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When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa.
You can always spot an Iowa man because he is wearing a baseball cap advertising John Deere or a feed company, and because the back of his neck has been lasered into deep crevices by years of driving a John Deere tractor back and forth in a blazing sun.
Jack Kerouac, of all people, thought that Iowa women were the prettiest in the country, but I don’t think he ever went to Merle Hay Mall on a Saturday.
My mother knew that personable old fart when he was a sportscaster called Dutch Reagan at WHO Radio in Des Moines. “He was just a nice, friendly, kind of dopey guy,” my mother says.
She was about as bad a cook as you can be without actually being hazardous.
Wisconsin used to ban margarine to protect its dairy farmers, so everybody in Wisconsin, including all the dairy farmers, would drive to Iowa where there were big signs everywhere saying, MARGARINE FOR SALE
RV people are another breed—and a largely demented one at that.
This was the heart of Appalachia, the most notoriously impoverished region of America, and it was just inexpressibly beautiful.
When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.
I only ever knew one journalist with a truly tidy desk, and he was eventually arrested for molesting small boys. Make of that what you will—but just bear it in mind the next time somebody with a tidy desk invites you camping.
The truth, as so often in this life, was disappointing.
I can’t remember the last time I had such a good time in a Republican household.
The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns.
the first professional night game under artificial lighting, played in Des Moines, Iowa, on May 2, 1930.
Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.
