How we got the Iowa By the Sea nickname
I figure I’m at least half Iowan; 50 percent Hawkeye — certainly enough to qualify as part-farmer. I’ve done enough farmwork to be an expert on agriculture. While visiting the old family farm in Belmond, Iowa, I’ve slopped the pig barn, inoculated piglets, chased a cow around a pasture waving my arms and shouting cowboy phrases and generally suffering through below-zero temperatures.
That’s all because whenever I visited the family farm, my cousin Sherman, who ran the place, would get me up before the rooster crowed to put on a half-dozen layers of clothes to do whatever he told me to do to Feed America.
My forebears were mostly Hawkeyes. My grandmother was born in the farmhouse there. So was her sister who would become my godmother. My grandfather was a fish and game warden in the next town over.
Eventually, they would mostly all wind up in Long Beach as part of the western migration of Iowans that would give the city a variety of nicknames including “Iowa’s Western Capital,” “Iowa’s Seaport” and most popularly, “Iowa By the Sea.”
I had enough Iowa blood in me that the Long Beach Press-Telegram would ship me back to the farm to write several stories, including on Jan. 1, 1982, to cover the University of Iowa’s trip to the Rose Bowl and, later, to report on the state’s farm crisis.
The Iowa-to-Long Beach exodus was so great in number that the annual Iowa Day picnic held at Bixby and Recreation parks would draw in excess of 100,000 Hawkeyes in the 1940s and 1950s, and when the movement was in full swing in the 1937, the Des Moines Register columnist Harlan Miller, who wrote a popular column called “Over the Coffee,” was dispatched to Long Beach to see what all the hubbub was about in “the California paradise where so many thousands of Iowans go before they die.”
Miller painted Long Beach as a bucolic town enjoyed by a large number of retirees drawn by a leisurely lifestyle with relentlessly sunny weather made more pleasant by cool breezes of salt air where they could relax in the parks, enjoy daily concerts on the beach and dine out at reasonably priced restaurants. In short, Miller wrote, “Farmers usually come to Long Beach around the age of 70 looking for 10 years of peace and repose.”
The columnist was impressed by the sheer number of Iowans here in the town with a population at the time of 160,000. “The vast majority of this augmented citizenry came 2,000 miles in pursuit of the setting sun.”
No ‘Pitt’ stop
So, I was already on the precipice of despair after finishing Episode 8 of “The Pitt,” after reading somewhere on the stupid Internet that the Max series consisted of eight episodes and, so, thought Episode 8 was the finale and settled in for another year at least before Season 2 commenced.
Turns out the idiot Internet was wrong. The season has 15 episodes, so, after wolfing down Episodes 9 and 10, I still have five more to watch, so life is worth living again (at least for me; maybe less so for the guy who sent me an email saying that he’d find more entertainment in reading my funeral announcement) and all the colors seem brighter, though my happiness is somewhat tempered by the fact that there’s still only five weeks before the end. I miss the days when shows had 22 episodes per season and considerably less than a year before a new season started.
The horror!
I tend to dislike horror movies (among other genres including to a large extent science fiction and definitely zombie movies), but I was lured into Max’s “Heretic,” solely because it stars Hugh Grant.
It starts with the weary trope of two innocent girls on their Mormon mission entering a dark mansion at the invitation of its owner, Mr. Reed (Grant) who’s eager to engage in a chat about Mormonism, while your inner voice, as usual in these situations, is screaming “Don’t go in!”
Most of the early part of the movie shows Grant at his finest as he amiably argues about religion, and it’s definitely enjoyable for the first hour or so, after which it becomes more sinister and grisly as Mr. Reed teases the girls into entrapment and further horror.
Just as that point begins would be a good time to listen to your inner voice screaming for you to get out! while you’re still more amused than horrified.
But, then, remember, I don’t tend to like horror movies.