Iowa Trivia & Tidbits - Page 2

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

—The sidewalks were getting dings and cracks from beer kegs being unloaded at bars near Iowa State University in Ames (pop. 50,731), so last August the city installed a creative solution: a shock-absorbing rubber sidewalk, made from shredded recycled tires.

first appeared: 1/11/2009

—West Branch (pop. 2,188), the birthplace of President Herbert Hoover, is located in the eastern part of the state, not the western, as reported in a previous edition. We regret the error.

first appeared: 12/29/2008

—Platted in 1846, Elkader (pop. 1,465) was named after Abd el-Kader, a young Algerian hero who led his country’s resistance against France and was in the news at the time.

first appeared: 11/30/2008

—The original White Pole Road, designated in 1910, paralleled the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad from Des Moines to Council Bluffs (pop. 58,268) and poles along the route were painted white. A section of White Pole Road has been re-created and links Dexter (pop. 689), Stuart (pop. 1,712), Menlo (pop. 365), Casey (pop. 478) and Adair (pop. 839).

first appeared: 11/16/2008

—Since 1999, artist Ray “Bubba” Sorensen II has painted a different patriotic mural each year on a huge granite boulder in Adair County (pop. 8,243) for Memorial Day. The boulder now is known as the “Freedom Rock.”

first appeared: 11/2/2008

—The crowd at Century Lanes in Alta (pop. 1,865) cheered when Dale Davis, 78, bowled a perfect 300 game in May. Nicknamed “The Hammer” for his powerful throw, Davis couldn’t see his fans—or the pins—because he is blind.

first appeared: 10/19/2008

—Correctionville (pop. 851) is so named because of the town’s location on a surveyor’s correction line, which is needed because the curvature of the Earth causes parallel lines, streets and meridians to converge as they approach the North Pole.

first appeared: 10/5/2008

—The first American woman to die in active service during World War I was Marion Crandall, also spelled Crandell, who was born in Cedar Rapids in 1872. She worked with soldiers at a YMCA in Paris and was killed in 1918 by German artillery striking the building where she was lodging.

first appeared: 9/21/2008

—The only fatality of the 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition was Sgt. Charles Floyd, who may have died of a ruptured appendix and is buried in Sioux City. A 100-foot-tall stone obelisk marks his grave.

first appeared: 9/7/2008

—A 19th-century baseball superstar, Adrian Constantine “Cap” Anson was the first player to make 3,000 hits in his professional career. Born in 1852 in Marshalltown (pop. 26,009), Anson was a player-manager for the Chicago White Stockings from 1876 to 1897.

first appeared: 8/24/2008

—The Iowa Band Museum, housed in an 1870s former rehearsal hall in Cedar Falls (pop. 36,145), chronicles the Cedar Falls Municipal Band’s rich history and preserves artifacts of other Iowa bands. Performing since 1891, the Cedar Falls band is the state’s oldest concert band.

first appeared: 8/10/2008

—Golfer Ted Kemp sunk two holes-in-one on the same round of golf in April at the Muscatine (pop. 22,697) Municipal Golf Course. The odds of such a feat are 67 million to one, according to Golf Digest.

first appeared: 7/27/2008

—One of the nation’s first educational institutions with a television station was the University of Iowa in Iowa City. The station, W9XK, broadcast during the 1930s.

first appeared: 7/13/2008

—Manson (pop. 1,893) lies near the center of a 24-mile-wide meteorite crater—one of the largest known meteorite craters in the United States—that was created 74 million years ago when a huge piece of extraterrestrial rock crashed to Earth. The town recognizes its gigantic, yet invisible, attraction with an annual Greater Crater Days.

first appeared: 6/29/2008

—Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the Netscape Internet web browser, was born in 1971 in Cedar Falls (pop. 36,145) and helped write Mosaic, the first Internet browser. Netscape’s successful initial public offering in 1995 made him an instant multimillionaire.

first appeared: 6/15/2008

—Gymnast Shawn Johnson, 16, of West Des Moines (pop. 46,403), became the fourth U.S. woman to win a world all-around title at the 2007 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships last September in Germany.

first appeared: 6/1/2008

—Hans Langseth of Kensett (pop. 280) grew a beard for more than 50 years and when he died in 1927, the beard measured 17 feet, 6 inches long. Believed to be the world’s longest beard, it was given to the Smithsonian Institution.

first appeared: 5/18/2008

—The Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend (pop. 834) is a composite of nine separate grottos, each portraying a scene in the life of Christ, and is billed as the largest collection of precious stones and gems found anywhere in one location. Priest and artist Paul Matthias Dobberstein began building the bejeweled wonder in 1912 and was working on it when he died in 1954.

first appeared: 5/4/2008

—In 1972, the Iowa Democratic Party moved the date of its caucus forward to Jan. 24, positioning it ahead of the New Hampshire primary election, and was followed by the Iowa Republican Party in 1976. The Iowa Caucus quickly gained national significance as the first-in-the-nation presidential nominating event.

first appeared: 3/9/2008

—The first female commander of the International Space Station is NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, born in 1960 in Mount Ayr (pop. 1,822) and raised in Beaconsfield (pop. 11). The mission, Expedition 16, began last October, and Whitson will serve a six-month stint.

first appeared: 2/24/2008

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