The older I get, the less I seem to know

I was surprised to find the records of the sale of 528 Iowa Avenue, which I had always known as my grandparents Jack and Adelaide Kennedy’s house, but that sale occurred in 1950. So, dad and Dorothy had to have attended high school and college while still living in the big farmhouse west of town.

Dorothy was a star student at St. Patrick’s, graduating as Valedictorian in 1944, before earning her degree from Iowa. Dad attended St. Pat’s for two years and then transferred to University HS, Iowa’s lab school in the College of Education. Why he did so remains a mystery, and the few souls who might have known took the secret to their graves. Dad managed to graduate in 1945, which means he must have begun school early or skipped a grade. He was a smart guy, so it might have been either reason.

The story that my brother Mike and I remember was that Grandma Kennedy had been lobbying to move to town for some time. She certainly put a lot of miles on the car driving in and out of Iowa City on Melrose, if dad’s diary entries are a good indication.

A suitable house came on the market, one that Albert and Emma Dunkel owned for many years. Albert was quite a local character, and the Dunkel family added a lot to Iowa City history.

Albert was a businessman and musician (he led a small orchestra that played locally) and he was known as Punch. He died in 1947 and his widow Emma was who sold the Iowa Avenue home to Grandpa. Punch had run several businesses, including the Pastime Theater.

I mention this because dad’s diary mentions attending 11 movies just during the month of March in 1938. The Pastime is mentioned specially, along with the Varsity, Englert, and Iowa theaters. Dad went to movies multiple times a week, usually with his mom and sister.

The fact that the home of the longtime owner of the Pastime would eventually become my grandparents’ home is one of those coincidences we should probably expect in a smallish town.

The theater was located at 205 E. College, was renamed the Capitol after Punch’s estate sold it in 1947, and closed in 1960 before being demolished when the block came down during Iowa City’s urban renewal phase. I vaguely recall seeing some animated films there… maybe Disney cartoons.

I wish I had kept a diary in my youth. That would be handy in trying to reconstruct events from many decades ago. I also wish I had been as organized as dad in how he rated the movies he saw (and when you go to at least two a week, you have earned some perspective): Rotten, OK, Good, and Swell, with “swell” being the highest rank.

So why would I be surprised to learn that the family did not move to Iowa City until 1950? My explanation is that a young kid doesn’t ask questions about the past too often and that I likely was so focused on my own monumental life experiences that it never occurred to me that there had been much history prior to my entering the picture.

I thought my dad and aunt lived in town when in high school – but was clearly mistaken – and I do remember that Dorothy had a bedroom on the second floor, looking out on the street. She might have lived there through college and beyond. I would guess that dad didn’t live there at all.

The house featured a somewhat steep but quite small front yard that sloped down to the sidewalk and I remember having to ride my bike over there from University Heights on many summer days to mow the lawn. That sloped front yard was my bane and it didn’t help that their lawnmower was a manual. Turns out I was not all that strong, I guess. The backyard was perfectly square and flat and backed to an alley. Nice and easy for mowing.

The good news about being sent by my mother to mow that yard was that Grandma would always offer pop and candy for my trouble. There was also a small grocery store called Pecina’s across Iowa Avenue that was one of the few stores willing to sell an entire box of baseball cards at a time. I remember the cost as being $3 or $4, but that may be low. There were 36 packs of cards in a box.

Gene Wandling and I would bike to the store occasionally when we had each accumulated enough money from our paper routes and then revel in opening each pack of ten cards, trading them, always searching for a Mickey Mantle card or some other gem.

I read that an unopened “wax box” of baseball cards from 1960 would go for $200K today. Keeping even an unopened PACK of cards would have been unthinkable back then, and I routinely would attach cards to my bike spokes to make cool noises as I sped through the streets. 

That small grocery closed in the mid-1960s, as larger groceries took their business. Hy-Vee’s first store in Iowa City opened in 1957 and Pecina’s was an eventual victim of that major chain’s success.

And now the idea of collecting baseball cards doesn’t come up much in popular culture. I did keep a large box of my favorite cards, and it was stored when I left for the Air Force in an upstairs closet in the Woodridge house.

