitcom Rosanne, talked about his iconic hometown “go-to” for pie, Canteen Lunch in the Ally.

Near the back, I was able to watch the faces of the people in the crowd. Relaxed, they quietly mused, murmured and laughed. Beth captures in the film what brought me back to Iowa and what I write about—that sense of community with people who share (mostly) common values, love their neighbors, state, and country despite the political angst that has so sorely divided us in recent years. In times like these we must find some common ground, and if it’s pie, so be it.

In her cinematography Beth captures the iconic places that you’d expect to find pie in Iowa: the State Fair, our bike ride across Iowa (RAGBRAI), our ethnic community celebrations, the special restaurants that figure into our lives, and the people we identify with certain kinds of pie from our churches’ community dinners.

WE ARE A STATE OF IMMIGRANTS

There are celebration and nostalgia, but there’s another theme in the movie that serves as an important reminder: We are a state of immigrants and each group who settled in this state from the 1800’s to today has left its mark in many identifiable ways, often with food. Beth reminds us virtually and in her conversations with Iowans, that every culture has a kind of pie. PIEIOWA suggests that Italians have pizza, Latinos make tacos, and Australians craft hand pies. And sometimes in the making, these multi-cultural pies take on flavors from other cultures.

Afterwards, Beth took questions about making the movie and invited stories from the audience. Eighty-seven-year-old Marilee Donnolly, sporting an electric-yellow cap, raised her hand. “When our First Lady Christie Vilsack created a cookbook, she asked for stories about the recipe we submitted. Mine was the mincemeat pie my mother-in-law , Mom D, made.” She explained that it wasn’t listed with the deserts in the cookbook but with entrees, because it was a meat pie!

I leaned over and waved to Marilee who was sitting the next pew over. She hadn’t seen me arrive. That got a laugh.

Since we were talking mincemeat, I motioned for the microphone. I grew up in the Episcopal Church in Mt. Pleasant, and every year the ladies gathered in the church kitchen to make large quantities of mincemeat, which they stashed in jars and sold to raise money for church projects. When I was in 6^th grade I got to help. It was a rite-of-passage, being invited into a community of women cooking together. Aromas wafted from big pots: nutmeg, cinnamon, raisins, meat. I told the crowd that when we moved back to Mt. Pleasant, they no longer made mincemeat. Most people today have never tasted it. Harold and Helen Hawkins lived two doors down from us on Main Street. They were church members when I was growing up, so Helen gave me her handwritten instructions. I told the crowd I’d be happy to share the recipe.

Our filmmaker was bewildered by this talk of mincemeat! She wasn’t familiar with it and had never heard a conversation about mincemeat pie in the many venues where she’s shared her documentary.

After a few more stories we were all ready for what came next—eating pie!

The PEO’s had prepared pies galore, every kind imaginable (except mincemeat) and on close inspection they all seemed to be homemade crusts and fillings. I nabbed two pieces of cherry from server Kathy Nellor, one for me and one to take home to Tom. I complimented Betty Mullen’s church lady hat. I stopped to chat with Marilee who was eating pie with her daughter- in-law Marlene. I ate my pie with teacher friends.

Classmate Charlotte Sommerfeld Zihlman told me her home had burned, and her family had lost everything. Would I share my mincemeat recipe? I promised it to her and several others.

On the drive home my mind wandered to other pie bakers I’ve encountered. My mouth waters thinking about Bernita’s Moore’s rhubarb pie. In 1998 after a long day of campaigning, I stopped at Bernita’s farm along the Turkey River for dinner.

Her son Lennis and daughter-in-law Sandy were special friends of ours in Mt. Pleasant. Bernita fixed beef roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, Jell-o salad, homemade rolls, frozen corn from her garden, bread and butter pickles and rhubarb pie for dessert. Just for me. After months of Burger King Big Fish sandwiches, it felt like the best meal I’d ever eaten. Besides that, Bernita, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, campaigned for us around Elgin and Elkader and showed up at a Democratic meeting to vote for Tom in a straw poll during the primary.

NEVER BAKE THE PERFECT PIE

And then there was BeBe’s mythical lemon meringue pie. I met Tom’s grandmother when I first visited Pittsburgh to meet his family in the spring of 1969. Her Catholic faith was unshakeable. She said the Rosary every day, then asked God to let her die in her sleep when it was her time. She also baked pies. Lemon meringue was her specialty, but her pies were never quite right. Each time she baked, she’d point out a flaw- crust too done, filling too runny, weepy meringue. But one day, when she was 82, Tom says she admitted that she gotten it just right. She’d finally baked the perfect pie. That night her prayers were answered. In her honor, I always find some fault with my pies. I’m determined to put off baking the “perfect pie”.

Ask your friends, family and maybe someone you’d like to know better for a pie recipe. Bake a pie or buy one from one of the many specialty pie shops mentioned in Beth’s documentary or wherever you live. Here’s a link to find out where you can watch PIEIOWA, eat pie and meet Beth, who thinks that pies are for sharing and finding common ground.

This recipe was meant to make many quarts of mincemeat. Direction? “Cook over low heat until thick.” And “When baking pie, cut with orange juice or sprite.” I have never made a mincemeat pie, but the recipe is precious.

MEET THE KONIJNS

Come with me to a dairy and tulip farm in the Dutch countryside to meet three generations of the Konijn family. We’ll visit their tulip fields, meet their Holstiens, and taste their Beemster Royaal Grand Cru, Gouda-style cheese, just named the world’s best cheese at the World Championship Cheese Contest in Madison, Wisconsin.

We’re greeted by daughter-in-law Cristal in the farm shop, where a neighbor and his daughter, Gwen, help themselves to milk produced by the Konijn’s Holstiens in the barn next door. They bring their own bottle, and Gwen gets a peek at the cows after they make their purchases, including some “self-serve” cheese from a cooled vending machine that dispenses their dairy and meat products. The matriarch, Betsie Konijn, arrives to take us to the tulip fields. She’s been serving apple pie and coffee to a group of 30 bike riders passing through.

“WE’RE THE BEST”

She can’t resist bragging a bit about their first-place cheese. Every three days a truck arrives to pick up their milk and the milk of about 40 of their neighbors. Their milk is used by CONO Kassmakers whose cow’s milk cheese was praised for its “nutty flavor, butterscotch notes and firm, crystalline texture.” Excited, she raises her arms in a proud winner’s stance.

That’s then we notice the photo: President Barack Obama standing with the Konijn family in their tulip field. “That’s my boss!” Tom exclaims. He explains his job as “Minister of Agriculture” for the U.S. during the Obama and Biden administrations and wonders about the odds of us visiting the same farm the President visited in 2023. Originally our tour didn’t include this farm, only a nearby historic windmill. But our super tour guide Mareke called an audible when she found out Tom’s background. She reached out to contacts and learned about the Konijn’s farm, although she was as surprised as we were about President Obama’s visit.

When the family dog wanders in, Betsie explains that he’s named Bruce for “The Boss”, their favorite musician. Tom tells them that he and our extended family met “The Boss” after Springsteen wrapped up the presidential campaign in Des Moines in 2012. Betsie has her own story: President Obama called “The Boss” so Betsie could say hello from the tulips fields during his visit.

Betsie’s son Niek interrupts his chores to take us on a tour of the dairy barn. Three-year-old Loek, caroms around the courtyard on his foot-propelled motorcycle. Cristal returns with baby Maartje who’s awakened from her nap. I notice a John Deere implement I don’t recognize in the barnyard. Niek explains that it belongs to the man their hire to behead the tulips next week. “Why would they lop the blossoms off those beautiful tulips?” I wonder to myself. I’ll save it for the tulip fields.

Niek shows us his tightly packed fodder they grow to feed their animals. Later when we see it growing in the field, we learn that some of it is packed with nutrient-enriching herbs.

He gets busy answering Tom’s questions. They use about 60 hectares to graze their cows, “because grass grows well here in the Midlands, but it also gives good fertility to the soil for the tulip bulbs later.” They have an additional three hectares in tulips, three in potatoes and three in corn silage (a hectare is about 2.5 acres).

They have an average sized herd: 110 milk cows, 50 young stock and a few beef cows. They’ve been selling potatoes for 30 years. They also sell eggs and recently added beef products and milk. During the corona epidemic, people came from the cities to buy produce. The Konijns take advantage of the opportunity to earn an extra paycheck from their “help yourself” store.

In the milking barn, big Loek, the patriarch, is attaching the milking machine to the cows who wander in when they’re ready to be milked.

Niek says students from Iowa State University visited with their professor to learn more about their dairy and tulip operation. He shows us the ISU gift plaque. More important are the blue plates on the wall. These are awarded locally for the highest quality milk. His mom, Betsie, holds up the most recent and explains that the rest of the plates won through the generations are displayed in their home. As we leave the barn a small milk truck arrives to collect the milk.

“OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!”

Betsie loads us into her truck for the tulip fields. I am shocked to learn that the miles of rainbow-colored tulip and hyacinth fields we’ve been photographing will soon be losing their heads. That John Deere implement I noticed earlier will remove and mulch the blossoms. Then the nutrients can flow into their crop, the bulbs. Grocery store and flower shop tulips are grown in the huge greenhouses we’ve seen lining the highways. Those are flown to consumers world-wide. If you’re a tourist who misses the height of tulip season in the fields, you’ll have to visit Keukenhof Gardens where 7 million flowering bulbs are displayed for about eight weeks.

We learn from Betsie that there are 3000 varieties of tulips and that it takes up to 20 years to develop a new variety. What we didn’t learn as we passed miles of purple, violet and blue hyacinths, and variations of yellow, pink and red tulips, is the work that goes into producing them. And most startling of all that in a few days it’s “Off with their heads!”

Betsie says the fields require a lot of hard labor. They hire high school and college students to do the work of pulling the volunteer tulips, (no red tulips in the yellow rows!) and ridding the fields of diseased plants. It’s the equivalent in rural America of “walking beans,” a way for many U.S teenagers to pay for gas or college.

Betsy explains how the bulbs are planted and how they’ll soon be harvested, cleaned and boxed for their buyer.

After the deflowering in May, the bulbs will be lifted in nets from the ground in June. “We clean them. We take off the old skins and the roots. We have a machine for it we call a robot. Eight to ten people walk behind the machine sorting and cleaning off dirt and roots, what she calls “bollenpellen”.

FARMING: RISKY BUSINESS

When we return to the barns to say our goodbyes, Niek and Tom talk about the risky business of farming.

Niek is the only one of his brothers who returned to the farm after college. I will remember Niek saying that he didn’t come back for the money, for sure. He wants to be a steward of his land. He wants to feed his neighbors, but he also wants to find innovative ways to improve his operation and win more blue plates.

“We always make a joke here,” he says. “We say farmers like to work too much. If all the other people win the lottery, they will call their boss and say, ”I’m quitting.” First thing a farmer does is buy more property, buy more land, get a new tractor. Work harder!”

Tom assures him that it’s the same where we live. “Because you farmers have become so good at what you do, the rest of us no longer have to grow our own food. But you can be the best farmer and still lose it all,” he says. Farmers everywhere are at the mercy of the weather, changing markets, and the decisions of policy makers far-removed from the farm.

We leave with samples of the prize-winning cheese and the good feeling that comes with meeting like-minded people who are truly connected to the land.

Take a walk with me through the streets of Amsterdam on an early weekend morning near the Westerkerk Dutch Reformed Church along the Prinsengract Canal. The morning light catches the reflections of the step-gabled hotels, homes and storefronts that line the canal. Water gently laps against the trademark houseboats. There are 2500-3000 of these floating homes in the city.

Our hotel is a block away, and in the night I hear the muted church bells. Standing by the diminutive bronze statue of Anne Frank in the church’s courtyard, absent the traffic and visitors, I feel the bells like a heartbeat.

Anne could hear them too during the two years she and her family hid in the Secret Annex above her father’s spice business. Behind a door disguised as a bookcase she wrote daily in her now-famous red plaid diary. She died a few weeks before the Bergen-Belsen camp was liberated near the end of World

At the statue’s feet lie tulips slightly wilted overnight, no doubt left there by the thousands who visit the Anne Frank Huis each day. No matter what the hour, people from around the world —of every color, speaking every language wait hoping to get tickets which are sold out weeks in advance.

