I’m grateful for so much this Thanksgiving, including an independent platform and a community of readers who appreciate in-depth coverage of Iowa politics.

In past years, I have marked this holiday by sharing links about its origins and the associated myths, or ideas for making soup and other dishes from Thanksgiving leftovers.

Today, with permission from Matthew Isbell, I want to share a vignette about Iowa’s Thanksgiving celebrations during a previous era, when (like today) this state was solidly Republican during a Democratic presidency.

Dave Leshtz is the editor of The Prairie Progressive.

228 E. Bloomington Street in Iowa City was a battered old duplex across the street from Tweedy’s grocery store, the future site of Pagliai’s Pizza. The elderly landlady lived in one half of the duplex. I lived in the other half with a married couple and their baby, plus whoever needed a bed for the night or the week or the month. 

A block south on Linn Street was the Hamburg Inn #2. The year was 1967, and the Burg was in its pre-caucuses heyday. I ate breakfast, lunch, or dinner there almost every day.

The customers were vividly eclectic: hungover fraternity brothers, young couples who obviously had spent the night together, lawyers with nearby offices, small-time gamblers, alcoholics who had trouble lifting that first cup of coffee to their lips without spilling, poets, and house painters.

Jay Howe wrote the following guest column at the request of the Chicago host committee that recently recognized Jesse L. Jackson on the 35th anniversary year of his historic run for the U.S. presidency.

Yes, those were the days, 1987-88! It all made quite an impact. We deliberately juxtaposed Jesse Jackson from South Chicago into rural, white, farm country Iowa. It worked well to raise his national visibility, eventually helping him win several state Democratic primaries. The first African American to rise as a viable presidential candidate.

National farm leader Dixon Terry of Greenfield, Iowa met Jackson at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. The two of them recognized the potential for including family farm agriculture and rural places in Jackson’s political coalition. The 1980s saw many family-scale farms in deep financial trouble because of high borrowing costs and commodity prices below costs of production.

So in January 1987, it all flowed into the Jackson exploratory event on Superbowl Sunday at the United Methodist Church in Greenfield. When Jackson witnessed a packed house of small-town and farm folks show up in southwest Iowa, that was “it”!

John Norris grew up in Red Oak, Iowa, and now lives in Des Moines. He delivered these remarks at the Jesse Jackson campaign reunion at the Rainbow PUSH Community Hall in Chicago on July 15, 2023.

I am John Norris. I was the first person hired in Iowa for the Jesse Jackson 1988 campaign, serving as Jesse’s Iowa State Director. After the Iowa caucuses I worked for a while in his national headquarters, then organized several western states, and continued on through the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta.

Also here today from Iowa are George and Patti Naylor from Greene County and David Leshtz from Johnson County. George and Patti are Iowa farmers; nothing says “white voter” quite like “Iowa farmer.” I think it is fair to say the Naylors are on the left spectrum of the Democratic Party, but in ’88 Jesse had support from liberal farmers to conservative farmers like Steve and JoAnne Heaberlin from Pleasantville. All over Iowa I witnessed farmers hugging Rev. Jackson and sometimes crying as he connected economic injustice from rural Iowa to urban Chicago.

David Leshtz is from Iowa City. He is a great organizer, but he had to take on the “I like Jesse, but” crowd. You know, those academic liberals who said, “I really love Jesse, but he can’t win.” David, who was also a Jackson ’84 supporter, did a great job challenging that “but” crowd. He helped build a stellar organization in Johnson County and continues the fight for economic and social justice to this day.

Larry Osweiler grew up in Keota, Iowa and now lives in Indiana. A graduate of the University of Iowa, he is an aficionado of Iowa treats found nowhere else: Pagliai’s Pizza, Sterzing Potato Chips, Maid-Rite’s, and kolaches from anywhere close to Cedar Rapids.

I got interested in Iowa politics in 1964 at the age of 8, when Governor Harold Hughes was running for re-election. I had sent for a picture of the governor and received a package from his office a few weeks later. I remember showing it to everyone on the school bus.

While waiting on the bus one afternoon, I remember Evan Hultman riding by on the back of a convertible with a Hultman for Governor sign on it. Hughes won with 68 percent of the vote. Hard to believe there was once a day when a Democrat would win a statewide race in Iowa by that large a margin.

I studied the book I’d received and memorized almost every state official. John Schmidhauser was elected to Congress from the first district. At our dinner table that election night, I wondered how my dad was so sure Lyndon Johnson was going to win the presidential election.

Ken Tilp was a high school teacher of Latin and French for 21 years before becoming president of the Iowa State Education Association for four years. He then worked for the Michigan Education Association for fourteen years, retiring in 2004.

It’s the 50th anniversary of a significant change in the West Des Moines, Iowa, school district personnel policy manual: teachers were no longer required to tell their building principal as soon as they found out they were pregnant.

The school board authorized a committee to review personnel policy, comprised of Bruce Graves, a school board member and young, progressive lawyer; Assistant Superintendent Mel Antrim (known to the elementary teachers as “Apple ass Antrim”); and Ken Tilp, 7th year teacher of Latin and president of the 300-member teachers association.

Catch this: during our discussion about why the requirement should be removed, Antrim said something along the lines of, “Well, I don’t know if I want my child sitting in a classroom with a teacher’s water breaking.”