Starting over...

...in this column writing game

JEFFERSON, Iowa -- Well, here I go again. 

With this column, I join the new Iowa Writers Collaborative, which is presenting the work of a bunch of us from around the state who think we have stories, photos, opinions and more to share.

We hope to help fill an informational void that has developed across Iowa as traditional media have been clobbered in this new era for media. 

Our group is coming at you via the relatively new online platform called “Substack.”  I hope you’ll “subscribe” to receive our work free via your email, or perhaps pay modest subscription prices if you can afford to and if you want to help subsidize our efforts. 

Mostly, though, we all want to entice you to become regular readers of our work, and then engage us in exchanges of messages, or give us ideas for future columns and features.

Some of you may remember that I’ve been at this a loooooong time – like 62 years.

That’s when I started my career, when I was 13 years old, as the boy sports editor of the old Evening Sentinel, then a five-day daily that served the area around my ol’ hometown of Shenandoah in southwest Iowa.

This 1961 Des Moines Register photo, which appeared in their “Sunday Spotlight Game” series in the Big Peach sports section, showed me in my first year of journalism, on the sidelines for a Shenandoah vs. Clarinda football game.

While other Shenandoah High kids worked sacking groceries at Hy-Vee, detasseled corn for Dekalb, or making great malts at the soda fountain of Jay Drug, I went to work covering the ball games of the Shenandoah High Mustangs, the Farragut Admirals, the Essex Trojans and teams from a few other nearby schools.  Soon, I launched my first column, “Off on Sports.”

It was like I was quickly hooked on journalism.  I was surely one of the few kids who grew up in Shenandoah back then without working even a single day for Earl May Seed & Nursery.  That’s because I was working at the Sentinel nearly every morning before school, then in the mid-afternoons on a work permit that gave me early release from classes, and many evenings at games.  During summers, in addition to continuing my sports coverage, I’d also work on straight news, features and doing photography.

All that helped me win a journalism scholarship at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., where I had a couple years experience in the big time, as a sports stringer for the Nashville Tennessean newspaper.  A pal and I started a campus humor magazine, then I focused on climbing the ranks of the twice-a-week student newspaper, the Vanderbilt Hustler.  I wound up as editor-in-chief.  Let me tell you, the late 1960s was a great time to be a college student, especially a college student journalist.  As you may have heard, or possibly even remember, we raised hell.  And learned a lot.

Then it was back to Iowa for me, spending three years back at the Sentinel – still doing sports, still writing “Off on Sports,” but also serving as managing editor.

In early 1972, I was recruited by the Des Moines Register after meeting three of the paper’s legends who came through Shenandoah on stories – news reporter Gene Raffensperger, prep sportswriter Brad Wilson and columnist Gordon Gammack.  I started at the Register as a general assignment reporter, generally roaming the state for news and feature stories. 

Then in 1977 the bosses asked if I’d want to succeed Gammack, who had died of cancer, as a feature columnist. “Name the column anything you want,” they said.  We brainstormed column names at home, and my stepdaughter Janae, then 7, popped out with “Iowa Boy.” 

Huh?  “That’s what you are,” she said.  Hmmm.  It was short, crisp and far easier to remember than my clunky German last name, “Offenburger.”

Janae was right.  I became the Iowa Boy.  The column took me all over Iowa for the next 21 years, including 16 times across the state on my bicycle as co-host with John Karras of the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI).

I wrote stories about great changes that were happening in Iowa – in the go-go 1970s, the Farm Crisis and recovery in the ’80s, and the floods and recovery in the ’90s.  I loved covering Iowa’s Sesquicentennial celebration of 1996, actually starting that coverage the summer before by leading 308 Iowans and Iowan-wannabes on a 5,048-mile bicycle ride across U.S. We invited everybody we met to come visit Iowa in ’96.

In other perhaps memorable coverage, I would issue Top Ten rankings of Iowa’s best cinnamon rolls in my “Roll Poll.”  I had a fashion consultant, “Ralph of Laurens,” the late Ralph Reining who was a mailman and school bus driver in that northwest Iowa town; he was always predicting the return of the mini-skirt.  And my sage on all other topics was “Sam the Barber” Kauffman, who ran the corner barber shop and became mayor in the southwest Iowa town of Audubon.  In 1994, I persuaded the giant shoe manufacturer G.H. Bass & Co. to start making my trademark black & white saddle shoes again, after I signed up 675 Iowans who promised they’d buy a pair – and did -- $48,000 worth!

The column also took me from New York to San Diego, from Atlanta to Seattle and on to Juneau.  It took me to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq while covering the Persian Gulf War in 1990 and ’91.  And there were more pleasant column writing trips to China, Europe and South Africa.

Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger now — 62 years into a career that’s been a whole lot of fun.

Yes, journalism let a poor kid from Shenandoah experience the world. 

In 1998, I decided I’d done most of what I wanted to accomplish at the Register, and I wanted to try teaching journalism and Iowa public affairs.  I did that for five years, with stops at Loras College, Buena Vista University, and Coe College.  It was gratifying to help launch several students into professional careers in media.

And I had time to freelance with The Iowan magazine, Okoboji Magazine, Iowa Farm Bureau publications, KMA radio back in Shenandoah, and when the new media age began on my own website Offenburger.com, which is now in its 22nd year.

I guess I just can’t get enough.  I always seem to run into just one more story that I think needs telling.  And one leads to another.

So please hang on with me here. 

I’ll be coming at you from my two homes, one in Jefferson in Greene County and the other in Des Moines.  I’ll take you roaming around the state and elsewhere.  There are a lot of new characters out there we all need to meet, restaurants to try (or try again), entertainers we need to hear, inspiring places we need to visit.

When I travel beyond Iowa, I hope you’ll tag along.   That’s going to include New England this fall, and I’m working on a baseball odyssey across Cuba early in 2023.

Life is good, you know?  So let’s get out there and celebrate it.

--

You can write me by commenting below here, or by direct email to me at chuck@offenburger.com.