What used to be a Catholic Church is topped by a resplendent blue and gold orbed crown. After the Reformation it was relieved of its statues and stained-glass windows and organ. Today the Westerkerk’s pulpit is its most prominent feature, but the organ has returned. Now it’s more a concert venue than a church. A poster announces an upcoming Bach concert.

I have walked past the church and Anne’s hiding place multiple times over my stay and each time the school children wait to climb the steep stairs where they’ll imagine themselves sitting for hours in silence, because their lives would have depended on it. For me the self-guided tour yesterday was an emotional experience. The house is a shrine more than a museum. No photos are allowed. Teenagers whisper. Except for the diary at the end, personal items have been removed, although visitors may climb the ladder the girls used to get a glimpse of weekend skies.

I taught the play for 25 years to 13 year-olds, and coming to this house was my main reason for visiting Amsterdam. I used to turn off the lights of my classroom and ask my students to sit in silence for 10 minutes to show them what it might have been like for teenagers to sit still as the workday proceeded in the offices below.

As a language arts teacher who asked my students to keep journals, the irony of the final panel with a single quote resonates:

“My greatest wish is to be a journalist, and later on, a famous writer. We’ll have to wait and see if these grand illusions (or delusions!) will ever come true…”

I am nearly alone as I walk along the canal. Suddenly, a woman comes out her door and down the step in her green housecoat, her dog unleashed. Many of the shades are closed this morning. Usually it is easy to see inside kitchens where a bowl of apples and pears entice or a child’s thermos is left behind on a kitchen table as parents have hurried them off to school. On almost every widow sill there is a plant, a bouquet of flowers or something unique to share with passersby they will never meet.

I turn off the familiar path into a residential neighborhood where local families begin to go about their everyday lives. All residents bike. There is one bike for every citizen, about 837,000. Then add the tourists! We are all warned of the dangers of bikers, especially those on electric bikes. That is not yet a problem this morning. Every bike has a basket or plastic box up front for carrying groceries and sometimes dogs. On weekdays, stylishly dressed women load purses into the crates.

A woman parks beside her front door and removes her reusable grocery bags from a wheelbarrow like container that can hold several children and groceries.

In this neighborhood of modest homes, people my age more freely ride their bikes to do their errands before the tourists take to the streets oblivious of the local rules of the road.

What I thought were owls, hooting in the evenings turn out to be very large pigeons. I find one sitting on her nest in a small tree along the street, coo-cooing not who-whooing like the ones in our forest at home.

Tiny garbage trucks remove detritus dropped by international tourists who come to ride the canal boats, drink the beer, eat stroopwafels and takes buses to the country to see the tulips at Keukenhoff Gardens—about 40,000 visitors and 7 million flowering bulbs. But here, where people sit on their stoops, there are small personal gardens to enjoy.

It is still too early for the black coffee to go I’m searching for. I window shop instead, hard to do during the day because the narrow sidewalks can’t accommodate all the foot traffic.

Now I can see the toy store with its mouse house. Next door are the multi-colored Crocs, which have replaced wooden shoes that only farmers wear into their soggy fields. There’s the ubiquitous bike shop. I’m told a basic bike costs $400-500. (“Lock them up or they’ll be taken or tossed in the canal.”)

And right beside it is the store which I think is a candy shop until I realize the lollipop tree is filled with cannabis pops. My first day looking for a takeout coffee, I turned into a shop that smelled like college dorms in the 60’s. Cannabis is illegal in Amsterdam, but I’m told that coffee shops which offer more than coffee are accepted as a way to keep hard drugs to a minimum.

Ah, I smell coffee. I am near what was city hall centuries ago. Later it was home to Napoleon’s brother and now serves, like Blair House in the U.S., as a residence for visiting dignitaries.

By 5 o’clock this evening all the topsy-turvy chairs along the cobblestone sidewalks will be taken by people drinking beer and eating croquettes, tourists mostly. But, looking more carefully, I saw a man who lives on a houseboat enjoying the evening sun with a friend surrounded by his floating garden. A neighbor near our hotel opened his tiny garage and sat just inside with friends who had stopped with their dogs for chat and a Heineken or Amstel.

It’s a sunny but chilly morning. I’m glad I brought my insulated jacket and my sneaks. I will put at least 8 miles on them before the day ends, but for now I continue my quest to see how the citizens of Amsterdam live. I turn into the supermarket. A mother is there with two blonde girls maybe 4 and 6 helping their mother fill her basket. They disappear around a corner and the chase begins with loud giggles. I see lots of windowed boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables for easy take-out. No shopping carts, no cosmetics, beer, or pharmacies sold here.

I pass a cheese shop, with huge red wheels of Gouda. I peek in a window with fish I do not recognize, except for the marinated herring that is popular here. Yesterday our guide, Marike, stopped at an open-air stand near the church to purchase a small herring for her lunch from the shopkeeper who recognized her and knew what she wanted. She dangled the herring above her mouth, then down the hatch. “That’s how we locals eat it,” she said smacking her lips. He cut mine into chunks. It was delicious.

Later we will visit a whaling village that now specializes in smoking and exporting eels that live in fresh water where the land has been reclaimed from the sea. Now the fishermen there make more from tourism than fishing. In Amsterdam we are never far from fish and water, something unfamiliar to this Midwesterner.

I consult my map to be sure I’m headed back toward our hotel. I’m used to streets on grids sometimes I get a little lost on the various grachts and straats. Our room looks over a beautiful hidden courtyard with olive trees and tulips galore. It’s time for breakfast before we visit dairy and tulip farms.

I have passed up Swedish sweets, Italians cannolis and French baguettes, and I have yet to find Dutch pastries to match the bakeries in Iowa’s Dutch communities. But oh do I love Dutch pancakes and the grainy brown bread slathered with flavorful butter from Holland’s happy Holsteins.

Next week come with me to visit a dairy and tulip farm. We’ll meet three generations living and working outside a small rural Dutch village. We’ll also see some historic working windmills and some new ones, too.

Drake Law student Quincy Weigand went home during spring break to her family farm near Cairo, Missouri. They were lambing, and she wanted to be there to help. She grew up in 4-H, joined FFA and has shown cattle around the country. This summer she’s going home to intern with local lawyer and county prosecutor, Jordan Force, the only female lawyer in her community and one of only a few lawyers left in Shelby County, Missouri.

“I decided to go to law school specifically to serve as a rural practitioner. Where I grew up lots of counties are legal deserts with few or no attorneys. I hope to take my education and turn it into an opportunity to give back to the community that made me the person I am today,” says Quincy. Shelby County doesn’t have the funds to pay for a summer clerk, so being paid as a Vilsack Intern at Drake gives her a chance to earn enough money to pay for her living expenses during the coming school year. Last summer Quincy interned with the Farm Bureau in Des Moines, and this year served as Editor in Chief of the Drake Journal of Agricultural Law. She’s also excited that her younger sister will enter from Drake Law School and is also interested in a rural practice.

Because many small-town lawyers are retiring, and because fewer law school graduates are seeking a career in rural places, there just aren’t enough lawyers in rural Iowa and surrounding states to handle everyday legal work. City and county attorney jobs become part time or remain vacant. I became aware of the term “lawyer desert” when I was talking with lawyer friends in my hometown recently.

DRAKE’S VILSACK INTERNS TRY SMALL TOWN PRACTICES

Tom and I wanted to help find a solution, so with The World Food Prize and Drake University, we recently announced the Vilsack Interns at Drake Law School. With the same partnership, we are also created and funded the Vilsack Interns at Drake’s Darling Institute for Sustainability. “It’s a recognition that small towns need lawyers and lawyers can be leaders, catalysts for economic development in communities,” says Tom. “If law students aren’t aware of the opportunities in the food and ag space, they might be tempted to go to a big city law firm when they’re better suited to a small-town practice.”

He will be directly involved in preparing interns for a rural experience. He started his own career in a small town and led community organizations while building his practice, which involved representing farmers during the farm crisis of the 80’s. He wants to give interns a toolkit for adding value to a rural practice based on what he’s learned over the years as a lawyer and policymaker. He’s on a mission to rebuild thriving rural economies across the country, so he’ll be educating the Vilsack Interns about the climate smart agriculture programs that he developed at USDA. The programs created new funding streams for small farming operations in every state to complement the incredible growing and earning power of larger farmers who are feeding the world. He hopes to visit the communities hosting Vilsack Interns to talk about his revitalization blueprint with local leaders.

Jennifer Zwagerman, Director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake, and Laura Dufoe, Director of Career Development, are leading the intern recruitment effort. They’ve designed the internship to support students who want to clerk in rural practices, or in organizations or businesses connected to food or ag-related food policy.

Laurie explains that Drake is committed to eliminating the lawyer deserts in rural counties in Iowa and across the country. Drake has ramped up their efforts to invite rural law firms to recruit at the law school. “Everything that we hear from our real practitioners is that lawyers just out of law school will earn just as much in small communities as any Des Moines beginning attorney. Laurie says that rural lawyers state their practices are so robust, because they are sometimes serving their entire county. Recently she wrote about rural practice preparation at Drake in the March Issue of the Iowa Lawyer published by the Iowa Bar Association. “Preparing students for a rural legal practice requires more than encouraging words. It requires intentional exposure, meaningful relationships with practicing attorneys, and practical support that allows students to explore opportunities they might not otherwise consider.”

LAWYER/FARMER HELPS SOLVE LEGAL DESERTS

Kathy Law, President of the Iowa Bar Association, is also committed to encouraging more students at both the University of Iowa and Drake Law School to consider taking jobs in small communities. She, her husband Dave, and their son Jonathan farm near Churdan. Jonathan is also a lawyer in nearby Greene county seat, Jefferson. Before she went to Drake Law School in her 40’s she was a full-time farmer, driving tractors, walking beans and combining corn. Now, in addition to her private law practice with Nyemaster in Des Moines, she teaches a class at the Agricultural Law Center at Drake. Because of her own commitment to rural places, she has just finished a tour of Iowa to talk with local stakeholders in communities that are experiencing lawyer deserts. This week she’s at the state capitol lobbying to pass House File 2331 which establishes a loan repayment program and provides up to $10,000 annually for six years for attorneys who practice law in Iowa and handle indigent defense cases.

A map of Iowa shows that there are 43 counties currently considered legal deserts, which means there are fewer than one attorney for 1,000 residents. Forty-three counties currently qualify.

Some experienced lawyers want to retire, but they say their clients are like family and they can’t leave them without legal representation. Rural lawyers are willing to pay young lawyers as much as $70,000 to join their firms, salaries that are competitive with those offered by larger law firms in Des Moines. But they also worry that they’re not prepared to mentor a young lawyer in a digital world. They’re going to need help.

Kathy has also talked with community leaders in places like Creston, Marshalltown, Burlington, and Fort Dodge about the possibility of incentivizing recruits by helping to find office space, helping them find homes, or co-recruiting CPA’s to partner with beginning lawyers.

Young attorneys worry about choosing a rural practice, because they’ve been led to believe that they won’t make enough money to pay off student loans or that they’ll never be considered a good lawyer. They worry about professional and social isolation and lack of career opportunities for spouses and partners. Many aren’t sure about running a business as well as learning the law.

The Iowa Bar Association issued a report about what they discovered. Included is a list of potential solutions. Since one of the suggestions was mentorships, we’re hoping the Vilsack Internships will help fill the gap.

BELLE BABB MANSFIELD: LEGAL PIONEER

I am particularly heartened that four of our six Vilsack Interns are female law students willing to try out working in small towns to serve rural clients, or with organizations focused on rural America. They follow in the footsteps of the first woman to be admitted to the U.S. Bar in 1869. Belle Babb Mansfield studied at the desk of lawyers at the Ambler Firm in my hometown, Mt. Pleasant, before there was a law school in Iowa.

The three local lawyers who administered the oral examination, the norm at the time, deemed her to be “imminently qualified to practice law in the State of Iowa”. For that to happen, they had to change the law, since only white men were allowed to practice law in Iowa at the time. She lived in Mt. Pleasant teaching at Iowa Wesleyan College and traveling the state to speak about women’s suffrage. In 1900 she was recognized by the National Association of Women Attorneys meeting in Chicago as the first woman in the U.S. to be admitted to the Bar.

Because I grew up not knowing about her, when I was First Lady, I led a group of men and women in Mt. Pleasant in raising resources and awareness about Belle, so we could build a statue to honor her. My interest in creating the Vilsack Internships is in part because I want more young women to consider legal careers that honor Belle’s legacy of breaking barriers and choosing to live in a rural community.

