BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF IOWA: Nile Kinnick

Nile Clark Kinnick
(July 9, 1918-June 2, 1943)
—student, athlete, and naval airman—was born in Adel, Iowa. His father, Nile Clark Kinnick, was a farm manager in Adel, and his maternal grandfather, George W. Clark, was a former governor of Iowa. As a youth, Kinnick excelled in several sports. He played American Legion baseball, catching for future Hall of Famer Bob Feller, and in 1930 he led the Adel Junior High football team to an undefeated season. In three seasons of high school basketball, Kinnick scored more than 1,000 points.

During the Great Depression, as the Kinnicks fell on hard times, Kinnick's father found work with the Federal Land Bank in Omaha. Kinnick finished his last two years of high school at Benson High School in Omaha, then enrolled at the State University of Iowa (now University of Iowa), where he excelled academically. As a freshman, he played on the baseball, basketball, and football teams. In his sophomore year, he dropped baseball, and as a junior he dropped basketball, in order to concentrate on his studies and football. After successful freshman and sophomore football seasons, Kinnick struggled his junior year with a painful ankle injury for which, as a Christian Scientist, he refused treatment.

In 1939, Kinnick's senior season, he became the undisputed star of a team that became known as the "Ironmen" because the roster was so thin that key players were forced to play 60 full minutes in several games. Kinnick played an amazing 402 consecutive minutes until he was injured in the final game of the season. The undermanned Hawkeyes compiled a surprising season record of 6-1-1, highlighted by dramatic wins over Notre Dame and Minnesota. Notre Dame arrived in Iowa City with a six-game winning streak and was ranked number one in the nation. Kinnick scored the Hawkeyes' only touchdown and converted the crucial extra point in the 7-6 upset, and he booted a spectacular 63-yard punt in the final minutes to pin the Irish near their own goal line and preserve the win. Against the powerful Minnesota squad, the Hawkeyes fell behind 9-0, but Kinnick threw two touchdown passes in the fourth quarter to secure the 13-9 victory.

...

After his first year in law school, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy Air Corps Reserve and was called to active duty three days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. On June 2, 1943, Kinnick took off on a routine training flight from the carrier USS Lexington, which was on a shakedown cruise in the Caribbean Sea. After his plane developed mechanical difficulties, Kinnick attempted a water landing, but when rescuers reached the crash site, neither the plane nor his body was found.

SKULL IN THE ASHES by Peter Kaufman

Don't forget to check out Skull in the Ashes: Murder, a Gold Rush Manhunt, and the Birth of Circumstantial Evidence in America, by Peter Kaufman. A story just in time for Halloween!

"Peter Kaufman has written a wonderful yarn about a murder and a manhunt that happened more than a hundred years ago in Iowa and Alaska. Skull in the Ashes is a suspenseful, colorful tale--history told as it should be, evenhanded and accurate, with memorable dialogue and fully-realized, larger-than-life characters."—Cedar Rapids Gazette

Photo from SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE PORCH, by Jim Heynen and Everett W. Kuntz

In this photo, a neighborhood gathers on the front porch on a summer day. See more photos like this one in Jim Heynen and Everett W. Kuntz's book, Sunday Afternoon on the Porch.

Nina Furstenau Book Talk

Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, author of Biting Through The Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America's Heartland, will be participating in the Osher Saturday Morning Book Talk tomorrow! Come for pastries at 9:30 A.M. and hear her speak at 10:00 A.M.

