JAMES VAWN

In spite of a long history in Clarke County, our Vawn family is dying off. A cousin, Richard, responded to an ad offering information about family history, and discovered there are only about a dozen households of Vawns in the country. There are ten in Pennsylvania, him and me in this area, and now he has a son who will carry on the name. However, our branch of the family is dwindling and if our history isn't recorded by one of the remaining few, it will be gone. That is my motivation for this project.

The usual spelling of the name is Vaughan, and the story behind the change, as I understand it, is that my grandfather's grandfather was born in eastern Pennsylvania, and sometime around 1810-1820, there were bad feelings, which caused him to be disowned by the Vaughan family, but instead of moving away, he changed the spelling of his name. So Vawn is my last name, and my first name, James, was my grandfather Vawn's middle name - Frederick James. My middle name was the first name of my other grandfather, Warren Monroe Hart.

There are many stories that probably no one else would know - and maybe not care. These are things that have stuck in my mind. First, on the Vawns' side: My grandfather was born in 1856 in western Pennsylvania at Peru-lac, which apparently was a village with a post office, similar to Jamison. One aunt had quite a little information, but when she died 1 ½ years ago, it was lost. She had been in contact with some of the family.

There was a period from the time my grandfather left home, until he was about 40 that nobody ever talked about. He seems to have floated around and at that time he showed up in the Galesburg, Illinois area. He had a bag of gold when he was at Galesburg, where he met a girl, Mary Flynn, who was 18 or 19. Her mother had been a Hayes, whose family may have been motivated to come to America by the previous generation, which suffered a potato blight in Ireland. She came to America in 1867, on a wooden sailing ship - not powered in anyway. The ship kept getting lower and lower, and she truly felt she had been born again because she thought she and all the others were going to die.

The Flynn family settled in Soperville, which was also a little village like Jamison, north of Galesburg. Even though he hated Catholics, Grandfather became involved with this Catholic girl and got her pregnant. He agreed to marry her but told her if she went to church, not to come back. They never told when they were married, they just said, "Back in Galesburg."

They had six children and lived together for more than 30 years (and that's punishment enough). Grandfather had about $10,000, which would have been enough to buy a good 80 acres and stock it, but he wanted more ground. One of the banks in Galesburg had foreclosed on a mortgage for 160 acres just east of where the Osceola Rehabilitation Center is now. They gave him a ticket to come out and look at it. It had a good 80 and a not-so-good 80. He figured he could buy it and stock it for the same price he could have bought the 80 back in Illinois. He was already buying up some stuff, so he, his wife, and eldest son came here in 1898. The other children were born here, one set of twins, whom they said the doctors scalded and they are buried at Union Chapel Cemetery. I don't know exactly where. They probably just put down a rock to indicate the place.

The rest of the children lived: my father, Isaac Walter Vawn. As a kid he hated the name, Isaac, so he became Walter Vawn. It appears that way even on his Social Security. His brothers were Fred and Henry; his sisters were Helen, who married a Steigall - they moved to Abingdon, Illinois just south of Galesburg - Kathryn (McGrew) and Mary (Woods). His sisters went to high school, graduated, and took the summer normal course which qualified them to be turned loose to teach little rural kids. None of them taught very long. They were all married within a few years. A number of the Flynn-Vawn family had been school teachers, both women and men.

My grandmother Vawn broke her hip about 1954. At that time, it about did you in. In contrast, when her daughter Mary (Woods) broke her hip, all she could think of was what it had done to her mother, but after she had professional care for about 10 days, she was able to go back to her apartment for five or six years. One generation of medical advances made the difference.

My great grandfather Hart was born in Ohio in the 1830s, and was in the Civil War. He was with Grant when they were trying to dig the canal around Vicksburg. Like a lot of the soldiers, he contracted malaria.  If the men were seriously ill, they were able to stay. If the afflicted could walk, they were dismissed to go home. If they died it was tough luck. There was more concern for those nearer to dying. He went home but returned for the last nine months of the war, and was involved in guarding railroads and supplies from an occasional guerilla attack.

