The staple of traditional summer cookouts is celebrating a major milestone this year. Grabbing a burger from a fast-food place, or throwing one on the grill is second nature to most Iowans. It was something new though 100 years ago. Nancy Degner of the Iowa Beef Industry Council says the hamburger was used in the 1800′s, but the first commercial use of hamburger came at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Degner says thousands of buns, pickles and gallons of mustard and ketchup later — we’re still frying and grilling the burger. She says Americans consumed more thirteen-BILLION burgers in 2003, and she says we average around 30 pounds of ground beef per person per year. Degner says the research shows hamburgers are the most popular food for the grill, followed by steak and chicken. Degner says the Iowa Beef Industry Council will hold events around the state to celebrate the 100th birthday of the burger.She says the Iowa Beef Industry Council has information about ground beef, and 100 ideas for building a better burger on its website. You can visit the website at www.iabeef.org.
Cicadas need 95 degrees to make their music
Forget about the boys of summer. The -bugs- of summer have emerged from their long slumber. The strange, clicky cry of the cicada fills the air in many parts of Iowa. The inch-long insects are more plentiful than you’d imagine — one-and-a-half million per acre — about a ton’s worth. Entomologist John Oddland says “The concentration itself helps them to survive. These animals are helpless against predators, at least one by one. But what they achieve is predator satiation. There’s so many of them that the predators can’t eat them all.” Most cicadas only live five weeks, after spending nearly two decades maturing before emerging from their shells. Odland says the survival of cicada young may depend on their mother’s choice of the tree on which she lays her eggs, which take 17 years to mature. Odland says “Seventeen years is a long time in the life of a tree. Only a few generations of cicadas can use the same tree, so that evolution may select for those mothers who seek young trees that have a long lifespan that can nourish their young for the next 17 years. Those young trees are also most likely to be found along sunlit forest edges.” The serenade of the male cicada is perhaps the loudest sound produced by any insect. To properly sing, Odland says the male needs to have a body temperature of about 95 degrees. Odland says “It takes a lot of energy to make all that noise. The animal really has to warm up. A few males start singing, they set up what’s known as a ‘calling center,’ and it’s likely that other males join that calling center to increase the amount of noise, rather than call individually, when someone else has already started. So, they concentrate partly to make more noise and attract more females—same theory as a heavy metal band. The noise you hear is from the male cicada, searching for a mate, but the racket makes him an obvious target for predators. Females who survive the onslaught can lay up to 600 eggs each, assuring survival of the species.
Iowa veterans celebrate national WWII memorial
The dedication of the new World War Two Memorial this weekend has sparked an excitement among the Iowans who served. Iowa veterans who served in World War Two have gathered in small towns and large throughout the state over the years to play the old songs and remember those who served and those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. But they’ve never had a national memorial to their effort. It took 60 years from the time the landings at Normandy that started the end to the war, and 10 years since plans for the memorial itself got underway, to make it become a reality. Iowa American Legion Commander John Ross isn’t sure what caused the delay, but says part of it is that we just forgot about the war. He says it’s awfully easy to forget unless you happen to have been one of them that was there. Ross, who served near the tail end of World War Two and in the Korean war, has seen the memorial. He says it has reflecting pool in front, and then a series of columns dedicated to the different areas of World War Two. Each one of the columns has a wreath. He calls it “just a gourgeous memorial.” The dedication of the World War Two memorial comes at a time when interest in the war is surging. Ross says the attacks of September 11th have helped refocus the nation on the sacrafice made by the young men and women who fought the war. Ross says the veterans he knows are thrilled to finally see their memorial become a reality, and he calls it long overdue. He says they were “the greatest generation” , and we owe a lot to them. Ross, who’s from Osage, hopes the memorial reminds generations into the future of the things the veterans did, and he hopes all Iowans continue remembering the veterans. Ross says sometimes when we leave the cemetery and the parade is over, we forget about the veterans. Ross says that’s not right and veterans should be remembered every day. He says you should thank a veteran, that’s all they ask, just for a thank-you.
Vilsack’s brushes with disaster
Once he became governor, it sometimes seemed as if Tom Vilsack might not survive the experience. Early in his first term, Vilsack traveled to the far east on a trade mission, and wound up in the midst of an earthquake in Taiwan.
