Throwing away 10,000 columns & stories
After nearly two years of paying monthly rent for a storage unit – and almost never going there or doing anything with the contents – it was time for it all to go. (But he kept a few treasures.)
JEFFERSON, Iowa – Best I can figure, in my 63 years of journalism, I’ve written more than 10,000 columns and stories.
In the past week, I’ve thrown away almost all of them. Several tubs of the columns and my notes about them went to recycling. Several more went to the county landfill.
I kept a couple of binders that hold my Des Moines Register columns from 1995. That was the year I co-led the “Iowa 150 Bike Ride: A Sesquicentennial Expedition,” which had 308 of us riding our bicycles 5,048 miles across the U.S. as a promotion for Iowa’s celebration the following year of 150 years of statehood. I wrote every day of that 100-day adventure. It has a special place in my heart.
Likewise, I kept a couple dozen albums of family photographs, even though I haven’t ever really gone through them. Someone in the family might eventually want to do that.
How I appeared on page one of the Ottumwa Courier when I concluded my 1982 Ottumwa High School commencement address by singing the “OHS Fight Song,” which I’d judged it to be the worst high school fight song in the state. Courier photographer Michael Lemberger sent me this copy of the picture.
Also saved from my purge – a few framed photos of significant moments in my newspaper career, a scrapbook about my senior season in high school baseball, and a couple of souvenir baseballs (one autographed by my all-time favorite radio broadcaster for baseball, the late Harry Caray).
My son Andrew Offenburger’s collection of baseball cards went to the dump, too, but not before I asked him. He’d gone through them in the last couple of years, he said from his home in Oxford, Ohio, and he didn’t think there was anything there of significant value. Out they went.
A day later, he texted me with one reasonable second-guess of himself: “As a kid, I always heard older men say, ‘Boy, I wish I hadn’t let my mom throw away all my baseball cards!’ And now I just told you to toss ’em all. Talk about a middle-age rite of passage!”
I told him what I was doing was an older-age rite of passage, while also being a generational act of kindness. Huh? Well, if I didn’t take care of the stacked and packed storage unit full of stuff here in Jefferson, someone else would eventually have to do that. So, both Andrew and my wife Mary Riche were encouraging me.
Mary had a valid economic point, too. “How long do you want to keep paying a monthly rental fee to have that storage space?” she said. “If you don’t want the money yourself, you could at least be giving it to someone else who needs it.”
Of course I had to save this 1961 Des Moines Register picture by their photographer Thomas DeFeo. The paper made that fall’s Clarinda-at-Shenandoah Homecoming football game their “Sunday Register Spotlight Game of the Week.” Among their feature photos, they showed this young sportswriter in the first year of his career.
Emptying and cleaning the storage unit also let me donate some furniture, household furnishings and tools to the Greene County Food Pantry, which distributes such items to local people in need.
A couple other journalist friends were stunned when I told them what I was doing with my clippings. Most of us in this profession tend toward being hoarders of our work.
But I’ve wound up feeling no great need to preserve my reportage myself. Most of it is and will be available elsewhere, and in far better forms of organization than I had it stuffed in plastic tubs and big paper envelopes.
It’ll be in the seven books I’ve done – two of them collections of favorite columns, one of those covering 10 years, a follow-up one covering five years.
My early work will be available in bound volumes, microfilm and online archives of The Evening Sentinel, available at the Public Library in my hometown of Shenandoah in southwest Iowa. Archives of the Des Moines Register will have most of my columns and stories from 1972 to 1998. I buy a subscription to the archive www.Newspapers.com, and that gives me access to nearly everything I wrote for the Register and a few other major publications.
Many other pieces I wrote between 1998 and about 2010 will probably be available from “The Iowan” magazine, “Okoboji Magazine,” and the Iowa Farm Bureau’s “Family Living” magazine.
Had to save this high school baseball memento, too.
My most recent work and probably that in the near future is or will be archived on our website www.Offenburger.com and here on Substack.
Glancing at a few stories in recent days, as I handed them off for recycling or dumping, I felt some pride in what a good, long run I’ve had, both in print and now cyberspace. I’ve got more tales to tell, and hope I can keep writing years into the future.
But I wanted to get away from the feeling that I personally need to carry around and preserve all I’ve done before, when others are already doing that for me.
So, thanks to all the archivists. Even more important to me are all you readers. Thanks for hanging with me for a looooong time!
I saved the binder with my 1995 Des Moines Register clippings telling the story of our “Iowa 150 Bide Ride.”
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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.
Here’s our line-up:
Nicole Baart: This Stays Here, Sioux Center
Ray Young Bear: From Red Earth Drive, Meskwaki Settlement
Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin, Windsor Heights
Tory Brecht: Brecht’s Beat, Quad Cities
Dartanyan L. Brown: My Integrated Live, Des Moines
Jane Burns: The Crossover, Des Moines
Dave Busiek: Dave Busiek on Media, Des Moines
Iowa Writers Collaborative: Roundup
Steph C: It Was Never a Dress, Johnston
Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake
Suzanna de Baca: Dispatches from the Heartland, Huxley
Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County
Randy Evans: Stray Thoughts, Des Moines via Bloomfield
Daniel P. Finney: Paragraph Stacker, Des Moines
Arnold Garson: Second Thoughts, Okoboji and Sioux Falls
Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, Des Moines and Okoboji
Avery Gregurich: The Five and Dime, Marengo
Fern Kupfer and Joe Geha: Fern and Joe, Ames
Jody Gifford: Benign Inspiration, West Des Moines
Rob Gray's Area: Rob Gray’s Area, Ankeny
Nik Heftman: The Seven Times, Iowa
Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt, Lovilla
Iowa Capital Dispatch, an alliance with IWC
Iowa Podcasters Collaborative,
Iowa Podcasters' Collaborative
Wait! Wait! Chuck! There’s a book in there. Don’t let those columns go yet.
Good job on the purge. Saving your son from having to do it someday.
By the way, I was friends with Michael Lemberger and his wife when I lived in Ottumwa in the 90’s. Small world!