(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 has a reputation of being big, brash and bold.  Carl Sandburg called it “Stormy, husky, brawling” and “the city of big shoulders.”  For years, Mike Royko has immortalized its dirty politics and colorful characters in his straight-talking newspapers column.  The Sears Tower.  The Chicago Board of Trade.  Al Capone.  Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.  These things are Chicago.

Chicago, with it s Midwest mystique, has always seemed to be a far away place.  Despite what the map said, it had always seemed to be a distant big city of endless business and activity.  It was a place to read about, to wonder at and to visit if you were lucky.

Somehow, it seemed odd that we could drive from Boone to Chicago in only six hours.  Conversation with friends made a trip go quickly and soon we were winding our way through the concrete spaghetti of downtown freeway interchanges.

We cruised into Chicago at midnight a week ago.  The city glimmered around us and above us.  Beyond Lakeshore Drive, Lake Michigan stretched into the darkness.  It looked as if it went on forever.

Chicago was everything we expected and more.  It was loud and rude and big and exciting.  Its lights burn all night.  At 3 a.m. Taxis race through the streets and revelers wander the sidewalks and clog the cafes and nightclubs.  When do they sleep?

The architecture is spectacular.  Old stone buildings and their ornate features reflect the wealth that grain, banking and shipping brought to the young city.  Among these older gems, towers of steel and glass punctuate the skyline, monuments to the newer business of trade, finance and retailing in Chicago.

True to its reputation as the windy city, the lake whips through the canyons created by the towering buildings.  Waves crash onto the shore and piers stretch like fingers into Lake Michigan’s blue depths.  Beyond the shore and the piers the lake stretches to the horizon.

We found the excitement intoxicating and invigorating.  Chicago’s museums, galleries and night spots tempted us and teased us.  There was so much to do and the weekend was so short.  We stretched our days into the wee hours of the morning to try to cram it all in.  Still, Sunday’s departure came much too soon.  We pointed our car toward the end of the downtowns canyons, wound our way through the concrete spaghetti and headed back to Boone.

We’ve been to Chicago and come home again and the windy city still seems as if it is much farther away than six hours.  Compare the city of Boone or even Des Moines and the differences is like night and day.

You’ll find no towering building here.  The only night life here at 3 a.m. Is the rumbling of trains.  Ironically, most are probably headed to or coming from Chicago.  There are no honking taxis, few hustling street peddlers and only a few people who could be considered brash and rude by Chicago standards.

Chicago is a wonderful place to visit and I’m sure we’ll go back.  But Boone is an even better place to come home to.

(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) 

My wife loves me.  I know because she helped me put a rubber donut in our sewer pipe.

We’ve been working on a bathroom project in our house and finally last weekend, it was time to install a new sewer pipe.  The new plastic pipe had to be fitted into the old cast-iron pipe in the basement floor.  The key element in this operation was a rubber donut.  The plastic pipe fits into the donut hole and the donut fits into the cast-iron pipe.

The theory behind the assembly is simple, but the installation proved to be a challenge.  The donut is designed to provide a very water-tight fit.  We tried wedging it in.  We tried prying it in.  We tried pounding it in.  We used soap to try to slip it in.  We even soaked the donut in hot water to make it more pliable.  No matter what we tried, the donut would not fit into the cast-iron hub.

Finally, as a last resort, we hauled out the big sledgehammer.  The big hammer is a handyman’s dream At eight pounds of solid steel and with a 30-inch hickory handle for the ultimate swing, the hammer is perfect for those delicate jobs like knocking down walls, braking up concrete or encouraging reluctant rubber donuts to slide into cast-iron fittings.

Unfortunately, the donut and the fitting were located below in a hole in the basement floor.  There was just no way to bring the hammer directly in contact with the donut.
“You’ll have to hold this chunk of two-by-four against the donut, while I pound on it,” I instructed Mary.

“Are you sure this will work?” She asked.

