Masthead Logo The Palimpsest
Volume 68 | Number 1 Article 5
1-5-1987 Cedar Rapids in the Roaring Twenties Clarence A. Andrews
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Recommended Citation Andrews, Clarence A. "Cedar Rapids in the Roaring Twenties." The Palimpsest 68 (1987), 32-49. Available at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/palimpsest/vol68/iss1/5
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by Clarence A. Andrews THE CEDAR RAPIDS to the river, because they were surrounded by which I came in May of some of the world s most fertile farmland, be 1919, fresh from a year on cause of good railroad transportation, and be the high arid plains of cen cause of a surplus rural population which tral Montana, hut weary produced a pool of workers looking for means from riding seventy-two to support themselves in the cities. Their facto hours in wooden coach seats on three different ries were agriculturally oriented, producing railroads, was mv second Iowa home. I had implements and tools for farmers and convert been born in Waterloo, fifty miles north, in a ing farm surpluses into food for the nation and house on the bank of the old Red Cedar River the world. in 1912. The two cities were much alike, indus The 1920s were to be boom years for the two trial towns in the Corn Belt, with east and west cities as well as for the nation. But the Parlor sides centered on the river. Both had devel City (as Cedar Rapids called itself, imitating oped because of the potential waterpower in such civic sobriquets as Chicago’s “Windy City,” Cincinnati’s “Queen City,’’ and Phila delphia s “Quaker City”) was to embark on a Above: A Cedar Rapids panorama shows May’s Island, period of growth which eventually would make stretching under three bridges, before the new construc tion of the 1920s. Boxed line drawings inset throughout it Iowa’s second largest urban area. article are from the 1928 Acorn yearbook, courtesy of The nickname “Parlor City," suggesting a Coe College. middle- to upper-class residential image rather
32 THE PALIMPSEST ' : v
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X \ £ . ■■V . •- •s&sx-v* than a working-class image, was well chosen. the nation’s largest Masonic library. Cedar Rapids was a city of many fine homes, Like the rest of the United States after the including Brucemore (the three-story mansion end of “the war to end all wars,“ Cedar Rapids of the Douglas family, set on eighteen acres of was in an expansionist mood. Of 363 business landscaped ground) and the Robert Armstrong leaders interviewed by the Cedar Rapids home, designed by artist Grant Wood. (Arm Gazette for a daily column in 1926 and 1927, strong was to be a driving force in Cedar Rapids two-thirds were Republicans but were not for the next seven decades.) When an English standpat Republicans. Although most admired visitor was being shown Cedar Rapids, he President "Silent Cal’ Coolidge, they were not asked at last Xto be shown the city’sJ slums. He marching in place. One of those hard-headed was told by his guide that the working-class Republicans, David Turner, son of a Cedar homes he was looking at came as close to a slum Rapids pioneer, became the patron for Grant area as the citv had. Wood, subsidizing him with a home, studio, Each quarter of the city had its own park, and funds so that Wood might have the time including one adjacent to the downtown busi and a place to work. When Frances Prescott, a ness district, another with a zoo, and another principal at both Adams and McKinley junior which stretched for almost a mile along the high schools, hired the uncertified Wood to river. It had an outstanding four-year college, teach art classes, the school board backed her. an auditorium, a nationally famous opera Jay Sigmund, an insurance company vice- house, the “world s largest cereal mill, and president, was as much respected for his SPRING 1987 33 r-h '-r 3 H p CD?■ h—«L> X — CDo • w i—2•—- •^ 3"" sj qs. =p o 3 " « tn r-t- f\«\ C/> O P »—«P O 3 C- 3^>> 3 > P ^ 3 CD X ■ ET 3 • o • 3 r-*r m3 p > 0 v< X *Tj * 3 P rD O ^ '< C/35 • g c r-t- v< 1 PI w w/—v poems (the Gazette printed them on its edi was a class in dramatic art. torial page) as for his business acumen. This The city had fourteen grade schools in 1920, same Jay Sigmund inspired a young Paul Engle ten of which were nineteenth-century two- and * to become a poet also, and eventually head of th ree-story red brick buildings, three of which the world-famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop at were new and modern in design, and one of the nearby University of Iowa. which was a wooden building (in “Stump- Luther Brewer, a newspaper and book pub town,” south of the city on the west bank of the lisher, was attracting national attention for the river). Several of these schools offered eight books he published and for his astuteness in grades of instruction plus kindergarten; the building a unique collection of rare books and others offered only six grades and kinder manuscripts focused on the great poets of Eng garten. The fourteen schools were named for land’s Romantic Period. Brewer had installed a deceased United States presidents, beginning huge bed in an upstairs bedroom to accommo with Washington; the school in Stumptown date occasional visits from his oversized friend, was Pierce School. Each school had a “prin former president William Howard Taft. cipal