Moving forward, the proceeds from Common Ground’s paying subscribers will move to an account that will help fund the Vilsack Interns at the Darling Institute for Sustainability and the Vilsack Interns at Drake Law School. Thanks for considering subscribing, but feel welcome to continue as an unpaid subscriber. I welcome you all to read and learn.

The late-night view from 34th Street.A DAY AT THE AIRPORT: IT’S NOT WHAT YOUR THINK!

The guy next to me at LaGuardia Airport this morning asks if I want his Wall Street Journal. He’s off to Palm Springs. I accept, enjoying the feel of a real newspaper. I ask if he knows what I’m looking at across the river. I can no longer see the New York skyline, so I’m turned around. “That’s Queens across the East River,” he explains. He asks where I’m from. We talk about how delighted we are with our experience getting to and through the airport this morning. I say, “My husband left our hotel two days ago at 5:30 a.m.to catch his flight. It took 90 minutes to get through security, and he was the last guy to board.”

Be at the airport at least two and a half hours early his text advised. The friend I was staying with reminded me of the No Kings protests taking place near Central Park. Traffic patterns will change, the media warned.

Yesterday it took this guy’s wife hours to get through security. So, we both arrive four hours early, and here we sit, eating lunch, reading the news, looking at Queens, and having a relaxed conversation with a fellow traveler. What’s not to like about that? We talk about the healthy food choices. A blue-lit fountain spouts behind us. We are both old enough to remember what LaGuardia and JFK were like not so many years ago.

My cab ride from 34^th Street takes 20 minutes. No traffic. A cheerful American Airlines employee tags my bag, and the conveyor-belt guy asks where I’m from. “Iowa!” I say and he replies, “Oh, yeah. Slipknot, the band!” I laugh and tell him it’s the first time anyone has mentioned Slipknot first when talking to me about Iowa. “I can’t think of anything else,” he says. “Next time you put gas in your car, think ethanol. It’s made from Iowa corn!” Now it’s his turn to laugh. The whole bag exchange takes five minutes tops.

The ICE agents are out in full force, riding the escalators, getting lunch, standing around. It seems like there are more of them than us, but those at the security checkpoints are friendly and try to help. I know the drill, but I ask, “I have a new knee, which portal?” The guy points to one of the TSA officers for help. “They’ll probably make you take off your shoes and pat you down,” he said. “I don’t think so,” I say skeptically. “Or, maybe not,” he says with a shrug. “Travel safe.” And I am on my way in maybe three minutes.

The guy beside me had a similar experience, but neither of us mentions the word, ICE. It might ruin the karma.

“I’m retired, and I’m just tired of all the hassle traveling,” he says, but today, we agree, we got lucky

With a wave, he heads to his gate. I peruse his Wall Street Journal. “WE DESERVE MUCH BETTER HOTEL ROOM TECHNOLOGY,” the travel section headline shouts. Another whispers, “The Best-Kept Secrets of Portugal”. (Seems you must get out of the tourist-choked cities.) “IF YOU’RE HITTING THE ROAD WITH YOUR DOG, HERE’S HOW TO MAKE IT LESS STRESSFUL”. I don’t have a dog, but I now know to avoid highway rest stops and get a room far from the elevator. That sounds like good advice even if you’re not traveling with a dog.

I return to my three devices waiting to help me finish a rough draft of my Substack column, but I can’t quit thinking about the last few days in my favorite city. Not one New Yorker has been rude to me, including far too many ICE agents.

First there was Douglas, a concierge at the Hilton Garden Inn (Central Park South) who learned our first names when we checked in and remembered them every time he saw us for the next three days. There was the young woman from Kosovo working at the Empire Steak House next door, who was so excited that I’d visited her country. She called over her boss, also from Kosovo, to hear me talk about the special relationship between Iowa’s National Guard and Kosovo.

There was the Indian taxi driver, who told me he’s having a hard time making it competing with Ubers and having to pay higher gas prices. Another taxi driver admitted he hears the endless video screen ads in his head all night. Another immigrant taxi driver made a U-turn in the middle of 34^th street to get me right to the door my college friend’s apartment. She’s in Japan, “but make yourself at home!” she said.

I met my friend Constance for lunch in her Greek neighborhood. If you ever find yourself on 9^th Street, in Hell’s Kitchen, stop at the Westway Diner for some spanakopita and the Mediterranean salad. I got there early but they seated me because Constance is a regular. “Kostantina!” they welcomed her warmly in Greek diner-speak. Even the Spanish waiters speak basic Greek.

Constance left New Jersey to attend high school for two years in Greece near extended family before becoming part of our Kirkland college class in upstate New York. She’s has lived most of her adult life across the street in an apartment building housing 3000 people. It was originally built as subsidized housing for actors, so they could live close to the nearby theater district. Constance started her acting career as a freshman in her New Jersey high school in a play starring Meryl Streep. Eventually she found her niche in astrology. Now she’s published several books and was the first person I knew with a Substack column.

After we run errands. There’s the international grocery store whose manager greets her in Greek. Brown bags full of spices offer little trowels for shoveling. Tins of olive oil are labeled with the kind of olive pressed to make it. The baklava oozes with honeyed nuts. We pass up the fish monger—“too smelly in there,” says Constance, and move on to the butcher. She greets him by name in Greek, then purchases ropes of chicken sausage and some ham. His prices are fair, she says so he can hear. I see every kind of lamb and a few pork chops- Iowa chops, I explain.

We stop by her apartment building, home to as many people as a small town in Iowa. Like any small town there’s an outdoor playground and swimming pool, but they’re a few floors up and the view is skyscrapers and the Hudson River. I invite her to join me for A Death of a Salesman starring Tony and Emmy Award-winning Nathan Lane. She’s already seen Dustin Hoffman play Willie Loman, so will catch this one another day.

Later, I chat-up the guys running B&B Rare Books on Madison Avenue. They also sell sports memorabilia. When they find out I’m a Pirate fan they rub in our opening day loss to the Mets, good-naturedly of course. I ask permission to pick up a first edition of Death of Salesman. I can afford my ticket for the play, but not the thousands for the first edition. I also can’t afford the first edition of Stuart Little by E.B. White, contributing editor of the New Yorker magazine and author of Charlotte’s Web.

Years ago, I tell them, I bought a small book at another bookstore nearby, Here Is New York, written by E.B. White, in a New York hotel room on a 90-degree day in June 1948. I’m rereading the book on my trip. It’s only 50 pages, but it captures the complexity of the people in the city I fell in love with when I was 8 years old.

Which brings me to the end of my musings in my delightful day at LaGuardia Airport, but in the mood to share White’s observation about New York, which I discover to be true each time I visit.

The oft-quoted thumbnail sketch of New York is, of course: ‘It’s a wonderful place, but I wouldn’t want to live there.’ I have an idea that people from villages and small towns, people accustomed to the convenience and the friendliness of neighborhood over-the-fence living, are unaware that life in New York follows the neighborhood pattern. The city is literally a composite of tens of thousands of tiny neighborhood units. No matter where you live in New York, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand, a dry cleaner, a laundry , a delicatessen (beer and sandwiches delivered at any hour to your door.”)His list continues for two pages, but you get the drift.

When I visit New York, I like to wander a few blocks off the beaten path, sit on park benches and engage in casual conversations just as I would at home. I always come away with stories about the city and the resilient people who live here.

I hand the Wall Street Journal to the woman beside me and grab my carry-on. I’m ready get home now, but I’ll be back.

A DAY AT THE AIRPORT: IT’S NOT WHAT YOUR THINK!

The guy sitting next to me at LaGuardia Airport this morning asks if I want his Wall Street Journal. He’s off to Palm Springs. I accept, enjoying the feel of a real newspaper. I ask if he knows what I’m looking at across the river. I can no longer see the New York skyline, so I’m turned around. “That’s Queens across the East River,” he explains. He asks where I’m from. We talk about how delighted we are with our experience getting to and through the airport this morning. I say, “My husband left our hotel two days ago at 5:30 a.m.to catch his flight. It took 90 minutes to get through security, and he was the last guy to board.”

Be at the airport at least two and a half hours early his text advised. The friend I was staying with reminded me of the No Kings protests taking place near Central Park. Traffic patterns will change, the media warned.

Yesterday it took this guy’s wife hours to get through security. So, we both arrive four hours early, and here we sit, eating lunch, reading the news, looking at Queens, and having a relaxed conversation with a fellow traveler. What’s not to like about that? We talk about the healthy food choices. A blue-lit fountain spouts behind us. We are both old enough to remember what LaGuardia and JFK were like not so many years ago.

My cab ride from 34^th Street takes 20 minutes. No traffic. A cheerful American Airlines employee tags my bag, and the conveyor-belt guy asks where I’m from. “Iowa!” I say and he replies, “Oh, yeah. Slipknot, the band!” I laugh and tell him it’s the first time anyone has mentioned Slipknot first when talking to me about Iowa. “I can’t think of anything else,” he says. “Next time you put gas in your car, think ethanol. It’s made from Iowa corn!” Now it’s his turn to laugh. The whole bag exchange takes five minutes tops.

The ICE agents are out in full force, riding the escalators, getting lunch, standing around. It seems like there are more of them than us, but those at the security checkpoints are friendly and try to help. I know the drill, but I ask, “I have a new knee, which portal?” The guy points to one of the TSA officers for help. “They’ll probably make you take off your shoes and pat you down,” he said. “I don’t think so,” I say skeptically. “Or, maybe not,” he says with a shrug. “Travel safe.” And I am on my way in maybe three minutes.

The guy beside me had a similar experience, but neither of us mentions the word, ICE. It might ruin the karma.

“I’m retired, and I’m just tired of all the hassle traveling,” he says, but today, we agree, we got lucky

With a wave, he heads to his gate. I peruse his Wall Street Journal. “WE DESERVE MUCH BETTER HOTEL ROOM TECHNOLOGY,” the travel section headline shouts. Another whispers, “The Best-Kept Secrets of Portugal”. (Seems you must get out of the tourist-choked cities.) “IF YOU’RE HITTING THE ROAD WITH YOUR DOG, HERE’S HOW TO MAKE IT LESS STRESSFUL”. I don’t have a dog, but I now know to avoid highway rest stops and get a room far from the elevator. That sounds like good advice even if you’re not traveling with a dog.

I return to my three devices waiting to help me finish a rough draft of my Substack column, but I can’t quit thinking about the last few days in my favorite city. Not one New Yorker has been rude to me, including far too many ICE agents.

First there was Douglas, a concierge at the Hilton Garden Inn (Central Park South) who learned our first names when we checked in and remembered them every time he saw us for the next three days. There was the young woman from Kosovo working at the Empire Steak House next door, who was so excited that I’d visited her country. She called over her boss, also from Kosovo, to hear me talk about the special relationship between Iowa’s National Guard and Kosovo.

There was the Indian taxi driver, who told me he’s having a hard time making it competing with Ubers and having to pay higher gas prices. Another taxi driver admitted he hears the endless video screen ads in his head all night. Another immigrant taxi driver made a U-turn in the middle of 34^th street to get me right to the door my college friend’s apartment. She’s in Japan, “but make yourself at home!” she said.

I met my friend Constance for lunch in her Greek neighborhood. If you ever find yourself on 9^th Street, in Hell’s Kitchen, stop at the Westway Diner for some spanakopita and the Mediterranean salad. I got there early but they seated me because Constance is a regular. “Kostantina!” they welcomed her warmly in Greek diner-speak. Even the Spanish waiters speak basic Greek.

Constance left New Jersey to attend high school for two years in Greece near extended family before becoming part of our Kirkland college class in upstate New York. She’s has lived most of her adult life across the street in an apartment building housing 3000 people. It was originally built as subsidized housing for actors, so they could live close to the nearby theater district. Constance started her acting career as a freshman in her New Jersey high school in a play starring Meryl Streep. Eventually she found her niche in astrology. Now she’s published several books and was the first person I knew with a Substack column.

After we run errands. There’s the international grocery store whose manager greets her in Greek. Brown bags full of spices offer little trowels for shoveling. Tins of olive oil are labeled with the kind of olive pressed to make it. The baklava oozes with honeyed nuts. We pass up the fish monger—“too smelly in there,” says Constance, and move on to the butcher. She greets him by name in Greek, then purchases ropes of chicken sausage and some ham. His prices are fair, she says so he can hear. I see every kind of lamb and a few pork chops- Iowa chops, I explain.