When I went to retrieve them in the mid-1970s, I learned that mom had made the executive decision to toss them. She did not toss my stamp collection, which I still have and which is now worth about nothing. But that’s for another tale.

I will just note that the price of a first-class stamp rose to 82 cents last Sunday. A first-class stamp in my youth was 3 cents.

But the service is better, right?

Thinking about a birthday from long ago

The year of my birth -- 1950 -- brought a number of changes to the Jack and Adelaide Kennedy family, though I was none the wiser. 

One change was the still new farm equipment sales and service business that Grandpa had begun a few year before. Grandpa must have been friends with Glenn Hope Sr., who farmed northeast of Iowa City, with both serving in WWI and on the local draft board in WWII. Hope was well-known as chairman of the Johnson County Supervisors in the 1940s. At any rate, they went into business together and created Capitol Implement Company right after the war (my assumption as to the timing). 

A second big event was my arrival on the scene, which brought mom and dad to Iowa City. My brother Mike remembers learning that our grandfather bought out Hope in 1950, coinciding with dad's return from Freeport as a married man with a pregnant wife. That led to my birth at Mercy Hospital (and my 76th birthday is tomorrow, not coincidentally). 

Mom always told me that I was the first baby that Dr. Charles (Chuck) Eicher delivered, perhaps as a resident at Mercy. He graduated with his M.D. degree from UI in 1951. 

But, according to my birth certificate, which I am looking at right now, the attending physician was Stephen A. Ware, M.D. Ware was a long-time Iowa City doctor who served as City Health Officer, whatever that entailed. He likely would have been a strong voice adocating for local children to receive the polio vaccine, a vaccine I am grateful to have received. 

You would think she would have remembered the doctor who was there for her first child. Dr. Eicher did love delivering babies and I am pretty sure he delivered John and Barb's other seven children. During his career, he delivered 2,683 children in Iowa City. I was not one of them, though it took examining my physical birth certificate to realize that my mother had fudged the facts a bit and that I have lived a long time under a false impression. Who studies their birth certificate?

Kathleen points out that I am assuming stuff here. After all, Chuck Eicher could certainly have been a resident at Mercy Hospital when I was born and Ware just added his official signature. 

Dr. Eicher was our family physician for many years, and mom was quite clear on my status in the man's career. Mysteriously, mom and dad got a wedding present of a vase from the Eichers though they did not marry until months after my parents. How the two couples were connected is something I would love to discover.  

On the "certificate of live birth," we find that dad's listed occupation was manager of a bulk oil plant (meaning he delivered gas, I assume, for his father, probably for Skelly Oil). He was 22 and he and Barbara Fern's street address was listed as "Iowa Apt. #29." That doesn't seem like a complete address to me, but that's what is on the document. 

That birth certificate is stored in a fire-resistent box in our home office, and that box contains lots of other valuable information.

For instance, I find that my godmother was Dorothy Kennedy, my aunt, and my godfather was Ray Hoffman. The baptism was performed by Father P.J. O'Reilly (that name seems like a cliche) on July 30, 1950, at St. Patrick's Catholic Church. 

"Ray" appears many times in dad's 1938 diary and I assume refers to Ray Kennedy, one of dad's cousins, but that may be, as Kathleen would point out, just another assumption. 

The Hoffman farm was adjacent to the Schnare farms (later the Kennedy farms), just to the west. I feel like I should remember Ray Hoffman, but those brain cells are not connecting very well, apparently. 

Anyway, 1950 was quite a year for the Kennedys, with mom and dad renting a little house on Summit Street (not one of the giant, expensive ones). Dad began working for Grandpa, abandoning his advertising degree, while mom traded college dreams for raising a large family. 

In other 1950 news, McCarthyism was just starting, and the Korean War had begun in June. The "Peanuts" comic strip premiered, and Harry Truman was president.  

Those things don't match my birth, of course, in terms of world import, but it's nice to have a little context.

Have I mentioned that I hate the president?

My mantra these days is "Trump ruins everything," and this 4th of July weekend, as well as the 250th birthday of the country, doesn't disappoint in terms of a range of ruination. The nation is in distress.