teacher, often simply called the “prin In March of 1929, the Carnegie Corporation cipal. These persons, all women in the 1920s, chose Cedar Rapids as the midwestern city in were also the school disciplinarians. In addi which it would subsidize a “Little Gallerv”* of tion there were four Catholic schools, two on art and pay the salary of Edward Rowan, the each side of the river, a Lutheran primary gallery’s first professional director. school, and a Catholic academy. I arrived in Cedar Rapids just in time to hear I he public schools were fortunate in having the roar of the explosion which blew the Doug an able, progressive superintendent, Arthur las Starch Works sky high on the night of May Deamer, and progressive-minded school 22, 1919, killing forty-three men, among them board members. In 1920, Deamer and his the workman who had just taken my father’s board proposed that Cedar Rapids mortgage its place fifteen minutes earlier. That fall I started future and build one or two new grade schools school at the old Taylor School; before I com to replace obsolete buildings, and several new pleted schooling in January of 1930, I attended junior high schools. The new junior highs almost everv west-side school. My family would change the school system from an 8-4 moved often. basis of grades to a 6-3-3 basis, a relatively new concept at that time. One hope was that with THE CEDAR RAPIDS this system, students who might otherwise schools in 1920 included drop out at the end of eighth grade might be Washington High School, a encouraged to complete ninth grade. For a three-story Gothic stone time in the 1920s, Madison School on the west structure across the railroad side was the site of classes for fourteen- to tracks from the Union nineteen-year-olds who had dropped out and Depot. The Gazette usually referred to it as the then returned. Cedar Rapids High School, even though there Bolstered by support from women voters, was a newer high school on the west side. That who had just won the right to vote in August, was the Grant Vocational High School, in the proposal carried by a landslide. Work on tended to train west-side students in the man Junior High School and Buchanan ual arts which led to factory jobs. To west- grade school got under way at once. Roosevelt, siders the implication was clear — the east side Franklin, and \\ ilson junior highs followed in was cultured, upper class; its students would turn. \\ ilson opened in September of 1925. go to college and become the city’s leaders. In 1923 the school 1 )oard ordered a program So in the early 1920s, west-side citizens, of accelerated classes which would allow egged on by their children, rebelled against some students to complete seventh and eighth this discrimination. They demanded and got grades in a year and a half. Students were to be the same liberal arts program that the east-side selected for the program on the basis of test school had. The first liberal arts class at Grant scores and their grade point averages for fifth 34 THE PALIMPSEST Known as the “White Bank,” American Trust and Savings Bank was where Cedar Rapids schoolchildren deposited pennies on Bank Days. As students practiced thrift, new multistory buildings downtown reflected prosperity. SPRING 1987 35 and sixth grades. In the fall of 1924, I was one of signed for right-handed students, and I invari six southwest-siders selected, three girls and ably got a failing grade in penmanship because th ree boys. of my messy papers. * But Jennie Post, principal at Van Buren and Because the svstem intended that we would later at Wilson, a woman with a mind of her receive a broader education than the Three R s own, would have none of this newfangled non alone permitted, the system also had super sense and refused to admit us. So for two weeks visors for art, Emma Grattan, and music, Alice we trudged across the river to McKinley (with Inskeep. We loved Miss Inskeep and we the exception of the Douglas girls, who were wouldn t let her end her periodic visits without chauffeured, all students walked to school a performance of the "Rooster Song, each then). There Frances Prescott, the principal stanza of which ended with a rousing “Cock-a- who had hired Grant Wood, welcomed 1 1 s. But doodle-do!” two weeks later Jennie Post relented and we And every spring we were visited by Effie were back in Van Buren. Burton, Grant High School librarian, who Five mornings a week all the grade schools handed out free packets of vegetable seeds ob and junior high schools performed mandated tained from the federal government, and en opening exercises — the pledge to the flag couraged 1 1 s to plant our own gardens in plots (minus the words “under God”), the 'Ameri furnished by the school district. can's Creed/ the first verse of “My country tis To ensure that our tastes in music would of thee, the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty- range beyond the then-popular "Barney third Psalm. Never mind that some of our Google with his Goo-goo-goo-glv Eves," the names were Kozberg or Leibsohn or Kacere or ungrammatical It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Haddad, we all recited in unison. It was the More, and “Show Me the Way To Go Home,” melting pot principle at work. we had music memory classes. Once a week we Something else afoot then in the school sys listened to phonograph records of such classics tem was THRIFT. Ben