"My View from the Porch" & "What’s Carla Reading?"

Let Carla Offenburger tell you about herself

My life would be best if every day included time in my garden here at Simple Serenity Farm, where we live near the little town of Cooper in southern Greene County, Iowa.

I like to nurture plants and watch them grow. I like dirt under my nails and the sun on my face. I like to organize my gardens based on what I have on hand, or can find to purchase. I like variety and simplicity. I like watching beauty arise from nothing. I can spend all day working hard outside and not realize it, especially if I see progress. I also like the feeling I have when I come indoors after a day outside and my body aches – it’s the confirmation that I worked hard.

While much of what I do isn’t always in my garden, it all reflects those same qualities. I like to nurture and watch things grow. I’m not afraid of the dirty work, or working hard to accomplish what needs to be done. I appreciate seeing progress, and can work long hours to see it without realizing it, or whining about it.

For as long as I can remember – or choose to remember – this is how I’ve operated

Let me tell you about myself.

I’m a native of Des Moines and a Lincoln High School graduate. My mother Suesy Burt still lives in the home where I grew up. My father Carl Burt passed away in 1996. I have two sisters, one younger Christine Woods, and one older Tammie Amsbaugh. Both live in Des Moines with their families.

After high school, I started college and then had a five-year marriage that ended at an age earlier than young folks should even consider getting married, as well as a few mediocre, go-nowhere jobs. So I went back to school, attending Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. I was on what we now laugh about as “the 9½-year plan.” That’s how long it took me to attend evening classes, on again, off again, and get a bachelor degree in business management.

After I graduated in May, 1992, one year after I married Chuck Offenburger, I told him I wanted nothing to do with business. And I immediately enrolled at Iowa State University to get my master’s in English.

For the most part, I was in a classroom for the next 10 years – as a teaching assistant at Iowa State, then an adjunct faculty member at both Simpson College and at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Indeed, there’s a lot of nurturing and growth in the college classroom. There’s an equal amount of nurturing and growth outside of a classroom on a college campus. I loved it all. And I’d like to think I’ve made a difference in the lives of many students.

But it’s not just college students I’ve nurtured. I feel like I did a pretty good job with my step-son Andrew Offenburger. And when Chuck and I took on the role of surrogate parenting for Bolekwa Sifo, a young girl from South Africa who was in Iowa for part of her high school and all of her college education, I think we did a pretty good job with her, too. I continue to keep busy nurturing and mentoring young folks as much as I can.

Now, out of the classroom, for the most part, I spend more time in my gardens! I also do a lot of my second favorite activity – reading. I don’t do either one as much as I’d like, because so far, neither produces a monthly paycheck or retirement plan. But trust me, I’m working on that!

Meanwhile, I work at the Greene County Medical Center as an administrative assistant, where I also oversee the day-to-day maintenance of the hospital’s foundation. I also work on a contract basis overseeing the renovations of the Gallup House, the boyhood home of American pollster George Gallup, in Jefferson.

Occasionally, I work as an adjunct instructor for Upper Iowa University at their Des Moines campus.

I’m involved in a lot of community volunteer projects most of them revolving around economic development and tourism in the area. I’m the president of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association, which serves as the “chamber of commerce” for this 56-mile paved trail going from Jefferson to the west side of the Des Moines area. I am also president of the Committee for a Super Cooper, the booster club for our town of 30 people and Franklin Township that surrounds it. I also serve on the Jefferson Downtown Streetscape committee.

In other words, I’m still nurturing and watching things grow – but now it’s a lot of community-spirited programs.

And there’s plenty of nurturing and growth in my marriage to my partner for life, my best pal and the man who keeps me grounded – mostly because he can sometimes be a bit flighty! As we decided early in our marriage, which took place in April of 1991, he’s “my biggest project.” He keeps me busy and happy.

We’ve done a lot in 17 years together, but perhaps most significant to our lives now is our partnership with this Internet news & opinion site, Offenburger.com. I do a lot of fun work for us on this.

