-
Nov 4, 2024 | 
okobojiwriters.substack.com | Julie Gammack |Art Cullen |Laura Belin |Chuck Offenburger
Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. No one in the political pundit class thought the Iowa presidential race could be in play. And now it is. Today, our Potluck Podcast guest is J. Ann Selzer, who revealed that Iowa still has a purple and blue streak. Harris surpasses Trump in this sliver of time. Check it out at The Iowa Poll.
-
Feb 22, 2024 | 
iowacapitaldispatch.com | Chuck Offenburger
DeWITT – It was two years ago this week when the very good life that young pharmacist Ginnel Gadimova had known in the southern Odessa region of her home country of Ukraine, fell apart. On Feb. 24, 2022, neighboring Russia invaded its neighbor country in eastern Europe with bombs, artillery, drones, tanks and the infantry. Because of that, hundreds of thousands have died. Millions of other lives have been changed. Even 4,500 miles away here in DeWitt.
-
Jan 20, 2024 | 
chuckoffenburger.substack.com | Chuck Offenburger
JEFFERSON, Iowa – There were 110,298 total votes recorded across the state Monday night on the Republican side of this year’s Iowa Caucuses. Let me tell you about my favorite single vote among all those. It happened right in front of me, in the caucus for Jefferson Precinct One, which covers the east half of our west central Iowa town of 4,136. I have no idea who the voter was, because Republicans use a secret ballot. And I didn’t realize just how neat this one vote was until a couple days later.
-
Dec 28, 2023 | 
portside.org | Chuck Offenburger
Banning Christmas in Cuba Was an ‘Error’ That Fidel Castro Fixed Published December 28, 2023 If we could go to Cuba right now, as I was telling an audience in Des Moines recently, one of the first things we’d notice is that our island neighbor nation is, like us, preparing to celebrate the special religious holidays that are upon us. It will probably come as a surprise to many of you that religious and church life in Cuba is thriving, and has been since the 1990s.
-
Dec 25, 2023 | 
iowacapitaldispatch.com | Chuck Offenburger
If we could go to Cuba right now, as I was telling an audience in Des Moines recently, one of the first things we’d notice is that our island neighbor nation is, like us, preparing to celebrate the special religious holidays that are upon us. It will probably come as a surprise to many of you that religious and church life in Cuba is thriving, and has been since the 1990s. There’s a story in that, something I unexpectedly stumbled on in my 2017 visit to Cuba.
-
Nov 11, 2023 | 
chuckoffenburger.substack.com | Chuck Offenburger
JEFFERSON, Iowa — There’s an old saying in journalism that every reporter ought to cover one war, and one is plenty. It was 32 years ago right now that I came home from covering mine, the Persian Gulf War of late 1990 and early 1991. I wrote this reflection in 2016 on the 25th anniversary of that war. On this Veterans Day in 2023, I share it again. Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
-
Aug 1, 2023 | 
chuckoffenburger.substack.com | Chuck Offenburger
DES MOINES, Iowa — When Theresa Knight, a producer & director at Iowa PBS television, called me last fall and said she wanted to interview me for a new documentary on the Iowa State Fair, I asked her, “What part of it? What’s going to be your focus?”Her answer: “All of it.”I don’t think I said it, but my thought: “That’s a whole lot of history, sister! And I’m glad it’s you doing it, not me.”She and her colleagues did it, all right.
-
May 10, 2023 | 
chuckoffenburger.substack.com | Chuck Offenburger
MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa – When a well-established Iowa college closes – and a half-dozen or more of them have done that in my lifetime – I always feel a little shame. We all should. It’s like our society is breaking faith with young people of the past, and denying opportunity to young people of the future. And we all know that when a college fails, its town or city is going to get clobbered.
-
Mar 29, 2023 | 
chuckoffenburger.substack.com | Chuck Offenburger
JEFFERSON, Iowa – If you’re not living in Iowa, you might not appreciate just how nuts all of us here are right now about Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team, which has reached this coming weekend’s Final Four of the NCAA tournament. I saw additional proof of it Monday afternoon when I was browsing Facebook, and came across a post by my hair stylist Catherine Wilson, owner of Catherine’s Hairem, which is located exactly 47 paces south of my apartment door in Jefferson.
-
Mar 27, 2023 | 
communitynewspapergroup.com | Chuck Offenburger
There are some of us old-timers who thought we’d seen girls’ sports – and maybe even women’s sports – get about as big as they were going to get back in the late 1960s and 1970s. That’s when the Iowa high school girls’ state basketball tournament championship games were filling 14,000 seats at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines and were being watched on TV by people in nine states.
