By CHUCK OFFENBURGER IOWA CITY, Iowa, Feb. 5, 2015 – I had a flashback the other night to April of 1983, when I learned that the University of Iowa was offering a course in “billiards.” So of course, I drove right over here to audit the class one evening back then, and wrote the following…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER COOPER, Iowa, Jan. 13, 2015 – If you were a college student in the mid to late 1960s, especially in the South like I was at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, you had a front row seat to observe some of the biggest changes in American history. But if you had any heart at…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER COOPER, Iowa, Jan. 14, 2015 – Late last spring, an ugly story that had been hiding for 45 years erupted in front of me, and I barely knew what to think. It involves a black basketball player beating up a white sportswriter in our student years back at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. I was…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER JEFFERSON, Iowa, Jan. 30, 2015 — When I heard that Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks had died last week, I immediately thought of Randy Bunkers, co-owner with his wife Phyllis of the famous Bunkers Dunkers Bakery on the east side of the courthouse square in our county seat town of Jefferson. As…
By CHUCK OFFENBURGER JEFFERSON, Iowa, March 6, 2015 — Let’s see, how is it that the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil’s weather predictions work out there in Pennsylvania? Isn’t it that if Phil comes out of his burrow on Groundhog Day and sees his shadow, there’ll be six more weeks of winter? In Iowa, weather information is easier…