Of course the guy is a creep and demented and ugly and obscenely rich... and his cult exults in all of that. His MAGA fanatics aren't bothered a bit by his raking in over $2 billion, with the clear connections to corruption, if not outright bribery, in just the past year. Their reasoning? That just shows how great a businessman he is. My view is that he's just a pumped up P.T. Barnum who fully embraces the idea of a "sucker born every minute." 

I also am a fan of H.L. Mencken and his quote from a newspaper in 1926: “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” 

That quote is not as pithy as "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," which he never really said, I find. But the edited quote captures the sentiment pretty well.

The "plain people" are the ones who would sympathize with an Iowa MAGA leader who was quoted in the Times today saying, "It's the 4th and kids are out of school... and it's hot" to explain why most of those plain people in Iowa can't be bothered by Trump's fleecing of America. Willful ignorance is powerful.

Honestly, it turns out that Dear Leader is not grabbing nearly as much loot as his multi-billionaire buddies. Many of them have reaped hundreds of billions in new wealth as they bribe their way into our would-be dictator's graces. In the big picture, Trump isn't even in the same league as the world's first Trillionaire Elon Musk. So, maybe his buisness acumen is overrated.

Trump gleefully posts an illustration of his mug being added to Mount Rushmore and everyone is well aware that such a thing won't happen. His supporters cheer. But he most delights in mocking and trolling anyone NOT already invested in his cult.

Trump represents everything we should be ashamed of in America's history, of course, from the hypocrisy of the wealthy to the outright racism and sexism that many cult members share (or are willing to overlook). But what struck me today is that Trump has allowed me to see so many people all around me as just as flawed as he is, though without the money and power. 

No matter what excesses are exposed, about 40 percent of Americans seem to be OK with them. It's puzzling, since most of them will never see much more wealth and will continue to be patsies for the super rich. But their hate of everyone else is enough to drive them.

A Christian nation indeed.

Independence Day should be all about unity and a nation that truly represents "e pluribus unum," out of many, one. It really should be a great time to discuss conepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration of Independence didn't claim that anyone would attain happiness, however that might be defined, but that everyone could pursue it. 

I must admit to not being as patriotic as I once claimed to be. It's tough to be proud of a nation that can be so ugly and so ignorant as to elect a charlatan like Trump... twice. 

Still, it's a big country full of big ideas and I have benefited from so many of them. 

Trump will continue to ruin everything, with help from the bigots and wackos he has surrounded himself with, for another 30 months. That seems like an eternity, but my brain tells me it's not.

So this Indepedence Day I will hang onto hope and set my sights on January of 2029, when the Old Fool is put out to pasture. THAT will be a true day to celebrate.

Let there be light - June 3, 1938

 

Friday, June 3 – Light in hall.

Before 1938, the vast majority of rural areas surrounding Iowa City—including West Lucas Township—remained entirely in the dark, so to speak. Private investor-owned utility companies based in nearby cities viewed running lines into sparsely populated rural farmlands as economically unprofitable. While residents in Iowa City enjoyed modern electric infrastructure, nearly 90 percent of local farm homes lacked access to the electrical grid, including young John Kennedy's house.

The Rural Electrification Act (REA), was a major New Deal initiative signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. The REA provided low-interest, long-term federal loans directly to farmer-owned, non-profit cooperatives. This bypassed commercial power companies and empowered local communities to build their own distribution networks.

The formal push for rural electric cooperatives (RECs) in eastern Iowa began in 1938, and the family farm benefited from the Eastern Iowa Light and Power Cooperative. Township meetings were held to secure enough participants, typically at least three subscribers per mile of line, with each subscriber paying a $5 membership fee to buy a stake in the co-op. Farm owners also needed to sign easement paperwork that allowed crews to dig, plant utility poles and string copper lines across their property and along local roads. 

Electricity meant that new wells could be much more efficient, and dad had written on May 17: Helped men dig well. I drank too much lemonade this afternoon.

The next day part of his diary entry added: Watched men dig well. I got hit on the head with a pipe. My head hurts awful.

Must not have been too horrible as he was able to join the family later for a movie in town, but between feeling a bit queasy due to overindulging in lemondade and being in the wrong place as a pipe was being maneuvered, the lesson may have been to let the workers do the work.

Then came a flurry of activity as the farmhouse was readied for new utility access.

