By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

DES MOINES, Iowa, Jan. 31, 2026 — He was so full of life.

That was true late in September at the 60-year reunion of our Shenandoah High School Class of 1965 — “the biggest and the best,” as we always say. It was still true as late as November. But suddenly, about Christmastime, horrible pain started sweeping him.

Early on Friday, Jan. 30, the damnable disease pancreatic cancer, which so often moves quickly, ended the life of my great friend since childhood, Bob Longman. He was 78 and living in the southwest Iowa town of Sidney, 15 miles west of Shenandoah, and he was active in both communities to the end.

With him were his wife Ellen West Longman, who before retirement had a 40-year career as editor and publisher of the Sidney Argus Herald, and their daughter Molly Longman, 31, a rising star in journalism who formerly wrote for the Des Moines Register and now bases in New York City. She writes for “The Daily Skimm” newsletter, “Wired” and is a stringer for the New York Times metro and politics desks.

Bob Longman, at the 60-year reunion of his Shenandoah High School last September. (Photos by Mary Riche)

A visitation is scheduled Friday, Feb. 6, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Nishna Valley Funeral and Cremation Service in Shenandoah. The funeral service will be Saturday, Feb. 7, at 2 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church in Shenandoah, with burial at Rose Hill Cemetery, also in Shenandoah.

Molly told me Saturday morning that her dad “often said he’d been kind of an ‘ornery kid,’ and truthfully, I think he kept a lot of that spirit his whole life.”

Did he ever!

He came up with so many quick, great lines that have stayed with me forever.

When we were sophomore boys at Shenandoah High, one day we were having a conversation about dating with our classmate Kathy Anderson. “Why are all you girls in our class dating all these older boys?” Bob asked her. Kathy was quick to respond: “Because we’re tired of waiting for you guys to ask us out.” Bob responded to that even quicker: “Yeah, but you’d get a lot cooler guys if you waited for us!”

At either the 50- or 55-year reunion of our Class of ’65, Bob served as emcee — and he was still kidding the “girls” in our class. Looking over the audience, then all in our 60s or older, he cracked, “I’m surprised that so many of our girls seem to have had their mothers represent them here tonight!”

His daughter Molly has also aptly described him as “an adventurer.” That goes waaaaaaay back with me.

I think Bob and I were about 8 years old, which means this story happened in about 1955, when we’d become accustomed to riding our bicycles all over Shenandoah. This was without parental supervision, although as you readers in small Iowa towns can attest, there was always plenty of adult supervision. The two of us decided we would ride our bikes out on to Iowa Highway 2 and do a circumnavigation of the whole perimeter of Shenandoah.

We were a mile or so southeast of town when we saw a curving stretch of highway that had earlier been part of Highway 2. But it had recently been fenced off because it was too dangerous — “Dead Man’s Curve,” we later learned it had been nicknamed. We rode out bicycles around the fence, and did a couple laps up and back on Dead Man’s Curve. Actually, in our 8-year-old minds, we thought we’d discovered it!

We pedaled another couple miles east on the main highway, then north on a gravel road. That’s when we adventurers realized we were lost — and scared. My memory is we stopped at a farmhouse and asked for help in calling one of our parents to plead for a car ride home.

Bob Longman (standing) in a breakfast chat at the Class of 1965 (“the biggest and the best”) reunion last September with Bruce Ketcham (left) of Shenandoah and Joellen Roberts Roffman of Iowa City.

In 1957, when Shenandoah’s “Everly Brothers” had just had their first rock ’n’ roll hit “Bye Bye Love,” Phil Everly made a visit back home. Phil was staying for a few days with the Danielson family, whose son Jim was a boyhood pal of the Everlys, next door to Longmans’ home on 7th Avenue. We had plenty of parental supervision then, warning two 10-year-olds not to be sneaking over and bugging Phil Everly. But Bob and I led the neighborhood gang in doing just that.

It was so worth it! A couple of afternoons, the young rocker came out on the front porch of the Danielson home, sat down, played his guitar and sang for us. The second afternoon, when we were out there waiting hopefully for him, we all argued what we wanted. “I want to hear him sing ‘Bye Bye Love’!” I think I said. Bob might have said, “I want to hear ‘Bird Dog’!” Then Janice Livermore, who was about 14 and obviously more worldly than many of us, said, “I don’t care what he sings — I want to tear his clothes off and kiss him all over!” It was kind of like our introduction to rock ’n’ roll, you know?