Franklin’s axiom that “a as the “Turkish March” or Haydn’s Surprise penny saved is a penny earned” had become a Symphony, and we clipped stories about these solid rock in America’s foundation. (Of course, compositions, printed weekly in the Gazette as in the 1920s a penny bought a stick of forbidden part of the program. Those of us who chewing gum, or a lead pencil, or an all-day assembled neat scrapbooks of the clippings sucker, or a stamped postal card which could (mine were messy), or who could remember all be used to send a message to a distant relative.) of the record titles when portions of the music Every Tuesday, as part of the opening exer were played back at the end of the semester, cises, we also had Bank Day, the brainchild of were awarded free tickets to concerts by the * Thrift, Incorporated, a Chicago firm. We were visiting St. Louis Symphony or Minneapolis all encouraged — almost ordered — to make a Symphony. My lifelong affection for classical deposit every Tuesday even if it was only a music began in music memory classes con penny. If every one of our class made a deposit, ducted by Dorothy Stoflet at Taylor School and we were allowed to parade through the school Ruth Larson at Wilson. Miss Larson even dug singing the “Thrift Song, and we received a into her slender schoolteacher’s purse to pay banner to display beside the American Hag all for carfare for those of ns southwest-siders who week. The class with the highest percentage of lived a long way from Coe College’s Sinclair deposits at the end of a school year was award Memorial Chapel, where the concerts were. ed a painting by Thrift, Inc. To ensure high educational standards, the school system had subject supervisors who reg- MEANWHILE, outside our ularly✓ came to our classrooms. Emma Beenk classrooms Cedar Rapids made sure that we were all learning the Palmer was bursting at the seams as Method of Penmanship, invented by Austin N. a growing population re Palmer of Cedar Rapids. Unhappily for left quired new housing far handers such as I, the Palmer Method was de beyond the trollev-car lines 36 THE PALIMPSEST GI Y D AST SR . W O TR S ZA ED BY D E N W O L A IN IG R O Small-town car dealer H. Hagge and Son (Andover, Iowa) lines up new Fords. In larger towns like Cedar Rapids, automobile rows’ of service stations, dealerships, and repair shops lined major streets. had a large vacant area where traveling car which had been built in the 1890s. In 1926, bv* ordinance, the city added thirty-one square nivals and itinerant medicine shows had set up miles to its previous fourteen square miles. shop in the heart of the city. But the new court In addition to the city’s growth into former house and county jail would take up all that cornfields and pastures — which now bore the space. persuasive sobriquets of Rompot Acres, Construction of the courthouse and jail was Worthing Acres, Casper Schaefer Heights, followed on the north end of the island by the Fruitland Heights, Belmont, East Highland, Memorial Building, with its eight-story south North wood, and Ridgewood — new commer tower supporting a concrete replica of a sol cial buildings were springing up all over the dier’s bier, and its controversial Grant Wood city. The nineteenth-century mansions imme window of stained glass — controversial diately east of the downtown business dis because it had been fabricated in Germanv,0 trict, which had once been occupied by the where so many Allied soldiers had died in the Douglases, the Sinclairs, the Bevers, the Van recent war. Vechtens, and the Brewers, were replaced by Other 1920s buildings were the Merchants or remodeled into industrial and commercial National Bank, at that time the city’s tallest buildings. “skyscraper”; the Dows office building; the In 1920 the Penick and Ford Company of Iowa and the Capitol (later Paramount) com Louisiana bought the debris-covered site of the bination theater and office buildings finished former Douglas Starch Works and began build within ninety days of each other; major addi ing a new and larger starch works — one that tions to the Quaker Oats and National Oats stank up the town even more than the former plants; an eight-story Churchill Drug ware plant had. Veterans just home from World War house; the Harper-Mclntyre warehouse (an I and veterans of the Civil and Spanish-Ameri- nounced by the fattest edition of the Gazette can wars were petitioning the city to erect a ever published); the Colonial Bakery; the Con building memorializing the Cedar Rapidians sistory and El Kahir Shrine Temple buildings who had given their all in those conflicts. In (the Shrine Temple immediately replaced the 1919, Linn County residents (most of whom aging Auditorium as the major Cedar Rapids lived in Cedar Rapids) had voted to move the entertainment center); the Roosevelt Hotel; county seat from Marion, where it had always the Ausadie and Commonwealth apartment been, to Cedar Rapids, so plans were under buildings; and several new churches. At the way to demolish the police station, the city hall end of the decade, plans were made for a new (which had once been SmulekofFs furniture downtown post office and federal building on store), a storage building, and a bathhouse the riverbank, where the Sunshine Mission above the city’s bathing beach — all on May s and the Gazette office had been. The Gazette Island in the Cedar River. The island had also also erected a new