Photos by MARY RICHE/Text by CHUCK OFFENBURGER GRAND JUNCTION, Iowa, Sept. 23, 2022 — The Democratic Party seems alive and well in Greene County, judging by a turnout of 88 people at the party’s annual fundraising dinner here Thursday night. Inspired by a fiery speech from Deidre DeJear, the party’s nominee for governor, the crowd…
Photos by MARY RICHE/Text by CHUCK OFFENBURGER WAHPETON, Iowa, Sept. 22, 2022 — I felt like we’d almost checked-in at Grant Wood’s Art Colony in Stone City, back in the 1930s. But instead, it was the second annual “Okoboji Writers Retreat” that former Des Moines Register columnist and WHO radio talkshow host Julie Gammack and her…
By MARY RICHE DES MOINES, Iowa, Sept. 13, 2022 — I’ve been thinking about how I used to spend Sundays with my family and even more about the Stanley Union Church where I grew up. It was a non-denominational country church in rural northeast Iowa, though it was in the town of Stanley, pop. 81. …
By MARY RICHE DES MOINES, Iowa, Sept. 2, 2022 — I got married this morning. The groom, Chuck Offenburger, is a septuagenarian. So am I. We were friends for 47 years before we fell in love and decided to spend the rest of our lives together, however long that might be, as husband and wife.…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER DES MOINES, Iowa, Sept. 2, 2022 – Late this past April, when Mary Riche let me take her back to Stanley and Aurora, her tiny hometowns in northeast Iowa. and when she answered dozens of questions from me as we made the long round-trip, I knew I wanted to marry her. And…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER and MARY RICHE DES MOINES, Iowa, Sept. 5, 2022 — A former pastor of ours at Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ here sometimes talked about how in moments of extreme happiness, we are “blissed out!” And that’s how the two of us have been living since our marriage at late morning on…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER JEFFERSON, Iowa, Aug. 31, 2022 — A group of 18 Latino business owners & entrepreneurs from Denison, Storm Lake, Perry, Carroll, Coon Rapids and Omaha spent Tuesday, Aug. 30, in Jefferson and Greene County on an invitation from Greene County Development Corp. to come see opportunities here for re-location, expansion or totally…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER JEFFERSON, Iowa, Aug. 4, 2022 — Before Mark Prosser was hired 33 years ago as the new police chief in Storm Lake in northwest Iowa, he’d been a homicide detective in O’Fallon, Ill., also serving as an investigator and supervisor for a “Major Case” homicide unit working the entire St. Louis metro…
By STEVE SAWYER ATLANTA, Georgia, Aug. 4, 2022 — Do small towns or big cities provide a better place to live and raise a family? We could discuss this question for decades and be no closer to an answer than we are when we discuss “nature” or “nurture,” or which came first, the chicken or…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER JEFFERSON, Iowa, July 18, 2022 — When Deidre DeJear accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor of Iowa at the state convention last month, she reminded the crowd that she came to this state 18 years ago “on a hope and a prayer.” She’d been “a little girl from Mississippi,” African American,…
