In gratitude for a great newspaper
The Des Moines Register on Friday, July 26, celebrated its 175th birthday. I’m thankful I got to be part of it for 26 of those years.
DES MOINES, Iowa – Across the top of page one of the Friday, July 26, 2024, Des Moines Register, the banner headline read, “IT’S OUR 175th BIRTHDAY!”
In dark red type just below the banner was this message: “The earliest predecessor of the Des Moines Register, the Iowa Star, published its first edition on July 26, 1849.”
I’ll be forever thankful for the 26 years I got to be on the news staff there, 1972-1998. I’ve contributed a few columns since I left the staff to teach, freelance and loaf.
Plus, I’ve answered lots of questions about the Register and Iowa topics when asked by the newspaper’s reporters who’ve succeeded me. So I’ve stayed in touch.
Chuck Offenburger, in Kuwait, covering the Persian Gulf War in 1991 for the Des Moines Register. Those are Iraqi tanks and other vehicles that had been bombed and burned by U.S. Marines.
On Friday, I dashed off an email to Register executive editor Carol Hunter, congratulating her and the staff for leading the paper to this significant anniversary, expressing my continuing appreciation for their coverage of Iowa, and thanking them for their special coverage they provided this month of the Register’s 175 years.
“Glad you’ve enjoyed the anniversary coverage,” Hunter responded. “It’s been a pretty heavy lift, especially in a month which always has RAGBRAI and this year also saw an assassination attempt on a former president and the current president dropping out of the re-election race! I’m really proud of today’s staff. They’re small but mighty!”
Indeed they are. I’ve long said that the people I know on the Register news and editorial staff today are as good at what they do as my generation of staffers was. But there are only about 20 percent as many of them, maybe fewer, due to the downsizing that has happened across nearly the entire news industry.
Consider that downsizing: As best I can recall, when I joined the Register staff in March of 1972, the paid circulation of the Des Moines Sunday Register was about 535,000 across Iowa and just across the borders of six surrounding states. The circulation of the Register on Mondays-thru-Saturdays was about 250,000. The afternoon Des Moines Tribune, circulating only in central Iowa, went to about 80,000 subscribers. Ten years later, the Tribune was closed.
Today, the Register’s circulation figures for print editions are about 10 percent of what they were in ’72. However, I think the number of online subscribers has recently topped the number of subscribers to its printed papers.
When you combine print and digital, the Register is still a damned good source for news and opinion, probably still the best for all of Iowa, although the Cedar Rapids Gazette is very strong, too.
As you’ll read below here, this was the first time I appeared in the Des Moines Register — in the “Big Peach” sports section’s “Spotlight Game of the Week.” I was in my first year as a sportswriter for the Evening Sentinel in my hometown of Shenandoah. The Register was covering the Clarinda vs. Shenandoah high school football game, and photographer Tom DeFeo shot this picture.
Can you allow me some personal nostalgia about the Register?
I actually went to “work” for the newspaper about 15 years before I collected my first check as a reporter. In 1957 and maybe ’58, when I was 10 and 11 years old, the Register had a circulation manager named Art “Irish” Martin in my hometown of Shenandoah in southwest Iowa.
I believe it was every early fall, he would round up the kids who were Register newspaper carriers and offer prizes if they could sign up new subscribers. I remember the shelves in his basement office had such enticements as new cameras, passes to the movies at the Page and State Theaters, free hamburgers at the Spot Café, and maybe even a bicycle for the carrier who sold the most new subscriptions.
I was not a Register carrier – a couple years later I had a route for two years for the hometown Evening Sentinel – but I had friends who were, and “Irish” Martin let me join the Register contest. I sold a half-dozen Register subscriptions, and one of those new flash cameras was mine.
In the late fall of 1961, I made my first appearance in the Register. By then I was a freshman in high school, and I’d moved from being a carrier for the Evening Sentinel to being its sportswriter!
