By CHUCK OFFENBURGER COOPER, Iowa, May 15, 2018 – It’s been 20 years since a gubernatorial campaign in Iowa has made me squirm as much as this year’s race. Back in 1998, the candidates were Democrat Tom Vilsack, of Mount Pleasant in southeast Iowa, and Republican Jim Ross Lightfoot, from my hometown of Shenandoah in…
By CARLA OFFENBURGER OXFORD, Ohio, May 10, 2018 — This is getting serious, folks. Granddaughters Lindsay (10), Casey (7) and Audrey (3) just did a fourth “Master Chef Junior” meal with me last weekend. It proved to be another success for the chefs and for the recipients of a great meal. We spent Friday evening…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER DES MOINES, Iowa, May 1, 2018 — It was fun being able to celebrate with two Des Moines Register editorial writers over breakfast one day last week — the recent Pulitzer Prize winner Andie Dominick and her predecessor on the staff, Bill Leonard. After he retired and then Dominick got his job in…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER CARROLL, Iowa, April 26, 2018 — You want voters to understand how important the public library is to people of all ages? You want to have fun with old-timers recalling happy moments in their lives? You want to wake up people about the seriousness of sexual assault in our rural communities? Then…
We Offenburgers have written many stories about our own cancer journeys. We’ve read and heard the stories of many others in the “Cancer Club,” as we sometimes call it. On Saturday, April 21, 2018, during the Greene County Relay for Life, we heard this tremendous cancer story, told by Lou Blanchfield, of rural Churdan, Iowa.…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER COOPER, Iowa, April 3, 2018 — Fifty years ago this week, a college pal Mark McCrackin and I spent a night in “a unique moment and place in American history,” as he later wrote of it. We spent that night, April 4, 1968, in the rooms of the Rev. Martin Luther King…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER COOPER, Iowa, April 3, 2018 – My older brother Tom Offenburger’s three years as press secretary to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – 1966-’68, the last three years of King’s life – paralleled my years as a student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. And that enabled me to have some highly…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER BOONE, Iowa, March 29, 2018 — It was in this same week in 1994 when, over lunch in downtown Des Moines on a Tuesday, the discussion turned to “has there been some specific place you remember as having a profound spiritual experience?” My great pal Chuck Corwin jumped on it. “Chapel Point up…
By CARLA OFFENBURGER COOPER, Iowa, Feb. 20, 2018 — My cancer journey in 2018 has started off with a whole lot of waiting and a whole lot of fun “busy-ness.” Certainly a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think, pray and worry about the cancer within my abdominal area, liver and lungs, but in…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER CLYDE, Missouri, Jan. 25, 2018 — Anna Martina Sims Offenburger, my mother, has been dead for nearly 22 years. If she were alive, she’d be turning 111 this week. But on a stop here this past Saturday, I almost felt like I was holding her hand — when she was 13 years…