building. SPRING 1987 37 Everywhere streets were being paved with developed along Second and Third Avenues brick or concrete, or else coated with oil or East, replacing the mansions of an older gener covered with asphalt to answer the complaints ation, and along First Street W est. Sen ice of citizens who had bought new black Fords, stations also sprang up at major intersections, Bnicks, ‘Chevies/ Hupmobiles, Velies, air especially along the Lincoln Highway, a na cooled Franklins, or, like some well-to-do ma tional road which ran from east to west through triarchs, Milburn Electrics, and whose cars the city, and along the Red Ball Road, which were now bogging down in the mud. The iron- ran from south to north. and-wood First Avenue bridge over the Cedar With the automobile, Cedar Rapids had burned in 1919 and was rebuilt as a six-lane policemen no longer walked eleven-hour beats concrete bridge to handle the expected in six days a week, but patrolled in radio- crease in traffic. equipped cars, following an innovation first Up until the 1920s, the trolley cars with their tried in Detroit — which had become the tracks radiating out from the loop to all corners Motor C ity/’ Virgil Powell, the first black of the city, the interurbans running at regular policeman in Cedar Rapids, rode a motorcycle intervals to Waterloo, Iowa City, and Mount through the business district doling out tickets Vernon, and points between, and the railroads to cars parked too long in one place. were the only practical ways to travel. Cedar Many ol the calls police now got had to do Rapids had direct connections with all the with stolen cars — or even car parts. One major midwestern cities. When Cedar Rapids Cedar Rapidian stole a car, then used it to haul booster groups, promoting local business or stolen merchandise to his house. But the car the local rodeo, toured through eastern Iowa, bogged down in a muddy street, and the man interurbans and trains took them to everv town * was arrested by police responding to neigh worth visiting. bors calls about a car blocking traffic. Whereas in the nineteenth century Jesse James and his THE AUTOMOBILE would kind had ridden into small towns to stick up change all that. Proving fatal banks, bank robbers now used automobiles — to businesses in small towns, more often than not cars which had been the automobile brought stolen, so the robbers would be more difficult farmers and small-town resi to trace. dents to the city for shop Automobile accidents became a major cause ping and entertainment. In 1920 a Cedar of human death and injury. The gory statistics Rapidian could buy any one of over fif ty makes — five killed in weekend crashes — replaced of automobiles from any✓ one of 250 dealers newspaper stories about runaway teams of within a thirty-mile radius. Ninety percent of horses. A police car smashed into one of the these were black “touring cars with cloth tops newfangled traffic lights which had unwisely and side curtains to attach in case of rain. Seven been installed in the center of the intersection years later there were fewer makes and fewer at First Avenue and First Street East. A promi dealers, but Americans owned three times as nent Cedar Rapids woman and her three chil many* automobiles as theyj had in 1920, most of dren died from exhaust fumes filtering into the them “closed” (with hard tops and glass win family’s closed car. dows), and a few even in bright colors. The automobile had come of age — in the words of a AUTOS BEGAN producing popular song, “Henry [Ford] had made a lady significant changes in our out of Lizzie. ” social patterns. Young lovers A significant part of the 1920s business boom who had once conducted in Cedar Rapids (we called it “prosperity ) their courtships under the came from the sale or service of automobiles. watchful eyes of parents or One Ford salesman sold a car a day in 1923. grandparents now retired to side-curtained Automobile rows, consisting of side-by-side cars in dark streets. Young ladies who had once car dealers, service stations, and repair shops, written to advice columnists asking when it was 38 THE PALIMPSEST COURTESY COE COLLEGE were intonowbackseatsclimbingwillingly to a s o thecause of wordsthose whatever and to“pet” or“neck, andthatwords two of knew south-side Ionly smokeforbidden sipcigarettes,illicit “hooch,” first time the man for proper young a kiss to ie t a Pulitzer Prize-winninga had itawriter,time publishedLutherby the Brewer, but although for newspaper, good another paper theor— button). tf ea h \ mnsAheis sectionstaffwithacar beganomen'sAthletics“\\ the readthe didnt I it. readMacKinlay rarely I Kantor, meant. toonsuggesting sport. newa years spreadingold, it out onthefloor because d o — klce ad h wr fr belly- for word the and “kolachesidiom — y am wr to hr t hl i. had dis- I it. holdmy to shortarms too were Bohemian “Czech, term rarely the (we used i th tongue in cheek, the 1929 Coe College yearbook 1929 College Coe the ith tongue in cheek, Iwas toall of socialthiswitness change be I began readingthe Tribu Tribu ne Gazette. Listy eitherit — was a union labor — whichwas — printedin ea Rpd as had Rapids also Cedar Gazette we 1whenwas six Republican , brother andI deliveredpapers from AvenueE for themagic word Colaat nocharge. somecaps thattous abottleof entitledCoca- and after I had soldall my Chicago papers my Rapids, Cedar in Sunday editionculating its t h