Tuesday, May 31 – Carpenters at work. They tore out closet. The electrician is at work. His name is Stevens.

Wednesday, June 1 – Carpenter, electrician, plumber and furnace men at work. They tore down chimney. Slept upstairs because downstairs bedroom is tore up.

The lack of electricity to that point might explain the frequent drives into Iowa City, not only for those many movies but to visit homes of relatives who had moved into town. My dad never writes about being jealous of town life and conveniences, but he must have been very happy with the changes, despite some temporary upsets as the work was completed. 

I also assume that Jack and Adelaide must have gotten service relatively early since their house was so clost to town. It would be another 12 years before they left living on the farm behind in favor of a very nice home at 528 Iowa Avenue. 

That house's history will be covered in my next blog post.

Two busy days in mid-March, 1938

 

Tuesday, March 15 – Went to school. Hebls and us were the only ones there. Got A in Spelling. Had lessons good. Played basketball. Bad day. Pack [probably Pack Williams -- His birth name was Paschal, married to Mae or May, and he farmed in the area] went with Dad to mission. Art stayed here. Played six handed. Art, Joe and I against Dorothy, Mother and Grandma Schnare. They won 2 and we won 1. Spot and Dannie slept with me. Situation in Europe tense. England + Germany!

On that day, Adolf Hitler stood at the Heldenplatz in Vienna and delivered a speech officially declaring the Anschluss - the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. This marked a critical flashpoint in European history, effectively erasing Austria's sovereignty and absorbing it as a province of the Third Reich.

I am not certain how dad would get such timely information other than through the radio. But the farm had not yet been hooked to electricity. Some farms had battery-operated "farm radios." Specially designed to bypass the lack of a power grid, these radios relied on heavy, direct-current (DC) batteries or home-rigged generators to power their vacuum tubes.

Electrical power would arrive in the fall of that year. 

I have not yet determined who Art and Joe were, but would guess that one or both of them were in the Williams family. But what struck me was the final notation about what would eventually become WWII. It didn't earn much detail from the boy and was placed last in the diary, perhaps because he learned of the tensions just before going to bed. I had the sense that dad tried to end his day with his daily summaries.

Now, with full knowledge of the carnage and disruption of the war that was on the horizon, it's a good reminder that children can't possibly comprehend earth-shaking events... but they can certainly take notice of what the adults are discussing.

Wednesday, March 16 – At the top of that page is a special inscription that "today is Gus’s birthday." Augustus A. Schnare was born on March 16, 1863 and had died in 1936, age 73. 

Augustus, or Gus, as everyone called him, never married and is described in various official documents as a bachelor farmer. Dad had only been seven when Gus died, but Gus clearly had a major influence on the boy. Dad himself summed it up as "they were close" and he spent a lot of time with his uncle. Family members and neighbors took to calling young John "Gus," and the nickname stuck for his entire life.

Augustus was born in Iowa to German immigrant parents, Wilhelm Schnare and Lena (Sabina) Schnare, who settled in the region during the mid-19th century wave of German immigration to the Midwest. The arrived in Iowa in 1854, just six years after Iowa became the 29th state. Iowa City was the original state capitol, giving way to Des Moines in 1857. 

He grew up in a large household alongside five siblings:

• Henry William Schnare (1860–1927)
• William Fredrick Schnare (1865–1928), who later served as a local steward for the Johnson County Poor Farm, which we will get into in the future.
• Louise Schnare Davis (1869–1904)
• Wilhelmina "Minnie" Schnare Hastings (1873–1904)

A few years before his death in 1998, dad typed up some thoughts on how he would like his own death and funeral to go, "just in case," as he wrote. 

To tie the two days together, dad remembered that when his Uncle Gus died, neighbors came to the house and stayed up all night with the body, telling stories. Pack Williams was specifically mentioned as being part of that wake. Dad hoped something similar might happen after his own passing. He also urged everyone to not "spare the horses."

An all-night vigil was out of the question when dad passed, but a good-sized crowd did gather 50 years after the death of  his beloved Uncle Gus at the Donohue-Lensing Funeral Home to share stories and laughs the night before the funeral. 