We stop by her apartment building, home to as many people as a small town in Iowa. Like any small town there’s an outdoor playground and swimming pool, but they’re a few floors up and the view is skyscrapers and the Hudson River. I invite her to join me for A Death of a Salesman starring Tony and Emmy Award-winning Nathan Lane. She’s already seen Dustin Hoffman play Willie Loman, so will catch this one another day.

Later, I chat-up the guys running B&B Rare Books on Madison Avenue. They also sell sports memorabilia. When they find out I’m a Pirate fan they rub in our opening day loss to the Mets, good-naturedly of course. I ask permission to pick up a first edition of Death of Salesman. I can afford my ticket for the play, but not the thousands for the first edition. I also can’t afford the first edition of Stuart Little by E.B. White, contributing editor of the New Yorker magazine and author of Charlotte’s Web.

Years ago, I tell them, I bought a small book at another bookstore nearby, Here Is New York, written by E.B. White, in a New York hotel room on a 90-degree day in June 1948. I’m rereading the book on my trip. It’s only 50 pages, but it captures the complexity of the people in the city I fell in love with when I was 8 years old.

Which brings me to the end of my musings in my delightful day at LaGuardia Airport, but in the mood to share White’s observation about New York, which I discover to be true each time I visit.

The oft-quoted thumbnail sketch of New York is, of course: ‘It’s a wonderful place, but I wouldn’t want to live there.’ I have an idea that people from villages and small towns, people accustomed to the convenience and the friendliness of neighborhood over-the-fence living, are unaware that life in New York follows the neighborhood pattern. The city is literally a composite of tens of thousands of tiny neighborhood units. No matter where you live in New York, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand, a dry cleaner, a laundry , a delicatessen (beer and sandwiches delivered at any hour to your door.”) His list continues for two pages, but you get the drift.

When I visit New York, I like to wander a few blocks off the beaten path, sit on park benches and engage in casual conversations just as I would at home. I always come away with stories about the city and the resilient people who live here.

I hand the Wall Street Journal to the woman beside me and grab my carry-on. I’m ready get home now, but I’ll be back.

RAISE THE JOLLY ROGER!

The first thing I learned about my husband was that he was a Democrat. Next, I learned that he was a Pittsburgh Pirate fan. Politics and Pirates have continued to intersect throughout our lives.

On New Years Day, 1973, we were attending mass in Pittsburgh at Saint Pauls’s Cathedral, when the priest announced that Tom’s childhood hero, Pirate outfielder Roberto Clemente, was killed in a plane crash while delivering food aid to Nicaragua.

Two years later, when he left Pittsburgh for my hometown in Iowa, I gave up the Cardinals and Packers to become a loyal Pittsburgh sports fan. On summer evenings, Tom would drive around Mt. Pleasant at night to pick up the signal for KDKA and listen to Bob Prince, long-time Pirate sportscaster and friend of his dad, announce the games.

Before our boys were old enough to play baseball, he coached Little League with his friend Carter Challen. We visited Carter and Amy this week in Punta Gorda, Florida on our sojourn to Pirate Spring Training.

We brought our sons to Spring Training in Bradenton, Florida to watch the Pirates play when Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, and Doug Drabek baseball cards were precious. Our son Doug has always been a Steeler fan, but as a kid, he followed the Rangers as a die-hard Noah Ryan fan, so we were able to catch some of his games in nearby Port Charlotte, where Doug scored an autograph.

FATE CHOSE A DIFFERENT PATH FOR TOM

Tom watched the Pirates play in three World Series before he came to Iowa. Unfortunately, the Pirates have never made the World Series in the last 46 years. They almost made it the summer he was running for the Iowa State Senate in 1992. Jess, Doug, and I were watching the game at home. Tom was out driving around listening to the radio, deciding that if he had to choose, he’d choose a Pirate win over his senate win so he could take his boys to their first World Series. Second baseman, Jose Lind, fumbled a ground ball and fate chose a different path for Tom.

Both boys are lifelong Steeler fans, but they roll their eyes, when their dad starts talking about his hopes for the Pirates about this time each year. He never loses hope for the “baseball gods” to work their magic.

Years later, when we had to drop out of the 2008 presidential race after it came down to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the primary, we left Des Moines on a cold March day for a small island I had found on the map near Bradenton. We thought sun and Pirate baseball would make us feel better.

It did, so for the past 20 years, Tom and I have returned to Anna Maria Island for a few days every March to watch the Pirates get ready for the season. We have good friends in Florida, including the Challens from Mt. Pleasant Little League days. Even during our years going back and forth from Iowa to Washington DC while Tom was serving as Secretary of Agriculture, we managed to steal long weekends in Florida to catch a few Pirate games after his speaking engagements at farmer conferences, viewing hurricane crop damage, or visiting food banks.

This year we needed to escape the Iowa winter and political headlines more than ever. Then, just before we left for Bradenton, 89-year-old Bill Mazeroski died, one of the last of the 1960 Pirates who won the World Series.

R.I.P BILL MAZEROSKI 1936-1926

Most of you will not have heard of Maz or the The Glove as he was affectionately called by Pittsburgh fans, but anyone who grew up in the Pittsburgh area in the 1950’s will tell you where they were when Bill Mazeroski hit a walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth inning to beat Mickey Mantle’s seemingly “unbeatable” Yankees. So, our journey this year was more significant. I had heard the story many times and Amy and Carter had too, but we all enjoyed hearing it again over lunch this week.

Tom attended Game Two of that series with his mom. The Yankees won 16-3. They won two other games 10-0 and 12-0, but the Pirates managed to win three games. Game Seven was in Pittsburgh on Friday the 13^th.

“Thirteen is my lucky number,” says Tom. “I was at Saint Paul’s Cathedral school in fifth grade, and the nuns brought a black and white TV to our classroom at about 3:00 o’clock. They said, ‘It’s the bottom of the ninth and it’s tied 9-9.’ The only reason it was tied was that the Pirates were down by two runs, and they had a man on first with one out and a guy hit a ground ball to Yankee shortstop, Tony Kubeck. It was a tailor-made double -play, and it would have ended the inning, except it hit a rock in the infield, hit Kubeck in the Adam’s apple and knocked him flat. Both runners were safe and the next guy up, Hal Smith, hit a 3-run homer.” Then Micky Mantle came to the rescue for the Yankees and tied it up in the ninth.” He sighs, remembering.

IT WAS PURE JOY!

You can imagine how excited the 5th graders were as Mazeroski came to the plate. Tom explains that Mazeroski was a great second baseman, but he wasn’t a home-run hitter. “On the second pitch he hit a home run to left field!” Tom raises his arms in a victory sign just as he had as a kid amid the clapping and shouting. “It was pure joy,” he continues. “It was the only time in World Series history that there ever was a walk-off seventh game homer.” He pauses for effect. “But what’s even more significant, I think, is when they tore down Forbes Field, they left a part of the left-field wall as a monument to that home run. Every year people gather on the 13^th of October to commemorate it.”

Saint Paul’s was just a few blocks from the stadium, and Tom remembers his ride home on a city bus. The people of Pittsburgh were in the streets singing a jingle they’d been singing all year. “The Bucs are going all the way, all the way, all the way…” For a moment, he becomes that ten-year old boy again.

“For me that was one of the most extraordinary thirty days of my life because the Buc’s won The Series and a month later John Kennedy was elected president. As a Catholic family we were excited about that.

HERE’S THE REST OF THE STORY:

George Will, conservative political columnist for the Washington Post and a great baseball fan has a party every year on Opening Day. His book Men at Work is a baseball classic. He’s a Cubs fan and he knows Tom’s a Pirate fan, so he invited us to his home near Washington D.C. during the Obama years. Sports commentator Bob Costas also attended. When he learned Tom’s Pittsburgh roots, he told this story about Bing Crosby and the home run that tops ESPN’s list of the hundred greatest.

“Bing Crosby was part owner of the Pirates in 1960,” Tom begins. “He was in France filming one of those Bob Hope movies. He couldn’t be in Pittsburgh to watch the game, so he hired a cameraman from Hollywood to film the game from the roof of the grandstand behind home plate. Back in 1960 there was no replay. Once the broadcast was done, it was done. You couldn’t see it again. There was no Sports Center. He filmed the game so Bing could watch it, but no one really knew about it. This big canister is in Bing’s attic for fifty to sixty years and his kids are going through his stuff and they think it must be one of his movies. They put it on a projector, and it’s the seventh game of the 1960 World Series.”

Once discovered, a video of the game was made to match the radio broadcasts of Bob Prince and Yankee announcer, Noel Allen. Costas sent Tom a copy.

IOWAN MITCH KELLER, OUR FAVORITE PIRATE!

This year, we have tickets for two Spring Training games. Our favorite Pirate pitched on Tuesday. Mitch Keller joined the team when he graduated from high school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 2014. Tuesday wasn’t his best game. The Pirates lost 10-1, but his next outing was better.

Tom has a theory about baseball that matches the way he looks at politics. “Baseball is every day—162 of them. Every day you have the chance to feel really good. If your team doesn’t do well, there’s always tomorrow, when things could turn around immediately.

In politics, if your team’s not doing well, if you’ve lost elections and the other team’s in charge, there’s a tendency to lose hope. If you think like a baseball fan, you’ll be willing to invest the time, the energy and the resources to do what you can today to win.

Wednesday we were hoping for a Pirate victory, and we weren’t disappointed. The Buc’s beat the Orioles 3-1. Tomorrow is Opening Day! It’s the Pirates vs. the Mets in New York. Too bad it’s not the Yankees. I hope Bill Mazeroski is watching.

EXPLORATION PERRY

Drake University senior, Sterling Angeroth from Crescent, Iowa worked in Perry last summer with high school students and their business teacher to identify ways they could improve the small town’s economic outlook. Allie Raines, a senior from St. Peters, Missouri has worked with the Perry Chamber of Commerce as a graphic design intern for two years. She’ll live in Perry this summer with Ruby Woodburn, a sophomore from Winfield, Kansas who is in her first year as an intern.

In the first three years of the Jay N. Darling Institute, Executive Director, Keith Summerville sent interns to Perry to develop a community garden and orchard, to determine the feasibility of planting a prairie under a solar farm and currently to develop signage along the bike trail to lure bikers into town to eat and shop. Ruby is already working on a website and other social media to highlight the new economic development brand, Exploration Perry. This summer she and Allie plan to get the signage for the bike trail approved and posted. Keith asked Sterling, who graduates in May, to use her internship this summer to serve as his Chief of Staff and intern supervisor, a role she’s looking forward to before she started her graduate degree in city planning at Iowa State University.

This summer the three Drake students will become the first Vilsack Interns at the Darling Institute through a partnership created by my husband, former Governor Tom Vilsack, between Drake University and the World Food Prize, where he serves as CEO. Here’s how it happened. A few months before he died, businessman Bill Knapp and his wife Susan invited us to lunch with Marty Martin, President of Drake University, and Bill Knapp II, Co-chair of the Drake Board of Directors. They wanted to ask Tom to donate his papers as Iowa’s Governor and Secretary of Agriculture in the Obama and Biden administrations, to the archives at Drake here in Des Moines. The Knapps have been major supporters of the university and friends and neighbors of ours. Other recent governors of Iowa have also given their papers to the Drake Archives. They made the case that Tom should join them.

PARTNERING DRAKE AND THE WORLD FOOD PRIZE

Tom agreed but had an ask of him own. Would Drake partner with the World Food Prize to create paid internships focused on revitalizing rural places through the Darling Institute and the Drake Law School? We would become the major donor to a fund supporting the interns. Tom invited the Knapp Family Foundation to contribute as well. By the time lunch ended the Foundation had contributed along with Bill Knapp II and his wife Nancy and Gerry and Mary Lou Neugent. Bill and Gerry are Drake graduates and serve as co-chairs of the Knapp Properties Board. A few weeks later the CEO of Syngenta, Jeff Rowe, a Drake alum, committed funds from his company. Cindy Eisenhauer, who served as Tom’s Chief of Staff heard about the fund so she and her husband the Honorable Larry Eisenhauer joined, so we will fund five interns a year at the Darling Institute and for 5 years and five additional interns at Drake Law School.

