Recently I ran into a childhood friend who is a lifelong (and successful) farmer. “How’s life in the big city?” he asked, referring to my home in the Des Moines suburbs. I get this query occasionally from rural friends, some of whom cannot imagine living in the city or suburbs. ...

The year I was a junior in high school, four college students were shot on a campus in Ohio. The setting was Kent State, a public university. On May 4, 1970, a rally protesting the expansion of the United States’ involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia went sideways; 28 National Guard ...

As I have stepped into this role of leadership, I have come to realize that I quite literally had no idea what I was getting myself into. What I thought the position was when I declared my candidacy to now is a complete 180 turn. No one really knows what goes into a respective position until ...

“Jeepers Creepers, where’d ya get those peepers?” Now there’s a phrase you probably haven’t heard for a while. Perhaps you’ve never heard it. The line is from a song recorded by Louis Armstrong in the late 1930s. At the time of the recording, the word jeepers was quite common but ...

Reflections on the 9/11 tragedies are vivid in most of my friends' and families' memories. It might be hard to understand if you did not live through it, but it haunts most of us. My parents compared it to the way they felt when Pearl Harbor was bombed during World War II. It was ...

Very few experiences have impacted my life as strongly as the Army. The Salvation Army, that is. Uncle Sam didn’t want me for the U.S. Army. It was 18 years ago about right now that I interviewed for the position of development and communications director for The Salvation Army of Des ...