Great-grandfather Hart came to Iowa, which was not the frontier but in the process of becoming fully settled. He somehow got to Dubuque. I am guessing he must have come on a river boat and then rode a horse from Dubuque to Chariton, which he must have heard of from someone who returned to Ohio from Iowa. He wandered a little farther and came to Clarke County in 1858. We might have to speculate a bit about the sequence of events. The county was established in 1851. There had been a few people ahead of that, like Lost Camp in 1846, and the earliest permanent settlers, the Jamison family, came about 1848. The Homestead Act was not established until 1862, but there may have been a little Homestead ground in this area. Until the Civil War, the federal government was financed significantly by land sales. Land was supposed to sell for $1.25 an acre, with them deviating a little on the down side for poor ground. There was a great deal of land speculation in 1857, and over-speculation caused a terrible crash. The Depression of 1857 was very hard on the frontier.

Great-grandfather ran onto the Milers, who had come to the Liberty Township area in 1855, and he married their daughter. As shown by a document in the Historical Museum, his in­laws bought 80 acres in 1860, about two miles southeast of where I live. They had a log cabin and there is a story about it being hit by a tornado and unraveling. The men were gone but the women and kids saw it coming over the hill and took shelter in the root cellar underneath.  The cabin unwound off the top of them but they were okay. No one was hurt.

The invention of barbed wire made many significant changes when it became available in this area, around 1868. Before then farmers fenced in their crop ground, but cattle and pigs roamed loose and lived off the land, eating whatever they could find - acorns, prairie grass, etc. When they were fat, the local market not being sufficient to utilize the livestock that was grown in the area, there were hog drives as well as cattle drives to the nearest place they could be put on a boat, which was Keosauqua. People traveling by horse, wagon, or buggy, went where it was easiest to travel, and that was on the ridges. Barbed wire altered that, making it possible to fence in areas and build roads. They had already designed how the roads should go, on section lines - a mile this way, then a half a mile the other way, etc. With the use of barbed wire, it was possible to put the roads where they planned, and farmers could fence in whatever they wanted.

My great-grandfather Hart died in 1877. He got pneumonia from driving sheep and they thought it must have been because of his weakened lungs, which resulted from malaria. His wife had seven children in the 1860s and '70s- Samuel Eugene, known as Eugene, James Edward, known as Ed, Jenny, Jacob (Jake), Emma, and the last one born two months after great  grandfather died, was Della. My great grandmother was left a widow for 52 years. She had a rough time and finally received a pension. I don't know how many years later or the amount. It may have been $10 or $15, but that would have been a big help.

Great grandfather is buried along with his father-in-law in Twyford Cemetery. There is a stone for him and one for a family of Naylor's in Section 19, Liberty township, just  east of the ground we had. It is a virtually unknown cemetery, but was located by the Clarke County Cemetery Association. In 1960, it was pasture but 20-some depressions and two stones were visible. At least the stones were still there four or five years ago, and persons who farmed the area worked around them. Then it went to brambles so there is nothing left to see. It was just north of where the Milers' farm was. My great-grandfather's mother-in-law, Mary Bonham Miler, is buried at Union Chapel Cemetery. Great grandmother, Emeline, is buried at Maple Hill, Osceola, along with most of her children, several in the same plot.

The story is told that either Mary Bonham or her daughter, Emeline, would say whenever someone commented about cleanliness especially involving food, that everyone had to eat a peck of dirt in their lifetime, so they should go ahead and eat. Both these ladies had grown up in log cabins with a stomped dirt floor, so immaculateness would have been impossible.

My grandfather Hart was born about two miles southeast of where I live, and died in 1938. My mother inherited 120 acres 1 3/4 miles east of the home place, and in 1958 there was an opportunity to buy an 80 acre timber adjoining it. They put it in my name when I was just a kid in high school. That comprises the farm, about 471 or 472 acres.

My grandfather bought the home farm in 1911, but never lived on it. It had been known for a generation, or a generation and a half, as the Trumbo place. Grandfather and his brothers owned quite a lot of land in that area. There was competition between the older brothers who were in partnership raising cattle, and the younger brothers, my grandfather and his brother Jake, "the Hart brothers," who were in the horse business until they dissolved the partnership  in 1918. Their business location was east of the 500 block of North Main.  I don't know that they had a livery stable, but they had stallions for breeding purposes and horses for sale. In 1906 they built a large white barn adjacent to the older barns, which in later years became a sale barn used for community sales of all kinds of animals. It remained in the family until the 1950s.