The World Food Prize will accept all contributions and administer the partnership, because the mission of the Darling Institute aligns with the mission of the World Food Prize. The Darling Institute and the Law School will choose the interns based on the criteria we all agreed on.

The Jay N. Darling Institute was named for Jay “Ding” Darling, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Des Moines Register, who grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. He also created the Federal Duck Stamp Program which raised more than a billion dollars for the protection of wetlands and wildlife habitats. You can visit the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island in Florida.

Darling’s papers are also housed in the Drake University Archives. The Darling Institute works to create partnerships between Drake and the people of rural communities to help bolster the economic, social and cultural vibrancy of rural America, particularly the rural Midwest.

This fits with the World Food Prize mission “to elevate innovations and inspire action to sustainably increase the quality, quantity, and availability of food for all. It also fits the vision Tom has for better defining the World Food Prize’s connection to small towns and farmers in Iowa and surrounding states.

“When I was hired by the World Food Prize Foundation Board, I realize that part of my responsibility was to deepen the relationship between the Foundation and Iowans and to broaden the foundation’s reach beyond the state of Iowa. I wanted the Foundation to have the resources it needed to do the work that is has been doing with youth institutes, the Borlaug Dialogue and the WFP Laureate Award. To do that we needed to be able to intersect the interests of donors with the work of the World Food Prize Foundation that could be advanced by their contribution.”

REVITALIZING RURAL COMMUNITIES

When he was approached about donating his papers to Drake, Tom realized that a partnership would help Drake and the World Food Prize. It would also provide undergraduates and law students an opportunity to work with him to educate farmers and small-town leaders about his blueprint for new funding streams for small and mid-sized farmers that would help revitalize rural communities economically. Tom has offered to educate interns about climate-smart farm programs that they can share in the communities they serve.

Keith Summerville graduated from Miami University in Ohio, with a PhD in zoology. He says he came to Drake 25 years ago, because “it’s the only place that’s ever said, we want you to come here and build a nationally competitive natural science and sustainability program, and we’re going to give you the freedom to do it.” After serving as professor of environmental science and sustainability he became associate dean of the college of Arts and Sciences. Now he is also the Paul and Claudia Schickler Executive Director of the Darling Institute. Paul Schickler serves as Chair of the World Food Prize Board. He and Claudia endow Keith’s position along with state and federal grants.

In placing interns, Keith says he chooses communities that USDA recognizes as unmistakenly rural. The other criteria are need and fit with a project. “I try to identify specific project opportunities for which I already have a student in mind. I am looking for a student who is unflappable, who can take physical and emotional stress well. That student could be an A or a C student who will work his or her ass off. I can teach knowledge, but I can’t teach disposition and work ethic.”

That’s why Sterling, Allie and Ruby made the cut as Vilsack Interns at the Darling Institute. They will be joined by Maggie Blair from Longmont, Colorado and Amber Wagler from Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. You’ll meet them on the job later.

Let’s end with a few words from Sterling.

STERLING: “I SEE MYSELF IN IOWA.”

“This program blends a lot of what I’m very passionate about—rural places, sustainability which is my degree program and community development work.” She says they’ve been taught to think about sustainability as a three-legged stool. If we’re looking at the long-term sustainability of Perry, we’re thinking about, ‘How do we make Perry more environmentally friendly and resilient to storms, to the changing landscape, the changing environment. Economically we’re looking at their varied industry. Are there different choices for people for jobs? Then socially, what structures do we have to support the community? How are we supporting all populations with green space, the built environment as well as natural environments?”

Sterling is also working in Milo, a town of 700. She’s helping them create an operations manual. She says the city maintenance engineer is super smart, but he has all the information in his head. “If all that information gets lost, where’s their resilience?”

Will she stay in Iowa? “I see myself in Iowa,” she says. “This is where my family is. This is where I’ve lived all my lie. I’ve had varied experiences thanks to the Darling Institute. There’s so much value here.”

Would she live in a smaller community? “I would, and I don’t think I could have told you that some years ago before became a Darling Intern. It’s so rewarding to be able to say, ‘I created some value for this community’, and I’ve created connections for myself in these communities. If I could work for the Darling Institute for the rest of my life, I would.”

Postscript: This is the first anniversary of my Substack column, Common Ground. Thanks for joining me on the journey. To celebrate, I invite you to become a subscriber. If the work of the Darling Institute and the World Food Prize interest you, consider moving from a follower or unpaid subscriber to a paid subscription. Your fee will go into a special account to fund the Vilsack Interns at the Darling Institute at Drake. Also feel comfortable continuing as an unpaid subscriber. More to come on the Vilsack Interns at Drake Law School.

Every day, the play, The Diary of Anne Frank, adapted from her famous teenaged diary, is performed somewhere in the world. Little did I know in the 1970’s and 80’s when I was reading the play with my eighth graders that just down the road in Danville, Iowa, another teacher, Birdie Mathews, in 1939 managed to connect her students with Anne Frank herself.

Birdie, who had traveled abroad, invited her students to choose a pen pal from countries she had visited. Ten-year-old Juanita Wagner chose a girl her age in Amsterdam named Anne Frank. Her older sister, Betty, chose Anne’s older sister, Margot who was 14. Those letters are now on display in The Danville Station, a small museum connected to the Danville Library, one of two places in the world to view them. Tom and I will be visiting the Secret Annex in Amsterdam in April, an item at the top of my bucket list. I didn’t want to visit the Frank Family’s hideout in the attic of Otto’s Franks workplace, until I’d visited the museum in Danville just 20 minutes from my hometown.

Before we take the tour, let me explain that the museum is part of the Danville Library, which unlike most libraries in Iowa, relies on private funding. The exhibit wouldn’t exist without the leadership of Janet Hesler, who met me at the museum to explain how the library and museum came to be.

In the library, before entering the museum, is a display case filled with artifacts belonging to her father, who was part of General George Patton’s Third Army. After they triumphed at the Battle of the Bulge, they marched into the Dachau concentration camp the day after liberation. Her father was tasked with helping to deliver humanitarian relief. “It was very difficult for him to talk about it, so I knew what an impact it had on him. I think that’s what got me involved with the story,” Janet explained.

She joined history and language arts teachers from Danville, and a history teacher from Mediapolis to create the exhibit, which opened in 2017. UNI professor, Dr. Stephen Gaies, a Holocaust studies professor, offered advice on the project. After examining the letters, we watch a video of Betty Wagner, recorded in 2008, recalling how she and her sister Juanita became pen pals with Anne and Margot Frank. “We wrote that we lived on a farm. We had cows and chicken and pigs. It was just friendly talk. We didn’t have television and sometimes we didn’t even have a radio. All we had was a little weekly newspaper that wasn’t very worldly. So, to write to somebody overseas was a great experience,” said Betty.

In Anne’s letter to Juanita, dated April 29, 1940, she included a postcard that pictures the Amsterdam canals. At the time she had a collection of about 800 postcards. In Margot’s letter to Betty she said, “We often listen to the radio, as times are exciting. Having a frontier with Germany, and being a small country, we never feel safe.”

Juanita and Betty wrote back, but they never received replies. Two weeks after Anne and Margot wrote their letters, Germany invaded the Netherlands. The Wagner girls feared they might never hear from their pen pals again. “Bombs were dropping. We didn’t know if they had enough to eat. But we always thought of them. We never forgot. They were very important to us,” Betty said in the video. For that reason, the Wagner girls saved their precious letters.

After the war, Betty wrote to the Amsterdam address. Months later she got a five-page handwritten letter back from their father Otto Frank telling about what happened to them during the war. His letter informed them that fifteen-year-old Anne died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp of typhus. Margot, 19, died shortly after. “I cried,” said Betty. “We all cried.”

Otto survived Auschwitz, but his wife Edith did not survive the war. In 1956, Betty was living in California when she heard a radio story about a Broadway play based on a book called, The Diary of Anne Frank. It was the first she had heard of it. Her financial advisor at the time was Jewish and understood the significance of the letters she had saved in a shoebox. In 1988, the letters were sold for $165,000 to an anonymous buyer who donated them to the Wiesenthal Center. Exact reproductions are displayed at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and at the tiny library-museum in Danville, Iowa. The originals are stored in a bank vault.

The exhibit highlights the letters, Birdie Mathews, and the Danville community. It also creates a historical context for what was happening as Hitler came to power and focuses attention on significant milestones of WWII as it unfolded across the globe while these four girls struggled through adolescence.

Like the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, there’s a bookcase in the museum. Behind it is a representation of the Secret Annex that shows how the Franks and other families in hiding lived during the 761 days before their discovery, separation and transport by railcar to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen in Germany. Janet thinks that 8^th grade visitors to the exhibit like the bookcase and the secret room behind best.

After finishing the library and museum, Janet was determined to locate a German railcar to add to their exhibit. They found one in Macedonia, but another group raised the money to purchase it first. Through the Auschwitz Foundation they found a second railcar, but the Polish Government would not release it to the U.S. Finally, a contact in Israel located another German railcar. The museum foundation purchased it with help from a $500,000 grant from Destination Iowa, a program once called the Community Attraction and Tourism grant (CAT) which Tom created during his administration to promote tourism in smaller rural communities.

Last year at the Danville Station, 584 eighth graders from around Southeast Iowa got to walk into a German railcar while listening to Eva Schloss’s voice tell her story about boarding a similar railcar as a Jewish school girl growing up in Germany on her way to the camps where 6 million Jews were murdered or died of disease. Eva survived and spent her life traveling the world educating people about the Holocaust so no one would ever forget. She died at the age of 96 in January of this year but in 2018 she traveled to Danville to speak with students and community members who had worked together to build the museum.

She donated reproductions of her father’s and brother’s paintings created to deal with the boredom if hiding. The originals were recovered from a hiding place after her father and brother perished during the Holocaust. Eva was born to Otto Frank and her mother, who married after the war. Her family and the Franks had lived in the same neighborhood, and she played with Anne and Margot as child.

I saw a high school production of the Diary of Anne Frank when I was 13. I also read her diary. I saw the play again years later with one of my best friends in Edinburgh, Scotland. By then we were grandmothers, but we met as college roommates, a protestant girl from the Midwest and a Jewish girl from the suburbs of New York.

I wish I could have taken my 8^th graders on a field trip to the Danville museum. Instead, I had them sit on the floor absolutely still, the light turned off in my classroom for just 10 minutes so they could feel what it must have been like for Anne and Margot Frank, whose lives depended absolute silence. I also invited Fred Lorber from Des Moines to talk with my students. He escaped Vienna, Austria in 1939 as Jews were being imprisoned, including his father. Lorber served in the U.S. military and marched into his old neighborhood to liberate it. He lived to be 91 years old and spent a lot of his time traveling to schools around Iowa to educate teachers and students like mine about the Holocaust,and those to fought to end it.

If you are a teacher, a parent or grandparent, a scout leader, a religious education leader, you might enjoy involving your students in a project created by Danville social studies teachers in 2012. Every year Danville eighth graders reach out-to schools across the country making two requests. First, accept people for who they are. Second, send a postcard to Danville Station to honor Anne Frank who collected them. Their goal is to receive 1.5 million postcards to honor the 1.5 million children murdered during the Holocaust. The address is Danville Postcard Project, 419 South Main, Danville, Iowa 52623. Read here about their attempt to stop intolerance.

Tom and I were standing in a long line at the Elliott Chapel Funeral Home in small town New London, Iowa, to pay our respects to Frances , wife of former Democratic State Senator Bob Dodds, and our friends David Wilhelm and his wife Degee, Bob’s daughter. It was the first week of January 1998, probably a Sunday afternoon. Tom was elected governor later that year.

Our friend and local Democratic County Chair, Mary Elgar, had come with us to the visitation. The large room was packed with farmers, small town neighbors and friends, political allies who’d traveled from around the state. Bob had a loyal following of constituents across party lines. Not only did he serve his legislative district with the help of his wife Fran, but they also ran a Main Street insurance agency in Danville, and they worked together as Baptist lay ministers in Southeast Iowa.

Mary was standing behind Tom and remembers what happened next: “I heard a commotion behind me. I turned around and saw Jesse Jackson coming in the door. I pulled Tom’s sleeve and told him. He gave me this skeptical look. Then he turned around.”