“I’m a perfect shot with a hammer,” I replied.

“Speaking of being a perfect shot with a hammer, how is your thumb?” She asked.

“Just hold the two-by-four,” I said.

She did and I started pounding.  The donut began sliding into the fitting.  Mary moved the two-by-four around the edge of the donut as I slammed the hammer down time after time.  Each time the hammer fell in that cramped corner of the basement, it was only inches away from Mary’s hands and face.  She never flinched.  It was one of the most stunning displays of marital trust that I had ever seen.

It was then I realized that sometimes love has more to do with sewer pipes than candle-lit dinners.  All told we spent more than an hour fighting with that rubber donut in the dirtiest, darkest, smelliest corner of our basement.

Call me a romantic fool, but if that’s not love, then I don’t know what it is

 In my relatively short life, if I think back to the women who have made the greatest impact in my life, there are two that stand head and shoulders above the rest.  The first, probably obviously, is my mother.  The second is my father’s mother, the women that I simply knew as grandma.

She looked like a grandma should.  She was a big women - physically, socially, morally, spiritually, intellectually.

At six feet tall, she seemed to tower over most of us grandkids, and over most of her peers as well.  She came from a big family - most of her brother’s and sister’s were near or well above six feet tall as well.  And she was strong.  Years of toiling in the gardens, in the farm kitchen, and in the barns, well before most of todays modern convienences.

She had an eighth grade education, merely because that was all she had available to her, but she was an avid reader.  Books, newspapers, copies of Reader’s Digest.  It was always fun to go over and hear grandma’s view on the world as a boy, her knowledge, combined with experience, always brought out the common sense approach to world problems, and often gave us things to think about.

Socially, her personality was naturally a little reserved, but that didn’t stop her from being out and active.  When I was a child, she was living in a seniors apartment complex.  She was constantly out playing cards, visiting her neighbors, or trying to help someone with something.  She believed that being part of a community, as big or as small as it was, meant helping those around you.  Just shy of her ninetieth birthday, she was going from apartment to apartment in her retirement apartment helping people to count pills.  When scolded by my Dad that she shouldn’t be doing that - what happens if something happens and she got in trouble.  She replied that she needed to be there to help the friends…and what was the worse they could do to her at ninety years old?

In a world where so many things seem grey today, where society tries to blend the lines between what is right and what is wrong, where we are suppose to accept all peoples opinions and and just ‘go with the flow,’ Grandma Rose saw things very black and white.  It didn’t mean that she didn’t love and respect all people, but she knew where she stood and took very active steps to make sure that was known - especially to her grandchildren.  More then once I was lovingly, but firmly explained the morality of issues.  I remember my brother joking that he might have to go to Canada if there is a draft…and Grandma turning to him and saying simply…Then never come back.  Even the simple lessons in life…she never let us win at card games, no matter how much we pouted.  “Life isn’t going to let you win,” she said simply.

Spiritually, Grandma never talked religion.  She didn’t have too, she lived it.  Her rosary, Bible, and prayer books were always by her side.  Until old age limited her movement, she walked regularly, almost on a daily basis to church.  But it was how she treated people, how she taught her children and grandchildren, how she gave of all that she had, that truly told us where her heart lay.

She never talked about it, but reading the family history, and hearing the stories of her neices and nephews, it was clear, she had a hard life.  An immigrant at the age of six months with her family, working hard through her young years, marrying right before the Great Depression, holding her family together through some of Grandpa’s recurring illnesses, fighting the weather and finances, her life was not one of tremedous opportunity, and it would have been very easy for her to be bitter - but she remained one of the happiest and cheerful people that I ever knew.

Part of me wishes I could go back and ask her how she could stand, teach such lessons, care so much, in a world that seemed always to be trying to hold her down.  I don’t know if she couldn’t have given an answer beyond “what was the alternative?”  But ultimately, she did have a choice.  And at heart, her life, her legacy, and her attitude could probably be summed up in one word - love. 