“I had rosary beads next to my bed. I grabbed them and I just said a prayer. In essense, I said you know if this is the time, I’m ready, and if it’s not, thanks for the opportunity to live another day,” Vilsack said during a telephone conference call with reporters back in Des Moines. “Things that were in the bathroom began flying around and basically it was very similar to a scene out of ‘The Exorcist’ with things flying all over the room.”
His next brush with danger came during the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. As Vilsack made his way to the conference center, he found himself in the midst of the rioting. The governor’s state trooper escort grabbed Vilsack’s belt and pulled him out of the mayhem.
Vilsack himself spawned a political storm in 1999 when he signed an executive order declaring that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender state workers were not to be discriminated against because of their sexuality. A group of republican legislators sued, and hired a lawyer named Mark McCormick to press the case. McCormick is the democrat Vilsack beat in a primary in 1998 on his way to winning the governor’s race.
During his five years as governor, Vilsack has had three chiefs of staff and six different people have served in the role of press secretary or communications director.
Thomas Fogarty, an editor at U-S-A Today who used to cover politics for the Des Moines Register, says Vilsack’s tension with reporters was evident during his years in the senate. Fogarty says Vilsack had an “idealized vision” of what the press should do and wasn’t bashful about showing his dissatisfaction.
“I don’t think it much matters on the national stage,” Fogarty said during an interview with Radio Iowa. “I think if he were to become the vice presidential candidate the press would have at him in very controlled settings and I don’t think they would ever have that sort of informal contact that you have 14 hours a day sitting 15 feet away from him in the Iowa Senate chamber.”
Radio Iowa news director O.Kay Henderson has also spent hours covering Tom Vilsack. More on that experience is next in Radio Iowa’s review of Vilsack’s career.
Vilsack: weathering the storms
In January of 1999, Tom Vilsack was sworn in as Iowa’s 40th governor. Republicans Bob Ray and Terry Branstad had been governor for 30 years, and Vilsack offended statehouse democrats and the state workers union that had backed him when he chose to keep many of the administrators who’d been working for the previous republican governor. Lowell Junkins, the democrats’ 1988 candidate for Governor and a former Iowa Senate leader, is a backroom advisor to Vilsack and Junkins contends Vilsack kept those managers around to signal he was willing to work with republicans.
“It was well intended,” Junkins said during an interview with Radio Iowa. “It was an act of statesmanship from my perspective and he got bit by both sides. It’s a case where statesmanship really did just cost him a big kick in the pants by both sides.”
Then came the death of two-year-old Shelby Duis. The Spirit Lake toddler died of child abuse — even though signs of that abuse had prompted state social worker calls to the child’s home in the weeks before her death. Vilsack attended a forum to try to difuse the community’s anger about the child’s death. Vilsack staffers say they were shocked when Vilsack ended up talking publicly about his own abuse at the hands of his alcoholic mother. The stir his comments spawned didn’t die down for days, which Vilsack acknowledged during a statehouse ceremony.
“After having talked a lot about this over the last couple of weeks, my inclination was to be silent about this because I’ve probably said enough,” Vilsack said. “But then I realized that’s precisely the problem with this situation is that too many people are silent, too many people don’t talk about it, too many people don’t deal with it and as a result children get hurt.”
Vilsack received praise for talking publicly about a painful past, for encouraging victims of abuse to seek help and for being a role model for abuse victims. But Vilsack was also criticized. Republican Senator Mary Lundby of Marion said Vilsack’s revelations were diverting attention from the fact that the state “safety net” hadn’t protected Shelby Duis.
“Having watched President Clinton over the last eight years, I thought it was particularly like that kind of activity where you cry or elicit some kind of sympathy so that we don’t deal with the real issue,” Lundby said. “There are a lot of sad things in my previous life, too, but I don’t bring them up every time I have an issue to work on.”
The Vilsack Administration weathered the storm, and Vilsack’s Lieutenant Governor, Sally Pederson, sat down with legislators to revamp the state’s child protection system. Vilsack also survived an earthquake and rioting early in his years as governor. Details in the next installment of Radio Iowa’s review of Governor Tom Vilsack’s career.
Vilsack: the 1998 campaign for governor
1998 was a big year in Iowa politics. Republican Governor Terry Branstad was not seeking re-election after 16 years in the job. Two democrats launched campaigns for governor — Tom Vilsack and Mark McCormick, a Des Moines attorney who had been a justice on Iowa’s Supreme Court. During that campaign, Vilsack cast himself as the champion of the little guy, as listeners heard in this Radio Iowa report filed during that campaign.
