His RAGBRAI this year was 15 wonderful miles of what he nicknamed the “Mary Riche Roots Tour.”

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

AURORA, Iowa, July 27, 2025 — So, how many of us were on the 52nd RAGBRAI, which rolled across Iowa last week? Ten thousand? For sure. Twenty thousand? Maybe on one or two of the shorter days. More?

“We were hearing there were 40,000 in Aurora!” said Rich Roepke, who for 24 years was mayor of the town, now lives in Ames but came back to be a volunteer host at the Aurora Historical Museum during RAGBRAI’s visit Saturday morning. “That’d be twice the population in all of Buchanan County!”

The town of 166 sure looked packed from the photos of the Aurora visit that the Des Moines Register published on Sunday. Those were shot between 7 and 8 a.m.

But I swear, when I pedaled into Aurora about 12:30 p.m., I was the last bicyclist to get there.

Everybody does RAGBRAI in his or her own way, you know? When I served as RAGBRAI co-host for 16 years, during my time as a Register columnist, I learned there are as many different RAGBRAIs going on each summer as there are the number of riders.

I came to love it so much that by now I’ve ridden in 35 or more RAGBRAIs, long after I left the Register in 1998.

RAGBRAI is the biggest, oldest and, in my view, best bicycle touring event in the world. It’s also one of the few truly “major league” kind of events we have in Iowa — those few events that will draw people from all across the nation and around the world to come participate in it. This summer’s RAGBRAI, covering 400-plus miles, again lived up to its grand reputation.

But this year’s RAGBRAI was different for me, for two reasons.

At 78, I’m now not up to riding a whole week. In fact, right now, I knew I wasn’t up to riding a whole day.

But when the route was announced in January, I realized that it was going to not only be passing right through my wife Mary Riche’s three hometowns — Oelwein, Stanley and Aurora in northeast Iowa — but it would also go right past the cemetery where her parents and brother are buried and also right past the farmstead where she grew up.

I immediately declared that the 15 miles of the route across her home area — on Saturday, July 26 — would be the “Mary Riche Roots Tour.” I pledged to ride it, and since she’s no longer bicycling, she pledged to be my the driver of my support vehicle.

She isn’t the only person for whom it was a roots tour. Matt Phippen, the RAGBRAI director, is a native of Oelwein, and he was proud to take the big ride into his hometown. Stores downtown had great photos of him from his childhood displayed in their windows. Barb Ehlers, one of his teachers years ago, was walking around Oelwein Friday night wearing a T-shirt saying, “I taught Matt Phippen how to read!”

I hope he had as much fun back home as Mary Riche did. We hung out with several of her friends from high school. We also had a good visit with my step-daughter, who was a support vehicle driver for a bicycling friend of hers.

We had a great time, and as we’ve both told each other afterward, we fell even deeper in love with each other in the experience. That happens on RAGBRAI, you know?

Here’s our 2025 RAGBRAI story in photos.

There’s about $120 worth of fun represented in our two wristbands and the permit for our support vehicle — and well worth it! (Most of these photos, unless otherwise credited, were shot by us RicheBurgers.)

Mary Riche’s Oelwein High School 1966 classmate Margaret Doughty Damge, who lives on a farm outside Stanley, is very active in activities in the Oelwein area — and volunteered Mary to join her working in the beer tent. They were checking IDs and issuing wristbands for admittance. One more classmate, David Mulder, arrived at the farm to spend the weekend after his week in Iowa City at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

An outstanding mural on the side of a building in downtown Oelwein.

We RicheBurgers got to spend some time Friday evening in Oelwein with Chuck’s step-daughter Janae Jaynes, of Omaha, Neb., who spent the week serving as a support vehicle driver for a friend of hers, Deb Canale, of Scottsdale, Arizona, who was riding her bicycle on RAGBRAI. (Photo by Deb Canale.)

