Checking in with Iowa’s coffee groups

There are great stories being told around the tables In Shenandoah, Muscatine, Ames, Jefferson, Osage and Des Moines -- as good as I hear from my own "Bean Boyz" and "Old Sports."

DES MOINES, Iowa – To bring you up to speed for this dialogue, two weeks ago a friend I don’t regularly see asked, “So what are you doing now to keep yourself busy?”

I thought a minute, then answered, “I go to coffee.”

And that led to last week’s column, in which I told you about the two groups I most often hang with — the “Bean Boyz” of Jefferson and the “Old Sports” in the Des Moines area. You can read that column right here.

I invited you readers to share your own coffee experiences, and your tales have been fun, even inspiring. Please keep those coming by email at chuck@offenburger.com. And thanks for the invitations to come visit your groups.

“Bean Boyz” gathered last Friday morning, Sept. 20, on the deck of the Jefferson home of Guy and Katie Richardson. Clockwise from the left, Guy Richardson, Jerry Fields, Jed Magee, Roger Custer, Doug McDermott, Joe Gitch visiting from Iowa City, and Rick Morain.

An old friend, Mary Irvin, asked that I come have coffee with her group in my hometown of Shenandoah in southwest Iowa.

“We have a group of ladies here in Shenandoah who meet for coffee at the Sanctuary Restaurant on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and discuss EVERYTHING!” she wrote. “We would be honored to have you make the trek to Shenandoah and coffee with us! Also bring your wife Mary Riche, if she would like to come, and anyone else who might enjoy it. Since we have yet to name ourselves — after 25+ years-- we thought perhaps your creative mind could help us with that! Let us know!”

We RicheBurgers have accepted the invitation.

Chuck Van Hecke, retired athletic director at Muscatine High School and still a leader in that southeast Iowa community, says I need to experience their group.

“The ‘Table of Knowledge,’ as we call it, meets most mornings, rotating among restaurants to help each of them, as it is a tough time for the restaurant business,” Van Hecke wrote. “Our leader is Tom ’Taco’ Hendricks, retired Taco John’s owner. Tom is in the Iowa Volunteers Hall of Fame, and he’s also our Social Director. This gives you a clue about out group.

“The ‘Table of Knowledge’ will have up to 12 to15 guys on a good day, 7 to 8 most days. Some people refer to us as ‘a group of old white guys’ but they consider that a nice reference. We solve all the problems, especially of the city and the school. We have a social fund where we send flowers to individuals as needed. We donate to the school’s Cake Auction.”

And those around the “Table of Knowledge’ have a group motto, Van Hecke reports: “Life is too short to drink nasty coffee.”

Their motto reminds me of one that a group in Ames used long ago when they would meet for coffee in a reception room at the old Sheldon Munn Hotel downtown. I got there as a guest of the late-great Harry Burrell, who was the longtime sports information director at Iowa State University.

When that group would close their meetings, they’d do so with a group recitation of this poem:

“As you ramble on through life,
Whatever be your goal,
Keep your eye upon the donut,
And not upon the hole!”

Google has differing attributions of that verse being “an Irish proverb,” “The Donut Philosophy,” “The Optimist’s Creed,” the slogan of a 1930s New York City company Mayflower Donuts, and it’s often been linked to noted Canadian novelist and poet, Margaret Atwood.  Google also notes that two U.S. presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Iowa’s own Herbert Hoover, quoted it in their campaigns.

Bud Legg, retired as an educator and later director of information for the Iowa High School Athletic Association, lives in Ames and tells me he doesn’t think the Sheldon Munn Hotel group still meets.

But a coffee group led by Gary Thompson, the two-sport All-American at Iowa State U in the 1950s and a basketball commentator on TV for decades, has been meeting at least monthly “probably for at least 20 years,” Legg said. He thinks several of the regulars in that group are high school teammates of Thompson at little Roland, northeast of Ames. Ever since high school, Thompson has been called “the Roland Rocket.”

A wonderful story about a coffee group came from Anne Stearns Tanner, a native of Osage in north central Iowa, now retired in Iowa City.

“I don’t know whether the Osage coffee group is still going,” she wrote, but I’ve confirmed there still is one. “I haven’t lived there since before 2009, the year my dad, Bill Stearns, died. My brother, Rick Stearns, and I met with the substitute minister (Rev. Ruth Moerdyk at the United Church of Christ in Osage) to give her some ideas for a funeral for a guy she had never met.

“As we talked, she got a strange look on her face. ‘Is there a men’s group that meets every day uptown?’ she asked. We confirmed that there was one. At that, she adjourned our meeting and left.

“At the funeral we found out that she had walked up to the men’s coffee table, ignoring the fact that she would be the only woman there. “Bill Stearns has died, and I need you to write my sermon,’ she said, ignoring the shocked looks. ‘Who wants to start?’

“That worked. It was the best eulogy you could imagine—funny, appreciative, and mostly true! And I’m still grateful to her and all the guys around that table.”

The official mug of my group in Jefferson.

There are two more women’s coffee groups I’m hoping to visit some morning.

“You know my coffee group, Chuck,” wrote Karen Lawton, my former neighbor and great friend in Greene County. “Linda Jones, Rosemary Hoyt, Cheryl Nailor, Sherry Bates, Peg Raney and myself. We’d love to have a joint session someday (with my “Bean Boyz” group in Jefferson). Is the Board Room at Greene Bean Coffee big enough for all of us?

“Here is our story: Female elephants are known as fierce protectors. When one of them is suffering, the others circle around her. This is who we are and who we are meant to be for each other. Sometimes we are the ones circling and sometimes we are the ones in the middle. Always fierce, always protecting. There is no herd like a herd of women.”

Lawton said she calls the group “The Herd.” And yes, the “Bean Boyz” look forward to a joint session with them at the coffeehouse.

Finally, there’s the “SNuG” coffee group meeting Friday mornings at different coffeehouses around the Des Moines metro area. “We’re looking for one that will meet all our needs,” said Mary Ann Beard, one of the group. “We haven’t settled on one yet, but we’ve found some real gems around the area.”

The group gatherings began “15 to 17 years ago” with three friends Beard, Maureen Keehnle and April Talbot — all single then. “We started having Sunday evening dinners together,” Beard said. “We’d meet on a rotating basis as each of us cooked a Sunday night meal with enough leftovers to send home for each of us to enjoy during the next week.”

Over the years, Becky Anthony and my wife Mary Riche became part of the Sunday night group dinners.

The “SNuG” name? “That came from being a Sunday Night Group,” Beard said. “And we liked the idea of the group being ‘snug’ for each other, supportive, kind of like a hug.” When most were not married, they joked they were also the “Sunday Night Unmarried Group,” and over the years as members married, they changed the “U” to lower case.

They go out to dinner on their birthdays now, but ended the regular Sunday night meals, and as most retired, morning coffees became another way to keep the conversations current while moving around downtown Des Moines and the suburbs to enjoy a different coffee shop each Friday morning.

As my wife tells me, “The first cup of coffee may be important, but the conversations, the shared stories, and the friendships are what keep us coming back to meet again and again.”

And that’s true for the “Bean Boyz,” too.

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