Monday, March 8, 1938 – the county schoolhouse

Ash Wednesday had been March 2, just before my father's diary began, but the family went to mass every day that week before school.

The diary entry for March 8, following "went to mass":   

The two Heble children, Bernard and Billie, start to school. They and us were the only ones in school.

First, the correct spelling is Hebl, and that family lived on the north-south gravel road that ran along the west edge of the school.The road, now named Hebl Avenue SW, runs south to the landfill. The Hebls had 10 children.

That one-room country school was officially West Lucas No. 1 and unofficially the "Hebl School." Helen M. Cole was the primary schoolteacher who taught at the West Lucas Township country schoolhouse during the late 1930s. It was under the jurisdiction of the Johnson County Superintendent of Schools. The system of township schools eventually ended in the 1950s when West Lucas No. 1 was included in the Iowa City Community School District. 

The Iowa School Law of 1858 mandated and structured public education throughout the state. The goal was for these one-room schoolhouses to be about two miles apart, putting them within walking distance for children living on farms.

Cole was an Iowa City resident and student at the University of Iowa, and it was common for rural schoolteachers obtaining their teaching certificates from the university's education program to take such positions as they began their careers. 

As the teacher, Miss Cole was responsible not only for the daily curriculum (reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography) but also for maintaining the schoolhouse woodstove, organizing the annual Christmas pageant, and prepping the older students for the mandatory county-wide 8th-grade examinations held in Iowa City.

Frank J. Snider served as the Johnson County Superintendent of Schools from 1937-1964. He initially managed over 60 independent, local rural school districts and oversaw the professional certification of teachers.

He led the major legislative shift toward school district consolidation in the 1950s, drastically reducing the number of small country schools to form larger, more resource-rich community school systems. In 1959, he established Johnson County's first daily special education classes for children. Believing public school settings should accommodate everyone, he urged the County Board to transition a former one-room country schoolhouse, the Blackstrap School, into a dedicated daily classroom.

The Blackstrap School (also called Black Strap) was located near Highway 218 just south of the Iowa City airport.

Final thought: Miss Cole must have needed to be extremely flexible with her approach to each day as she seemed to regularly welcome then-11 year old Dorothy and my father for lessons. But the Hebls and several others from nearby farms might show up or might not. I assume many farm children were pressed into needed farm work. Dad mostly referred to others in school by their first names. He never mentioned questioning how many were in school on a particular day, but he did often "take attendance" in his diary entries. 

There were never more than eight in school. 

The school was permanently closed at the end of the 1962–1963 school year due to mandatory statewide school consolidation. In the fall of 1963, students from West Lucas No. 1 and other nearby rural country schools were absorbed into the newly constructed Lucas Elementary School in Iowa City, which was named in honor of Iowa's first territorial governor, Robert Lucas.

Our daughters Lesley and Sara attended Lucas in the 1980s and were able to walk there from our home. Buses would have been required to get West Lucas township students to the school (though later Irving Weber Elementary opened, which was much closer... but not walking distance).

Day three of dad's diary - March 6, 1938

At the risk of losing the handful of readers I can boast...

Here’s a full Sunday’s activities, from my dad's diary, dated March 6, 1938:

Went to Mass. Went to Kennedys this afternoon. Played a marble game. Went to show at Varsity. It was the “Hurricane” with Dorothy Lamour. Fair. Ate supper at Dysarts. Went to Helena’s [there was a Helena Berhens in grandma's line, though she had passed in 1909, who married Wilhelm Schnare... so maybe a daughter?]. Mom went to the mission. Played cards at Helena’s. George and I played Dorothy and Dad. We won two and they won two. It was 11:30 when we got home. Spot and Dummy Dan slept with me all night.

There’s a lot to unpack there. "Hurricane” was Dorothy Lamar’s second starting role, released in 1937, and she became famous in “female Tarzan” roles where she wore sarongs and interacted with “civilized men” in corny love stories. She most famously played a “straight woman” to Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in their series of Road pictures. Nine-year-old Johnny was not a big fan of romantic comedies, it appears.