bgnigo li Pr. hr w dug Park.Ellis we Thereof beginning the at andsensation-mongers bought the thecorks out of Coca-Colabottle caps, looking Westall theway out toEdSheftic’s Boathouse Examiner o people.mon et nce fr ah n sl. Die-hard sold. one each for nickel a kept onthe corner of Third Street and Thirdwaythrough Avenue Grant High Schoolselling papers nightpostofficetheon corner at Second Ave ese i silk in hatsnessmen taking advantage of com thecorner of ThirdAvenueand Second Street e ul cn buh theRepublicans bought u ad hr Sre Es, n Jhn Kin- Johnny and East, Street Third and nue Ea st. Id sell East.as Id many as a hundred of eachand 1 rade, thecrippled newsie who wasworking his aaie fo ery onn utl ae at late until morning early frommagazines Tribune East. ibl rtes wo od esaes and newspapers sold who brothers, Kiebel o d ta I a lann i sho ad with school and, learning in was Iwords that covered thatthe newspaper was using the same for one cent each andsold them for two cents — “alky and “hooch,” runner” mule,” “whiteas Auditorium,and concessionaire at the baseball promoterautomobile a refereesalesman,and n wi” o Cdr Rapids’s cit best-known Cedar for“newsie” prohibited alcohol). (“alkv”and theothertwo terms beingslang for f oig n wetig ace a the at matches wrestling and boxing of n hnrdpret profit hundred overhead! no andpercent one a became I — own my on business into thecomingof Prohibition 1920, in wordssuch park EveryIsoldevening West. Avenue E on Gazettes Alexinizen,whoFidler,addition tothebeing Gazettes (The itsdailyshare me.) was beyond itstayed in business on 160the dollarsthat was n udy onns I od h Chicago the sold I mornings, Sunday On n 92te e MoinesIn 1922 Des the y cifcmeios ee h tre adult three the were competitors Mychief o evr i te umr f 90 I went I 1920, of summer the inMoreover, t wsago uies Ipapers boughtItthewas a business.good Gazette and Chicago on aoncorner.downtown street tet ae sprio ws lo an also was supervisor sales street ih t lrd atos f busi of cartoons lurid its with scirculation 16,000wasand how Free Herald and Examiner and Herald printed onthe inside of Tribune Register SPRING Democrats; Herald and Herald began cir 97 39 1987 on A big news story in 1928 was the kick-off of Herbert Hoovers campaign in his hometown, West Branch. Andrews and bis brother tried to sell newspapers to the crowd as they left the huge tent after the speech. ‘Why buy a paper? spectators asked. “We just beard the speech.' Below: A crowd waits at the West Branch depot. 40 THE PALIMPSEST My enterprise led to my first brush with the spectacular stories on radio.) law. By citv ordinance, children had to be four- Locally the big stories were the murder of teen years of age to work at any job, including Patrolman Francis Wilson in the Carnegie selling papers. Newsies had to buy a badge for Public Library in July 1921; the arrival of the six cents from A. L. Bailey, the truant officer Harding funeral train on August 7, 1923; the for the public schools, but he wouldn't sell me murder of six-year-old Kathleen Forrest by a one because I was only half that age. So one neighbor boy in September 1927; and the morning I found myself with Alex Fidler in the beginning of the Herbert Hoover "front porch” municipal courtroom of Judge Thomas B. presidential campaign in Cedar Rapids and Powell, looking up into the face of a man West Branch in August 1928. (On that occasion accustomed to dealing with hardened criminals the Gazette sent my brother and me to West such as alky runners and underage newsies. He Branch by train to sell papers there.) lectured Alex and me on our errant ways,✓ then But drawing more attention than all of these turned us loose with a final word to Alex — together was the death in late 1929 of Hoover’s Keep that kid off the streets.’ We went out secretary of war, James Good, a Cedar Rapids the door and as we parted, Alex looked down at native who had been instrumental in persuad me with his infectious smile. ' See you tonight, ing Hoover to begin his campaign in the area. kid. And keep hustling, will you? ’ ("Hustling For almost ten days, beginning with Good’s was a respectable word to be applied to young fatal illness in Washington, D.C. and ending a entrepreneurs in the 1920s; it hadn’t yet day or two after his burial in the Oak Hill moved to the world of the demimonde.) cemetery on the east side of Cedar Rapids, the Gazette carried multiple pages about Good in AS A NEWS IE I looked everv0 issue. every night for great stories A continuing news story each fall in the early that would sell newspapers 1920s reported the football successes of the to businessmen on their way0 Washington High School Tigers under the from offices and stores to the coaching of Leo Novak with the ubiquitous vellow* trolley * cars that cir- Alex Fidler as trainer. Modern Cedar Rapid- cled the loop and then rattled off to various ians, accustomed to intracity rivalry and the sections of the city. The biggest story of the crowning of a city champion, may find it hard to 1920s was the nonstop flight of Charles A. believe that the school district officials would Lucky” Lindbergh from New York to Paris in not allow Grant and Washington to play each May 1927. Other stories that sold papers were other, while at the same time permitting the d aily reports in 1925 of Floyd Collins Washington to schedule games with high trapped in the Kentucky cave where he died; schools