Carl Kurtz's Photo Essay: Mating Monarchs

In preparation for the upcoming second edition of A Practical Guide to Prairie Restoration by Carl Kurtz, we're excited to be sharing Carl's beautiful photos and observations about nature!

Carl Kurtz is a professional writer, teacher, naturalist, and photographer. He and his wife and partner, Linda, live on a 172-acre family farm in central Iowa that is one of the few prairie seed sources in the Midwest.


For most birds, mammals and insects the season for reproduction is spring or summer.  In the case of butterflies it is late spring or summer when there is an abundance of food for the larval stages, nectar for adults and warm temperatures to promote activity.  While much of the insect world goes about its business unnoticed, monarch butterflies are banded and monitored by individuals across the country.  They are a favorite among school children and likely have been studied more than any other butterfly species. 

The Farm at Holstein Dip Excerpt

Household life centered in the kitchen where we sat down to three meals daily. It had a table, chairs, cook stove, wood box, cupboards, and sink. a hand pump drew rainwater from a cistern in all seasons, but a drain to the septic field could be used only in frost-free months. At other times, Mother put a slop bucket under the enclosed sink and emptied it daily. White enameled wainscoting, curtains, wallpaper, and linoleum on the uneven floor brightened the room. Besides two entrances, four doorways opened to the rest of the house. One led to a pantry where a trapdoor covered the steep cellar stairway and a white porcelain pail for drinking water brought from the spring-fed outside well stood on a table. By the back entry, a door closed on the stairway landing where Father hung his work clothes.


An excerpt from "Home," in Carroll Englehardt's The Farm at Holstein Dip

20 Colleges Embracing the Green Roof Trend

We're delighted to bring you a very interesting article from Best College Online expanding on our salute to colleges and universities that are going green! Happy reading: http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/2012/08/16/20-colleges-embracing-the-green-roof-trend/

Written by Tim Handorf

Carroll Engelhardt Interview: Part 2

What did you enjoy most about your childhood? Least? What was your favorite Sunday dinner?

Summer afternoons in the old swimming hole on our farm with the many kids who biked or walked from town are the most pleasurable memories. I also liked roaming the woods. Forty acres of pasture gave other kids and me an ample playground for games of war. I generally disliked the endless routine of daily chores and really hated fixing fence. I enjoyed feasting at Mother’s bountiful holiday meals—Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. She always made Sunday dinners special with mashed potatoes, gravy, corn or peas, rolls, real butter, homemade jam and jelly, a variety of pickles, and either chicken, ham, beef or pork roast. Roast chicken was my favorite. She browned it first in the frying pan. My brother and I claimed the drumsticks. I recall the legs and thighs of these free-range chickens as being much larger than what we now buy in supermarkets.

At the end of your book, you return to Elkader for your 50th high school reunion. What has changed the most since you graduated? What has remained the same?

The town has about two hundred fewer people. Severe Turkey River flooding in recent years has caused the removal of about twenty-four homes on the south end. Instead of three or four groceries, drug stores, car dealers, and hardware stores there is now only one of each. Theis Clothing and McTaggart’s Furniture—large retailers of my youth—are gone. The hospital, public library, public school, and several churches remain. The residents’ affection for small-town living still endures.

Writer, researcher, professor: you’ve had a long, successful, and fulfilling career. Is there any other path you dreamed of taking? Field naturalist, restaurant owner, Arctic explorer?

Novels and movies fueled my fantasies of adventure, professional sports, and space exploration without stimulating any realistic career goals. My parents realized early that I did not have an aptitude for or an interest in farming. Until I became a high school junior, my main ambition was to become a senior. Compelled to consider life after graduation, I attended Iowa State Teachers College with plans to become a high school social studies instructor because I had always enjoyed history and school. During a first semester humanities class, I decided I wanted to be a college teacher of history. I’m glad that worked out; I don’t know what I might have done otherwise. My success has been quite modest. Still, I’m grateful for my academic career. A surplus of doctorates and a shortage of positions in the seventies pushed many of my graduate school friends into other lines of work.

The Farm at Holstein Dip: An Iowa Boyhood by Carroll Engelhardt 

Carroll Engelhardt Interview: Part 1

After years of teaching about other people’s histories, what caused you to write your own coming-of-age history?

I can’t pinpoint a definite cause. The seeds were planted early. As a child I frequently studied the histories and readers that my parents used when they attended country school. These textbooks later became sources for my doctoral dissertation about citizenship training in Iowa. During my graduate studies, I read about the agrarian myth and McCarthyism, which gave me a sense of how my family entered into history. Mother and Father still believed that farmers—even though declining in numbers—were the backbone of the American Republic. A neighbor often talked about communists in our small town, and I remember watching the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. After hearing stories about my childhood, my daughters urged me to write them down. By way of encouragement, the younger one gave me This House of Sky by Montana novelist Ivan Doig. His memoir about growing up as a ranch hand’s son revealed how ordinary lives could be made interesting for readers. Retirement finally gave me leisure to write about my rural boyhood.

To set the world of your childhood in northeast Iowa in context, you blend hometown details with national and world history in an intriguing and informative way. How did you achieve this?

By researching several sources. The Clayton County Register and county histories helped me connect family stories and my memories with Elkader and Clayton County events. Histories of Iowa, American agriculture, small towns, the Second World War, popular culture, and American society in the forties and fifties enabled me to tie our lives to national and international trends. Setting lives and events in larger contexts is what historians are trained to do. It is hard to learn; I don’t think I did it successfully until my forties when I published several historical articles. Putting any topic in context is also hard to teach undergraduates, I painfully discovered.  

