(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

I’m discovering that everyone is a bit of a sadist at heart.

We’re in the process of purchasing our first home and every time we mention it to someone, it brings their evil side bubbling to the surface.  They try to disguise it as comforting conversation or neighborly advice, but you can see that they take great glee in scaring us silly.

I’ll say, “Yeah, we’re in the process of buying a house.”

And they’ll say, “Oh, really?  That’s great.  How are things going?”

I’ll say,  “The bank’s processing our load.”

And they’ll say, “I remember when we bought our house.  The bank told us it would take three weeks to get a loan and it wound up taking four months.  We almost lost the house and it cost us almost $5,000 more than we expected.  We teetered on the brink of bankruptcy for years after that.”

Why do people think they have to say stuff like that?

Or might I mention that our basement is made of brick.

“No kidding?  My brother bought a house with a brick basement and one day a whole wall caved in.  Man, you coulda’ drove a truck through that hole.  It cost him about $30,000 to get it fixed.  Of course, by then the whole house had settled.  Most of the doors still don’t close right.”

Now there’s a comforting thought.  There’s nothing like the old “collapsing basement ” story to boost your self-confidence.

We’ve heard stories about bats in the attic, snakes in the basement, salamanders in the bathtub, fires in the chimney, lead in the water, mold under the porch and water in the basement.  Buying a home is starting to sound more like the Great American Nightmare than the America Dream.

“Yeah, we had galvanized pipes and one of them broke inside the wall.  Until it started soaking through the wallpaper, we couldn’t tell where the problem was.  It sounded like Niagara Falls in there, though.  By the time we got the water turned off, it had ruined three walls, two ceilings and a floor.  Still, if it hadn’t happened we might not have found the termites for years.  Those little buggers can do A LOT of damage.”

Despite all of these encouraging little anecdotes, we’re plunging ahead.  We can’t wait to start making payments on a mortgage.  By the time you read this column, we should have already closed the deal and we’ll be homeowners.

Just last week, a friend commented, “The day before I supposed to close, the owners of the house backed out of the deal.  I had already rented my apartment.  I moved all my stuff into a buddy’s garage and I slept in my car for a week.  I was just getting used to it when the police arrested me because they thought I was some kind of vagrant or something.  You know, jail food’s not so bad.”

 I never understood Garrison Keillor’s humor.  Uncle Hank, born and bred in Minnesota, would come to visit from his home in Pennsylvania and make sure that he bought the latest cassette recordings of Garrison and his shows.  Driving on crop tours with him or listening during a quite time in between visits inside the house, I would see him laugh until the tears came rolling down his cheeks.

No one else except Aunt Peg would find the humor, not us nephews who looked up and respected Uncle Hank, not his brother who grew up with him.

Oh sure, we would chuckle at parts of it.  But otherwise….we weren’t sure what was so funny.

Heading off to graduate school at the University of Illinois, the first couple of weeks were painfully lonesome.  Back home and at school at North Dakota State, I had friends and family.  At Champaign, I was 750 miles from the entire world that I had known for the first twenty-two years of my life.

More then once, I’d think about loading everything up from my apartment and heading north again.  Just pack up and leave.

On Sunday mornings, a time when our family traditionally would be going to church together and then eating together, maybe do a crop tour, and listening to Polka Party on the radio (Dad’s insisting) - I would get up, go to church, then drive around the rural Illinois countryside, fighting the desire to just give up and move back.

It was during one of these Sunday morning drives, scanning through the radio, that I found our friend Mr. Keillor’s show, A Prairie Home Companion.

Something drew me in.

The stories of the Kresbachs, the Hansens, the Olsons, the friendly rivalry between the Lutherans and the Catholics, the home town pride, the small town politics, the personal anxiety and angst, the very local humor - the phrases and word fillers: uffda, you bet, not so bad, oh yah, the long “o’s.”

In confines of the Illinois prairie and the halls of academia, the stories of small town life suddenly turned very funny.  Once a week, it was like peaking into some warped picture of my hometown.  For those two hours, I heard the stories of Guy Noir.  I heard some of the same songs and hymns.  When he talked about Willmar and Moorhead and Bemidji, and Duluth, and St. Paul - I knew what he was talking about.

It was a balm that eased the pangs of homesickness.

Even though I’m back to living in the state of my birth and don’t have to turn to the magically Minnesota elixir of my youth, I still try to turn the radio dial to my friends at “A Prairie Home Companion” every once in a while.

If for no other reason then to make sure that he is still there and still there to greet me should I ever have to leave my home state again.