as flu- west as Sioux Falls and Lincoln, the Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee; any of and as far east as Chicago, Toledo, and Har several notorious murder cases, such as the risburg, and to allow scheduling of postseason Hall-Mills case with its Pig Woman testifying games (two in one year) for the so-called from a stretcher; the disappearance in the national championship. (Grant High won the southwestern desert of evangelist Aimee Sem 1929 Iowa state championship by beating a ple McPherson; any World Series baseball hitherto unbeaten Sioux City Central High game (Ring Lardner, one of the better sports- School team on the old Coe College athletic writers, called it "the Worlds Serious”); or any field in a blinding Thanksgiving Day snow Jack Dempsey boxing match. storm. I was a cheerleader there — but no one Some spectacular stories, such as "the was in the stands.) strange death of President Harding in San For World Series games and major football Francisco in the early morning of August 2, games, the Gazette erected “playographs” and 1923, were reported in "EXTRA! editions of "gridgraphs” outside its old building on the the Gazette which sold for five cents. (The last riverbank, later outside its new building at Gazette extra was issued May 28, 1949. By Third Avenue and Fifth Street Southeast. then, most people got news of fast-breaking, While action was simulated on the big green SPRING 1987 41 and white scoreboards, an announcer would visor, and its oversized price tag, still attached, megaphone the details to crowds which over kept fluttering and snapping in the breeze. flowed into the streets, blocking traffic. Jack On summer nights at the old circus grounds Dempsey boxing matches would simply be on Fourth Street and Twelfth Avenue South megaphoned to the crowd. west, we watched touring tent shows such as those owned by J. Doug Morgan or Hila Mor SHORTER WORKDAYS gan, two of Cedar Rapids’s own. These road and five-day¥ workweeks companies presented a different play each gave us more time for recre night of the week, but the star attraction was ation in the 1920s. We mo always a red-haired, freckle-faced, gap-toothed tored (that was a new word) “Toby’ character. Despite his ungainliness, he to Iowa Citv to watch the air always managed to triumph over the city mail planes land or to watch Iowa play football slicker (usually a banker’s son) by the end of the in the university’s new west-side stadium. On play. summer Sundaysr we trolleyed / out to Ellis Park Or in the early 1920s, we might watch Ethel to gaze at the ducks in the duck pond or, after Barrymore or George Arliss in stage plays at 1924, to swim at the new beach; or we trolleyed Greene s Opera House, or topflight vaudeville out to Bever Park to picnic near the zoo or the at the Majestic, or first-run movies at the Lyric, new water reservoir which stored our drinking the Crystal, the Palace, the Isis, the Strand, water. Both the Cedar Rapids Country Club on the Rialto — theaters whose names and mar the east side and the Cedar View Country Club quees promised to carry us far from our worka on the west side had new clubhouses, and the day world into the illusory* world of such films east-side club had a dandy new outdoor pool as as Iowa’s own Emerson Hough’s The Covered well. One memorable day at the east-side club W agon or Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of I caddied for Congressman Cyrenus Cole, Bagdad. \V e went to movies in those vears✓ to whose weekly letters to the Gazette appeared see ourselves as we might be, not to see our on the same editorial page as Jay Sigmund’s selves as we were. verses, and who wrote an Iowa history titled / I he Olympic on the southeast side and the Remember l Remember. That day, though, he Colonial (we called it the Clink — don’t ask drove the other members of his foursome batty me why) on I bird Avenue West showed sec because he was wearing a just-purchased sun ond-run movies and westerns at lower prices. 42 THE PALIMPSEST PETE C PETERSON COLLECTION. SH SI (IOWA CITY) h aes hwd w o tre e fii a ms new three or two showed Theaters e k N mngr hwd h sm fl on film same the manager showed No week. o h audy n Sna bcue n those on because Saturday Sundayboth and two Reallydaysbigmovies. alltothe we went butdidn’tno We longer. samethewant to see films — Rush Richard Barthelmess, or c o s n e fls Hlyod n h 1920s the in Hollywood films. new actors in filmoverand sametheover; to wanted see we HaroldLloyd — might be kept for a solid week, leavesa competitor in a cloud of dust. Below: Mechanics e t Te ed n Cdr aisMro at race Rapids-Marion auto Cedar a in lead Left: The precededthe decade; thefirst Indianapolis 500 washeld repairs. 