Yours was a fourth-generation Iowa farm family; your parents grew up in homes without electricity on farms without tractors and began farming in the same way. Then telephones, radios, automobiles, electricity, and tractors came along to revolutionize their lives and those of their children. How did such affluence affect your community?

Tractors, mechanization, and electricity increased productivity and made possible larger farms, fewer farmers, and a reduced number of small-town businessmen. The small-scale diversified farming that my parents practiced eventually disappeared. Automobiles and hard-surfaced roads expanded shopping opportunities for families. Movies, radio, and television tied farm and small-town folk to a national consumer culture. Radio newscasts brought world events into our homes. Television privatized leisure, which diminished large rural neighborhood card parties and socializing during Saturday nights in town. While rural and-small town residents lamented these changes, they also embraced the more comfortable and interesting life styles made possible by modern technologies.

As a boy in 1940s and 1950s Iowa, you rode a horse on the hayfork, hired out to other farmers to load bales in the field, and worked in the haymow. Needless to say, this does not sound easy. Tell us more about the kinds of work you did.

My experiences were typical. I’m sure I worked less than some of my classmates who had more acres and more livestock to care for. For example, neither my brother nor I was kept home from school to help with the corn harvest, fall plowing, or spring planting. The economic success of small farms depended on shared labor. All worked so all could eat. It was an important life lesson that most parents imparted to their offspring from an early age, expecting them to help with whatever needed doing. The care and feeding of livestock dictated morning and evening chores. Planting and harvesting crops had to be completed during optimal weather conditions. Fixing fence, repairing machinery, cleaning barns, hauling manure, sawing wood, and roofing buildings are some other tasks I recall. Writing about Harvard colleagues who said he worked too hard, Professor of Economics John Kenneth Galbraith comments, “Their main problem was they weren’t raised on farms!”

The Farm at Holstein Dip: An Iowa Boyhood by Carroll Engelhardt 

Cary Illian Exhibit

Attention Cedar Rapidians! Be sure to check out Clary Illian’s special exhibition preview reception at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art tonight from 5:00-7:00 p.m. This event is free and open to the public! If you can’t make it to the reception, swing by this exhibition, which will be available for viewing from August 25, 2012, to February 17, 2013. 

Clary Illian is the author of A Potter's Workbook (University of Iowa Press, 1999). Clary says of her pottery, “What is the heart of the matter in pottery making? To call into being an object and to ask the object to have qualities that evoke in the viewer a sense of rightness, beauty, or vitality is to tinker with the divine. Making pots offers a constant challenge to search for the mysterious underpinnings of the physical world itself.” We hope to see you at the exhibit!

http://www.crma.org/Exhibition/Detail/Upcoming/Clary-Illian-A-Potters-Potter.aspx

Interview with Evelyn Birkby: Part 5

After sixty-plus years of writing a weekly column, you must be running out of ideas. What keeps your writing so fresh and energizing?

Life continues to be exciting. I get up in the morning and follow the pattern of my father and say out the door or window or out on the porch, “Good morning world, it is going to be a good day.” Then I get my coffee and toast and head for the computer and start writing.

I try and get ideas for columns ahead of time. I carry a notebook around with me all the time to write down ideas. Sometimes a thought will come in the middle of the night and I write in my notebook beside the bed so I won’t forget it by morning. Ideas can come from anywhere. I also have three sons who are vitally interested in my writing and give me ideas. I tell them I don’t want to write old, so they help me stay fresh. Lately they tell me to write about what it is like to get old. “Not many people write about how they feel and think and act after 90. You can do that and you should,” they say.
I would like to have lived in a university town. I would have liked the energy and opportunities to learn more. I had samples when I studied at the University of Colorado and later the University of Chicago—so I had a little exposure to this kind of town.

Writer, journalist, KMA radio homemaker, Iowa master farm homemaker: you’ve had a long and successful career. Is there any other path you dreamed of taking? Park ranger, bookstore owner, Amazon explorer?

That really takes some thought. My path has gone one step at a time, sometimes from necessity, sometimes accidentally, certainly when love entered the picture and then children. But what would I have chosen or dreamed of choosing any different? When I was young I talked of being a nurse, until I realized I did not have the natural qualities needed for such work. I took teachers’ training in college because I could get a certificate in two years and money was desperately tight and my parents did well to send me for two years.

I would like to have lived in a university town. I would have liked the energy and opportunities to learn more. I had samples when I studied at the University of Colorado and later the University of Chicago—so I had a little exposure to this kind of town.

So many exciting paths have opened up to me along the way: my time in Chicago, my exciting romance and coming back to Iowa, then the doors that opened with my writing and radio—television, public appearances, working with Fannie Flagg, knowing Jane and Michael Stern, and, lately, the great experience of making a documentary with Iowa Public Television and then writing my books. The fun with the University of Iowa Press and their great staff and the Iowa Women’s Archives wanting my memorabilia and all my writing. Mercy, I would never have imagined so much. And the joy of having three wonderful sons and two perfect grandchildren and a great daughter-in-law.

My cup runneth over. I don’t need any other dreams.

Evelyn Birkby is the author of Always Put in a Recipe and Other Tips for Living from Iowa's Best-Known Homemaker, as well as Up a Country Lane Cookbook and Neighboring on the Air.