 It was a great growing season.  We knew this was going to be the last year we would put in a crop, and the last year we would harvest.  Dad had announced his desire to retire and had already worked out a rental agreement with some of the neighbors.  Once the crop was in, he would still own the land, but the crops - and the work, worry, and reward that goes with it, would belong to someone else.

That summer of 1993 was a good one for us.  The crops seemed to get just the right amount of rain, just the right amount of sun, just the right temperatures.

The small grains, the wheat, barley, and oats, all looked fantastic, waving majestically in the fields that spread out west and north of the farmstead.

God seemed to be smiling down on us for this last crop.

We were in the beginning throws of harvest when the rain started.  And it just wouldn’t stop.  The grain, some of which was already lying in swaths on the ground, was submerged or floating in the lakes that sprung up from the rain falling on saturated soil.

Some of the neighbors got desperate.  Putting duals and tracks on combines and having tractors on standby to pull the harvesters through the field.  Every day there were stories about farmers tearing apart drive trains or destroying engines with the contraptions they had designed to fight the wet fall mud.

To add insult to injury, the crop just wouldn’t dry down.

Most of the grain had to be hauled into the town for additional drying, and our little country elevator just couldn’t keep up.

The last weeks before school started Dad and I would start a new ritual.  After lunch, we would harvest two gravity boxes of grain and I’d haul them to town.  Dad, borrowing two additional gravity boxes from a retired farmer, would fill two additional loads as I waited in line at the elevator, and then meet me in line.  With any luck, we would get the first two wagons unloaded before evening milking, and have them filled before night fall so that one of us could haul them in right away in the morning.

This meant we would spend all day getting six wagons of grain, all of three trips, into town.

It wasn’t efficient.

Once school started, the lines at the elevator were reduced, but the sloughs weren’t.  Everyday before driving the old pick up into school, I’d haul a gravity box or two out to one of the fields, Dad would go out about two o’clock and fill them up.  Coming home from school, I’d dump them before doing chores.

It made for a very long fall.

But we got all of the crop in.  What it lacked in quality, it made up via our pride.  It was a slow, grinding, almost cruel process to go through, but Dad, after a lifetime of farming, seemed hardly phased.  That is just how it goes sometimes and patience and hard work pay off in the end.

I will never forget hooking up that last load of wheat and hauling it into town, November 1^st, 1993.  It was a cool, crisp fall day.  I remember pulling away from the elevator and thanking Ken and the other guys - telling them this was it for this year.  I remember driving those two miles back home, as the first snow flakes of winter danced in the air.

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

It was 11.p.m. On Saturday night and I was faced with a tough, tough decision.

I swung open the freezer, hoping the dim bulb inside would give me some inspiration.  It did not.  I stared numbly at the nearly 500 corndogs lying in the freezer’s frosty silence.

I was in charge of the Boone County Humane Society’s corn dog booth at the Pufferbilly Days Artfest, and this was the moment of truth.  Frozen corndogs do not cook well.  They get crunchy on the outside, but stay frosty on the inside.  Ideally, they should be thawed overnight.  But thawed corndogs can’t be returned to the distributor.  If we thawed them, we either had to sell them or “eat” the loss.

What if we couldn’t sell any corndogs on Sunday?  What was I going to do with seven cases of thawed corndogs?

Weather prognosticators predicted sunny skies and warm temperatures.  The Pufferbilly mood downtown was upbeat.  I noticed that many of Saturday’s vendors were smiling.  I decided to take a gamble.

All the corndogs came out of the freezer.  I drifted off to a restless sleep as visions of corndogs danced in my head.

At 8 a.m. The next morning, the society’s loyal band of volunteers assembled the official Humane Society Corn Dog Stand.  We plugged in the fryers, mixed the lemonade and put the iced tea on ice.  We were ready for business by 10 a.m.

I was worried.  Why weren’t more people buying corndogs for breakfast?  “Oh, no! ” I thought, “I’ll be eating corndogs until Christmas!”

At 11 a.m. I began wandering the grounds.  Each time I met someone I knew, I grabbed them by the lapels and begged them to, “Please, please, pleaseeeeese go buy a corn dog.”

My wife fed me funnel cake to soothe my nerves.

As the crowd built in numbers during the noon hour, Sales picked up.  The society’s noble volunteers served the corndogs with such efficiency that the hard work looked effortless.

At 2 p.m. We did a corndog count.  Far more than half of them had been sold.  “Oh no,” I thought,”What if a mob of perturbed Pufferbilly partiers pillages and plunders our booth, demanding more corndogs? I knew I should have ordered more.”

