|
| |
Hometown Pride
The humble proprietor of this website spent his youth living either in or on
a farm outside of the small town of Manson, Iowa (not named after Charles
Manson, although he did once express interest in buying some vacation land
there). Manson's official slogan is "Celebrate Country Life,"
which won a controversial contest when my own entries, "Where Dreams Go to
Die" and "Let the Ennui Consume You" were disqualified.
Despite its sleepy exterior, however, Manson has the remarkable distinction of
being the site of the largest natural disaster in American history--the only
reason it isn't better known is that it happened 70-odd million years before any
humans got around to living there. However, the event is now being
celebrated on the side of U-Haul trucks nationwide:
The meteor is believed by many to have killed virtually everything in the
surrounding 850 miles. The impact was thought for a short time to have
been "the meteor that killed the dinosaurs," but before a theme park
could be built in celebration, scientific consensus moved on to an impact near
Yucatan. Still, as the signs below indicate, Manson does host a
"Greater Crater Days" every summer and we proudly claim ourselves to
be home of the "Manson Impact Structure":
 
Because of later glaciers, there is nothing about
the surface of Manson that would let you know it had once been a big ol'
smoldering crater. An interesting detail is that Manson has long drawn its water from a underground pocket that is basically the
crater. It was discovered several years ago that the untreated water, which I drank
throughout
my youth, has all sorts of intriguing chemical properties, including
"traces" of iridium (an element that is rare on earth, but common in
meteorites). So if you are ever wondering what my problem is, blame it on
the iridium.
 | Where is the Freese family farm? (Not for
a slow connection, but with exciting photos at the end) |
| See local news coverage of my father's soybean field triumph |
| See a recent local news retrospective
on my father's most successful season in the cutthroat competitive world of
purebred sheep shows |
| See local news coverage of me winning an
award for my dissertation (note: I cannot be held responsible for
the generous character of the prose here. Then again, if your
hometown paper, relying on information submitted by your mother and sister,
cannot be a vehicle of excessive accounts of personal successes, what's the
point? Something of particular pride to note is that the story about
me was accompanied by a photo, while the story immediately beneath about a
local competitor in the Miss Teen Iowa pageant was not.) 6/27/01 |
| See Manson's only intersection
with stoplights! (There would seem no good reason to retain these
stoplights except that to remove them would be to admit the town's
irreversible decline and eventual demise, sort of like when you finally have
to take the car keys away from an elderly relative. As you can see from
the photo, however, there's not necessarily a lot of activity at this
intersection.) |
| Judge a catty
local controversy for yourself! In
2002, Manson painted its watertower. According to the "official story,"
the water tower is painted navy blue, celebrating the colors of
Manson-Northwest Webster high school (the "Cougars").
However, some claim that the watertower was actually been painted a rueful
purple, reflecting the earlier school colors of Manson High School (the "Eagles")
before its not-so-congenial consolidation with Northwest Webster High School
(the "Bulldogs").
You can decide for yourself what color it is. (Actually, this photo
might leave some ambiguity, and my batteries ran out when I tried to take a
shot from a couple of feet away from the side. So just let me say
that when you look at this thing up close, you realize that one would need the
enormous capacity for denying the self-evident that small-town life brings in
order to see the watertower as being any color other than purple.) 12/26/02 |
Regarding the
Calhoun County Journal-Herald
| In response to voluminous inquiries about the more general content and
flavor of my hometown and its newspaper, I scoured the previous year's
issues of the Calhoun County Journal-Herald when I went home
for Christmas 2001 (my wonderful mother always saves these for me), and I
selected biggest front-page crime story to
hit my hometown in the past year, the biggest front-page positive business
development story in the area, and an example of the paper's
ever-progressive editorials. |
| During Christmas 2002, I once again spent my customary hour going
through the previous year's issues of the local newspaper that my Mom saves
for me. This time, I selected the biggest front-page
county government story
of the year; an example of the paper's "society
news"; an example of the
urban renewal going
on in Manson; an advertisement for one of
the stand-up comedy shows that
I've taken to occasionally doing at one of the local bars (I didn't choose my
stage name); and yet another one of the paper's progressive
editorials. |
| See an example of the
Journal-Herald's spelling prowess in a report on an intriguing solution by the
Manson Northwest-Webster drill team to problems of extreme shyness among its
members. |
|