The Reverend Jesse Jackson had a presence in any room. He had run for President twice in 1984 and 1988, and hosted a CNN show called Both Sides from 1992-2000. He is regarded as one of the most influential African American activists of our time. He was a big man with a rich, commanding voice, but in this room, he was also the only person of color. And it seemed as if he’d just dropped from the sky, which indeed he had. The room hushed, then buzzed as David and Degee, surprised, went to greet him.

NO ONE WILL FORGET WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

No one in the room will ever forget what happened next, although the telling of it may vary from person to person.

He invited the mourners to gather. We made a circle. Then he told us to hold hands. We did.

Never before or since have I stood with a bunch of white Midwestern protestants holding hands. By that time the Catholics were giving each other the sign of peace by shaking hands with the congregants around them, but culturally Iowans aren’t very “touchy-feely”. My husband has always teased me about my reluctance to hold his hand in public. But on that day, in that place, to honor Bob Dodds, and either out of respect for or in awe of his power over a crowd, we held hands and prayed with the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Mary remembers that in his short, impromptu eulogy, Reverend Jackson told us that Bob and Fran were dear friends. “He said that he and Bob had spent hours talking religion and enjoyed all their chats,” says Mary. He was flying home to Chicago on a private plane when he learned of Bob’s death. He diverted the flight, landing in the Burlington, Iowa airport about 20 miles away and driving to New London just in time for the visitation. What I remember most was his voice, butter-rich, assured and commanding.

If you’re a reader with no connection to Iowa politics and our long history of caucuses, both Republican and Democratic, you might not understand. If Iowans haven’t met everyone running for President since Jimmy Carter first elevated the Iowa Caucus in 1975, it’s their own fault. Since we returned to Iowa that year, presidential candidates have visited most of the 99 counties in Iowa or have come within driving distance of every voter in the state. It’s not unusual for the Reverend Jesse Jackson to have met Bob and Fran Dodds, but there’s more to the story.

THERE’S MORE TO THE STORY

Their daughter Degee met her husband David Wilhelm when they were both campaigning for then Senator Joe Biden. David was running Joe Biden’s Iowa campaign for President, so we got to know him. At the time I was teaching, and Tom was practicing law in Mt. Pleasant, but we were also traveling the state talking as volunteers to high school students about Senator Biden’s campaign. After Senator Biden ended his campaign, David went on to run Bill Clinton’s campaign for President followed by serving as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He and Degee moved to his home state of Ohio where he ran for office, and now he’s CEO of Hectate Global, the leading American developer of renewable energy projects in global emerging markets. Degree is founder and managing partner at O’Connor, Haseley & Wilhelm. She was admitted to the bar in Ohio and Illinois and at the Supreme Court.

We reunited in person at the Chicago 2024 Democratic National Convention when David introduced Tom to the Ohio delegation where he spoke on behalf of the Harris-Waltz campaign. Ironically, we were all together in Chicago where David had started his political career managing Richard Daley’s campaign for mayor, and then directing Paul Simon’s successful U.S. senate bid in 1984. You really can’t have a conversation with a politically active Iowan of either party without hearing a recitation of the candidates they supported in every caucus season since 1975.

In hindsight, it’s not surprising that Jesse Jackson dropped from the sky for an hour to pay his respects to long-time political friends and allies. Tom always tells me that politics is a series of temporary alliances, but sometimes those temporary alliances become life-long friendships, long-lasting marriages, or political friendships that span decades of campaign wins and losses. For instance, Iowa activists John and Jackie Norris who have served in many leadership positions through the years, met when they worked on Tom’s campaign for governor.

And sometimes those relationships continue with the next generation. As Secretary of Agriculture Tom worked with Jesse Jackson’s sons, Jesse Jackson Jr. and Jonathan Jackson, both congressmen from Illinois, to assure the equitable resolution of lawsuits against USDA brought by Black farmers through the years, preceding the election of President Barack Obama. They also worked together to assist financially struggling families by pushing back restrictions to SNAP benefits and increasing support for WIC and summer feeding programs. Jesse Jackson and Dexter Scott King presented Tom with the Dr. King-President Johnson Humanitarian Award at the Rainbow Push convention for his civil rights advocacy.

To read another great story about Jesse Jackson written by long-time political friend David Leshtz, editor of the Prairie Progressive, enjoy Jesse Jackson On the Ground: An Iowa Caucus Memoir.

I checked to see if there was any mention in local newspapers of Jackson’s OTR visit to Bob Dodds’s visitation in 1998. I can find none, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

TAX SEASON

Last week I drove two-and-a-half hours to Mt. Pleasant to deliver our tax information neatly compiled by my lawyer-husband in a brown manilla envelope. It’s becoming a ritual for me, or maybe it’s penance for railing all my life about taxes. I’m all for paying taxes: It’s the price we pay for all the perks of our democracy. But, as a child, I dreaded tax season.

Tax season meant losing my mom for four months. Besides the four weather-related seasons, there was hunting season, football, basketball and baseball seasons. And Christmas season, of course. These are all special times to look forward to, but in my family and in the professional lives of many small-town lawyers, there was tax season, from the day after New Year’s Day to April 15^th, the filing deadline for wage-earners, March 1^st for farmers.

As a child, tax season meant my parents were preoccupied with preparing tax returns for my dad’s clients, many of them farmers. Most people knew my mother as a stay-at-home mom. Few knew that she had worked as a legal secretary in Washington DC during World War II. She had an office in our basement where she figured hundreds of tax returns each year.

Keys clattered as she pounded her Royal typewriter. The adding machine added the incessant tap, tap, tapping of keys and a ratcheting sound as she pulled the lever that filled the small rolls of white paper with endless numbers.

We were never without clean clothes, soups for lunch, and fried pork chops and potatoes for dinner. We enjoyed our ritual bedtime stories, but while we were in school or late at night, she went downstairs to figure, refigure and check her numbers. I think she thrived on the work. She kept careful track of how many returns she completed each year, but her acumen was also a necessity for a small start-up law firm. Preparing tax returns was a way of developing relationships and acquiring clients who might need a lawyer for a lawsuit, an adoption, or to probate a will years later. This hard work, and the lawsuits that resulted made it possible to remodel our home, to expand the office for another lawyer and to save for college educations.

We knew that tax season was almost upon us when my dad left for Des Moines and the Iowa Bar Association Tax School the first week of December to learn all the changes in tax laws. We knew tax season was coming to an end when my parents tackled the biggest, most difficult tax return—”Mr. Spooner” as he was referred to in our home. His return was more complicated, because he owned multiple farms and he had lots of investments.

I swore I would never become a lawyer or marry one because I wanted nothing to do with all those numbers. I was a word person. At my dad’s office over Crane’s Hardware, I tapped out poems and stories with two fingers on his secretary’s Royal and later learned to type on my mom’s at home, but I avoided the number keys. I still must look at the numbers when I’m using my computer because my fingers have no muscle memory for the numbers.

MY SUMMER JOB IN 10 MINUTES

During summers in high school and early college I joined the family business to earn spending money for college. I sat in front of an electric Olivetti. Every day, I typed the same letter using carbon paper and corrected mistakes with one of those round rubber erasers with a green bristle brush. And I made lots of mistakes, not because I wasn’t proficient, but because I was bored out of my mind. Today it would take 10 minutes to finish what it took me two months to accomplish.

Dear So and So, I typed, “I hate to inform you but it’s income tax season again. Please call the office to set up an appointment…” It was so boring that I sometimes dozed off in the middle of a sentence, but my paychecks became the first money I’d ever earned.

That college education my parents’ hard work paid for put me in upstate NY at the same time as Tom Vilsack, and as fate would have it, he came home with me to Iowa to practice law with my dad and my brother. That meant going with my dad to Tax School in December 1975 to learn to prepare tax returns.

He remembers learning about STA-FED, a computerized system that used information collected by lawyers from their clients to electronically populate the forms. Lawyers still needed to meet with their clients to gather the data. Clients would spend about 45 minutes to an hour with their lawyer.

“Some farmers would give you their records and ask you to decipher them. Often, they came on calendars, pieces of paper, receipts, spiral notebooks, a real combination of ways people kept their information. I didn’t have much knowledge of farming, and I certainly didn’t understand the difference between pigs on sow, gilts and boars, the various terminology that had implications in terms of tax preparation.”

He remembers it as a pressurized time for my dad. He enjoyed catching up with his clients, but he had to get hundreds of tax returns out the door. He spent weekend mornings at the office. He knew Orville Bloethe would be at his desk in Victory, Iowa. Orville was the “guru” of tax and estate planning, says Tom. He was the guy everyone went to listen to at tax school.”

GENERATIONAL LAW FIRMS/GENERATIONAL FARMS

Over coffee in Mt. Pleasant after delivering our tax data to the CPA’s , I spoke with Jeff Thomas and Seleta Bainter to find out how tax preparation had changed for small town lawyers since we were kids. Jeff and Seleta practice law with their daughter Josie. They bought their law firm from retiring lawyer Harold McLeran. Seleta’s dad, Harlan Bainter practiced with his dad before he became a district court judge. Jeff prepares tax returns. Seleta specializes in estate planning. Now only one other lawyer in town prepares tax returns for clients, they explained. Today most wage earners do their own taxes with the help of technology or a franchise like Turbo Tax. “Your dad did returns for grandpa and grandma, mom and dad and the kids, says Jeff. “We don’t have many generational farms anymore.” Today it costs about $200 for a wage earner’s return, about $400 for a farm tax return, unless you bring your receipts in a sack. “We do punitive billing for that,” Jeff jokes. “Six hundred dollars.”

Their clients don’t show up with grocery bags full of receipts anymore, but Seleta remembers her dad preparing tax returns for client who did when she was growing up. He had a special small desk where he interviewed clients. He was a cryptographer during WWII, so he could talk to clients and operate the adding machine without looking. Seleta claims clients liked coming for their tax appointments just to watch her dad operate that machine. Like me, she associates tax season with the racket of the adding machine computing the numbers. And she also remembers that my dad introduced her to Orville Bloethe, then into his 90’s, to help her when she had probate questions. Now the December tax school is named for him.

Over lunch I talk with Mary Elgar who worked for her family law firm most of her professional life. Her dad, Lanny Elgar and his brother John also practiced law as we were all growing up in the 50’s and 60’s. She remembers a story about a guy who, as she tells it “sewed himself into his long johns every winter.“ When he came for his appointment, they opened every window. The lawyers collected the information as quickly as possible, and the secretaries stood ready to type it up so they could collect their fee and get him out the door.

THE UBIQUITOUS ADDING MACHINE

She also remembers that after she went to bed as a kid her dad set up a table in the living room and, “I’d hear the old adding machine. He’d add some numbers then roll that lever. That was a sound that to me and my brothers was comforting. “

She also remembers a woman who came in for her tax appointment carrying a shopping bag. “I didn’t think anything of it because of the ways people bring their records in. During her appointment I got a call from another attorney, and I thought it was important, so I knocked on the door and my dad looked up at me and said, “We’re busy. Helen had two grandchildren get married last year and a high school graduation and she brought all her scrapbooks.”

Over the years, all those numbers I remember turned into stories that my generation shares to remember our parents who created rich small-town experiences that made some of us want to stay, some of want to come back, and encouraged some of us to produce another generation of lawyers.

When I see those windowed envelopes arriving with W-2’s inside, I think back to the talk of 1040’s, depreciation tables, and the curled ribbons of adding machine calculations filling waste baskets, and I think, maybe tax season wasn’t so bad after all.

Note: The loss of talented young lawyers returning home to practice law means legal deserts in rural areas like Southeast Iowa. More to come on that issue and the resulting volunteer leaders rural Iowa loses to more urban areas.

My conversation with Jonatha Bayse, my public librarian, started and ended with her mother, and speaks volumes about the values Jonatha brings to her job at the Van Meter Public Library, where you can take the tour by turning in a circle. On the other side of her door is the police department. It’s not unusual for a local cop to stop in for story-time. Jonatha took the job at Van Meter after working as a public librarian in Waukee, the Bateman Library at Langley Air Force Base in Omaha and as a high school 9-12 classroom teacher and librarian in Ralston, Nebraska, a suburb of Omaha.

But back to her 81-year-old mom: she’s furious. Last year Jonatha sent her links showing people testifying at Iowa legislative hearings. She demanded to know why people were calling Iowa’s librarians pedophiles and groomers. “She’s a great lady, but she’s conservative. I’m not, but she’s of the same mindset when it comes to reading and information,” says Jonatha. They find common ground in books.