We began our mini-RAGBRAI, which I had nicknamed the “Mary Riche Roots Tour,” on Saturday morning at her alma mater Oelwein High School. Mary is posing with the statue of the Husky dog that is the mascot of Oelwein’s sports teams. The first 15 miles of Saturday’s route went through her three hometowns — Oelwein, Stanley and Aurora — as well as going by the Stanley Cemetery where her parents and brother are buried and also right in front of the former Riche farmstead.

On the northwest corner of Stanley, the schoolhouse and gym where Mary Riche spent from kindergarten thru eighth grade still stand. The school has become a residence, but the arched roof of the old gym — where Mary once scored 32 points in a seventh grade basketball game — has collapsed.

Bicyclists entered the actual town of Stanley by pedaling between flag-bedecked combines parked along the route, adjacent to the Stanley Union Church.

When we stopped at the Stanley Union Church, which Mary Riche attended through her high school years, she met two longtime church members and the mother was a woman she’d known since childhood. They were Karen Brownell (right) and her daughter Kim Brownell Dittmer. They showed us the church, where both Mary’s father and mother held their funeral services, and about 20 years ago a church hall with a modern kitchen and up-to-date technology was added. The church and its members are still very active. Karen and Kim were both volunteering at the RAGBRAI breakfast served in Stanley.

We were the only ones in the sanctuary, so Mary sat down at the piano, opened the hymnal and started playing the piano, again, at the Stanley Union Church where she began performing when she was 4 years old. She’s a sight-reader and doesn’t play “by ear.” I didn’t hear any mistakes as she played the great old hymn “Be Still, My Soul.”

Playing the piano in the beautiful Stanley Union Church sanctuary.

Our mini-RAGBRAI moved on a mile south of Stanley to the community’s cemetery, where Mary’s parents Frank and Verda Riche, as well as her brother Dick Riche, a twin to her sister Bette, died in infancy, are buried. Bette and Dick were born prematurely at six months. Note the retractable flagpoles on either side of the cemetery sign. Those were purchased and placed, as part of Verda Riche’s bequest, with memorial funds honoring her.

The back of the gravestone for Frank and Verda Riche.

A solemn moment in our visit to the Stanley Cemetery.

By the time I was pedaling up to the former Riche farmstead, south of Stanley and west of Aurora, Mary was following right behind me in our car, since there were almost no other bicyclists still on the RAGBRAI route there. A car came up behind her, driven by a RAGBRAIer Ray Smith, of St. Louis, Mo., who’d already finished his riding. Mary noticed his vanity license plate that said “RAGBRAI” as he passed. And then he stopped on the side of the road where it turned to go to Aurora. He had noticed our car’s “Vanderbilt University” license plate frame, and “figured it had to be the RicheBurgers.” Ray was looking for us, since he grew up less than two miles south of the Riche farmstead and was a classmate of Mary’s from kindergarten through their high school graduation. And that was the start of a series of fateful events that resulted in a mini-reunion of the OCHS class of ‘66. Ray called another classmate who’d also been riding, Les Silka, who lives in northeastern Oklahoma, and told him he’d found us at the old Riche farm. Minutes later, another classmate, Rich Roepke, of Ames, Iowa, who’d been volunteering in hosting the RAGBRAI visitors in Aurora and waiting for our arrival, heard by either phone or text where we all were, and he drove over to join the impromptu mini-reunion. This photo shows (from left to right) Lois and Ray Smith, Les and Mary Silka, and us RicheBurgers. (Photo by Connie Steffen Tolan, of Waverly, Iowa, who grew up on the “Riche farm” after her parents bought it from the Riches in 1968, and who on Saturday was visiting her father Ron Steffen there on the farm.)

Oelwein High School 1966 classmates (left to right) Les Silka, Rich Roepke, Ray Smith and Mary Riche. The one person at the reunion we didn’t get in a photo was Barb Roepke, who’d meandered out of camera range.

We RicheBurgers on Main Street in Aurora at the finish of our “Mary Riche Roots Tour” on RAGBRAI. Mary’s parents Verda and Frank Riche for 25 years operated a small grocery in the brick building on the right side of the photo. During that time, they lived in a house they built two blocks south of the store.