 The phone call came in at about 3:30am Australia time.  I was expecting it, but I managed to miss the call anyway….it was 3:30 in the morning.

Calling my sister-in-law back immediately, she wearily picked up the phone call. “Hi.  You’re an uncle again.  Trevor was born this morning.”

I slept well the rest of the night.

This was the sixth time that I’d become an uncle.  I remember the day that Abigail was born, today a eigth grader.  I remember getting the call that Sarah was born and making the trek to the hospital and seeing that dark hair.

I remember the day that Matthew was born, I was living in the cities at the time and getting the call on a nice spring day.  Then there was Nicholas, I remember that phone call too and the excitement that it caused.

When Parker was born, Trevor’s older brother was born, I was at a work meeting in northern Minnesota, I held him in my sunburned arms only two days later.

The phone call was as exciting this time as any other.  It is exciting to have another nephew, to be an uncle again.  A new member of the family to cherish and guide (torment and tease my current neices and nephews would say) - but love all the more.

With Trevor, as there was with all of the nephews and neices, there is a sense of hope, of the things that may lie ahead, a sense of the things not seen.  While I’m a long way from home today, I can see the small face, the innocense, the fragile little kid lying there.

What might that fragile little person become?  A doctor?  A lawyer?  A mechanic?  A statesman?  A farmer?  A commodity trader?

In the end, I don’t care what he does.  I care more about the man that he will be - a rightoues man, filled with honor and integrity.  Charitable, caring for his fellow man, strong moral character.

(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) 

This country music craze has caught me off guard. Wrangler jeans and cowboy shirts are a fashion craze.  Country dance clubs are becoming as popular as sports bars.  Cowboy boots are replacing Nikes and Reeboks as status symbols.

The hottest stars on the pop charts are country stars.  Local bands like central Iowa’s Blue Sky Band are booked solid.  When nationally know groups tour in Iowa, they play to large and enthusiastic crowds.  How enthusiastic are they?  I waited in the rain for more than two hours with hundreds of fans at the Boone county Fair as they waited to see Brooks and Dunn.

All around the country, Sawyer Brown, Alabama, Diamond Reo and the Kentucky Headhunters draw packed houses. Clint Black, Randy Travis, and Dwight Yocum are sex symbols.  Country music has its own magazine.  The popular press is hopping on the bandwagon.  Garth Brooks appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, the USA Weekender, and the Saturday Evening Post.  Some heretics even say Garth might be bigger than …Elvis?

I was ahead of my time.  I grew up on country music. I didn’t have a choice.  There was a battered radio wedged up between the ceiling joists in the barn that was permanently tuned to an AM country station from Fargo.  If you turned the dial to the left..static. If you turned the dial to the right..static.  So we listened to country music.  Constant use seemed to keep the radio dry and in working condition so it played 24 hours a day.

As we did the morning milking, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard performed between crop reports and advertisements for the Fargo Implement Company.

When we did chores in the afternoon, Dolly Parton and the Statler Brothers sang between weather reports, closing markets from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and commercials from A&T Farm Supply.  Evening milking time was accompanied by Hank Williams Jr., Loretta Lynn, Tanya Tucker and messages sponsored by the Farmer’s Union Livestock Exchange at the West Fargo Stockyards.

Dad seemed to enjoy it, the cows didn’t mind and the rest of us learned to like it too.  When we listened to country music scraping out of that battered Am radio, w never dreamed we were on the leading edge of a revolution in popular music.  I wonder if those cows know how lucky they were.

(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) 

Small town and rural America aren’t always known for being progressive and open minded.  Boone County and its communities sometimes fit that mold.

Minneapolis, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles are used to being on the edge of social change.  Boone, Pilot Mound and Madrid usually follow sometimes much later.

Working women are a case in point.