1920s, Popular autoracingneverthelessin the o e ih rvr fr nteso tr cags and changes tire on-the-spot for drivers withrode n 1911.in with Charlie Chaplin, or Broken Blossoms Broken / ✓ withLillian Gish and The Kid The 0 Safety Last Safety or The Gold The with were “morewere stars — than thereare inHeaven o sn cm t te StrandJolson the in to came producedfilmsmore a inmonththan arepro came the marvelous voice of "the world s world "the of voice marvelous the came Al 7, March on Then, screen. the beneath paperrollsafull-blown to orchestra pit thein ue nwdy i aya r oe ad there nowadays and more,duced ayear inor whodidn’ttoa belongcountry club dancedat from FattvArbuckle Zasu to Pitts. ra etetranr Themovies’ long greatest silence entertainer. stillness accustomedthe of out suddenly and ou ws rne o te cen although screen) the on printed was logue had ended. hr a anythingwasfromthere aplayer usingpiano h Adtru, h Gen art Frank Parrot, Green the Auditorium, the When we wanted more action, those of us of those action, more wanted we When U ntil early 1928, the films were silent (diasilent films were the 1928, Until early 0 0 SPKING The Jazz Singer The Jazz 97 43 1987 , Brookhiser’s Dreamland (later Danceland, in a new location) and, in the late 1920s, at the Memorial Building or the Shrine Temple. In summer we danced at Cedar Park or Chain Lakes, or else we canoed from Sheftic’s Boat house upriver to Brookhiser’s Manhattan on an island in the river. Later, we floated back downriver to a mandolin playing ‘Whispering” or Just a Song at Twilight or “Juanita. W hen we stayed at home there was the vie- trola or grafonola, or the player piano, and other songs: T in Always Chasing Rainbows, “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” or “Smiles/ In the 1920s, everyone could have music in their homes. Pianos or victrolas could be bought for five dollars down and a dollar a week. In 1925, Frontier Park (now Hawkeye Downs, south of Cedar Rapids) opened with a full-scale rodeo: boy and girl bull riders, calf ropers, bronc busters, steer wrestlers, and the Roman Races, with riders of both sexes, each standing on a pair of horses galloping side by side around the half-mile track. On Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day,J 7 the track was taken over by ✓ auto racers, chief among them our own local favor ite, Gus Schrader, who on weekdays repaired autos at his garage on Ellis Boulevard and who had once bought Sunday Registers from me. And there were the Bunnies of the old Mis sissippi Valley minor baseball league. The postwar decade was a great sporting era, and watching or talking or reading about sports became a national craze — whether it was golf, tennis, the Kentucky Derby, football, mara- thou dancing, or baseball. The names of Bobby Jones, Helen Wills (“Little Poker Face”), Zev, “Red Grange, and Babe Ruth slipped trip pingly from our tongues. When the Bunnies were in town and playing Davenpoi t or Water loo teams at Belden Hill Park, we went out there on sunny afternoons (no night games) — the adults to sit in the grandstand shade to watch the likes of Bill Speas, fleet-footed Cletus Dixon, or ex-Coe College athlete Midge Makeever, the kids to get in free in the un shaded bleachers by shagging baseballs fouled Memorial Building, set in a sleek, starlit metropolis — as pictured in this Chamber of Commerce promotional hook from the end of the 1920s. 44 THE PALIMPSEST out of the park. Sitting in those bleachers, many of us got our first taste of another 1920s innovation — an Eskimo Pie. ALTHOUGH ALL of these events and many more were reported by the Gazette, none were reported on radio until later in the decade. In 1920, radio was primarily a device by which ships at sea could warn each other of derelict icebergs or floating mines left over from World War I. But early in the dec ade, kids in Cedar Rapids and other towns began making crystal sets out of empty Quaker Oats boxes, a few strands of copper wire wrapped around the box, and a crystal and ear phones bought from D. \1. 'Tex’ Perham’s electrical shop at 322 Third Avenue West. Coe College had a small broadcasting station in 1920, and in 1921 a Cedar Rapids radio club was organized. In 1922, Perham cleaned out his electrical goods and set up his own broad casting station, WJAM. He fabricated his own transmitter (later called a microphone) and covered the walls with heavy drapes to elimi nate echoes. WJAM was a one-man station. Tex would look up local talent — perhaps soprano Helen Kacena Stark or violinist George Cervenka — and invite them in to sing or play for a time. When the performance was over, he would shut down and go looking for more program material. I was one ofa group of schoolchildren invited to sing one afternoon. Tex couldn’t crowd us all into his studio so we crowded around the door where Tex stood holding his transmitter. On August 4, 1923, Tex rigged up a tele phone hookup to the Strand Theater s or chestra pit and began broadcasting “live music three times a week. The following year he rigged a hookup to Frank Brookhiser s new Danceland and broadcast three hours of dance music twice a week. On March 3, 1925, Cedar Rapids schoolchil dren assembled in their buildings heard Presi dent Coolidge promise us less government and greater prosperity. For the first time, millions of Americans heard the voice of a president. By this time the Gazette printed a daily radio SPRING 1987 45 ' V • SS5$ ^ ■6 column with listings of national broadcasts, and teners heard some unusual sound effects. some were wondering how soon radio Cedar Rapids’s best-known radio figure was movies’’ (television) would follow. Two years Arthur Collins, son of Merle H. Collins, whose later, we had the first national hookups, the farms with their all-white buildings and rail predecessors of today’s networks. Commer fences circled Cedar Rapids. Arthur Collins cials soon followed. began with a crystal set he fashioned from auto Meanwhile, Harry Parr had begun KYVCR parts in 1919, when he was only nine years old. in his home at 1444 Second Avenue Southeast. At fifteen, in 1925, using homemade equip Late he moved the station to the former ment he had designed, he was almost the only Greenes Opera House building (most of the radio operator in the United States to commu building was being used for storing autos of nicate daily with the MacMillan-Byrd expedi overnight guests of the Roosevelt Hotel across tion to the North Pole — the first such expedi the street). In his new location, Parr began tion to use airplanes. Collins was at the dock in inviting vaudeville entertainers at the Capitol New Aork when the expedition embarked; he and Iowa theaters to do broadcasts advertising had been invited by John Reinartz, the expedi their shows. 