Grandfather's older brothers, Eugene and Ed, had been born in '64 and '65 and were 13 and 12 when their father died. They became the farmers of 120 acres of rather poor land, and were responsible for providing a living for the family of five younger children. They originally had been over at Lone Elm, but as time went along, they bought additional ground. Uncle Eugene, the more dominant of the two, said he never bought any cheap land. When he could afford to buy land, others could as well, and the price went up. By 1922, when they bought the last ground, they had 1040 acres all in a block, just to the southeast of where I live, on the Liberty-Fremont township border. They did everything "the hard way." Although tractors were available by the 1920s, they never had a tractor, and they never owned a manure spreader. They scooped it on the wagon and scooped it off the wagon. They bought a new 1917 Ford Touring Car, which they continued to drive until 1948.  They made their money with cattle. Each year Eugene would go to Chicago with four or five carloads, while Ed, more quiet and reserved, was content to stay at home. This covers the period from 1877 until Ed died in 1948 and Eugene moved into town with his sister in the house where my mother was born. By that time it was owned by my great-aunt Jenny, the sister of Ed and Eugene. Eugene died in 1957.

My grandfather was in the horse business virtually all his life. There was still money to be made in the sale of work horses until 1938 when he died. The carriage horse trade, of course, had long since passed. From 1900 to 1925 it was customary to ''bulk up" horses as was done in the 1950s with cattle. Formerly large horses were used for dray animals in cities, farm horses didn't tend to be very large. It came to be realized that farm machinery could be increased in size if there were larger horses. Thus a market was created for Belgian, Percheron, and Shire breeds that could be imported from Europe. I don't think Jake ever went to Europe, but about the time of Grandfather's marriage in 1907, he began making yearly trips abroad with a group of 20 to 30 people from a number of Midwestern states. This was interrupted by the war but he made three trips after the war, a total of 16 times. They took an ocean liner to England, toured England, almost every year they went to Le Havre, France, and generally into the Low Countries. Several times before the war, they went to Germany.

Della, the youngest, born after her father's death, was always babied. Della wrote quite a lot of poetry and even the family, who are usually the harshest critics, thought she had some talent. Her mind deteriorated later in her life, to the point she was sent to Clarinda. At that time it was customary to administer shock treatments, which destroyed what was left of her mind. Although she lived a number of years across the way from me, she was very limited and I saw little of her.

My grandfather married Minnie McNichols, who had two daughters by a previous marriage. One died in the influenza epidemic. My mother, Marie Louise Hart, was born in 1907 in the house at 601 North Main. It has a lot of family history. Except for a brief period when Jenny and Charles lived on Fillmore, it had always been occupied by some of the family.   Mother's father died there, two of her uncles died there, and Jenny's husband, Charlie, died there. The town horse barn and the house at 601 North Main were built in 1906 and 1907, but which was which, I am not sure.

Mother had only one full sibling, Glen (Puny) Hart. My grandmother, Minnie, had no use for my mother, and beat her every day until she was about 14. At that time she was big enough that she might hit back. From that point, Minnie tried to work her to death. My mother always thought of herself as the drudge of the family. It is no wonder that she had no use for her step­mother and after they settled her father's estate, she never spoke to her again. The only time I ever saw her cry was when she told me about this. But families are lots of ways, and that is how her family was. Minnie spent the last years of her life in Omaha, where the daughter of her first marriage lived.

People were always floating through their house. In addition to relatives, Mother's grandparents, the McNickles, operated a boarding house. Mother's mother was born at Groveland where her family had a little boarding house. Later they operated a boarding house located where Paul's John Deere dealership was, east of Dr. Dean's house on the north side of the street. That house was moved to East Clay Street. After my parents were dead, some woman came along who was somehow related. I showed her the house and told her all I knew about it.

Mother loved to tell about a situation that occurred in the spring of 1918, when she was 10 going on 11. Grandfather went to a farm auction where people were buying and selling animals. They didn't have good fencing for sales, so they kept the horses in the barn, and let them out one at a time. The people in attendance formed a circle around them. One horse came out mad and ran into the people. It broke Grandfather's right arm. Grandfather had a car. I am told he was the fifth one in Osceola to own a car. He had a number of Overland touring cars over the years, and they were about the size of a tank. That may have been what he was driving at the time of this incident.

The injury disabled him and he couldn't drive.  He had my mother steer for him and work whatever pedals were on the floorboard, while Grandfather sat in the "suicide seat," and shifted the gears.  By fall he had recovered sufficiently to drive the car, but he took advantage of the fact that prices for grain and animals were quite elevated during the war, and he bought a fairly sizeable herd of cattle between Van Wert and Grand River. He arranged for men to help him drive them to Osceola. My mother went along to drive the car, knowing she would have to return home by herself  Not only that, she had to cross the Burlington Northern tracks five times. The only instruction Grandfather gave her was, ''Remember, girl, you've got a brake."  So, at 11 years old, she drove the car alone the fourteen or fifteen miles successfully.