According to the reporter, it is “the latest effort by Republicans in the Legislature to limit children’s access to content and materials they view as obscene.”

The first time I visited the Van Meter Library years ago as First Lady, the fifth-grade class walked three blocks from the school to the library, which is so small I had to sit on the circulation desk so the kids could see the books I was sharing. Experiences in over 500 of Iowa’s libraries led me to believe in the importance of building relationships between school and public librarians to save taxpayer money, and to provide more books and information sources to citizens of all ages.

My foundation provided resources for local librarians to partner in bringing the community together to highlight what they were already doing to support literacy and to identify and fill gaps in services. I provided a facilitator for each community to lead a three-step process that resulted in choosing one gap the community could address. The best part of the program were the lasting collaborations between librarians.

Jonatha explains why her relationship with teacher librarian Shannon Miller is so important. “It’s important, because we’re good about getting them when they’re young but we’ve got to continue to keep them reading.”

For parent-teacher conferences they set up a table for parents to sign up their children for library cards. Together they visit classes in the spring to promote the summer reading program which has been growing steadily over the last three years as a result.

HOUSE STUDY BILL 636

Because of her concern about the newest legislation regulating libraries, Jonatha attended Legislative Day at the Capitol in Des Moines last week. She spoke with her representative, David Young, a resident of Van Meter, about her concerns with the bill. She explained it’s negative fiscal effect on rural districts that don’t have school libraries. She mentioned that some small schools house the school and public libraries to save resources. She was scheduled to visit with her state Senator Sarah Trone Garriott later in the day.

Even Christopher Rants, former Republican Speaker of the House and currently a spokesperson for the Des Moines Public schools, questions the fiscal responsibility of the bill and wonders if the administration will provide more funding if the bill is enacted.

“Does this bill mean that you won’t be able to participate when a visiting author comes to speak with students at the Van Meter school?” I ask. “Does it mean kindergarteners won’t be able take a field trip to your library during their school day?”

Details like this haven’t been ironed out, but Jonatha, who used to be content to serve on committees to choose award books, who is intent on providing adults in her community the newest, most sought after books, who enjoys discussing them with the library’s book club, is now stirred up.

“I think the public thinks l have an agenda. I don’t have an agenda! I want people to have access. PERIOD. I want kids to love to read. There’s no agenda. If there’s a book you want. Cool. Let’s get it. If there’s a program you want. Cool. Let’s do it.” She continues.

“I watched the Education Committee meeting the other night and they were discussing these bills. It just disheartens me that there are people who think that we are groomers and pedophiles, and they say it out loud. That’s not who I am. That’s not who my librarian friends are. I want libraries to be the third space for people. It’s not your home. It’s not your job. It’s a place where you can go and hang out, find a book, find a movie, use the computer.

Jonatha recently attended a showing of a documentary, The Librarians at the Varsity Theater in Des Moines. I watched the 90-minute documentary, presented at the Sundance Film festival, which premiered this week on PBS. It’s worth viewing to better understand the campaign to undermine the professional integrity of librarians and the first amendment rights of school children and young adults who need to understand a rapidly changing world so they may participate as voting citizens when the time comes.

The public shaming of librarians is shocking. If readers want to stand up for democracy, speak with your legislators and consider discussing these restrictions as a fiscal issue as well as an issue of access. This isn’t just happening in Iowa. The movie will show you that it’s an issue nationwide.

IOWAN FORREST SPAULDING WROTE THE ALA LIBRARY BILL OF RIGHTS IN 1938

Remind legislators that American librarians still follow a Library Bill of rights written by Forrest Spaulding, Director of the Des Moines Public Library in 1938 and adopted by the American Library Association in 1939.

Jonatha makes professional decisions based on this code. “As a librarian if someone has a library card, you can’t say, you can’t check out a book! Librarians shouldn’t feel pressure to self- censure. I can’t do that. It’s not my job. I want information to be available.”

The American Library Association affirms that all libraries are forums for information and ideas, and that the following basic policies should guide their services.

I. Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves. Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.

II. Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.

III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

IV. Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.

V. A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.

VI. Libraries which make exhibit spaces and meeting rooms available to the public they serve should make such facilities available on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use.

VII. All people, regardless of origin, age, background, or views, possess a right to privacy and confidentiality in their library use. Libraries should advocate for, educate about, and protect people’s privacy, safeguarding all library use data, including personally identifiable information.

See the documents designated by the Intellectual Freedom Committee as Interpretations of the Library Bill of Rights

For Jonatha, it’s also a personal code, which she learned from her mother, who I’m sure is still shaking her head at this ruckus.

OPEN THE DOOR

“My mom ended her career as a 6^th grade teacher. She let my brother and I read whatever we wanted. She had read to us since we were small.” Jonatha said she started reading Stephen King in the 6^th grade because there weren’t many books for adolescents at the time. “The thing my mom always said to us was, ‘If you are reading something and you’re upset, confused, scared, come and talk to me about it. She opened the door.”

Her advice to parents who are worried about what their children are reading: Read with them. Read and discuss the books they’re reading. Don’t just drop them off at the library. Come on in. Help them make choices. “Develop a relationship with your librarian. You can trust them to keep your kids safe.”

I still remember how it felt to play basketball when I was 13 years old. Mrs. Mac, my 8^th grade language arts teacher, opened the gym at the high school on Saturday mornings and taught us to play 6 on 6. I don’t think I ever shot a basket. I didn’t have to, because the rules of the game at that time didn’t allow guards to cross the center line. I was probably the shortest and slowest person on the court, but in those early years, it was the most fun I’d ever had. I loved stealing the ball and passing it to the shooters.

At the time, 1963, I didn’t realize that I’d never get to compete, like my brothers, for a school team. All the smaller schools around my county-seat town supported girls basketball. Mediapolis, Winfield and Mt. Union sent teams to the state tournament every year. When I was in elementary school, my dad took me to a women’s game at powerhouse Iowa Wesleyan College to watch superstars Sandy Fiete and Dianne Frieden play for the Tigers coached by the legendary Olan Ruble.

Just before Christmas 2025, I had lunch with a friend from high school, Beth Swenson, who lives in Ames. When her family left their farm near Winfield and moved to Mt. Pleasant, she begged her parents to let her stay and play basketball, with no success. Over lunch we created an imaginary team, going through the girls in our class, including Beth, who would have been starters. I would have been happy just to make the team. Instead, I became a cheerleader like Vivian Stringer, whose Pennsylvania high school didn’t have sports for girls. Stringer, who later coached at Slippery Rock, Iowa, and Rutgers, only made the cheerleading squad with help from the NAACP and a lawsuit.

ABILITY COMES IN ALL SIZES, SHAPES AND COLORS

For Christmas I got tickets to the Iowa State game against Baylor January 4^th so I invited Beth to join me. I’d seen Caitlin Clark play for the Indiana Fever, but I hadn’t seen ISU’s Audi Crooks. It was ISU’s first loss of the season, but the experience proved that athletic ability comes in all sizes, shapes and colors. The half-time entertainment was a game, starring grannies in bloomers playing six on six.

For years, I’ve groused about how I could grow up in one of the states that championed basketball for high school and college girls and still not get a chance to compete or be part of a team. Many towns in Iowa the size of Mt. Pleasant didn’t offer girls sports until Title IX forced them.

No one satisfactorily answered my question until I attended the Okoboji Writers Collaborative Retreat in October and met Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford, who wrote a book about the history of women’s basketball 20 years ago and revised it in 2025. Their introduction starts with Caitlin Clark breaking Pistol Pete Maravich’s record of 3,667 career points and ends with a chapter focused on Clark, Angel Reece and the 2023 and 2024 tournament seasons. I attended their session, bought the book, Shattering the Glass, The Remarkable History of Women’s Basketball.

I’ve dog-eared the pages, underlined passages and starred the paragraphs devoted to the important part the state of Iowa played. I have just finished it, a few weeks before the Iowa state basketball tournament season begins. Fifty years ago, the USA women’s basketball team competed for the first time at the 1976 summer Olympics. Thirty years ago this year, they beat Brazil for their first gold medal in 1996. (Ironically, I was with my family in Atlanta to watch the men play.)

SHATTERING THE GLASS ANSWERED MY QUESTION: WHY DIDN’T I GET TO PLAY?

At the retreat, Pam and Susan answered my question quickly. Female physical educators across the country didn’t think women should play competitive sports, the writers explained. They believed in intramural sports for women. In the early 1920’s physical educators launched a nationwide effort to promote their brand of sedate cooperative play in high schools. State by state supporters of girls basketball found themselves fighting to keep their teams. When supporters lost, intramural sports became the norm. This explains why my classmates and I were offered GRA (Girls Recreation Association) after school instead of trained coaches and competitive teams.

When I read the book, I learned that one of the most important battles for high school basketball for girls took place in Iowa, in part because of the success of the first state basketball tournament in 1920. After the tournament, the state’s female physical educators called for its abolition and the battle that resulted ended in the founding of the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union. It began with 25 small schools whose coaches and supporters refused to give up their teams. Over time the athletic union grew to 700 schools. “In the decades to come, the efficiency and independence of the IGHSAU would build the most vibrant girls high school basketball program in the nation,” the authors explain in Shattering the Glass.

And the leaders of the new union were all male. Many men, including principals and coaches encouraged women to play, the authors contend. “The battle lines over women’s sports would instead be drawn between clashing assumptions about women’s capabilities, the role that sports should play in individual development and community life and the distribution of resources.” (page 31 Shattering the Glass)

When I visited the Clutier Library during my years as First Lady in the early 2000’s, the high school was long gone, but the photo of the 1942 undefeated state championship girls basketball team hung above one of the two computers purchased for the tiny library by the Gates Foundation. Right there the past and the future aligned. During those years living in Des Moines, I’d slip away during tournament week to watch girls from towns I’d visited around the state compete. Most of the women in the crowds my age and older were there watching daughters and granddaughters play a much different game than the one they grew up playing.

I’m proud of the role Iowa played in the history of women’s basketball at the high school, college and university level. I haven’t mentioned here the many women who went on to become coaches and athletic directors like Christine Grant at the University of Iowa. I haven’t mentioned the role of African American athletes from urban centers like the McGee twins from Flint, Michigan who played for USC and coaches like South Carolina’s Dawn Staley. No matter where you live in this country there are success stories and important lessons to be learned from Shattering the Glass. We should all know by now that if we fail to pay attention to history, we are bound to repeat it.

TITLE IX WAS THE TIPPING POINT

The first half of Shattering the Glass focuses on games played by women in the 1890’s, creates a context for understanding the slow but steady progress towards Caitlin Clark, Audi Crooks and the legions of men and women who persevered in the fight for parity. The tipping point centers on the year 1972 and the passage of Title IX. That year Richard Nixon signed the bill into law. “It barred educational institutions from discriminating based on sex. It would spark a sports revolution. Though few realized it at first, the law gave women’s athletic programs legal clout for the first time in US history. Title IX would open doors to women throughout educational institutions—including those of gymnasiums. (page 95, Shattering The Glass)

That year I graduated from college and started my teaching career in upstate New York at Waterville High School, a small rural community near Utica where I had done my student teaching. In the three years I taught there I watched young women compete in field hockey, track and basketball led by coach Pat Hosford, who had already built a strong program.

When I came back to Mt. Pleasant to teach in 1975, Mt. Pleasant offered track, then added basketball for high school girls--finally!

“There’s a credibility that you earn in performing on the playing field that you really can’t earn in any other arena, particularly women. There is something that happens in the way that men view women when women are seen to perform under pressure at a really high level physically. I’ve always argued that Title IX is the closest thing to an Equal Rights Amendment that ever passed in this country. Women’s sport is the real secret history of the women’s movement,” said Sally Jenkins Washington Post sports columnist. (page 218, Shattering the Glass)

Now, when I walk at the YMCA on cold winter weekend mornings, from a track above the gym I watch six, seven and eight-year-old boys and girls playing basketball on co-ed teams. They are trying hard and having fun. They will all benefit from learning teamwork. Thanks to Title IX, I see the future taking shape.

You, too, can see it here.

Note: If you want to read more about Iowa women’s sports and beyond from someone who knows her subject, connect to The Crossover by Iowa sports reporter Jane Burns.