1 was fascinated by the oppor tion s radio operator who knew of Collins’s abil tunity for closeup views of nationally famous ities. Hie Gazette of August 11, 1925, reported performers, among them Bert Wheeler and that Collins was receiving messages every day Bob Woolsey, Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, and forwarding them to Washington, D.C. and the blonde child star, Jean Darling. But I News of Collins s achievements spread was even more fascinated byw the two rat- among amateur radio operators, and soon peo tlesnakes in the terrarium on the table next to ple were writing to Collins asking where they Parr’s microphone. On occasion, KYVCR lis- could buy equipment like his. In May 1926, Radio Age published an article he had written Tliree thousand listen to Coolidge’s inaugural address about his equipment. brought to an Iowa campus by radio. Cedar Kapids Collins began building sets in the attic of his youngsters heard the radio speech in school assemblies. parents home. Later he took over the base- 46 THE PALIMPSEST ment. In 1932 he moved into his first small Barnstormer on weekends, Cedar Rapids car salesman facility on First Avenue East. I sold him some on weekdays, pilot Paul Shaw (right) was instructing students in his Eagle Rock by 1930. Pilots like Shaw second-hand office furniture, which he paid for gradually showed Americans that planes were useful with a postdated check. My employer was commercially, beyond air circus stunts. furious, but the check was good. A decade later, in 1944 and 1945, I flew on C-47s, B-17s, the influential editor of the Gazette, com B-24s, and B-29s, all of which had Art Collins’s mented that "the horse will be with us for a equipment on board. By then he was Iowa’s long time.’’ Cedar Rapidians were still agree largest manufacturer. ing with him nine years later: they voted down Cedar Rapids was slow to catch on to the a proposal for expanding the airport to permit potential of the airplane. Our aviation equiva passenger and mail service. So Iowa City got lents of Tex Perham were Dan Hunter and the eastern Iowa airmail and passenger plane Paul Shaw who, after World War I, began fly stops, and on dark nights Cedar Rapidians ing war surplus planes. Hunter established his could look to the south and see the reflection of first airport in 1920 south of Cedar Rapids. But the Iowa City beacon in the skv. four miles was too far out for people to come on Nevertheless, in 1921, the Gazette paid the Sundays to take a three-minute ride for five airmail fare of 24 cents an ounce to "airmail a dollars so he moved to Simpson’s pasture at the 150-pound Gazette reporter from New York to top of the Third Avenue West hill opposite the San Francisco — 2,356 miles, 14 days elapsed Chandler home. time, 33 hours actual flying time. But Cedar Commenting on this move, Verne Marshall, Rapidians who could take the train to Chicago, SPRING 1987 47 watch the city’s own Earl Whitehill pitch against the White Sox, and return home — all on a Sunday — were not impressed. The Cedar Rapids boom years (and the nation’s) hit the skids on my seventeenth birth NOTE ON SOURCES day, Thursday, October 24, 1929, and five days Examination of daily issues of the Cedar Rapids Gazette later on “Black Tuesday,” October 29. In the from January 1920 through December 1929 augmented the author s own experiences in Cedar Rapids during that 1920s, Cedar Rapids had repeatedly bragged decade. Ihree Cedar Rapids histories proved useful. that it had never had a bank failure (in fact, Ralph Clements, Tales of the Town: Little-known Anec dotes of Life in Cedar Rapids (Cedar Rapids, 1967); three new banks opened for business in the Janette Stevenson Murray and Frederick Gray Murray, decade). By 1933 all but two Cedar Rapids The Story oj Cedar Rapids (New York, 1950); and Ernie Danek’s Cedar Rapids (Woodland Hills, Calif., 1980). banks had closed, Merle Collins’s farm com I he author also referred to considerable miscellaneous pany, which owned all those white farm build material collected personally, including material given to him by Grace Walsh N an Winkel, a Cedar Rapids class ings and fences, was bankrupt, and even all of mate who now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The us who had thriftily deposited our pennies each author interviewed Paul Shaw concerning his own avia tion experiences in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (where he Tuesday throughout our school years lost all now lives). A similar paper was read at the Cedar Rapids our savings. Public Librarv in 1985. But the Roaring Twenties, for all their prob lems and scandals, were great years to be alive in America. There has never been a decade to compare with it since. D 48 THE PALIMPSEST