By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

JEFFERSON, Iowa, Aug. 27, 2025 — My wife Mary Riche said she’d do the bidding last November when we were attending the Jefferson Rotary Club’s annual dinner and auction to benefit local charities and good causes.

And when the live auction item “Dinner (or lunch) with Doug” came up for bidding, I was begging Mary right from the start, “Raise it! Raise it!” A couple of other people in the big crowd were contesting us.

“Doug” is Doug Rieder, who turns 69 years old this Friday. That’s the same day he will stat his 47th year on local radio as the play-by-play “Voice of the Rams,” our teams from Greene County High School here. He’s actually in his 50th year in radio, thanks to his earlier, brief career stops in Atlantic and Fort Dodge.

Way back last November, at the Rotary auction, I figured getting to have a long chat with Rieder — over a meal — would be great fun anytime. But it would be especially so as a primer for the next year of Iowa high school and college sports.

 

Mary, bless her heart, kept raising our bid. And we won, for $700! We knew the Rotary Club would put it to good use.

Our plan was to do a nice dinner or lunch with Doug and his wife Sue Rieder, but darned if we could ever make it work with our schedules. So as the start of this new sports year approached, Doug and I met for lunch at Casa de Oro, the fine Mexican restaurant in Jefferson. And I was in for another $12.50, paying for his sopito.

But it was so worth the total amount, to hear all Rieder’s stories from the press boxes — and beyond.

A native of Newhall in eastern Iowa, he graduated in radio broadcasting from Iowa Central Community College in Fort Dodge, then in 1976 joined KJAN in Atlantic for two years, before moving on to KWMT-KKEZ in Fort Dodge. In May of ’79, he moved on to Jefferson when KDLS, of Perry, opened a new studio here. Rieder began doing news, sports and advertising sales. The fun started and the memories began building, almost immediately.

In the summer of 1981, he and some new Jefferson friends went to a Major League Baseball game in Kansas City. Rieder was able to get a media pass, meandered on the field pre-game, and even wound up loaning his pen to Cleveland manager Davey Garcia so he could fill-out his line-up card. “Young man,” Garcia said to Rieder, “do you happen to have a pen I could use?” A few minutes later, Rieder and his friends watched from the stands when Garcia carried the line-up card out to the umpires. Tom Powers, a Jefferson teacher and coach then who is still an occasional color commentator on broadcasts with Rieder, gasped to the group, “There is Doug’s inkright at home plate in a Major League ball park!”

In 1982, Rieder was broadcasting the game when the boys basketball team from a neighboring high school, East Greene, beat Charter Oak-Ute in a substate final game and qualified to go to the state tournament.

“If I ever start to get too big-headed about my career, I think back to that East Greene game,” Rieder said. “It was played in Denison, and we were broadcasting from a crow’s nest up above the stands. So I had to push my radio equipment up into the crow’s nest, then climb up a ladder to get there. Randy Grossman was there, broasting for Charter Oak-Ute on KDSN radio in Denison. When we got to halftime, Randy yelled over, ‘Hey, your station called my station and said to tell you that you’re off the air!’ I’m pretty sure I said a few naughty words right then. But I started checking my radio equipment to see what was wrong. Then I looked down, and I saw my foot was right on the plug into an outlet. I had unplugged it myself! If that happened today on the air, I’d admit it. But back then, I plugged it back in, and when I knew we were back on the air, I said, ‘I apologize for the technical difficulties.’ ”

In 1983, he broadcasted the games as Jefferson High finished second in the state baseball tournament.

In 1986 and ’87, he did play-by-play as another neighboring school, Paton-Churdan, won back-to-back state football championships in Class 1-A.

In 1988, he did the games that carried Jefferson High’s girls basketball team to a third place finish in the state tournament, with three girls from that team moving on to play NCAA Division I basketball — Trisha Waugh at Iowa, Cathy Proctor at Kentucky and Kristi Kinne at Drake.

He has closely followed the careers of other local athletes who went on to notable college sports achievements — Bryce Paup, of Scranton High, a great player at the University of Northern Iowa, All-Pro in the NFL, and now assistant defensive line coach at Iowa State University; brothers Jim and Lant Doran, of Paton-Churdan and Iowa State U football; Carter Morton, an all-around athlete at Greene County High and now an All-American in decathlon for UNI; brothers Tyler and Jesse Miller, giant football linemen now starring at Iowa State and South Dakota.

Back to memorable prep games and tournaments, Rieder was “on the call” in 1999, when the Jefferson-Scranton football team went to Harlan and knocked off that perennial powerhouse, 6-0, in the playoffs, and moved on to the semi-finals in the UNI-Dome in Cedar Falls before losing to Central Lyon/George-Little Rock.

Through the years, he did play-by-play of five of the six Jefferson or Greene County High boys that won state wrestling championships.

He’s been to girls state tournaments with several softball teams.

And now he’s doing high school soccer matches, too. “I never saw a soccer game until we started the sport here in 2019,” Rieder said. “I’m really bad at soccer.”

Is that a half-dozen or more sports for which he’s done play-by-play?

And how many total games? “Oh, wow, I don’t even know,” he said. “I once started trying to count them, but I couldn’t begin to get them all. A few thousand games, for sure.”

 

 

His home base now is station KGRA, 98,.9 on the FM dial, with nearly all games also streamed on the internet at www.raccoonvalleyradio.com.

Most of his color commentators through the years are still with him — former teachers and coaches like Tom Powers and John Rowland, current Greene County Schools superintendent Brett Abbotts and activities director Dave Wright; banker Scott Weber; attorney Keith Pedersen; seed dealer Dustin Fouch; car dealer Tony Franklin; lawn care specialist J.J. Hoyle, and also Doug Rieder’s two step-sons, Ryan MacLagan and Brent MacLagan, who occasionally come home from Woodbury, Minn., and Coralville, Ia., to join Doug in the booth. Both MacLagans were excellent athletes in their high school years in Jefferson.