Mother attended the junior college in Osceola, which was on the third floor of the school building built in 1919. It was pretty much like a fifth year of high school. She also attended a business college in Des Moines for a short time. About 1927, when the Model T was made, Grandfather had the opportunity to get the Ford dealership. In 1928 they came out with the Model A, and in 1932, a much better car. The decision not to go into the Ford business was not a good one, and a disappointment to Mother, who would have been able to use what she had learned in business training, if he had stayed with it.

Glen's nickname was Puny because he wasn't. He had quite a speech impediment, which my mother blamed on his having been such a cute baby that people liked to tickle him. Glen drank. He wasn't an alcoholic but he would take a drink when it was offered. He was hard on cars. I don't know how many he wrecked and obviously survived. He had a lot of Overlands. One of his methods of stopping was to aim for a tree and shift into reverse. In the process, he managed to break something in the transmission and the gear shift could be lifted out. It could be put it back in, and by wiggling it around, it would shift. It might have been a safety device if it could have been developed.

In the late 40s, Puny was part owner of the Case dealership. He met and married a lady from Sioux City. She had two boys (Brodsack), both of whom turned out to be pretty good fellows. Puny and his wife started and operated a Maid Rite just south of the present veterinary clinic. She also had a beauty shop just off the square, on North Main Street, in the brick building north of the present Flowers N' More. In 1950, Glen began selling the land he had inherited from Grandfather. What Mother inherited was called the "cow farm," where I live. The horse farm, which Puny inherited, was a little over 160 acres at what then was the north edge of Osceola, now it is divided by highway 69, with 80 acres on each side of the highway, from Townline Road to Highway Lumber. He continued to live in the house the rest of his life. He died in 1976, and his wife had preceded him by eight or ten years.

My parents were married on my mother's birthday, July 1, 1933. I'm sure neither of them were the other's first choice. My father had a very limited education, which was caused by his father's keeping him out of school to work on the farm. My father was happiest when building things with wood, such as feeding bunks, hayracks and sheds. Mother was not particularly attractive and was overweight much of her life. Later she lost weight and was better looking at 70 years old than she had been at 20 or 30. Those were undoubtedly some of the reasons they didn't get along. My parents were good to me even though they weren't terribly good to one another. I didn't really understand it then, but even as a teenager I knew I would never marry.  I didn't know any reason I would be better at it than they were. There were very few kind words ever spoken, and it got worse at the last, especially on my mother's part.

My parents moved onto a rented farm northeast of Murray in 1934, and remained there four years.  They then moved to a rented farm southwest of Osceola for two years, and in 1940, they moved to the farm north of Osceola, where I still live.  Both sides of the family had experienced financial loss from bank failures in the 1929s and 1930s, which made my parents wary of the banking system. While they had little money until the time of World War II, they remained reluctant to deposit what they did have in a bank. The war brought a degree of prosperity to farmers, and gradually my parents had more money, which my mother kept in her purse. The first State Fair after the Second World War was in 1946. My parents and I attended the Fair and mother had to contend with corralling a 3 1/2 year old boy, at the same time as protecting her purse with $2,000, which would be like $12,000 or more today. The first business day after their visit to the Fair, they opened a bank account in the Clarke County State Bank.

Mother was born in 1907, my father was born March 16, 1904, and I was born in 1942, so Mother would have been 35 or 36 when I was born. She had been told she wouldn't be able to have children unless she had her appendix removed, and she nearly died from the operation. So I was an only child, a wanted child, then a smothered child. I understand why. She didn't think she could have a child, and she went through a lot to make it happen.

It turned out that the happenstance of my living quarters for the four years that I lived on campus had good consequences. The foreign students in our house didn't involve themselves in campus government. That had quite an effect on me. I got sort of a buy-into-the-thing attitude and was able to participate in activities I probably wouldn't have if I'd been in the big dorm or elsewhere. Throughout my years in Simpson I spent as much time in student government as I did in class work, and enjoyed it. That, in turn, led me into other campus goings on.