I also write two features here. I write a weekly book review “What’s Carla Reading?” and that keeps me focused on reading one or more books a week. I also write “My View from the Porch,” an opinion column about what’s happening around me.

Chuck and I work hard at operating “Our Iowa Store,” an online retail business found on Offenburger.com, offering the work of Iowa artists, authors and small manufacturers.

My newest position has me serving as “Corporate Gardener” for Simple Serenity Farm. There’s no paycheck for this job, but it’s a cool way to consider myself as I work in the many gardens I have here. Plus, it just sounds fun, doesn’t it?

If I was to draft a “mission statement” for myself, it’d be “trying to have fun doing the things I like most.” And at 49, I think I’m doing a pretty good job at it.

You can write her at carla@Offenburger.com

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"Out in Greene County, Iowa"

Chuck Offenburger, 47 years covering Iowa

After a long career as a feature columnist and co-host of RAGBRAI for the Des Moines Register, Chuck Offenburger is now writing from his farm home near Cooper in Greene County, Iowa, about 55 miles west and a little north of Des Moines.

Besides his columns on this Internet site, he also is a regular in the Iowa Farm Bureau’s monthly “Family Living” magazine, which circulates statewide to 48,000 readers.

Offenburger also does freelance writing for other publications, as well as serving as a visiting instructor at colleges and high schools, teaching journalism or courses on Iowa.

He continues to travel widely in the state for stories, speeches, meetings of boards he is serving on and consulting on matters of economic development and tourism.

Chuck Offenburger, 60, got his start in print at age 13 in his hometown of Shenandoah in southwest Iowa.

That’s when he began writing sports for the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel. He continued throughout high school, winning a journalism scholarship to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

After graduating in 1969, he returned to Shenandoah and spent three years at the Sentinel, becoming managing editor. In 1972, he moved to the Register and became a general assignment reporter. In 1977, he began the four-times-per-week “Iowa Boy” column, which continued until July, 1998. He was co-host for 16 years of the internationally-known RAGBRAI – that’s the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa – with John Karras.

In 1995, Chuck and his wife Carla Offenburger organized the “Iowa 150 Bike Ride/A Sesquicentennial Expedition” of 300 cyclists across the U.S., promoting Iowa’s celebration of 150 years of statehood in 1996.

Chuck served from 1999-to-2001 as writer-in-residence at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, teaching classes in reporting and column writing and advising the student newspaper. He has also taught journalism at Loras College in Dubuque, and courses on Iowa at both Buena Vista U. and Coe College in Cedar Rapids.

Since leaving daily newspaper work, Offenburger has written three books and is completing another.

The first, completed in early 2001, is a full-length biography of Iowa business leader Bill Krause, best-known as CEO of the Kum & Go chain of convenience stores, head of the Liberty Banks group and for his wide-ranging philanthropy. It was published as Iowa’s first Internet book on this site, available free, and we plan to bring back “up” on the site again soon.

In late 2002, Chuck’s book “E. Wayne Cooley and the Iowa Girl” was published by the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union. It is a full history of that organization, which is generally recognized as having the nation’s best sports program for high school girls. The story is framed around the biography of the man who put it all together, E. Wayne Cooley, who retired in the fall of 2002 after nearly 49 years on the job. That book can be ordered from the Girls Union off the Internet site www.ighsau.org or by telephone (515) 288-9741 or in “Our Iowa Store” on this Internet site www.Offenburger.com.

In the fall of 2005, Chuck’s book “Bernie Saggau & the Iowa Boys/The Centennial History of the Iowa High School Athletic Association” was published. The IHSAA, the organization which sanctions the boys high school sports program in the state, turned 100 years old in December of 2004. Its Board of Control commissioned Offenburger in the summer of 2003 to prepare the history and to include the biography of Saggau, who retired January 1, 2005, after 37 years as executive director of the organization. That book is available in bookstores across the state, as well as from the Internet site www.ighsau.org and in “Our Iowa Store” on this site www.Offenburger.com.

