Meet Me In Grundy Center

You may be familiar with “Solomon Grundy, Born on Monday……”, but have you ever heard of Grundy Center, Iowa? The town of 2500 is the county seat of Grundy County, home to some of the best farmland in the world, so they say.

I was in Grundy Center last Friday afternoon and evening for the district track meet. Raindrops began falling shortly after the field events commenced at 4 p.m. I was umbrella-less, having somehow managed to forget mine at home.

That absent-mindedness provided the perfect excuse for a brief foray into Grundy’s downtown, where I found a $2 umbrella at the locally-owned drug store. You get what you pay for---the umbrella proved to be uncloseable, once opened---but it did keep my head and shoulders mostly dry for the next few hours. Before heading back to Spartan Field, I snapped a few photos near the limestone courthouse. This statuary gal resembles her famous counterpart who stands in New York Harbor. The face seems quite different, though…..maybe they are distant cousins.

It behooved me to not waste much time downtown, or I would miss seeing my son run and jump, but here’s one more architectural feature along Grundy Center’s main thoroughfare:

I hustled back to the track meet and for the next several hours this was the view above my head:

Oh, look, its our friendly, neighborhood Earth Science teachers. They had forgotten their umbrellas, too, and had just bought these blue ones at the Dollar General Store on the edge of Grundy. Haha……I got a better deal than they did…..their umbrellas cost $5 apiece! Smiley-Guy on the left used to drive the milk truck which comes to our farm every other day; he and I would often discuss field rocks and prairie flowers. Then, all of a sudden last year, he decided to put his college degree to use and become a science teacher. How could he do such a thing! I miss our conversations.

You say you haven’t seen enough evidence of the alleged rain at the track meet……well, this next shot is offered as more proof. By evening’s end, my shoes and pant-legs were thoroughly mud-caked.

At this district meet, first and second-place finishers in all events earn a trip to the state track meet in Des Moines. One of the relays my son was in came in second by .03 seconds, though to my eyes it looked like they were third. Apparently, the eyeballs don’t have it when it comes to calling close races. The relay boys are ecstatic….they’ll be headed to Des Moines in a few days, and if I can find my way there, too, you’ll have to tolerate a blog report from Drake Stadium.

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Accompanying me to the track meet were four baskets filled with wet laundry. I gambled that a town the size of Grundy Center would have a laundromat and I was not disappointed. The only question in my mind was: What brand of farm implements were sold in the past here in Petersen's building?

Standing under several towering larch trees in the City Park was this one-room schoolhouse, labeled “Colfax #9”. It is also known as “The Herb Quick School”. John Herbert Quick grew up in Grundy County in the mid-to-late 1800’s and eventually authored several books. From childhood days, he had dreamed of being a writer: “I cannot remember when things that I saw and experienced did not appeal to me as the stuff of writing.” (Sounds like a blogger-wannabe.)

On my way to Grundy Center, I had dropped my daughter off at UNI for her Camp Adventure lifeguard training. After the track meet, I picked her up at Jimmy John’s Sandwich Shop on “The Hill” near campus. Yeah, the scene is somewhat blurry, but what do you expect with “Extremely Fast Delivery”!

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I'm writing this on Sunday night after a long day of cemetery-touring; a report about that will be filed in the next post. There’s just never-ending excitement around here. Have a nice day!

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