For 25 years, Rieder also was part of a broadcast team that did delayed weekly telecasts of seven different Jefferson High sports on the local cable TV system. The panel discussing the games, matches and meets included newspaperman Rick Morain, Rieder and the head coaches, with local businessperson Guy Richardson doing the filming.

And from 1993 to 2012, Rieder also served as sports editor of the Jefferson Bee & Herald newspapers. For nine of those years, her also served as managing editor of the Glidden Graphic weekly newspaper in a neighboring community. For five years, he also sold life insurance.

His is a career that, in 2023, landed him in the Greene County High School Sports Hall of Fame.

But he’s been active in so much more in the community than just sports.

Rieder chaired Jefferson’s iconic Bell Tower Festival in 1984 and has been a fixture announcing the festival parades. He’s acted and sang in musicals staged by the community theater group; served as president of the Chamber of Commerce; sang in a church choir; serves on the county’s ISU Extension Council; is a board member of the community foundation; he survived colon cancer in 2008-’09 and then headed the county’s chapter of the American Cancer Society, and, yes, he’s been a Rotarian since a month after arriving in Jefferson.

Plus, he’s taken an interest in local sports heroes who were active before he got here — like Jim Doran Sr., who was a pro football star with the Detroit Lions after learning the game at Buena Vista College and Iowa State U, and who later farmed near Paton, and the amazing Doreen Wilber, the Jefferson native who became the Olympic gold medalist in archery in the 1972 games in Germany.

And there was Donald Wilson, who was a Jefferson High School football player, but not a big star, before he graduated in 1926. It is Wilson’s story that has become Doug Rieder’s all-time favorite — and mine, too — among local sports stories.

 

“He was pretty small, even for that time when players weren’t so big,” Rieder said. “He must have been fairly fast, because his nickname in high school was ‘Speedy.’ But for some reason, he decided he wanted to play football for the University of Michigan — which was one of the best college teams of that era — and their Hall-of-Fame coach Fielding Yost. You can imagine, nobody else thought that this little guy from Iowa could do that. But Speedy Wilson didn’t give a crap what anybody else thought, he was going to do it.”

Wilson wrote to Yost, who told the lad he was welcome to try out for the Wolverines team. But by the time Wilson enrolled, Yost had moved up to athletic director and hired a replacement for himself as the coach. That was one disappointment for Wilson.

“I don’t know how many running backs Michigan would have had back then, but Donald Wilson was on the bottom rung of the ladder,” Rieder said, recounting his research on the story. “And they must not have thought he was all that fast, because at Michigan they changed his nickname from ‘Speedy’ to ‘Little Red,’ apparently because of his hair color.

“Even though he was on the bottom rung of that ladder — and not for one year, not two, but for three years — he would NOT give up. And in that time, his mother back in Jefferson passed away, and he had to deal with that. But he always went to practice. Finally, in his senior year, the coaches told him he would get to travel with the team. He had ‘bulked up’ by then — he was still just 5 ft. 7, but by then he weighed 140 pounds!

“Still, he never got into a game until there were just two games left in that fourth year. By then, Michigan’s running backs had been depleted with injuries. Their next to the last game was at Minnesota, and the Gophers were good then, with the famous Bronco Nagurski as their star. And that was when ‘Little Red’ Wilson finally got to play.

“Late in the game, with Minnesota leading 6-0, Michigan started a drive. The quarterback Joe Gembis threw a pass to Wilson, who carried it 35 yards to the Michigan 3 yardline. Then another running back Maynard Morrison ran it for two consecutive carries, the second one for a touchdown. Gembis kicked the extra point, and Michigan won it, 7-6!”

The Michigan Daily student newspaper on the following day had a banner headline: “WOLVERINES UPSET GOPHER TEAM, 7-6!” The sub-headline was: “Wilson and Gembis are stars as invading varsity outplays Minnesota in all departments!”

The next week, in the final game of the season, Michigan and Iowa played to a scoreless tie. “Wilson started in that game, I believe,” Rieder said. “And he had some carries.”

Donald Wilson lived out his adult life in New Hampshire, was active in his community, and he died in 1962.

“I love to tell that story to kids today,” Rieder continued. “I tell them that Donald Wilson had all the reasons to quit, but he wouldn’t give up. He’d set his goal, and he was going to reach it. I tell the kids now that if you change your own mind about what you want to do in life, fine. If it’s your decision, and you get to make it, that’s good. But don’t let somebody else limit you!”

Hearing Doug Rieder tell the Donald Wilson story again was indeed worth $700, in my view.

Then he told me one other thing about it that made it even more precious.

“So, how’d you hear about the Wilson story?” I asked him.

“It was back in the early 1990s,” Rieder said. “I was singing in the choir at St. Joseph Catholic Church back then, and the guy singing next to me was Justice David Harris, who was on the Iowa Supreme Court and lived in Jefferson. We were both tenors.

“Justice Harris knew of my interest in football, and one night at choir we were talking about the sport. He said, ‘Doug, there was a pretty good football player at Jefferson back in the 1920s that you ought to look into — Donald Wilson. It’s a pretty good story, from what I’ve heard.’ ”

Then he shared what he knew of it.

Rieder wrote to the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, and a researcher made copies of the stories from the Michigan Daily. He sent those to Rieder, along with an invoice for $9.54 in copying fees.

The Donald Wilson story is a good one, all right. And so is the story of Doug Rieder, the “Voice of the Rams.”

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You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com.