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…
By CARLA OFFENBURGER COOPER, Iowa, Jan. 16, 2018 — Now that the new year has begun and I’ve read my first book of 2018 — it is“River of Doubt,” by Candice Millard (and it’s my favorite so far!) — I can take the time to reflect on the good reading year I had in 2017.…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER FAIRFIELD, Iowa, Dec. 18, 2017 — Carla Offenburger and I had a terrific weekend recently in this southeast Iowa town, and one of the things we did was make our first visit to the wonderful bronze statue of our old friend Lee Gobble. Before his death at age 100 in the spring of…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER DES MOINES, Iowa, Feb. 26, 2018 — For choir singers, even old former ones like me, Sunday afternoon’s concert here by the Concordia College Choir, from Moorhead, Minn., was probably at least a “bucket list” experience. The 72-voice choir, directed for 32 years by Rene Clausen, is regarded by many to be the…
The ceramic tile mosaic “The Land of Plenty” – 14 feet in diameter and made from more than 48,000 hand-cut and hand-placed pieces – is probably the most fantastic art installation in the whole county. “It’s symbolic of your community, your history, your culture, your economy,” says one of America’s leading ceramic artists of today.…
By CARLA OFFENBURGER COOPER, Iowa, Dec. 19, 2017 — It was a year ago right now that my oncologist Dr. Matthew Hill gave me the news that my cancer had returned. That came a year after I’d had major liver surgery in the fall of 2015, when Dr. Qasim Chaudhry removed 60 percent of my…
