Oddities of a 50-Year Odyssey

Bumpy business trips, curious encounters with celebrities, and goofy happenings at historic events. A half-century of journalism produces some weird memories.

I’ve been a journalist for 50 years, counting a summer reporting internship. That realization hit me like a hammer to the forehead the other day. It also prompted me to look back at my career, and at some memorable occurrences.

The Last Man

Our Meredith Corp. marketing team was seated aboard the commercial jet, stuffed with travelers, bound for Atlanta, Ga., just as a flight attendant closed the door…but wait! There was one more passenger, a man, who’d just arrived at the door.

This man, The Last Man, was one of the largest human beings I had ever seen. He was tall, maybe 6 feet 5 inches, and thick. He looked like he could play right tackle for a professional football team. Or compete as an Olympic weightlifter.

The Last Man walked up the aisle, checking his boarding pass and reading the seat numbers displayed on each row. But there was no need for him to check. Because there was only one open seat on this plane. It was next to me, on my left.

I turned and looked at my teammates across the aisle. They were wide-eyed as they watched the scene develop.

I stood up so The Last Man could take his seat. We had to raise the armrest between us so he could squeeze into position. He occupied his seat and half of mine. So, I had to pivot in my half-seat to face the aisle.

This is impossible, I thought. I can’t fly from Des Moines to Atlanta seated sideways.

Mercifully, just before takeoff, a flight attendant stopped by and said she had arranged to open a seat for me elsewhere. She then explained to The Last Man, “I’m sorry, sir, but you are a very large person.” He nodded. He was now free to move about his two seats.

I relocated to my new seat and thanked the flight attendant for her inflight cabin magic. I was relieved — for myself, and for The Last Man.

Twister!

In 1998, I was among dozens of travelers who spent a good chunk of a late-June afternoon in the basement of Des Moines International Airport.

I didn’t know there was a basement at the airport. But there is and it served as an emergency shelter for us while a “super-cell” wall cloud rammed the Des Moines metro. The TV weather gurus called this rotational storm a “mesocyclone.” It packed winds up to 120 mph, causing considerable damage in the area. At the Hyperion Field Club golf course in Johnston, for example, 525 trees were destroyed.

At the airport, there was little to do except sit on the basement floor and make small talk until the storm passed. Once it was all clear, the airport began reorganizing to resume late afternoon and evening flights.

I was bound for Charlotte, N.C., and was relieved to be airborne. That relief lasted about 30 minutes, when a fierce thunderstorm rolled into our path and rocked the plane with jarring turbulence. Flashes of lightning added an eery Twilight Zone vibe to the darkened cabin.

A talkative young man soon engaged me and the pod of passengers surrounding us. He was a celebrity of sorts, portraying one of Tim Allen’s sons on the TV show Home Improvement. Soon enough, our energetic celeb passenger came up with an idea to add some levity to our situation. We’d have a betting pool and each of us would chip in a few bucks. The bet: Who could come the closest in forecasting our actual arrival time in Charlotte?

I don’t recall who won but it wasn’t me. No matter. I was happy just to land and be done with airplanes and airports for the day.

Fish Oil and Tear Gas

Now, I was not on this trip, but the story was shared with me by co-workers. I’ll do my best to do it justice.

One of our Meredith teams was flying to a client meeting back East. The team’s account manager, Hal, was a natty dresser, and on this trip he wore a sharp wool blazer.

Another passenger on the plane had bought some “fresh” fish — cod, maybe — and had it packed in an iced box for the trip. He stored the iced fish in an overhead bin — directly above Hal’s head. At some point in the flight, the ice began to melt. Liquid from the thawing fish squeezed through the bottom of the overhead bin door, and the fish oil began to drip, drip, drip downward…onto Hal’s snappy sport coat.

A foul-smelling jacket would have been bad enough. But another indignity awaited.

This was one of those flights that required passengers to exit outside, down the stairs and on to the tarmac. As passengers walked to the terminal, they were engulfed by a grey, rancid cloud. Their plane had landed near a site where SWAT or some other type of law enforcement officers were performing emergency response drills, with tear gas. Prevailing winds carried the gas to the airport landing strip.

