In the fall of 1939, a twenty-five year old named Bucky O’Connor took over as the head coach of Boone’s basketball team. He coached at Boone until 1948, when he became the golf and freshman basketball coach at the University of Iowa. He became the interim coach for the Hawkeyes during the 1949-50 season when two previous coaches stepped down, and moved into the head job fulltime for the next year. In 1955, he guided Iowa to the NCAA semifinals, and reached the title game in 1956, only to fall short to Bill Russell’s San Francisco Dons. Those two final four appearances account for two of just three in Iowa’s history.

Tragically, just two years later, O’Connor died at the age of 44. According to the April 23, 1958 Des Moines Register, O’Connor has swerved his car to avoid two guinea hens in the road and collided head on with a truck, whose load of concrete tile crushed O’Connor’s car. (The Register has a photo of the car, grimly captioned “O’Connor’s Smashed Death Car.”) The Register’s articles about the sad crash were titled things such as, “Can ‘Nice Guy’ Win? Bucky Was Rare One Who Could,” and “Bucky: A Friend and Coach Who Gave Iowa Its ‘Finest.’”

See more designs from the Boone set here.

On Instagram, I follow a great Iowa-based maker of prints and clothing called Bozz Prints. I had seen a post featuring a shirt that said “Ankeny: Coming Soon to a Town Near You,” with some explanation that Ankeny was expanding. It made me laugh, even though I didn’t know the specifics. When it became time to write about my Ankeny High set here, I knew it was time to find out what it was all about.

It seems that Ankeny has been annexing land in the more rural parts of Polk County, Iowa. Not everyone is all that happy about it, but an Iowa law stipulates that only 80% of homeowners have to agree to be annexed for the plan to go forward. The nearby city of Alleman (with a population of 423) developed its own annexation plan to try to insulate itself against the encroaching Ankeny, but Iowa’s City Development Board overruled it. So watch out—you may find yourself living in Ankeny soon.

See more designs from the Ankeny set here.

Does Knoxville, Iowa have the same namesake as Knoxville, Tennessee? Yes! How about Fort Knox? Also yes! So who are Knoxville, Knoxville, and Fort Knox named after?

If you’re a Hamilton person (you know who you are), you may know Henry Knox’s name from the song “Right Hand Man,” which I do not remember from the one time I watched Hamilton on Disney+. Knox was, as you could probably guess, a Revolutionary War general, and the United States’s second Secretary of War. Knox retired to Montpelier—his estate in Thomaston, which used to be a part of Massachusetts but which is now in—you guessed it, Knox County, Maine. Wikipedia notes that, “Knox died at his home on October 25, 1806, at the age of 56, three days after swallowing a chicken bone which lodged in his throat and caused a fatal infection.”

In July of 1950, the Knox Memorial Association threw a celebration for “the forgotten man of the American Revolution.” The New York Times teased it with an article breathlessly titled, “Fete to Revive Fame of Gen. Knox Slated.” But perhaps the most fitting tribute came in recent years, when a grandmother and her granddaughter wrote an entire maybe-not-so-Hamiltonian musical about Knox’s life, called Count Me In! You can get a feel for what the musical is like here. I didn’t make it to the end, but I’m sure the part with the chicken bone is thrilling.

See more designs from the Knoxville set here.

I liked this photo from the Council Bluffs library’s archive of an exchange student from Japan (left), an American, and an exchange student from France (right) cheering at an Abraham Lincoln basketball game in 1963.

The Japanese student’s name was Aiko Yoshikawa, and here’s what she had to say in the 1963 Crimson and Blue yearbook:

See more designs from the Abraham Lincoln set here.

An alumna of Thomas Jefferson was etiquette expert Marjabelle Young Stewart, who was apparently pretty famous but was as unfamiliar to me as etiquette is. Her 2007 New York Times obituary noted that she suggested that the proper way to eat a hot dog is to wrap it in a napkin, which is horrifying to me; it also noted that “Mrs. Stewart hinted, discreetly, at a romantic involvement with John F. Kennedy.” That seems like a difficult thing to do all that discreetly.

But my favorite part of Mrs. Stewart’s obituary came at the end:

See more designs from the Thomas Jefferson set here.

According to the website of Le Mars, Iowa (Ice Cream Capital of the World), railroad magnate John Blair came to the town and asked his traveling party what it should be named. The women of the party—Lucy Underhill, Elizabeth Parson, Mary Weare, Anna Blair, Rebecca Smith, and Sarah Reynolds—took the first initials of their name, combined them, and came up with Le Mars.

See more designs from the Le Mars set here.

Dubuque’s second high school, Hempstead, was set to open in the fall of 1969, but the building wasn’t ready in time for the school year. Until Hempstead moved to Hempstead in January 1970, a “split shift” arrangement was instituted, where Senior students would have an abbreviated day for the first half of the day, and Hempstead students would come in for the second half.

In the 1970 Echo yearbook, a Senior student wrote:

Alas, it couldn’t last. But I can imagine being a teenager with a whole autumn of midwestern afternoons ahead of me, and I’m jealous.

See more designs from the Senior set here.

J. Schuyler Long graduated from Iowa School for the Deaf and eventually became its principal. In 1909, he published The Sign Language: A Manual of Signs, which is said to be the first picture dictionary of sign language.

1909 also saw him publish a book of poetry, called Out of the Silence. In the final stanza of his poem “The Poetry of Motion,” he wrote:

I’m certain that he intended it to be set to the tune of the theme song to Gilligan’s Island.

See more designs from the ISD set here.

The Sargento Balanced Breaks Wheat Thins + cheese combo is unstoppable. A delight.

See you next week! Tell your friends!