As soon the crowd began to wander away at 4:30 and the other vendors began to pack their wares, we sold our last corndog.  One more case of corndogs would have been too many.  One less case would have been too few.” Yes,” I thought, “I knew all along that seven cases of corndogs would be about right.”

The society’s volunteers have packed away the official Humane Society corndog stand until next year and our fryers are scrubbed clean.  My clothes still smell faintly of corndogs and lemonade.  And I think to myself, “I wonder how many we’ll able to sell next year?  Half again as many?  A thousand?  The possibilities are endless….”

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

At night, we are lulled to sleep by the deep throbbing of diesel engines and the rumble of hopper cars rolling along steel rails.  Like distant thunder, we can hear the sounds of freight cars crashing together as cars are attached and unhooked from trains in the rail yards to the east.  On calm weekend afternoons, we can hear the scream of The Iowan’s steam whistle echoing through the heavy humid air from the west.

For three years now we have lived less than a block away from where the Chicago & North Western Railroad’s tracks cross Story Street.  The Boone and Scenic Valley Railroad has a set of tracks that pass only a few yards away from our apartment building.

At first we were disturbed when knickknacks and lampshades jiggled and wiggled to the vibrations of speeding coal trains.  For a time the blasts of air horns would wake us cruelly from our slumber.  Waiting at the crossings or detouring to the Linn Street viaduct were constant sources of frustration.

But no more.

The vibrations go unnoticed and the rumble of hopper cars and the blasts of air horns merely punctuated the comings and goings of our daily lives.  We sleep oblivious to nocturnal train noises.  Detouring around trains has become a normal part of in-town travel.

We have learned that trains are an institution here.  Their heavy rumbling is reassuring- something you can count on.

When Iowa’s farmers sow and harvest, the heartland’s golden grain pours to port on twin ribbons of steel.  Goods from the nation’s factories and ports cross the nation to diverse destinations on heavy rails.  Always, the trains are running, working and carrying the commerce of a continent.

Certainly, the railroads have lost some of their luster and their importance.  In the golden age of steam, railroads were the link between every big city and every tiny rural town.  Pullmans and gleaming, steaming locomotives ran nearly everywhere to the schedule of a conductor’s watch.

Now trucks and jetliners carry much of the cargo that was once the railroad’s fare.  But the rumblings and roaring of trains along the tracks though Boone remind us that railroads are still important to a country so vast as our.

With their history of puffing locomotives, red cabooses, grand Pullman cars and precise time tables, railroads have a place of honor in our history and hold a special mystique for us.  That mystique lives on in the rumbling of diesel locomotives at midnight and the clickety-clack of freight trains through oceans of Iowa corn.

It’s that mystique, along with the history and reassuring constancy of trains, that we celebrate during Pufferbilly Days this weekend.

 No one can think of the Minnesota State Fair without thinking about food.  And most people would say without thinking about food on a stick.  Corn dogs - on a stick.  Cotton candy - on a stick.  Pork chops - on a stick.  Hot dish - on stick.  Spaghetti and meat balls - on a stick.  Chocolate covered bacon - on a stick.  Chocolate covered deep fat fried candy bars - on a stick.

You get the idea.

Since that first trip fifteen years ago as an innocent country boy getting off the bus with a clean pair of jeans and a twenty dollar bill (reluctant to change either one) - not much has changed with the exception of my income.  No longer is my paycheck determined by the number of cows I milked for the neighbors.

But my tastes haven’t changed.

In those early days at the state fair, I had to learn how to stretch my dollar.  A couple of kolaches for one dollar and some time at the all you can drink milk stand in the morning made for a perfect breakfast.  Lunch usually consisted of one of the most perfect of fair foods - the malt from the Gopher Dairy Club.  For supper, you needed something stick to your ribs filling - which is where cheese curds fit the bill.  And one of my favorite memories - running into my cousin Pat that taught me one of the hidden secrets of the fair - a honey sundae from the honey section of the Horticulture building.

The next couple of years, I went as a representative of the Minnesota FFA, which meant we got food vouchers.  For some reason, they didn’t trust us to follow proper nutritional guidelines.  Then it was the Epiphany Dining Hall, various other church halls, and our favorite place.  The 50’s café by the midway.  The staff served up a mean burger - fairly standard fair (pun intended), but the real treat was when the song “Grease Lightening” would play from the juke box in the corner.  All the waiters and waitresses would fall into this highly choreographed routine that had them literally dancing on the counters and pounding on the grills with the spatulas.  It was awe inspiring.