Certainly, female secretaries and receptionists have been working in Boone for a long time. But women who own a business were once in the small, small minority.

Now that’s changing.  More and more women are taking leadership roles in businesses and community govern.  Part of that has been due to declines in rural population and farm financial problems.  As male leadership disappeared, women stepped in to take up the slack.  As farm income dropped, farm women helped out on the farm or took jobs to help maintain their family’s standard of living.

Not all male leaders were glad to see the changes come.  The formerly all-male fraternity of business and government was shaken by this influx of members of the opposite sex.

But in many towns, women have provided the drive and inspiration for much needed business and community development efforts.  In Boone, Dixie Howell and Debra Barr have proved to be able members of the city council.  Audrey Veldhuizen guides the city’s day-to-day operations as city clerk.  Gretchen Stark serves as assistant administrator of the Boone County Hospital.  Linda Betten and Terry Rasmussen serve as member of the Boone Community School Board.

In local business, Joyce Carroll recently moved her business, Frame-Art-Ique, into the downtown area.  Brenda Lasek manages the local ALCO store.  Holly Larson’s Ross’ and Marilyn Nash’s County Peddler make a strong case for downtown shopping in Boone.

The list could fill this entire column.  And Boone is not unique in the county or state.  Changing attitudes and social situations are paving the way for women to become more and more involved.

There are still those who believe that a woman’s place is only in the home, but the number of those fellows is rapidly dwindling.  Instead men are realizing how much better off our farms, businesses and communities can be when women become partners.

It’s a shame we didn’t figure that out sooner.

In some cases this women’s movement may have gone too far.  Today, women who choose to stay at home to care for their families are sometimes looked down upon by women who are active in the business world.  That’s as sad commentary on our changing way of life. 

Those attitudes are as backward as those held by chauvinistic men.  When will we be able to accept the choices made by others and do it with open minds and non-judgmental attitudes?

 I hate buying shoes.  They are expensive, it is hard to get a right fit, and from the training that I received in my youth, they are a major investment.  I think I still have the work boots that they my folks bought for me back in 1991.  They are good boots - and expensive - must have cost about a hundred bucks.

So as luck would have it, one of the first things that I had to buy in Australia was a new pair of tennis shoes.  Five kilometers (about three miles) walking one way to work, and being heavily used before moving, I should have saw it coming.

It took for two aching ankles to figure out what was wrong.

Walking into the Footlocker in Melbourne the day before Christmas, I was met by two, young, attractive, female sales associates…in soccer referee uniforms…I wasn’t in the US anymore…

“G’day sir!  How can we help you?” One of the young attractive women inquired.

“I think I need a new pair of shoes.” I replied.

“Well then, you’ve come to the right place. Do you know what size you are?” She replied.

“Only in US size.”  I replied.

“Well, good thing we have US sizes down here too!”  She said, “But we better check your feet to make sure.”

Instructing me to take off my shoes, she gauged my stride and my foot length and width.  Then we started looking at some of the shoes carefully placed on the wall.  Picking out several that I liked, she retreated back into the back room to gather the required size.

I was inspecting the now smooth bottoms of my old shoes, looking up at the young, cute, sales associate, I said, “I do a lot of walking.”

As she knelt in front of me, she innocently asked, “Do you wear thongs?”

My jaw dropped.

“Have you ever tried them?  They are really comfortable.” She said looking at me.

My jaw dropped even more.

“You really should, they look good too.” She continued to my astonishment.

My mouth was moving, but I wasn’t making any words, my eyes continued to grow big…

“Plus, they are really good for your feet, and if you get used to wearing them, you won’t wear down your expensive Nikes.”  She replied.

“You mean flip-flops?  You mean sandals?” I said coming back to my senses.

“Ah yes, you refer to thongs as flip-flops in the US.” She said perkily…seemingly unaware of the near shock she had me in.

As I paid for my new shoes, I thanked her for her advice and wished she and the other good looking sales associate a Merry Christmas.