“During the debate, Tom Vilsack said he and Mark McCormick don’t differ much on the issues. Vilsack said their biggest difference was in their clients. Vilsack criticized McCormick for taking a case for I-B-P. ‘It’s o-k for Mark to represent big companies that pollute, big companies that mistreat workers because he believes, and I think in good faith, that he doesn’t have to share the values of that company. He doesn’t have to believe in what they’ve done. I just can’t be that way. I guess it goes back to the playground. I didn’t enjoy being pushed around when I was a kid and I don’t enjoy other folks being pushed around by big folks,’” Vilsack said.
After Vilsack beat McCormick in that primary, Vilsack suffered a few major bumps along the road. Vilsack had to fire one campaign manager who’d been on the job just three days because the fellow went to the office of G-O-P rival Jim Lightfoot and posed as a volunteer.
“Certainly no place for it in my campaign,” Vilsack told reporters in a telephone conference call. “That’s why we moved as quickly as we did to send the young man back home.”
Despite the revolving door of campaign managers, many of the republicans I’ve talked with say one of the reasons Vilsack won the race for governor back in 1998 was that Vilsack not only told people he wanted to be governor, Vilsack told them what he wanted to do once he got the job.
“I’m here today to tell you that we need to begin the process of rejecting the politics of yesterday, the politics of yesterday that simply says all you need to do is cut taxes for the most fortunate of our society and just talk tough on crime and all problems will be solved,” Vilsack said during a speech at the Iowa Democratic Party’s 1998 state convention.
On election night, Vilsack’s republican opponent Jim Lightfoot lost his second-straight statewide race, and Vilsack ended the G-O-P’s 30-year reign in the governor’s chair.
“This election proves one thing,” Vilsack told supporters at a Des Moines hotel. “You’re a winner,” someone in the crowd yelled back. Once the applause and hooting had died down, Vilsack finished his sentence.
“It proves that standing up for Iowa’s working families actually counts.” But after the applause and euphoria died down, Vilsack had to govern. A review of Vilsack’s first days as governor is next in this Radio Iowa’s series examining Tom Vilsack’s career.
Vilsack: the state Senate years
Tom Vilsack was elected to the state Senate in 1992 and tackled complicated issues, like tinkering with the formula used to calculate how much businesses pay into the state’s unemployment compensation fund. Vilsack tried to find some middle ground in the brewing controversy over large-scale livestock operations. This how then-Senator Vilsack framed the issue during a speech on the Senate floor.
“If we are not interested in providing some degree of local control or joint control, then we have to give some safety valve to the pressure that builds up in the countryside when property’s being use and offensive odors occur to the point that someone’s enjoyment of their property or health is affected,” Vilsack said during that speech, saved in the Radio Iowa archives. Former state Senator Elaine Szymoniak of Des Moines sat next to Vilsack in the Senate.
“After he gave his first floor speech, I wrote him a note saying ‘There’ll be a time when I say I knew you when you began.’” Szymoniak said during an interview with Radio Iowa. “I didn’t really look ahead to a national scene, but I was pretty sure then that he’d be governor.”
Szymoniak says Vilsack quickly became a trusted ally who could broker deals on complicated issues. “And I went to him frequently when I knew things were going to have to be worked out and could talk it over with him,” Szymoniak said.
“He had a good way of bringing people together.” Thomas Fogarty, an editor at U-S-A Today who no longer writes about politics, was covering the Iowa Senate for the Des Moines Register during the years Vilsack was a senator. Fogarty, too, remembers Vilsack as a key negotiator.
“He was incredibly bright. He was incredibly talented on zeroing in on the points of potential compromise. He was extremely dilligent and he was extremely persuasive,” Fogarty said during a Radio Iowa interview. But Fogarty says it was apparent Vilsack did not suffer fools gladly.
“He has no patience for small talk and I always thought that in the long run he would be inhibited from advancement in politics because of his personality. And I see now I was wrong on that. You don’t get elected governor of Iowa twice and have a complete inability to deal with people,” Fogarty said. A review of Vilsack’s 1998 campaign for governor is next in Radio Iowa’s review of Tom Vilsack career.
