Nine years ago, after he first set foot in Ames to survey the city’s retail climate, Bucky Wolford returned home satisfied. A year and a half later, the developer from Chattanooga, Tennessee, formally announced his desire to build a new mall here, setting into motion an impassioned – and often misunderstood – debate that continues [...]

[Read more →]

Union Pacific Railroad and the City of Ames are engaged in an ongoing series of negotiations to determine the fate of the Squaw Creek Bridge, know locally as the Dinkey Bridge, which runs parallel to 6th Street, east of the Iowa State campus. The bridge is an iconic landmark in Ames. The Dinkey was a [...]

[Read more →]

The Varsity Theatre wasn’t the first business I saw close in Campustown. Stay around Ames for a few years and you can challenge your friends in the chronology of a location – Oleke Te, Maid-Rite, Angie’s Kitchen. . . or was it Santa Fe Café? Somehow though, when I saw the dumpster outside the Varsity [...]

[Read more →]

Independent and underground music is driven by passionate individuals who engage in DIY projects. DIY record labels have an important role in the national indie music scene because they provide an important service at a low rate to cash-strapped bands that need help bringing their music to regional and national audiences. Countless bands release records [...]

[Read more →]

It’s 8:34 p.m., and an elderly woman has fallen down in her home. We take the stretcher in past the evergreen bushes, the mailbox, and the Christmas lights, blinking through the cold darkness their message of suburban yuletide greetings, as the ambulance’s lights frantically spin and light up the driveway. The door’s open, so in [...]

[Read more →]

Twelve seconds left in the game. The Minnesota Vikings have the ball on the New Orleans 38-yard line. All Brett Favre needs to do is hand the ball off to Adrian Peterson and let him get three or four yards and set up Ryan Longwell, the kicker, for a long kick to win the game. [...]

[Read more →]

On Christmas Day 2009, a flight carrying nearly 300 people prepared to land in Detroit while a Nigerian boy, Umar Abdulmutallab, tried to ignite a small bomb on board. Jasper Schuringa noticed him and leaped over four seats to tackle and subdue the boy, saving everyone on board.
When the Twin Towers fell on September 11, [...]

[Read more →]

Leslie Hall answered the door in almost-complete costume. She invited us in and asked us to wait as she went upstairs to put the finishing touches on her outfit. Gavin and I had come to take a tour of the Mobile Museum of Gem Sweaters, which is parked in a barely used storage lot behind [...]

[Read more →]

I only met him five minutes ago, but I’m already wondering if Darren Keen is going to get me arrested. As I sit beside him in his dad’s turquoise Dodge Caravan, my eyes flit between Keen and the street before us. He’s in the driver’s seat, smoking weed out of a wooden pipe engraved with [...]

[Read more →]

I was an undergraduate taking a painting course in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in 1979 when I first recall noticing the skinny guy with curly hair who never seemed to be without his female companion (later, after he became famous, I learned she was his sister). I don’t [...]

[Read more →]