My best big ideas that died

In a long public career, I’ve had one good idea that happened in a big way. But I can quickly count 10 others that bombed. At least one should still happen.

DES MOINES, Iowa – Maybe I’ve been thinking about this because spring has arrived and I’m seriously thinking about starting another bicycling season.

Not one with a whole RAGBRAI or any other major tours. Rather, one befitting a 77-year-old guy. Short rides around our Owl’s Head neighborhood in Des Moines. Rides from our apartment in Jefferson on the Raccoon River Valley Trail. Rides on the trails along the rivers in downtown Des Moines.

And all of that may have reminded me that it was 30 years ago this summer that one of the biggest ideas I ever had became reality. It was the 100-day, 5,048-mile “Iowa 150 Bike Ride/A Sesquicentennial Expedition,” on which 308 people, mostly Iowans, rode with me from Long Beach, Calif., to Washington, D.C., in a promotion of Iowa’s 150^th anniversary of statehood that was to be celebrated the following year, 1996.

After briefly relishing memories of that adventure, something else occurred to me. For that one big idea that turned out so well, I’ve sure had a bunch of them that foundered and died. I quickly counted 10 of them. So, pedal along with me today on my humbling tour of rejections.

An idea man.

Let’s start with a relatively minor one.

Maybe 45 years ago, I noticed that the southern Iowa town of Seymour (pop. 634 now) had a great town sign – a huge horizontal arrow, maybe 15 feet long and two feet high, with the name “SEYMOUR” painted on it in big block letters. However, local officials told me they had no town slogan. I wrote a great one for them – no charge – and suggested they add it on a smaller sign under the giant arrow: “Seymour? We’ve seen less!” They never even considered it, despite my lobbying in my Des Moines Register columns and making it a main theme of a commencement address I gave at Seymour High School.

Another little one that still bothers me: My good friend Art Cullen has always called his column in the Storm Lake Times Pilot, “Editor’s Notebook.” The title is the only thing about Art’s work that is plain. I suggested a new title 20 years ago, “Life on the Lakeshore.” Sigh, it’s still “Editor’s Notebook.”

How about a whopper that’s never made it?

I probably wasn’t the first to this idea. But beginning soon after the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s, I have proposed to all who’ll listen that Major League Baseball should be required to put a Cuban-owned franchise in Havana. If that happened, I’ve said, and if the ridiculous travel restrictions were dropped, there would be regime change and massive economic re-development in Cuba without a shot being fired. I managed to get the county conventions of Democrats and Republicans in both Buena Vista and Greene Counties to put that resolution in their platforms.

Here's another very big one that could’ve, should’ve happened – but didn’t. In 2005, I was part a board member of a group “Iowans for a Better Future” that had continued from Gov. Tom Vilsack’s earlier, “Strategic Planning Council.” He charged us, in 1999, to come up with a vision for what Iowa could be like by the year 2010 and an action plan for making it happen. The state back then had a three-pronged approach to economic development – information technology, advanced manufacturing and the bio-sciences. We “Iowans for a Better Future” – and I think I was loudest among us – proposed a fourth approach: “The Iowa Higher Education Initiative.” We wanted to work with our state universities, private colleges and community colleges to make Iowa the best state in the nation to go to college. We wanted coordinated student-recruiting efforts across the nation and around the world. There’d be close linkages available to all students for internships and then careers with Iowa businesses and industries, with seed money for young entrepreneurs, too. At first, everybody seemed to like the idea. Then it broke down, basically, because the independent colleges and universities thought the publicly-supported schools would have unfair advantages. “They don’t call ’em independent for nothin’,” Gary Steinke told me. (He was then the executive director of the Iowa Board of Regents, but he soon jumped to become president of the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges & Universities.)

Three quick, bicycling-related idea I had that have been ignored:

--The State of Iowa should build a paved recreational trail, mainly along the scenic Little Sioux River, from the Iowa Great Lakes to Sioux City.

--The State of Iowa should build another paved recreational trail, mainly along the Des Moines River, diagonally across scenic and historic Van Buren County, going through the small towns of Selma, Douds, Leando, Pittsburg, Keosauqua, Bentonsport, Vernon, Bonaparte and Farmington.

--We should talk Harry Stine, the wealthiest Iowan, into building a pedestrian & bicycle bridge that would safely carry users of the Raccoon River Valley Trail up and over busy Iowa Highway 141 on the south edge of Perry. We would name the bridge the “Stineway.”

Another education-related thing: When the schools were merging in the neighboring northwest Iowa towns of West Bend and Mallard, I suggested the new nickname of their sports teams should be the “Grotto Ducks.” Instead, they picked “Wolverines,” even though we have no wolverines in Iowa.

There was the one I wrote about not long ago, a proposal I led to turn the vacated grain elevator adjacent to the Greene County Fairgrounds in Jefferson into a towering, colorful, lighted, $2 million art & history installation by the famous Des Moines art company “Sticks.” It would have been such a tourist attraction!

Let me close with one that I still think should happen – and soon.

In the 1982 election for governor in Iowa, 35-year-old Republican Terry Branstad defeated 38-year-old Democrat Roxanne Conlin in a close race. (Can you imagine today that there was a time when the two candidates for governor were both in their 30s?) In the 43 years since then, Branstad, now 78, and Conlin, now 80, have both proved themselves to be MVP Iowans. They have remained political rivals, and in at least one case, rivals in court. I don’t believe they’ve ever had a private conversation about that historic ’82 election and all that’s happened in their lives since then. In the last couple of years, I’ve told both they should have a public conversation about all that, in front of a live audience. At least one member in each of their families has told me they think a conversation like that should happen, too. I told David Yepsen, my former colleague the political columnist for the Register who is also a former host of “Iowa Press” on Iowa Public Broadcasting TV, that he should moderate the conversation. After all, he covered both Conlin and Branstad for years. Alas, he said no. There are several other possible moderators who would be good – O. Kay Henderson, Dave Price, Kathie Obradovich, Harry Smith. There’d be so much all of us could learn. Essential history. And probably fun, too.

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