Walking out, I realized that sometimes, a rose by any other name sometimes creates a little confusion…

 It was a little surprising when our high school principle caught me in the hallway on day early in my senior year.  We had tussled before, but something seemed, well different this time…

Escorting me into his office over lunch hour, he sat me down.

“Mark, you realize that this school has a policy against offensive clothing.  You can’t wear things that are inappropriate.” He started out saying.

“Yes sir,” I replied. “I’m familiar with the policy.  No drugs, no alcohol, nothing sexually explicit.”

“Well, we have had some compliants.” He said.

“Really?” I said, wondering what this has to do with me.

“Yes, specifically about that t-shirt.” He remarked.

Spinning around me, I expected to see some socially unacceptable shirt hanging behind his door covered in drug paraphelaia, beer logo’s and language only a sailor would say.

“No.”  He said firmly, “I mean the one you are wearing.  Now.”

I was incredulus.  And I don’t even think I knew what that word meant back then.  But clearly that is what I was.  Looking down, I saw the t-shirt that I had worn to school for over a year.  It looked like a harmless university logo’ed shirt with a small official crest on the top, left side and a large logo on the back.  But this wasn’t an ordinary university, this shirt was direct from the “Rush Limbaugh Institute of Conservative Studies.”

My jaw hung open.

“As I said, we had a complaint about your t-shirt.  People find it offensive.” The principle looked at me sternly.

Rush Limbaugh is a political commentater that expouses conversative viewpoints.  Values that I generally agreed with and found pretty spot on - and even if I didn’t agree with him, he made me think.

“You had a complaint about this?  This shirt?  With people walking around with skulls and cross bones on their Harley Davidson shirts?  People found this offensive?  You rank this up there with beer, liquor, drugs, and sexually explicit material?  This?”  I asked in astonishment.

“Yes, we had a complaint.  Someone found it offensive.  As I find it offensive.” He said.

He stared at me.  I stared back at him.

“Well, I guess you want me to turn it inside out so that people can’t see it.” Stating the normal rule for people that committed this offense.  He thought about this for a minute, thinking about how the curiosity of everyone was piqued when they heard that someone had to turn their t-shirt inside out, how there was generally some out cry among students about censorship…

“I’ll happily turn it inside out.” I grinned.  “Would enjoy letting people know why I had to turn it inside out.”

“Well, I don’t know if you need to turn it inside out - just don’t wear it again….” He backpedaled.

“No, no, no - I’ll gladly comply with the letter of the law, or would you rather I go home and change - will you get me a note for that?  Get me a note to go home and change? I’d love to tell my folks why I have to change…either that or the t-shirt is fine….” I replied.

“You had better get to class.”  he said wearily…

Freedom of speech, it is a wonderful thing.

 We sat in the bar in north Melbourne, having the place almost to ourselves, we had a good time.  We laughed, told stories, discussed politics, relegion, and other touchy subjects.  We saw the flash of the lightening and the distant fireworks, the sounds of the blending of the thunder and the concussions of the explosions.

We were a motely crew celebrating New Year’s Eve, but by the time the barkeeps served us the last of many, many pots, the crew had thined to about ten of us celebrating the ringing of the New Year.  At Midnight, the waiters finally kicked us out into the light rain and mist…”Come’on mates, we’ve got parties to go too as well!” they said as they pushed us to the doors.

Those of us left, the Australians and the few foreigners were a good bunch of people.  The Aussies from mostly the same country towns or friends from University.  They are good people.  Honest people.  Salt of the earth people.  They reminded me of mates from back home - hard working, intelligent, sensible, with a good dose of compassion - but that liked to blow off a little steam once in a while.

Grabbing a cooler out of the boot (aka truck) of one of the cars we had driven up there, we hopped a tram to head to a house party.

The house party was a friend of a friend - it was a three story townhouse with a great view of the sky line.