When it came time to choose a major, I knew I always liked history - and still do, so I had that in mind. Instead of a major and minor, I ended up with two majors - one was political science and history, and the other was business administration. Although my grades were higher the first two years, I ended up with a grade point of 2.6 or 2.7. The last semester of my senior year, I took 15 hours and ended with a 2. My graduation was delayed because the required year of foreign language was changed to two. I got through one year of German - just barely, but I did pass. A different teacher taught the second year and he had expectations I couldn't fulfill. I had to take it three times, causing me to continue another year. During my second senior year I stayed at home and drove in three mornings a week.

While I was in college there was the Cuban missile crisis, which I didn't sleep through, but I know it had a more significant impact on people around me than on me. Kennedy's death, of course, had an effect on everybody. I spent quite a lot of time in the Student Centers, and got into committee work. Toward the end of my sophomore year, I ran for Vice President of the student body and was soundly defeated. The next year I ran for Student Body President, and won. That was a surprise for everybody because there had not been a "non-Greek" in the office for many years. I hadn't joined a fraternity. It wasn't that I chose not to affiliate, I didn't even know about them, and didn't understand them when I did know.

Center House was sort of our own little odd group. Several of us became quite politically active in all kinds of things. When I became president of the student body, we would meet on Wednesday nights, and on Thursdays I would meet with our secretary and we would ask each other, "What did we promise to do?" The meeting place designated as the student government office was almost literally a dungeon in the basement of what was the old chapel. There was a floor in it, which was better than the adjacent rooms, which had dirt floors. On November 23rd 1963, the secretary and I came up from the student government room about 1:00, in time for my class, and someone came along and announced, "President Kennedy has been shot." It was Thanksgiving week, and classes were dismissed for the rest of the week.

I seemed to get into things that were not of my interest. Because of one of them, to this day I do not have a favorable feeling toward parades. It fell to me as student body president to help organize the Homecoming parade in the fall of 1963. I guess I got it done but then proceeded to get drunk and didn't recover until the next day. I knew it was important. I knew there were people who thought it was important, I just didn't think it was that important. However, on the whole, Simpson was enjoyable.

During those years, I got more deeply into Democratic politics, which party my family had been involved with as far back as the 1880s. My immediate family wasn't religiously active (and there is a story behind that), so I went to political stuff, and fortunately or unfortunately, continued that throughout my life. The Republicans had a great year in 1952, but in 1954 the Democratic party in Clarke County was revitalized when Bob Butt was the chair. He really made the effort. There wasn't a great deal of success but there was more activity to fill the ticket, and I went to meetings. In the summer of 1960, while waiting to go to college, I canvassed a fourth of Osceola, identifying would-be voters with the intent of getting them out to vote.

I graduated from Simpson in 1965. I think we were all surprised, and I had an additional surprise. It was in a different era, military-draft-wise. In college we got deferments, and I didn't think anything about the draft. About the time I was to graduate, on April lst, I had a one-day association with the armed forces, and applied for Officers' Candidate School. I'm not positive, but I think I qualified. However, in following psychological discussions, it was decided I was not foxhole-suitable. I was deferred, which I certainly didn't object to. I went into it honestly and it just happened. I went from Officers' Candidate School to 4F status in one day at Fort Des Moines, and what I remember as much as anything is having a good meal. So my military involvement was one day.

I realized I would be graduating in two months, so what would I do then? The year of 1964 was the Johnson sweep with the Democrats winning it all in state government. It was suggested by Wayne O'Neil, who was the county chair, that I apply for a position in the State Auditor's office, where word was there were openings. He must have gotten me the interview with Loren Worthington, who was the State Auditor. I expected nothing to come of it. I'd never been to an interview. He made me an offer of $6,300, which seemed like a lot of money. I knew teachers were getting about $5,000 for a nine month contract.

I started on June 1, 1965, and was there until I was fired after the Republican victory, in early March 1967. I was out of a job for two or three weeks, but in the interim, Worthington had been appointed by Governor Hughes to the position of Commissioner of Insurance. I applied again, simply explained I'd lost my job because of politics, and pretty much said, "So what are you going to do for me?" The truth was, I didn't know if they would do anything for me. However, I was hired as a field auditor in the Insurance Department.

It was largely the same kind of work as I'd done in the Auditor's office, where I audited cities, towns, and school districts - mostly school districts - looking over somebody else's books. In the insurance department I was one of four people working on some bigger companies. I was in Cedar Rapids the first nine months. That was very interesting to me. After about a year I was put out on my own. By that time County Mutuals had been brought under the law. So nobody had ever been there before, and I came across several independent companies. I explained to them that I wasn't there to put them in prison - I was only doing a sampling of their stuff. I had the auditors' knack. It seemed as though I could pull out the embarrassing stuff. I could somehow sense if there was something wrong. I could somehow look at a list and ask about it, and they would say, "Well, we know we paid this guy too much..." or, "We really shouldn't have done it this way." That is what I call the auditor's knack.

