mallorys_camera | "Here comes the twister." -- cf David Byrne

Jump: Charles City, IA → Cresco, IA – Howard County Fairgrounds: 50 miles
RIGHT out of the front of the lot… RIGHT onto CLARK
RIGHT at traffic light onto HWY 18 EAST to New Hampton
LEFT onto HWY 63 NORTH… if you need fuel, only station on route is STRAIGHT here on Hwy 18
RIGHT onto HWY 9 EAST to Cresco… arrows to lot…
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm

In a café this morning, I met a banker. He commutes to his job here in Charles City, Iowa from his home in Palm Springs, California.

“So how is California anyway?” I asked him.

He rolled his eyes. “Horrible. Horrible. There’ll be riots in every major city there this coming winter. That’s how bad the budget cuts are.”

“Really?”

“Really. I don’t see how California survives this. Of course, I don’t see how the rest of the country survives this either.”

“That bad? But the stock market is going back up. Analysts I’ve heard – admittedly they’re all on NPR – say we’re in the early stages of a recovery.”

The banker, a large handsome man with a silver fox beard, just shook his head. “Of course they always manipulate those numbers when they first come out. Then they revise them, sneak the real figures through the back door as it were. But I must say, I’ve never seen them manipulated quite so egregiously before. And for the record, yes, I voted for him.”

###

One might assume Charles City in Floyd County, Iowa was named for Charles Floyd, the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s only casualty. Floyd died just south of Sioux City along what is now the South Dakota border so I’m not entirely sure what his name would be doing on a county in the northeast part of the state. In his journals, William Clark describes Floyd’s malady as “a bilious cholic… Floyd Died with a great deal of Composure.” Modern historians believe he died of a ruptured appendix.

Charles City, though, was not named for Charles Floyd, but for the son of the first white settler to these parts, one Joseph Kelly, a hunter and a miller who platted the town on the site of an old Winnebago Indian village. Couldn’t ask for a more perfect spot for a town at least on a sunny day in summer when the Cedar River is behaving itself.

The tractor was invented in Charles City. Suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt was born here.

In 1968 a devastating tornado – actually two tornadoes meeting up just south of town – roared through town. The joke at the time was that it took out all the churches but left the bars standing. Local weather mavens estimated the winds to be 350 miles per hour. (Some people who lived through it wrote about their experiences here.)

A famous photo of the twister exists:

Now I’ve been in a lot of towns that have been partly destroyed by twisters as Fellini and Prendergas wends its way through Tornado Alley. Also seen my share of post-flood towns –Frank Lloyd Wright house in the picture above was one of many structures damaged in state-wide flash-flooding in May 2008. What’s remarkable to me about Charles City is that it really doesn’t have any of that brooding victim-of-some-dark-past feel to it. If I had to guess I’d say that many of the places that were taken out – at least in the historic part of town – were replaced by parks. Everything that’s cool and wonderful about small Midwestern towns is here. It’s a place where one could fantasize living – or at least maintaining a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed summer cottage.