Date: Saturday, October 4
Time: 9:30 A.M.
Location: Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, 1907 Hillcrest Drive, Columbia, Missouri

"It should be noted that the recipe for the keema... had me combing the county for cardamom pods."—New York Times Book Review

"Lush and lyrical, Nina Mukerjee Furstenau’s memoir, Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland, blends food and childhood, cuisine and family into a story that resonates and lingers like the spices she lovingly describes."—Kansas City Star

"A beautiful and sensitive memoir—with recipes!—about life in Kansas for a Bengali family."—Star Tribune

UI Press at the Iowa City Book Festival

Make sure to mark your calendars for the Iowa City Book Festival, which runs from October 2-5! The University of Iowa Press will have a booth on the ped mall downtown, so stop by and visit us! UI Press authors Kathleen Founds and Heather A. Slomski will be there to talk about their work at the festival as well. Check out Kathleen's book, When Mystical Creatures Attack!, and Heather's book, The Lovers Set Down Their Spoons.

For more information on our events at the ICBF, please visit our Facebook events page.

We can't wait to see you there!

Year of Family Farming: September

The Food and Agriculture Organization has declared 2014 the Year of Family Farming with the aim of highlighting the important role family and small farms play in feeding the world. To do our part, throughout 2014 we are featuring some of our favorite images and words from Iowa books on family farms. Here’s the latest!

Harvest is well under way in Iowa now. Although this photograph comes from about 1940, canning is enjoying a resurgence along with people’s growing interest in eating local.

Mrs. Ralph Mann, Jefferson Co., and part of her canning. Photo taken around 1940. From A Bountiful Harvest: The Midwestern Farm Photographs of Pete Wettach, 1925-1965, edited by Leslie A. Loveless.

Excerpt from INDIA'S ORGANIC FARMING REVOLUTION, by Sapna E. Thottathil

India's Organic Farming Revolution, by Sapna E. Thottathil, rethinks the politics of organic food by focusing on what it means for the people who grow and sell it—what it means for their health, the health of their environment, and also their economic and political well-being. Taking readers to the state of Kerala in southern India, she shows us a place where the so-called "Green Revolution" program of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and rising pesticide use had failed to reduce hunger while it caused a cascade of economic, medical, and environmental problems.

--

In the south of India is a land of coconuts—Kerala, as it is called in Malayalam, the local language. Several sizes and varieties of coconut trees fill every possible corner, swaying behind train stations in groves and along city streets, lining the sides of every canal and waterway, and ranging from the Malabar Coast to high into the foggy mountain ranges of the Western Ghats. When you look down from rooftops or out of the window of an airplane, everything is green—a verdant landscape extending to the horizon.

Kerala has enchanted travelers for centuries with its natural resources and geography. Marco Polo sought its spices, and colonial empires fought for control of its teak forests and medicinal plants. Today, the southwestern state is the "torchbearer" of the Government of India's Incredible India, a marketing campaign designed by the Indian Ministry of Tourism. Images of Kerala's greenery, from its rolling hills of spice gardens to its coasts lined with coconut palms, dominate promotional posters and videos for India.

"Don't be fooled," warned Sugathakumari, an environmental activist born and raised in Kerala. "You can't even drink our coconut water without getting sick." She did not see a mythical landscape of spices and coconut palms. Instead, when she looked at the state's landscape, she saw crops of pineapples, rubber, and other cash crops, all regularly sprayed with the pesticides furadan and endosulfan, two poisonous chemicals leaching into the watersheds. Promotional images of the state for travel and tourism belied how its greenery was produced.

It was the year 2010. The Kerala Forest Research Institute had just released a study documenting that the fingernails of pineapple pickers in Kerala were falling off after they had been exposed to an unknown cocktail of chemical pesticides. This was not an unusual story, Sugathakumari emphasized to an audience gathered for the 2010 Indian Biodiversity Conference in the capital of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram. She reminded the crowd that, earlier in that same decade, several children in a northern agricultural district of the state had been born with severe physical deformities after their parents had been exposed to endosulfan, a harmful chemical classified as a persistent organic pollutant by the scientific community because of its ability to linger in the environment for years. For over a quarter of a century, these agrarian communities had been repeatedly sprayed aerially with the chemical to control pests on nearby cashew plantations. Kerala had become a toxic place: its lush greenery was now drenched in poisonous pesticides, bad for human health and the environment.