He is now working on the biography of one of Iowa’s greatest sports heroes. Gary Thompson starred in basketball and baseball for little Roland High School in central Iowa from 1949-’53, leading the Rockets to three consecutive state tournament appearances and several upset victories of some of the biggest schools in the state. He went on to become a two-sport All-American for the Iowa State Cyclones, then played and coached AAU basketball across the nation and around the world. Now 72, Thompson retired in 2005 from a 34-year career as a basketball game analyst on TV coverage of Iowa State, Big Eight/Big 12 and NCAA tournament games. Thompson, who lives in Ames, heads a family business that owns and operates a small chain of convenience stores and rental properties. The Thompson biography will be available later in 2008.

Offenburger has authored three earlier books – two of them collections of his Des Moines Register columns and the other a biography of legendary Des Moines restaurateur Babe Bisignano. All were published by Iowa State University Press. You can order the first book of columns, “Iowa Boy,” from Our Iowa Store here on this Internet site. The other two sold out and have not been reprinted.

In 1999-2000, Chuck Offenburger served on Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack’s Strategic Planning Council, a 37-member panel the governor charged with the responsibility of coming up with a vision of what the state should be like by the year 2010 and an action plan of how to get there. He later served on the board of directors of a successor group, Iowans for a Better Future, as well as on the board of directors of the State Historical Society of Iowa.

Still an avid bicyclist, he is a strong advocate for development and enhancement of Iowa’s recreational trails. He currently serves as secretary of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association, which is like a “Chamber of Commerce” or development group for the whole area of the 56-mile-long trail in west central Iowa. The Offenburgers’ farmhouse is located along that trail. They are also both involved in the community booster group “Committee for a Super Cooper” in their town of Cooper, which has a population of 30.

Always a fan of nearly every kind of music, he is also a member of the choir at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Jefferson. And he is convinced every summer that “this is the year” for the Chicago Cubs.

Chuck and Carla have a step-daughter Janae Learned, who is in real estate sales in Scottsdale, Arizona, and a son Andrew Offenburger, who is in graduate school at Yale University. Janae’s husband is Chris Learned and her son is Connor Thomas Jaynes, 14. Andrew’s wife is Maria, and they have a daughter Lindsay, born in July of 2007.

You can write him at chuck@Offenburger.com

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Our Offenburger.com webmaster

Andy Upah, the wizard who keeps us “up” and running

Ah, the ways of web work! In the five years that Andy Upah has worked as webmaster of Offenburger.com for Chuck and Carla Offenburger, they may have actually talked to each other about business – in person or on the phone – maybe two dozen times. Instead, they have coordinated all that happens on this Internet site by several thousand e-mails back and forth.

When Upah, now 26, initially joined the Offenburgers, he was a junior at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake in northwest Iowa, where Chuck and Carla lived at the time. But for three years now, the site has headquartered somewhere between the Offenburgers’ Simple Serenity Farm in southern Greene County, Iowa, and West Des Moines, where Andy now lives and works.

Upah was raised on a small farm outside of Toledo in east central Iowa, where he developed early interests in farming, sports and journalism.

He was involved in 4-H, taking several woodworking and welding projects to the Iowa State Fair.

He started his athletic career as a wrestler and a fierce T-ball player. Later he switched over to basketball, football and continued in his love of baseball. At South Tama County High School, Upah was a baseball standout, helping his team to a state tournament appearance in his senior year. He also started on both offense and defense in football, and was a member of the basketball team.

He was the editor of his school newspaper, the Trojan Warrior, in his senior year. He considered going to college in journalism, but about then took a real liking to computer programming.

He was an excellent student, graduating as valedictorian at South Tama, and he also served as vice-president of the student body.

He was awarded a full tuition scholarship to Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, where he majored in computer science. At BV, Upah early-on went to work part-time for the university’s Department of Web & New Media, where he learned how to build Internet sites. He joined a couple of campus organizations, and ran their ’Net sites, too.

