Farm Bureau/Chuck Offenburger
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Our thanks to Chuck Offenburger for his interest in and support of Dedham and our Quasquicentennial and to the Iowa Farm Bureau for granting permission to reprint Chuck's article on Dedham's website. This publicity has reached countless readers and has increased interest in our community, the Dedham Quasquicentennial, and this website.
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DEDHAM'S LONG RUN OF FUN
"love, laughter & music since 1883"
The little town in West-Central Iowa is one of many across the state that will be celebrating special anniversaries in 2008. In Dedham, it’s the quasquicentennial, and they’re getting ready for it with the same tradition and spirit that have made the community famous for both bologna and baloney.
story by Chuck Offenburger
The new year means a new wave of centennial, quasquicentennial and sesquicentennial celebrations in towns across the state, including in one of my favorite little crossroads communities—Dedham, pop. 272, located in West-Central Iowa.
The good folks of Dedham will be celebrating their town’s 125 years on June 27-28, giving rise to a new local slogan: “Celebrate in ’08.” They’re prolific at slogans in Dedham. Another of theirs is: “Perfect place to raise a family.” And there’s this one: “Make our town your town!” Not bad.
But they had one of the best town slogans in the whole state for several years, and you can trust me on this because I study such things. “Dedham," it said. “Love, Laughter & Music since 1883!”
Wouldn’t that make almost anyone want to spend a little time there?
It was a perfect slogan for this town that has long been known as one of the real fun spots in the area, with lively dances, old-fashioned rope-pulling matches between tug-of-war teams, adult fast-pitch softball teams and more.
“Love, Laughter & Music since 1883” graced the town signs from 1999 until this past year, when the signs began showing some wear, so they were replaced. The new ones say, “Dedham welcomes you!” Now, doesn’t that show a burst of imagination!
True, the new signs look nice, and they do have plaques that name some of the town’s most active organizations—including the local 4-H club that has a name I’ve always admired, the Dedham “Go-Getters.”
The better news I can report is that I have raised enough heck about this—in phone calls and even a radio commentary—that reason and sentiment have returned to Dedham. They plan to restore the “Love, Laughter & Music since 1883” slogan and get it up on the town signs.
Donna Ankenbauer said it was easy for her to come up with that line back in ’99. “That is my slogan for life, and always has been,” she said. “And that’s kind of how life has been in Dedham, I think. A lot of love, a lot of good times.”
Oh, the people have known sorrow, too. For 27 years, Donna and her husband, Dean Ankenbauer, owned and operated the town’s nerve center, Donna’s Café, until Dean died from lung cancer in 1988.
She sold the café and followed a lifelong dream of going to nurse’s training, graduating as a registered nurse when she was 55. She still is working part-time in nursing. She also bought the café back after it struggled, and now leases it to John and Shelly Koester, who are returning it to its proper role as Dedham’s daytime gathering place. On toward evening, then Wiley’s “becomes the site,” Ankenbauer said. That’s the bar, owned by Bill Kral. What’s the “Wiley”? Kral’s nickname is “Wile E. Coyote,” after an old cartoon character.
Dedham is a place where nearly everybody has a colorful nickname—“Wimpy,” “Tickle,” “Boomer,” “Squeak,” “Noodles” “Peaches,” “Poopsie” and more. The Quasquicentennial committee did a recent tally on local people with nicknames, came up with more than 120 and listed them on a page in a new cookbook that features favorite recipes from cooks around the area.
Now they’re also gathering facts for an updated community history book, as well as planning the fun for the celebration in June. The committee is headed by Bob and Jeanne Danner, Mike and Jean Seidl, and Jim Schultes—and all three of those family names are big in the heritage of the predominantly German Catholic community.
Speaking of names, why is it “Dedham”?
“Well, the story that some people will tell you is that when the town was being settled, there was a curve on the railroad here, a livestock train jumped the tracks and a lot of hogs were killed—so ‘dead ham,’” said Jean Seidl. “But the real story is that one of the first railroad workers here had come from Dedham, Massachusetts, and named this after his hometown.”
Besides her involvement in the upcoming celebration, she has created and maintains the town’s own site on the Internet, www.dedhamiowa.com. How many towns of fewer than 300 people have one? It’s like giving the little community its own newspaper or radio station, a good means of promoting the quasquicentennial and everything else happening in Dedham.
The last two New Year’s Eve parties in the community have been fundraisers for the celebration, and those have featured a much-discussed takeoff on a TV game show that featured “beauty queens”—except the “queens” were 26 local men in drag. “They called us the ‘Dedham Darlings,’” said Bob Danner. Their photo wound up in the new cookbook, too.
Another big fundraiser was a fish fry last spring, with more than 900 people eating and contributing.
And an especially fun one was a first-ever “Bottle Race” held on Brushy Creek, which flows just north of town. “We had planned it as a rubber duck race, but the little rubber ducks we got didn’t float very well when we tested them,” Danner said. “So we went to the Pepsi Cola bottler in Carroll, and got 400-some 20-ounce plastic bottles with caps. We put a number in each one of them, and sold the bottles for $5 apiece, or six for $25.”
On a fine weekend afternoon in August, they had a picnic in the Dedham park, then loaded up 260 people on the Quasquicentennial float and other vehicles and took the crowd to the Brushy Creek bridge on the county road north of town. Everybody watched as the bottles were dropped into the creek and started floating southeast. Then everybody loaded back on to the vehicles and went to the finish line a quarter-mile down the stream. The first nine bottles to pass the finish line were cash winners—top prize was $200—and the very last bottle to arrive, after a float of one hour and 20 minutes, was a $5 winner. “We called that last one the ‘lame duck’ of the bottles,” said Mike Seidl. “To make sure we didn’t violate any pollution laws, we strung a stretch of orange plastic fencing across the creek, down from the finish line, just to make sure no bottles got past us. The heck of it was, we wound up having more bottles gathered up than we put in the creek, so we were calling it an environmental clean-up!”
Given all the above, it is appropriate that the most famous thing about Dedham in its 125th year is its baloney.
More formally, it’s “Dedham Bologna”—a ring of beef bologna with a bit of pork in it—processed and sold by Dave Kitt and his crew at Kitt’s Meat Processing locker operation, using the same recipe that’s been used for more than 90 years.
“I always bring it to my football tailgate parties, put it on Ritz crackers and people think it’s a delicacy,” said Dan Pomeroy, a Dedham native son who now lives in nearby Coon Rapids. “Those of us who grew up in Dedham have eaten it every way possible, because our folks fed it to us all the time when we were growing up.”
They probably took for granted how good it really is. That can happen in small towns—with good bologna, and with a good slogan, too.
You can reach the columnist at (515) 386-5488 or chuck@Offenburger.com.
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