No more than a year later, Bob and I and our neighborhood gang found a new hanging-out spot, in a rough equipment storage area behind an industry in the southwest corner of town. We fantasized that our rivals in the “Banana Gang,” older boys in a distant neighborhood, were probably going to attack us as we played back there. There were piles of gravel, probably left over from some paving or construction job. We decided to store some “ammunition” on the roof of the adjacent old industrial building, picked up rocks and started pitching up on the building.

Somebody threw too low and hit a window, which of course broke. Evidently that throw was contagious. We all started throwing rocks at the windows, and I think we broke out a half-dozen or more of them! The next day I was summoned from my 5th grade school classroom because a Shenandoah police officer and my own mother wanted to talk to me in the principal’s office. They told me I’d been identified as one of the rock throwers, since the old industrial building was the back side of the industry where Mom was the office manager!

She and the policeman pumped me for names of other rock throwers, and I must have complied. Bob was consoling me as we walked home after school that afternoon. And when we got to the Longman home, the same police officer was there waiting for us, with Bob’s parents.

The upside of that? After paying our fines — the total cost of replacing the windows on the back side of the old industrial building — I don’t recall that any of us in the neighborhood gang were in police trouble ever again.

Bob Longman, whip smart, especially in math and science, became one of the academic leaders of our Class of ’65. He was also a leading member of the SHS golf team that finished runner-up for the state championship. He had a love of that game the rest of his life.

He went on to the excellent Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. I was at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

He was still an adventurer. One late afternoon in January 1968, I received a call from the phone operator in the Vanderbilt student center. “There is a friend of yours, visiting from another college, up here at the desk,” she said. “He says his name is Bob Longman. Please come talk to him.”

My surprise visitor told me he was worn out at Carleton College, felt like he needed a break and decided to go somewhere. He thought of me in Nashville, and my memory is he hitchhiked across five states to get there! He stuck around for two or three days, sharing my dorm room.

Bob delighted my dorm neighbors and other Vandy pals with his road stories. They already thought I was flakey, for my quickness to take off on reporting trips for the student newspaper. And then they met Bob! One of them asked him, “So what do the people back in Shenandoah, Iowa, think of Chuck?” They howled when Bob answered, “Why, they regard Chuck as a pillar of the community!”

Bob decided he should find a job, and the idea of working on a riverboat had somehow occurred to him. My best Vandy buddy, Douglas T. Bates III, then and now of Centerville, Tennessee, knew his attorney father represented a barge line on the Ohio River. Bates called his dad, who called a barge captain, who told Bob Longman he could come for a job interview.

The captain, as I recall, had a long talk with Bob, including telling him all about riverboat work, then encouraging him to return to Carleton College — and to call his parents back in Iowa enroute.

It all worked out well. Bob Longman went back to Carleton, graduated and then joined the Navy, serving in that Vietnam War era in both the Philippines and in Japan.

In 1975, he moved back to Shenandoah, going to work for Central Surveys, a polling and product satisfaction company which Bob’s father Bill Longman served as president. Bob worked his way up from the survey teams that did polling across the nation and took over as president when his dad died in 1987. Bob headed the company until he retired in 2014.

SHS memorabilia always on display at the Depot Restaurant & Lounge in the ol’ hometown of Shenandoah, Iowa.

After that? I told you he had a lifelong love of golf, and he worked until his own death as one of the greenskeepers at the golf course in Shenandoah, where he was also a frequent player with other lifetime friends of ours. “The fellas,” Bob called them, according to his daughter Molly.

Interestingly, both Bob Longman and his wife Ellen West Longman headed companies that wound up being weakened and then eliminated by the rise of the internet — Bob’s polling company and Ellen’s family newspaper. Molly said both handled that well, with primary concern for their employees and communities, not so much for themselves and their own security.

“Dad and Mom were really devoted to each other,” Molly said. “They met when they were walking on the Wabash Trace Nature Trail, and I like to think they turned that into a walk through life together.”

Ellen was injured in a home accident last spring, and Bob was her steady, daily caregiver throughout her recovery.

“During that time,” Molly said, “he’d say to her, ‘It’s me and you. I can’t be me without you being you, so you’ve got to get well.’ He’s always been that way to me, too. Truthfully, I’ve talked to him almost every day of my life. He’s been the first person I’d go to when I needed advice. It’s been like that since I was a little kid. I think we were kind of kindred spirits. He was the best dad in the world.”

One of the best friends in the world, too.

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