We found out way to the top as the rain had almost stopped and the sky was clearing.  In the coolness of the evening, we drank, and talked until the crowd dwindled.

With only a few of us left, one of the owners of the house came up to see how we were doing.

“Anyone like a line for the New Year?”  He said as he took a little baggie out of his shirt pocket.

My mouth fell to the floor.

A few people tried to start the conversation again, my mouth was wide open…the baggie disappeared, and so to its owner.

My mouth was still hanging open…

“Come on, lets go downstairs.” One of the Aussies said.

In the kitchen, we proceeded to throw a lemon around the kitchen - how we did no damage, I’m not sure.

Soon, we not a host in sight, we decided that we should head for the door, but instead of the smart thing and head home, we headed to a bar.

On the walk over, one of the Aussies told me, “Just a shame, he was decent guy, but comes to the city, gets a good job, and gets too good for us, then gets involved in stuff like that.  Bloody shame.”

A beer or two later, with the sun now only an a couple of hours away from creeping over the horizon, we decided that we had celebrated the New Year enough….

We were lucky enough to grab a cab, and equally lucky that these guys that had taken me around town, fed me, gave me beer, also managed to get away with paying for the cab at the end of the night….

As I fought the crowds leaving the Docklands Stadium (the all night rave dance party still had a couple of hours left…but the thousands of people in once white clothing were in about as good of shape as me), I was happy to say good night to the old year…and welcome to the new.

 New Year’s Eve typically isn’t my holiday.  It has always been a bit of a melancholy holiday for me, more a night for quiet reflection then mayhem and destruction.  This year was going to be perhaps even more so, being half way around the world in a new city, my expectation was that it was going to be a quiet night at home.

Much to my surprise, as the New Year’s approached, the invitations started to roll in.  By the end of the work day, there were four invitations from co-workers and friends.  I took up one from friend Sam and his girlfriend to join them for a barbeque at a park with some friends.

Low key but social.  That seemed like the Australian way.

Sam and friends picked me up from my apartment about six o’clock New Years Eve, just as the ominous clouds broke over the skyline from the west.  It had been hot all day - hitting almost forty degrees…Celcius for those of you in the states, or about one hundred degrees Fahrenheit (for comparison’s sake it was almost forty in my home town on New Years Day back in Minnesota…forty below…at that point, really doesn’t matter if it is Fahrenheit or Celcius).

We made our way through the streets of Melbourne to the slightly eccentric northside - young, and hip…and slightly broke and a little rough around the edges, it seemed to be the perfect place to watch the fireworks.

The group grew to a large mix of people, both Australian and foreign (American, English, Indian), and some fantastic food and some adult malt beverages. 

Here I must stop and put in a disclaimer - wanting to pace myself, I followed the rules I was given - BYOB, so I brought along a six pack…trying to pace myself for the evening - I should have known that Australian hospitality was much too much for myself discipline and the slabs of beer (aka the 24 packs) were freely distributed.

One of the folks walked in and dumped out box of wooden blocks on the ground…and it transported me right back home to our family gatherings in northern Minnesota.  The game was the exact same as the one we played, imported by distant family and distributed through the family - some call it Chub, some call it Cub, some call it Kub, or Kube - in the end, I just call it fun.  It involves a big grassy area, wooden blocks that you must try to hit from your firing line on the far side of field, and a little bit of skill.

It was fun.

In between beers, bits of lamb and fruit and Cornish sausages, we managed to beat to opposing team - victorious!

Just as the rain started to fall and the lightening started to flash…

Or about fifteen minutes before the expected fireworks.

The entire group made its way to local establishment a couple of blocks away from the park.  Scrambling into cars or running for the awnings along the street, within fifteen minutes, we had all reconvened in the bar.

Nine o’clock in the evening, New Years Eve, with the fireworks crashing out of view in the distance…and thunder and lightening crashing around us…we toasted our friends old and new.

This is where things get hazy….