dsmWeekly - April 2, 2025

Editor's Note

In any group of coworkers, family members or friends, it’s useful to have someone who can reliably fill in the blank: “Remember that one time when _________.” Here at Business Publications Corp., we often turn to Dave Elbert, who wrote for the Business Record from 2012 through February of this year. Nearly 350 of his "Elbert Files" are archived online, and they're full of insights he gathered from reporting and writing over the years for the Business Record and during his previous stint at the Des Moines Register, where he and I first met. He can fill in more “remember when” blanks about Des Moines than just about anybody else in town, so when he offered to shift his focus to dsm, I jumped on it. Stay tuned for more of “Elbert’s Backstories” in the weeks and months ahead.

- Michael Morain, dsm editor

The Cardiff Giant was carved out of Iowa gypsum, buried in New York and "discovered" a year later. (Photo: New York State Historical Society)

PEOPLE & COMMUNITY

My interest in history goes way back

By Dave Elbert

I have a history of digging up history.

It comes from my Catholic mother, who wanted to boost my reading skills when I was 9 or 10 with books about the lives of the saints. I later learned that a lot of what I read was not literally true. But the books held my attention, and it was a short jump from saints to biographies of early Americans.

I was hooked, and I've studied history ever since, both in school and in my journalism career.

Little of what I write in these "Backstories" essays will be new, but a lot has been forgotten. For example, you may have heard about the Cardiff Giant hoax. It involved a 10-foot block of gypsum from Fort Dodge that was chiseled to resemble a man. It was then buried on a farm near Cardiff, New York, in 1868 and “discovered” a year later by people who claimed it was a petrified man. The “giant” was put on exhibition and earned money for its owners long after the hoax was exposed.

Eventually, the carved stone was sold to Des Moines Register publisher Gardner “Mike” Cowles, who brought it to his home on 37th Street. In his 1985 autobiography, he reported that his 7-year-old son and playmates damaged the giant when they applied a hammer to the stoneman’s anatomically correct manhood and broke off an essential piece. “I was enraged,” Cowles wrote. He added, “Eventually I found a craftsman who cemented the tip back on.”

In this column, I will also occasionally share personal stories, like the fact that my father, Willis Elbert, was one of two mechanics who built the world’s first slip-form paver. Iowa Highway Commission engineer James “Jimmy” Johnson invented the machine that revolutionized highway paving in 1949 with moveable concrete forms. But my father and fellow mechanic Rudy Schroeder were the guys who put the pieces together and made it work. When Johnson died in 1982, the Register’s Randy Evans wrote that the estimated savings “from the slip-form paver may have reached the $1 billion mark worldwide.”

Other times, I’ll focus my way-back looking glass on "what if" situations, like the time in 1928 when we could have had two Iowans running for president. That year, Herbert Hoover, the Republican from West Branch, defeated New York's Gov. Al Smith, a Democrat. But Hoover’s opponent could have been Des Moines publisher Edwin “E.T.” Meredith.

In addition to founding Better Homes & Gardens and Successful Farming, Meredith was a “dry” Democrat with a political itch. He made unsuccessful bids for Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat in 1914 and for governor in 1916 and served briefly as U.S. secretary of agriculture in 1920. In 1928, non-drinking Democrats promoted him as an alternative to Smith, who wanted to end Prohibition. But nine days before the Democratic convention began, Meredith died unexpectedly of heart problems.

Could he have won? We’ll never know. But it's quite a backstory.

Iowa Poet Laureate Vince Gotera will participate this weekend in Poetry Palooza. Read more about him in the current issue of ia magazine. (Photo: Sean O'Neal/UNI)

BEST BET

Catch a rhyme and have a slammin’ time

A school of fish. A troop of baboons. A conspiracy of lemurs. And an eloquence of poets? Whatever you call them, they’ll celebrate National Poetry Month with the third annual Poetry Palooza this weekend at Grand View University. Friday’s events run from 5:30 to 9 p.m., and Saturday’s poetry marathon lasts from 9:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Iowa Poet Laureate Vince Gotera of Cedar Falls joins an unusually distinguished roster of wordsmiths that includes Kelsey Bigelow of Des Moines, Jane Wong of Seattle and Ross Gay of Bloomfield, Indiana, whose bestselling 2019 essay collection, “The Book of Delights,” helped countless readers through the pandemic. The festival offers a slate of readings, workshops and performances to celebrate the written, rewritten, rewritten, rewritten, spoken, shouted and whispered word.

For the third year now, the festival opens with a ceremony to bestow the annual James A. Autry Award, named for one of our city’s finest writers.

