By Bruce B. Brugmann
Well, it isn’t Rock Rapids High School any more and it isn’t the almost famous Rock Rapids Lions. It’s now a consolidated high school district and goes under the fancier nomenclature of Central Lyon. (The Central Lyon Lions just doesn’t have it, does it? For the regular Bruce blog readers, you will realize that I am talking about my almost famous hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa, a little town in northwest Iowa known as the Gateway to the West.)
Jim Wells just flashed me the final score: Central Lyon 35 Carroll 0. A rout and a surprising one since our two quarterbacks have been banged up and it’s been questionable which one could play for how long and with what effectiveness.
Next game is on Saturday for the state championship, a big big thing back in Iowa, much bigger than the presidential primaries. Everybody in town (that’s about 2,800 people) will either be at the game or glued to the radio. I’ll keep you posted.
P.S. This is how things work back in Rock Rapids, by personal contact over the years and the generations. Jim Wells was the cpa for years for my parents at their drugstore, “Brugmann’s Drugs: Where Drugs and Gold are Fairly Sold, Since l902.” And he handled their personal taxes until they died in the early l990s. He is now reporting on Rock Rapids news for the Bruce blog. I am also getting reports from Dave Foltz and others. Dave is the grandson of Glen Foltz, who operated Foltz’s Construction for many years and then became the Lyon County sheriff. He reported earlier that Halloween in Rock Rapids was pretty tame this year and that my boxcar-across-Main Street generation had probably spoiled it for all the succeeding generations.
Working on the Foltz crew, during the summers, was a rite of passage for the young men in town just out of high school or in college. However, my crew was the crew for the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), FDR’s public power agency that brought electricity to the farms. But that is another story for another day.) B3