The rivalry football game that fall between my Shenandoah High Mustangs and the Clarinda Cardinals was picked by the Register’s sports staff to be the “Spotlight Game of the Week” in Iowa. That meant one of their photographers would attend the game, snap a few action photos, plus some of people in the crowd, and they’d be featured in the Sunday Register’s “Big Peach” sports section – along with brief stories in agate type of nearly all the games that had been played on Friday night across the state.
A photo of me on the sidelines, keeping a scoresheet on my clipboard, was one of the half-dozen pictures from the Shenandoah-Clarinda game.
In the fall of 1963, one of my mentors, George Haws, then the athletic director at Shenandoah High, told me that the legendary sportswriter Brad Wilson, who was the author of the Register’s “Prep Parade” column, was going to be in Shenandoah for part of a Mustangs’ game to check on the attention-getting performances of our quarterback Bob Cox. Athletic director Haws told me, “I know you still like to cover the games from the sidelines, but I want you to come up to the press box before the game so you can meet this Brad Wilson. If you’re going to be a professional sportswriter someday, you need to meet one.”
So I climbed the steps to the press box just before kickoff, and Haws introduced me to Wilson. He was wearing a blue blazer, club necktie, yellow golf pants, black & white “spectator” wingtip shoes, a snap brim straw hat and – most memorable of all – he was smoking a cigarette extending from a silver cigarette-holder!
I can clearly remember my first thought: “Oh my God, I do want to be a sportswriter!”
A sports writing scholarship actually led me to Vanderbilt University, where I became editor of the student newspaper The Vanderbilt Hustler, graduated in 1969 and returned to the Sentinel in Shenandoah. My hometown was the one place I knew I could enlist in the National Guard and thus avoid being drafted for my obligatory military service during that Vietnam War era.
In the fall of 1971, when I was managing editor of the Sentinel, I met two veteran Des Moines Register staffers when they came to Shenandoah on separate trips for stories – reporter Gene Raffensperger and columnist Gordon Gammack. They asked if I’d help line-up some local interviews for them, and that led a few months later to Register managing editor Ed Heins calling me and offering me a job.
After a decade at the Register, I became co-host of RAGBRAI with John Karras.
I started at the paper in March of ’72, as I said earlier, as general assignment reporter and feature writer, usually roaming around the state to do “people stories.” In the first couple years, I also worked the “police beat” in Des Moines on weekends.
Let’s see, over the next 26 years:
--I won several Associated Press reporting awards, and was on a team of Register reporters nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for our coverage of the gas explosions and fires that in 1973 killed 14 people in the north central Iowa town of Eagle Grove.
--Three years after Gammack died of cancer in 1974, I was picked to succeed him in the position that came to be called the “Iowa columnist.” I wrote my “Iowa Boy” columns from the fall of ’77 until I resigned in the summer of ’98. By now there have been five of us – Gammack, me, John Carlson, Kyle Munson and current Iowa columnist Courtney Crowder.
--When Iowa and Iowa State resumed their football rivalry in ’77, I became the self-appointed judge of which school’s marching band was better at the game each fall.
--In the 1980s, I became the self-appointed judge of the best cinnamon rolls in the state, conducting the “Roll Poll” to help determine new “Top 10s” three or four times per year.
--In 1983, I succeeded Donald Kaul as co-host of RAGBRAI (the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa), joining John Karras on the hosting team.
--Also in the ’80s, I became the manager of the Register’s newsroom softball team, named “Bad News,” which played in a company league as well as in city leagues. And we also began an annual “Western Iowa Shootout” rivalry softball game with the news staff of the Omaha World-Herald.
--In the ’80s and ’90s, I managed to convince Register bosses to send me on reporting trips with groups of Iowans who were traveling to China, Germany and France.