The Week Ahead

Misty Copeland, 7 p.m. today, Drake University’s Knapp Center. The award-winning ballet dancer and first Black woman to be a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre delivers the university's annual Bucksbaum Lecture.

AViD: Amina Luqman-Dawson, 6:30 pm. Thursday, Central Library. The winner of both the Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award kicks off this year's Authors Visiting in Des Moines series with the Des Moines Public Library. Her debut novel, "Freewater," a book of historical fiction for middle grades, is about two enslaved children who escape from a plantation. Local author Abena Sankofa will moderate the talk.

"Bob Trevino Likes It," 7 p.m. Friday, Varsity Cinema. Des Moines native Edgar Rosa’s film about chosen families has a special screening, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker.

Iowa Trail Run Series, 9 a.m. Saturday, Greenwood Park. The annual series starts this weekend with a 4-mile and an 8-mile loop. Just take your pick and run, walk, hike or skip.

Wild Lights Festival, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Blank Park Zoo. With the flip of a switch, more than 50 sculptural animals come to life in massive Asian lantern displays. The exhibit remains through May 26.

Des Moines Symphony, 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Des Moines Civic Center. The orchestra plays Carl Orff’s epic “Carmina Burana,” with hefty choral backup from more than 100 local singers.

History of Tea, 1-2:30 p.m. Sunday, Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden. Sip tea from around the world and learn about its role in global history and culture.

New leader: As of Tuesday, Cole Lindholm (pictured) started his new role as CEO of Hope Ministries, succeeding Leon Negen, who served in the role for 31 years. Under Negen's leadership, the nonprofit increased its annual budget from $300,000 to more than $15 million and moved into a new 50,000-square foot facility to better serve men, women and children who are homeless, hungry, abused or struggling with addiction. Lindholm has worked for Hope Ministries for 25 years and was already serving in the role of president.

Dick Prall’s recent album “Headful of Hiss” lets it all out. (Photo: Trilix Studio)

ARTS & CULTURE

With new album, 'Dickiebird' takes flight

By Anthony Taylor

When Dick Prall stands on the stage at xBk, singing the final track from his newest EP, “Headful of Hiss,” his eyes tell a whole story.

He’s always scanning the crowd, making eye contact, drawing people in, gauging the energy. Par for the course. But every once in a while, his gaze lifts up, over the heads of the people watching him play. And that’s where the magic is.

It doesn’t last long, just three or four seconds usually. But in those brief, crystalline moments, you can watch his eyes and see every second, every mile, every ounce of pain and death and sadness and joy that has brought him to this moment. It looks like he’s just staring at the back wall, but he’s really looking back through time.

Prall — Dickiebird to his mother, but just Dickie on stage — was born about 55 years ago in Hannibal, Missouri. He lingered in the Show Me State only for a year before his family packed up and made its way to Sheffield, up toward Mason City. Prall doesn’t remember his time in Hannibal, but he does remember the day his father died.

“I grew up in death,” Prall said simply, kicking back on the couch in his downtown loft. And while it sounds like a very Johnny Cash thing to say, it’s not uttered with any pretension or ploy for sympathy. It’s just the facts.

Prall’s dad died the day before Prall’s fourth birthday. Two years earlier, the Prall family had lost another son. And while Prall admits that he doesn’t remember much about his father and nothing of his brother, the pall those two deaths cast over the rest of the family was like a weighted blanket around the shoulders of the rest of his childhood.

It’s a blanket Prall has never fully shrugged off. He admits to struggling with depression throughout his life. (“My dad was dead and my name is Dick, for chrissakes,” he said. “Kids can be mean.”) He’s been through three marriages, and he briefly owned a music venue in Cedar Rapids — Dick’s Tap and Shake Room — that was embraced by local business boosters but ignored by the general public.

But through it all, Prall wrote. A debut album with the Dick Prall Band in 1998; a follow-up with an act called Starch Martins in 2001. Solo albums in 2005 and ’07. But it was a 2015 album that was supposed to take his career to the Next Level.

And, like most every other touchpoint in Prall’s life, it came from underneath that blanket.

“That was on the heels of my mother passing, and my stepfather passing three weeks later,” he said. “Three months after that, my wife left.”

And just like that, the man who grew up in death had a fresh crop of pain to process. Changing his stage name to Dickie, an homage to that nickname from his mother, Prall released the album of the same name.

It was a painfully personal, incredibly cathartic experience that seemed to split Prall wide open and let every creative spark inside him fly out at once, like sparks from a flint.

Read the full profile in the current issue of dsm magazine and then watch Dickiebird in the wild at 7 p.m. Saturday at Alluvial Brewing Co. in Ames and 7 p.m. April 25 at Wooly's in the East Village.