Fifteen years later, I can about map out my route at the state fair.  Sometimes it takes me all day to make it through it, sometimes it is a hurried week night affair, but the route seldom changes…and the foods never do.

Entering the state fair, I work through the barns - greeting friends showing or that are now 4-H and FFA leaders.  Making my way back up the street, I stop at the Gopher Dairy Club stand for a strawberry shake.

I work my way through the CHS Miracle of Birth Center and the FFA Leadership Center and then across the street to the DNR exhibit, then to the Care 11 barn (what used to be the FFA Barnyard).

Going past the reptile house (they look underfed with no dead chicks from the barnyard to feast on) and up the food isle, I nod my head to the French House - where the German restaurant used to be where I could get the kolaches like Grandma used to make (probably the first time anything French has taken over anything German).

To the 4-H Building, then around Machinery Hill - to the best cheese curd place on the state fair (just down from the antique tractors, one row down from the Minnesota Bound exhibits).  Winding my way back to the Horticulture building, I admire the seed art while nibbling on a good honey sundae.

Finally, to the Leinie’s Band shell, where I listen to the music of the state fair (country, rock, gospel - it really doesn’t matter) with a good adult beverage in my hand.

Then it is off for home - without touching any food on a stick.

 ”These kids represent agriculture and they can’t be screwing around.  You need to take care of this.”

Those of us working in the FFA Children’s Barnyard heard the exchange.  One of adult leaders was explaining to another a serious breach that had occurred that summer I spent a week at the Minnesota State Fair as a state FFA officer.

During our time, we were frequently called upon in our blue corduroy jackets or other FFA clothing to represent agriculture and represent our organizations at various functions.  There was the daily flag raising ceremony where we would alternate with our agricultural compatriots in the 4-H.  There was the constant functions in the barns - helping hand out ribbons, announce results, and making sure that we were putting on our best face (in my case, we worked with what we had) for our state and our industry.

There were the daily events at the Children’s Barnyard - working with the Honey Queen, working with the Beef Princess, helping the Sheep Queen do a demonstration.  Judging the pedal tractor pull.  Putting on various presentations and workshops (butter making anyone?).

Part of it was also representing to outside of the normal rounds of the fair.  Walking to the Farm Bureau, Farmer’s Union, and various dealerships to thank them for their support of our organization.  Bringing cows and animals to the radio and television stations to do interviews, and sometimes just to stand there to represent our industry during a broadcast was also part of a normal days work.  At the state fair, we got to be somewhat of a celebrity, so ribbon cuttings for new exhibits and participating in various contests were also part of the normal routine.

It was one of those events that got one of us into trouble.

Mark was a state officer with us, and as tasks were dished out in the morning, Mark was asked to participate in the celebrity cow milking contest.  I really think he was looking forward to the challenge, and a challenge it would be.  Mark was farm boy through and through, but one more along the lines of thinking that a cow was best used for a steak rather than milk.  Born and bred on a farm near Pipestone, MN to a family that once milked cows, but for most of his life, worked on making a name for themselves in the beef business.

In short, Mark knew which end of the cow the milk came out of, he knew how to get the milk out, but he really didn’t have a lot of practical experience.

The general rule is whoever ends up with the most milk in their pail after a certain amount of time will be the winner.  Generally, there are several heats leading up to the final.  Having since spent years watching celebrity cow milking contests, I can tell you now that most of the time, the deck is stacked.  The top politician in the contest - the one that controls the purse strings, will generally win hands down (even if it means swapping pails during the judging).

Mark didn’t get a lucky draw that day - I believe our budding beef entrepreneur ended up matched with Princess Kay of the Milky Way…the prettiest cow milker at the fair.  To make matters worse, while she got a nice uddered Holstein, Mark drew a skinny Milking Shorthorn - great for the beef, but not for the milk.

Half way through the competition, it was clear, Mark was behind.  Using his quick wit, Mark got up from underneath Bossy and started pumping the tail like a water pump - which naturally got a roar of laughter from the crowd - but the look of disgust from the adult staff on hand.

Mark got that thorough talking too later that day, with all of us watching.  The adult staff that had to deliver it explained that he was representing the Minnesota FFA and while it was funny, we must act professional.

As Mark walked out the door with his tail between his legs, that adult supervisor (who wasn’t present but was given the task of delivering the sermon) waited until the door was closed before erupting into laughter and pounding his fist on the counter he was standing against.

“Wait a minute, didn’t you just tell Mark he shouldn’t have done that?” We asked in surprise.

“Oh yeah, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t one of the funniest things I’ve heard!” He replied with tears coming down his face.