--In late 1990 and early ’91, I made two extended trips to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq to cover Iowans who were serving in the Persian Gulf War. Two points I made about my time as a war correspondent. Gordon Gammack had covered Iowans in three wars during his Register & Tribune career – World War II, Korea and Vietnam. When I joined the Register, I did tell the bosses “I want to be the next Gordon Gammack,” but I wasn’t really thinking then about war reporting. After I’d done it, however, I realized that the best training I’d had to go cover war was that I had covered RAGBBRAI. Huh? “War and RAGBRAI are alike in three ways,” I wrote. “They’re both very big. They’re both very confusing. And everybody involved in them wants to talk. Pretty good place for a reporter to be!”
--In October of 1994, when I’d worn out another pair of my trademark black & white saddleshoes, I used my columns to start a “Back in the Saddle” campaign. The G.H. Bass Shoe Company, then based in Maine, had halted production of my favorite shoes, saying there was no customer demand for them. In a half-dozen columns, my campaign stirred up Iowans to the point where 675 of them wrote checks to Bass Shoes totaling $48,000, and they indeed started making the fashionable shoes again. In fact, they re-tooled their factory for the special order, with the company president telling his staff, “I want those shoes made and delivered so those people in Iowa can wear them to Christmas Eve services.” The first 10 pairs they made went on the feet of their sales force repping the company at that fall’s New York City Shoe Show. They took orders from stores across the nation for 10,000 pairs – and that wound up putting me on page one of the New York Times Fashion Section!
--In 1995, I again coaxed a great “assignment” from my Register bosses. Having ridden 13 RAGBRAIs by then, I wanted to ride my bicycle across America. I convinced the bosses to not only let me stay on salary and do that for 100 days in the summer of ’95, but also to take 308 other cyclists – most of them Iowans or Iowa-wannabes – with me. We pitched it as a celebration of Iowa’s 150 years of statehood, since the Iowa Sesquicentennial would be happening the next year, 1996. We named it the “Iowa 150 Bike Ride/ A Sesquicentennial Expedition.” As we rode 5,048 miles that summer, we handed out pamphlets all along the way inviting people to visit Iowa in ’96 for the celebration.
It was a long, good way.
And, you know, that’s the story of nearly all 26 of my years at the Des Moines Register. Again, I’ll be forever thankful.
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You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com.
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A NOTE TO MY READERS: I write my “Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger” columns here as a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, which is led by Julie Gammack, of Des Moines. In less than two years, our group has grown to more than 50 professional journalists. We are spread across Iowa and write on a wide variety of topics, but all share a deep interest in life in this state. You can become free subscribers on Substack and read us without cost, but if you enjoy our work, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber at whatever level you’re comfortable.
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Hi Chuck, you won't remember me, but I remember you visiting Marshalltown Senior High School in 1986 or so when you came to see George Haws. I was his student teacher and you and he sat in his office and laughed and told stories. He gave me a film to show his class--I think he called it the Positive Attitude class, which meant most of the students had been kicked out of other classes. (I was a young minister's wife who had just gone through a difficult divorce and was back in college training to be a high school teacher. The first day I walked into his classroom, half a dozen students were sitting on top of the desks almost challenging me to teach them something. But George got through to them). I learned a couple of valuable lessons. One, Always preview the film! It was without doubt the most nauseating piece I've ever viewed about the effects of using smokeless tobacco--including shots of people's mouths all sunken in, missing pieces. Two, even in a room full of tough students, someone will be helpful. I was loading the film and a student whispered, "Turn the machine around! You're aiming for the front." I felt like I'd been tossed into the gladiator's pit, but I recall that the students and I were all so appalled by the film that they didn't give me any problems that day! George was one of the finest teachers I worked with, a combination of tender and tough. Thanks for the memory, Chuck! (I went on to teach as an adjunct at the Community College level and sub in high school for a decade, and then landed a full time teaching job at Hawkeye Community College. Thankfully, I never had to worry about aiming another projector again.
What an entertaining read! I loved every word!