Our red-eyed team was nearly in tears by the time they met the clients. And one team member reeked — as if he’d bathed in Long John Silver’s Baja Sauce.

Sam Donaldson. Wikimedia Commons.

Mighty Mouth

One of my first encounters with big-time national reporters happened in 1979, when I was a reporter for the Quad-City Times in Davenport.

President Jimmy Carter and his family made a three-day campaign trip to Davenport. The Carters and his staff arrived on a riverboat cruising the Mississippi River.

I was assigned to cover Carter’s scheduled appearance at the John Deere headquarters in Moline, Ill. A busload of us local and national journalists was driven from Davenport to the immaculate Deere compound.

We were directed to some bleachers set up outside the headquarters building. President Carter was scheduled to see a demonstration of Deere eco-friendly technology and then make some remarks. William Hewitt, president of the agribusiness giant, introduced the big green John Deere machinery that recycled corn cobs, and tried to explain how it works.

After a few minutes of this, someone behind me had heard enough.

“Are you Mister Deere?” a booming voice interrupted. He then demanded, “Where’s the president?”

I winced and turned to locate the source of the voice. It was Sam Donaldson, the arched-eyebrow correspondent for ABC-TV news.

President Carter arrived soon enough and even provided a photo op by dumping a bushel of corn cobs into the Deere machine.

Apparently, verbal sparring was routine gamesmanship for Donaldson and the president’s staff. A colleague covering Carter’s riverboat departure later that day filled me in:

The Carter family stood at the stern of the riverboat as it left the Davenport dock on the Mississippi, waving at the cheering crowd on shore. Just as Donaldson began his stand-up TV report from the riverbank, the boat’s deafening steam whistles blasted the early evening air. Donaldson, disgusted, scowled and dropped the mic to his side.

“Hey Donaldson,” a Carter staffer shouted from the boat. “That’s for you!”

Pope John Paul II. Wikimedia Commons.

From President to Pope

Later in 1979, the Quad-City Times dispatched me to Des Moines to help cover Pope John Paul II’s epic visit to Iowa’s capital city.

My work proved brief and uneventful; I was assigned to the press pen at Des Moines International Airport for the pope’s arrival. The newspaper had arranged for me to have a dedicated phone at a journalists’ table on the airport tarmac (no cellphones back then). A swarm of Italian journalists appeared, along with paparazzi eager to photograph every second of the pope’s landing.

The pope arrived, all smiles, and waved at a wall of bystanders and journalists watching from a roped-off area. He stopped occasionally to bless babies, and then he was gone, into the terminal. From there, he was transported by helicopter to St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Cumming.

Not much for me to report, really. Later, I spent a good hour trying to navigate my rental car to the hotel. It was a challenge, especially for an out-of-towner, to circumvent the numerous National Guard security roadblocks and checkpoints set up on main metro traffic routes.

When I returned to Davenport, Dan Hayes, my boss, had a question for me: Why were we getting billed for a bunch of phone calls to Rome?

Paparazzi!

Davenport Bank and Trust. Wikimedia Commons.

A Banker’s Banker

In my earliest days at the Quad-City Times, I ventured to Davenport Bank and Trust Co., not far from the newspaper. The building was an architectural marvel, from its grand, two-story lobby up to its imposing clocktower.

There, in the center of the lobby, an elderly man dressed in suit and tie sat alone at a desk, using long scissors to clip snippets from newspaper financial pages.

“Who is that?” I asked an employee.

“That is Mr. Figge,” he responded. “This is his bank.”

Mr. Figge, I soon learned, was V.O. Figge. Figge, a former state bank examiner, was credited with transforming a Depression bank failure into a huge, thriving bank in downtown Davenport.

“Well, why isn’t he in a nice office?” I asked.

The employee shook his head. “This is where Mr. Figge has always chosen to be, at a desk in the middle of the main floor.”

Indeed, he was there, at his desk in the middle of the main floor, every time I went to the bank to deposit a check.

The bank was sold to Norwest Corp. in 1991, and V.O. Figge died in 1995, at age 95.

This column is part of a fast-growing collection of reporting and writing from Iowa writers all over the map. Check out their work at Iowa Writers Collaborative.

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