That lasted until May 1, 1969, and I could have continued, but my father decided to take social security, which in 1954 was extended to farmers. When he retired, my father never could understand that it was right on the third of each month that he should be receiving a check from the government. He just couldn't believe anybody was sending him money. I don't think he ever got more than $220, and Mother $150, but they lived on it. My parents were under it for 15 years but they got back in 1 ½ years more than they had ever paid in, so I have good feelings toward social security. It had a positive effect on my family as it has had on many.

The main effect on me was that when Father applied for Social Security, it was expected that I become the official farmer. That was what I did for 12 years, from 1969 until 1981, and I was not good at it. I could deal with the animals and get along with them, but I had no mechanical inclinations whatsoever. With anything mechanical, I just plain didn't know how to operate it, or if I just looked at it cross-eyed, it would die. That doesn't work well with farming. Father had two old tractors, a '37 and a '41, and I bought a '49 and a '50, all John Deere.  They were all basically the same, and I did know how to change the oil.  We functioned that way but I wasn't a good farmer.

I was an only child. The Hart group as well as the Vawns have essentially died out. My cousins are: Uncle Henry's children - Richard Vawn, who lives in Osceola, Mary Ellis, his sister, at Weldon; Kathryn McGrew's daughters - Mary Fisher lives on East Clay, and her sister Doris lives in Illinois. Helen Steigall's son, Fredrick, is in rural Abingdon, Illinois and Mary Wood's son, Billy, is in the Omaha area. Those are my nearest relatives.

At the end of January 1949, my father's brother, Henry, was killed. Although nobody said so then, we would now call him an alcoholic. He never took just one drink. He was a fighter when he was drunk, but a nice guy when sober. When his father died in 1931, Henry became the official farmer. Grandmother Vawn was there; he was married and had a couple kids. He had wrecked his share of cars, and in January 1949, he ran his car off in a ditch. It wasn't all that serious. Somebody took him home and the next morning he took his old John Deere B tractor that had rubber tires, then the old steel wheel tires on the outside for traction. He and a neighbor got the car out and the neighbor drove it home. Henry drove the tractor and got the back wheel off the road just a bit. The tractor overturned and the hunk of iron that supports the steering wheel column crushed his chest. He had his father's watch in the bib of his overalls. His chest was crushed but the watch was undamaged. My mother bought my father a new suit - I think for $29, which was a reasonably good suit. The first place he ever wore it was to the funeral, and he would never put it on again. That is probably the reason we never again attended church.

Father died the last day of the year, December 31 1983. If he had lived another six hours, we'd not have had to send back the last social security check.  I have continued to live on the farm. I have only held a real job four years, and most of those earnings went to keep the farm going. In the years since, certainly the farm has not been a profit center, but there was other money which went for the same purpose.

My involvements in the community are mostly of a civic nature. I have been chairman of the Democratic Central Committee from '69 to '84, and from '95 to the present. Since 1990 I've been the bookkeeper for the weekly Bingo game that has significantly financed our local Democratic party. For 15 years it has been our weekly fund-raiser. I served on the County Board of Health from '71 through '82, the last seven years as chairman. I've served on the Clarke County Homemaker Association from '73 to the present. I have served on the Board of Southern Iowa Regional Housing Authority since December of '75, which means I've been on it for nearly 30 years, and chairman from '78 to '82. I've served on the board of the Southern Iowa Development Corporation for many years. It has now been turned over to the Clarke County Development Corporation. I am on the local housing board of Fillmore Place, a 24-unit senior housing complex which is a HUD 202 project. I've served several terms on the SCICAP Board, which is a five-county South Central Iowa Community Action Program. This was one of the programs which came out of the Johnson poverty emphasis. For awhile I was president of the county chapter of the Iowa Farmers' Union Local. I have attended Osceola Chamber of Commerce meetings since 1970 and have been treasurer since 1987. I've been involved with the Clarke County Historical Society, which came together in the summer of 1970 and we were
incorporated in the fall of 1971. My mother was one of the three incorporators.  I was president of Historical Society during the bi-centennial observance from 1975-1977, and have been an officer or director nearly every year since it was organized.

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