The Varsity theater was on Washington Street, basically across the street from the Englert. The site was originally the Garden Theater, which burned down in 1932, with the Varsity replacing it that same year. In September 1968, the theater was renamed The Astro. It closed in 1991 and was torn down to become part of the U.S. Bank building. It was sort of a dump, as I remember it, but a building down was Barbara's Bake Shop, where I would buy one of their amazing chocolate cake donuts when I had a spare quarter. I have never had a better one.

Dysart's Dairy Store was located at 218 East Washington Street in downtown Iowa City during the late 1930s. I don't know when it closed, but the building was occupied by other local businesses, including Younkers department store prior to it moving to the Old Capitol Mall in 1981, and currently houses a Target.

Grandma evidently went to “the mission” regularly that year, grandpa much less often. The St. Pat’s parish hall – St. Brendan’s Hall – was located across the street from the church itself (228 East Court Street), and was a vital hub for local Catholic charity work. It was informally called the mission, at least by my dad.

There was another mission known as the Iowa City Gospel Mission, run by the Mennonite community and located on Orchard Street, which provided Sunday school, spiritual guidance, and essential community support during the 1930s. There may have been others, most connected to a local church.

Our author never specifies a mission name or location, but my best guess is that grandma devoted her time to working in St. Brendan’s Hall. I would also guess that volunteering there provided many local women opportunities to interact and support one another.

Spot and Dummy Dan (a few days later referred to as Dannie) were dogs that dad was quite fond of (well, Spot, at least) and “sleeping with him all night” was a way he measured his popularity with them. There is no record of how Dorothy felt about that. Dorothy was two years older than dad, born in 1926. 

"The Kennedys" might have referred to my grandfather's parents, who lived outside Oxford, about 15 miles west. Grandma to our author was Ellen "Nellie" Mahoney Kennedy, married to James Matthew Kennedy Sr. James died in 1949, Nellie in 1968.

But considering the timeline of that Sunday, more likely is that "The Kennedys" here were my father's uncle Dennis and his wife Rachel, who lived in Iowa City, near Longfellow Elementary. They had an 8-year-old son at the time, James Edgar Kennedy (Jim), and THAT may be the closest we can come to ascertaining that my grandfather's birth name was John Edgar Kennedy. Grandpa's brother Dennis Edward Kennedy adds the possibility, however, that the brothers might simply have had the same middle name. So, crap.

 

And now for a few thoughts on my family heritage, which the diary has sparked.
I grew up thinking we were Irish, probably due to dad deciding that was the case (and who was I to know any better?). He sure loved to sing "Clancy Lowered the Boom" in assorted odd keys while driving me and brothers back from the Elks after a long day of golf. He often was a bit tipsy after some time at the "19th hole" (which would be the 10 hole since the Elks was and is a nine-hole course), and there were no seatbelts in the car. I never thought a thing of it, though I would guess my sainted mother might have had any number of choice things to say as we returned late on a summer evening.

And my grandfather John E. Kennedy could certainly claim Irish roots, with last names Fleming and Berry for his great grandmothers. My grandmother Adelaide was a Burke, with her grandmother being an O'Neill. BTW: Cornelius Burke married Catherine O'Neill and both were born in Limerick. 

She married a German fella, though, evidently not uncommon when the majority of those farming west of Iowa City were Irish or German. It wouldn't have hurt that the guy had money and land. But my grandfather could boast of having a lot of Irish blood.

Today would have been my mother's 99th birthday, and she was born Barbara Fern Guffey. The Guffey clan came to America before the Revolutionary War and were the McGuffeys until about 1800. They seem to have emigrated from Scotland. But my grandpa Champ Columbus Guffey (one of the all-time great names) married Sarah Davis, whose ancestors trace back to Wales. 

But my Grandma Estella Lorena Guffey was a Bausman whose mother was a Hurst, with grandmothers named Stoft and Menzemer, and all her grandparents were born in western Germany and mostly from the Alsace-Lorraine region, which regularly shifted from Germany to France due to various wars. It is currently in France, but was in German hands when my ancestors exited Europe for the new world.

Bottom line: my father was Irish/Irish/German/Irish among his grandparents. My mother was Scottish/Welsh/German/German among her grandparents. Add them all up and that leaves me with Irish x 3, German x 3, Scottish and Welsh. 

In other words, my siblings and I are mutts. Most Americans likely are.