He met the Offenburgers at BV, and was one of a dozen students who accompanied them on a service learning project to Colorado over spring break in 2003. That same year, they had hired him and another BV computer wizard Patrick Utz to design and build “Our Iowa Store,” which offers fine Iowa products for sale on the Offenburger.com site.

Later that year, Upah succeeded Offenburger.com’s original webmaster, Andrew Offenburger, who had launched the site in March, 2001. Andrew, son of Chuck and Carla, in 2003 moved into full-time work in politics, eventually on to freelance writing in Argentina and now is a graduate student at Yale University. So Upah stepped up to take over the maintenance of this site and the development of new programming features on it.

Upah graduated from Buena Vista in May 2004 and immediately went to work full-time for Quality Consulting, Inc., in West Des Moines as a software consultant.

Andy’s mother Charlotte Upah is a CPA and runs her own accounting business in Toledo, and his father Stan is the owner of a Polaris dealership and farm machinery repair business in Toledo. In June 2005, his younger sister Sara married Luke Cross and they reside in Colorado, where Sara is an HR specialist and Luke is a high school history teacher. His younger sister Kristy is a senior at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, where she has been the setter on the Kohawk volleyball team.

In his free time Andy plays volleyball, softball and basketball, and loves to go hunting, fishing, skiing and 4-wheeler riding. He also writes an occasional guest column for Offenburger.com.

You can write him at .

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"Poggensee’s Postcards"

Don Poggensee keeps his eyes (and cameras) on Iowa for us

Maybe one reason Don Poggensee finds such wonderful views for his photographs of Iowa, which are featured in “Poggensee’s Postcards” here on Offenburger.com, is because he has looked at life in this state from so many different angles.

Poggensee, of Ida Grove in northwest Iowa, has been studying and working in both photography and aviation for over 40 years. He will be 64 in June of 2008, “on my way to 120 years old, my goal before I graduate.”

He grew up one of 11 kids on a small farm north of nearby Denison, and graduated from Denison High School. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, which gave him training both as a pilot and a flight instructor. And while he was traveling extensively with the Air Force in the early 1960s, he began developing an intense interest in photography.

“Photography has been a passion for me,” he says. “It allows me to share with people what I see through the camera’s eye. I enjoy traveling to capture the photos, and I have always wanted to share my images with others who do not get to see what I do.”

As he was improving as a photographer, he had “a desire to prove that my images were ‘good enough’ to be published in magazines,” he said. “It is a challenge to research what photos to take, asking myself about the marketability of them.” He has always enjoyed photographing nature and wildlife and “that takes tons of time, in variable weather conditions, sometimes in remote areas,” he said. “It’s indeed a challenge.”

His favorite places to shoot include Alaska, the Arctic and Prince Edward Island, but Iowa has provided him with his most frequent scenes and subjects. He estimates he has over 200,000 shots of Iowa in his photographic library. Indeed, he has passed the test of whether his photos are “good enough” for publication, as his work has been published in more than 60 magazines and newspapers across the nation and around the world, as well as in books and on greeting cards and posters. His images are also displayed in several private collections and museums, including the new Iowa Hall of Pride in downtown Des Moines. There his eye-popping photo of an Iowa cornfield is displayed wall-sized, 12-by-24 feet. Another large image of his is featured in the new Des Moines Science Center, also located downtown.

Poggensee uses Canon cameras. “Presently, it is Canon’s high-end digital camera, as well as some Canon film cameras,” he said.

While he’s made his name in photography, his primary occupation for 30 years was corporate pilot for Gomaco, the Ida Grove company that manufactures road-building equipment used around the world, as well as classic trolley cars. Earlier he flew as a commuter pilot and also managed the Ida Grove airport.

He is retired from corporate flying and now manages a digital photo lab for Gomaco. He is also involved with his wife Pam in a framing and matting studio, as well as a stock photo business called Wind Rider Images. Earlier in her career, she was an elementary and learning disabilities teacher.

The Poggensees are very active, enjoying most all outdoor activities.

You can write him at donpog@netllc.net.

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