MENDING WALL

Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Fellow Iowa Writer’s Collaborative poet, Suzanna de Baca asked if I’d commit to sharing a favorite poem at the Des Moines Poetry Palooza February 14^th, Valentine’s Day. This year’s theme is love. Robert Frost’s Mending Wall isn’t a love poem, but I settled on it, because it’s about loving thy neighbour as thyself. (Matthew 22:36-40)

I knew I’d find it in my well-worn blue Harcourt Brace Jovanovich textbook Adventures for Reading which I used for over 20 years teaching 8^th grade language arts in my hometown. It’s an appropriate poem, I think, considering that I’m now writing this weekly Substack column I titled, Common Ground.

In the first line the speaker in the poem says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”. His neighbor insists that they meet each year to ritually mend the stone wall between their properties. The neighbor insists that “fences make good neighbors.” He learned this strongly-held belief from his father.

The speaker/poet agrees to mend the fence with his neighbor each year even though he thinks the man “moves in darkness,” and looks like an “armed stone savage.”

With wry humor the poet informs us that the wall separates an apple orchard and a stand of pine, that cows, unlike trees might be a different matter. To his neighbor he says, before he builds a wall he’d like to know what he’s walling in or walling out and to whom he might give offense.

What knocks the stones from the wall each year? Weather? Elves? Hunters? When Frost says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he doesn’t specify just what that something is, but I have an inkling, and I have my own story. Maybe you too have a story about walls and fences that make you think about the complex relationships we humans share and the difficulties we have accepting change and questioning long-held beliefs.

For about 25 years we lived in an old fraternity house on Main Street in small town Mt. Pleasant, next door to Jim and Genevieve McCabe on one side and Jerry and Kay Lange on the other. Our block was part of the original town, so our houses were very close.

We were separated from the McCabes by a narrow driveway that was built for much smaller cars. While doing our dishes I could look across and see Genevieve at her sink. Jim and Genevieve had seven children. Jim ran a stock brokerage with two of his sons, both friends of mine from high school, who became friends of ours when Tom and I returned to Mt. Pleasant as adults. The youngest, was one my students. Our families shared political views and attended Saint Alphonsus Church together. Genevieve served on Tom’s first jury.

Jim was an affable guy but gruff. He spoke his mind and was prone to swearing. He’d been telling us for years good naturedly, we thought, that our garage overlapped his property by about a foot. There wasn’t much we could do about it, and so we just ignored his griping. We tried not to leave a rut during the winter when it was hard not to sometimes slide off the driveway when the ground was covered with snow and ice.

One day years after we’d lived comfortably as neighbors, we noticed that Jim had installed a new feature along the drive. He cut an old telephone pole into pieces about 18 inches long and drove railroad spikes into them. He strategically placed four or five of them along the border. Later we laid a turnaround so we could drive out frontways, but at the time we could only back down the driveway. My mother would have washed my mouth out with soap if she could have heard me in the privacy of my own car as I hit one of those improvised warheads.

But my father, who came for coffee every Saturday and Sunday morning admonished me, “Never fight with your neighbors!” (I think he learned that from his father!) So, we never said anything to Jim about the barriers.

Our only satisfaction was that his sons would apologize profusely for his behavior, and when he wasn’t around, and they’d throw them under Jim’s porch. When we were getting ready to do some landscaping in the backyard and put in the turnaround, we decided we needed to find out where our lot line was. When I arrived home one day, I saw the surveyor had planted orange flags on the four corners of our lot. I laughed out loud. We owned the strip of land where the landmines lived along the driveway.

Our garage was clearly on our land and those bushes I’d been pruning for years at the back edge of our property belonged to our backyard neighbors. Half of my flower garden clearly belonged to them, also. We never spoke of it to Jim, but the spikes disappeared. I continued to tend my flowers and the neighbor’s bushes. Genevieve’s beautiful redbud tree which I had admired out my window for many years sent a seed our way which lodged near our kitchen door. I nurtured it and eventually Genevieve could admire it out her kitchen window.

We also continued to enjoy neighboring with the Langes on the other side. Our porch swing was so close to their family room window that we could hear Jerry shouting at the players or the refs during televised Cubs games on warm summer evenings. Kay was a good friend of my mother’s and their son Todd graduated with me from high school. Jerry often used his snowblower to clean the sidewalk for the whole block.

Eventually the McCabes sold their home to Ray and Crystee Stigge. Ray was once one of my 8^thgraders, who mostly likely had to read The Mending Wall. On the day we sold our house we were supposed to have dinner with them, but it was also the same day Barack Obama appointed Tom his Secretary of Agriculture at a press conference in Chicago, so we had to take a raincheck.

Jim McCabe died at 92 in 2014 . Genevieve lived to be 100. I visited her one day at the care center where she spent a good deal of her time on her computer communicating with her children and many grandchildren. I brought her news of our redbud trees.

As I reread this poem, I think of walls that have made and shaped history: the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, more recently the wall between the US and our neighbor Mexico. I think of the invisible walls, the political word walls we build today online and in our everyday lives between neighbors we used to share coffee with.

.

Recently, I noticed that the current owners of our home have put up a high white fence along the lot line in the space where Jim lined up his spiked soldiers years ago. I thought again of Robert Frost’s poem setting out two opposing views:

Fences make good neighbors vs. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Could they both be right?

Note: As it turns out, I won’t be able to join the Palooza, so I’ll read it here instead. My apologies to the organizers.

Twenty years ago, as Iowa’s First Lady, I traveled the state giving the Glass Apple Award to some of Iowa’s best certified teacher librarians to educate the public about the value of employing a teacher with an additional master’s degree in library science. At the time, schools were investing in technology before many teachers knew how to integrate digital learning into the curriculum. The reality of a digital device for every student (1:1) was in its early stages. Eventually, the Iowa legislature passed legislation that required at least one certified teacher librarian in every district. The law still stands, but it’s sometimes loosely interpreted.

“AN EXEMPLARY SCHOOL PROVIDING 21^st CENTURY LEARNING”

When we moved to the Van Meter School district in 2012, I discovered that a few years earlier, the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills had given our small rural district an award as an “exemplary school providing 21^st Century learning.” I started volunteering with teachers in the English/Language Arts Department to see how the concept of 1:1, a computer for every student, worked. That’s how I met Shannon McClintock Miller.

There are certain people in places large and small who are out in front, early adopters. How these visionaries bring others along determines whether they’ll be successful in changing attitudes and coaxing the reluctant to try something new. Shannon is one of those.

I am writing about her, because she epitomizes the kind of teacher schools need as we cope with an ever-changing world. If you don’t know the teacher-librarian/s in your district, please find and support their work. In many states they are under siege right now in part because the public doesn’t understand that they are highly trained information specialists in addition to their knowledge of books and learning.

Shannon was a catalyst for change at Van Meter, and it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t first developed a strong professional relationship with her superintendent and her principal. Together they experimented with various approaches to teaching with technology. They traveled to professional meetings together to share with teachers, board member and administrators in Iowa and around the country. They stressed the value of employing certified teacher librarians to navigate the opportunities for learning with changing technologies.

Shannon collaborated with our local public librarian. She developed strong relationships with her colleagues, including the director of technology. She also co-taught with classroom teachers, helping them plan lessons that involved digital learning. She knows when the 4^th graders are getting ready for their wax museum and will need to research famous people. She knows when it’s time to help the first-grade teachers with their unit about communities. She pays attention to what’s going on in the world and brings data bases and digital tools to the attention of teachers and students. “And I think about what students might want to do in the future with robotics, 3-D printing, art, whatever their passions are,” she explains.

She has served her community for 20 years, and she has no thoughts of retiring. She’s having too much fun. But she’s also in demand as a leader in her field, so she now spends half of her time as an instructional leader in Van Meter and half as an author of children’s books about technology and as a speaker in demand for her depth of experience with systems change.

As I waited for Shannon in her library, four fourth-grade boys charged in to continue work on a STEM project. School wouldn’t start for half-an-hour, but they engaged in conversation, leaning over a blueprint. In the hour-and-a-half I spent in the library, there was a constant hum of activity and lots of questions. That’s how Shannon likes it.

“I WANT THE QUESTIONS!”

“I want the questions!” she exclaims. Questions come from students: kindergarteners learning to read; middle school students wanting the newest graphic novel; high school students thinking about careers. Questions come from parents: How do we talk with our children about responsible use of technology and restricting screen time? Why have you chosen this book for the library which I don’t want my child to read? Teachers want to know: What books and tech tools can I use to help my students understand gravity, tariffs, the Holocaust? She answers questions from board members, administrators, and parent committee members about budgets, priorities and AI.

Speaking of AI, she’s not around to answer questions this week, because she’s attending and presenting at the Future of Education Technology Conference. She’ll address preparing future-ready librarians, the subject of her book, Leading from the Library. She’s also going to the conference to learn about AI, a subject she needs and wants to understand. She’ll come home ready to delve into the subject in more depth, ready to answer questions in her community.

While she’s gone, her library aide helps with checking out books and interacting with students. The STEM teacher also uses the library for STEM classes until the new addition to the school is finished, which will house the new library and connecting rooms for art and STEM.

FINDING COMMON GROUND

At a time when there is turmoil surrounding school libraries and the role of parents and the community in deciding what books students should or shouldn’t read, how is this community managing to find common ground? I’m not suggesting there are no challenges here. Four or five years ago some parents challenged books in the library. Like most schools, Shannon already had a community advisory committee in place. She was willing to listen and answer questions about the process she uses for choosing learning materials.

She’s surprised that she hasn’t gotten more questions from parents and the community about a new state law requiring all students to park their personal cell phones before school. She thinks it’s a positive change. She’s seen a difference in the level of conversation between students in the lunchroom, the halls and classrooms.

“UNDERSTANDING YOUR COMMUNITY IS IMPORTANT.”

Deron Durflinger, Shannon’s principal and now superintendent reflects on the value of having a certified teacher librarian during this time of transition. “It’s important to have a go-to person within a district who is connected and understands why it’s important for kids to have access, but also what that access needs to look like. Understanding your community is really important,” he emphasizes.

Superintendent Durflinger praises Shannon for finding a way to bring the rest of the world to Van Meter. “She sees the power of books and the power of technology and the power of exposure for students and adults to have a better understanding. She understands who we are as a community and what the level of expectation is for most.” He continues, “She’s willing to help educate people. Some of the things she’s been exposed to are good for our kids and our community to be exposed to, but not in a confrontational way. She‘s one of the least confrontational people I know.“

She was in such demand as a speaker, a writer and thought leader that a few years ago she left her job at Van Meter to pursue these interests. But eventually when Deron called saying they really needed her back, she was ready to return.

STUDENTS BECOME GOOD DIGITAL CITIZENS

What I really came to the library to talk with her about is the 5 children’s books she wrote during her time away, illustrated by Mel Darmawan and published by The International Society for Technology Education (ISTE) and Capstone, a publisher of educational books. I’ve read the first five books, and she says two more are about to launch. Each book focuses on one of seven ISTE technology standards.

The first one Sonia’s World is a picture book that celebrates the digital opportunities kids have today. Ana’s Smart Move focuses on being a computational thinker. Hagan Proudly Presents focuses on the ISTE standard about being an empowered learner. Jack’s Playground Plan is about being an innovative designer and Sonia Speaks Up is about being a good digital citizen. It’s this one that resonates with me, because of the vitriolic climate that exists online and the emotional and mental health toll it takes on students of all ages.

Her books are aimed at children 6-8 years old, but Shannon has used them with older students as well. Their strength for me as a teacher is that they are rich in content but also values- laden. Superintendent Durflinger nailed it when he said, “Her books are not just about the digital world but about being a good person in a digital world.”

These values, learned on the farm and in the small community where she grew up, are the values Shannon has brought to her job in another small town in Iowa, where she and her husband chose to raise their children. She is welcomed into much larger school districts in places like Louisiana and Long Island which serve thousands of students to share what she and her colleagues have been able to accomplish in our small school, because she believes in the transformative power of technology to build community, consensus, and collaboration.

Shannon knows there aren’t enough certified teacher librarians to go around. She knows it’s expensive to get the M.A. in Library Science, and it takes time. But she gives this advice to administrators: “Find the best teachers in your school. Don’t find the ones who are quiet in their classrooms, who don’t collaborate. Find your best teachers and put them in that role. Help them get their degree and they can make a difference.”