Iowa Trivia & Tidbits - Page 13

Looking for Iowa trivia? Try our list Iowa little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

Host of the popular radio and television game show Queen for a Day, Jack Bailey of Hampton (pop. 4,218) crowned 5,000 women and gave away $23 million from 1945 to 1964.

first appeared: 7/7/2002

Admitted to the Union Dec. 28, 1846, Iowa became the 29th of the 50 states.

first appeared: 6/30/2002

Comprised of 41 buildings on 129 acres, the entire campus of Cornell College in Mount Vernon (pop. 3,390) is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

first appeared: 6/23/2002

The word “blizzard” to describe a violent snowstorm first appeared in the Vindicator newspaper in 1870 in Estherville (pop. 6,656). Midwestern newspapers popularized the usage. “Blizzard” originally described a volley of musket fire.

first appeared: 6/16/2002

Before 1865, slaves fleeing the South found sanctuary at the Rev. John Todd’s home in Tabor (pop. 993).

first appeared: 6/9/2002

In the early 1900s, Muscatine (pop. 22,697) sewed up the title “The Pearl Button Capital of the World” for manufacturing 1.5 billion buttons a year from Mississippi River mussel shells.

first appeared: 6/2/2002

Audubon (pop. 2,382) beefed up its cattle-country image in 1964 with Albert, a 45-ton concrete bull with baby blues and standing 30 feet tall.

first appeared: 5/26/2002

The Rev. Robert Harold Schuller, best known for his Hour of Power television ministry, was born Sept. 16, 1926, and raised on a farm in Alton (pop. 1,095).

first appeared: 5/19/2002

The world’s largest strawberry—a 1,300-pound fiberglass monument standing 15 feet tall—stands in front of city hall in Strawberry Point (pop. 1,386).

first appeared: 5/12/2002

The average home-to-work commute in Des Moines is 18 minutes.

first appeared: 5/5/2002

Awed by the trees and rolling hills near Nashua (pop. 1,618) en route to see his fiancée, William Pitts was inspired to write the hymn, The Church in the Wildwood, in 1857.

first appeared: 4/28/2002

A German shepherd named Buddy was inducted into Iowa’s Hall of Fame for Courageous Animals last August for distracting a 1,500-pound African antelope, which had escaped from a game farm, giving his owner, Betty Kuhl, of Thurman (pop. 236) time to reach her home safely.

first appeared: 4/21/2002

Maytag Corp. traces its roots to 1893 when F.L. Maytag began manufacturing farm implements in Newton (pop. 15,579). To offset seasonal slumps in business, he introduced a wooden-tub washing machine in 1907. The machines proved so popular that Maytag devoted himself full-time to the washing machine business.

first appeared: 4/14/2002

In 1985, Ted Waitt founded Gateway Corp., one of the world’s leading personal computer manufacturers, on his family’s cattle farm near Sioux City. Its rural beginning gave birth to the company’s trademark black-and-white cow spots, which appear on every box shipped.

first appeared: 4/7/2002

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin was born in Cumming (pop. 162) on Nov. 19, 1939, to a coal miner father and Slovenian immigrant mother.

first appeared: 3/31/2002

During a wave of anti-German feelings at the end of World War I, the town of Germania was re-named Lakota (pop. 255) in 1919.

first appeared: 3/24/2002

James Norman Hall, co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty, was born in Colfax (pop. 2,223) on April 22, 1887. He moved to Tahiti shortly after World War I and died there in 1951.

first appeared: 3/17/2002

Iowa’s oldest Hispanic community is in Fort Madison (pop. 10,715), where Latinos came to build a railroad in 1895. Now, more than 82,000 Hispanics comprise Iowa’s largest minority.

first appeared: 3/10/2002

Kinderhook Oil and Gas Co. plans to drill Iowa’s first commercial oil well near Shambaugh (pop. 188) this spring. A test well last August revealed a small pocket of oil that is expected to yield about 8,000 barrels over a decade.

first appeared: 3/3/2002

A sign near one of the two intersections in Ricketts (pop. 144) states that it’s in the middle of nowhere and is 400 miles from Gay, Mich.; Tab, Ind.; Zap, N.D., and Peele, Okla.

first appeared: 2/24/2002

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