Out of a Cannon

Posted on January 1, 2024 by admin

Image from Shutterstock

I have never been terribly enthusiastic about New Year’s Eve resolutions. This is not because I lack resolve, but because the start of a new year has usually struck me as a rather arbitrary time to gain such resolve or to turn over a new leaf. If one is committed to certain goals and principles in life, then almost any day will do for fashioning new objectives in serving those goals, depending on circumstances. Why January 1? I suspect that it is mostly a reminder for many people that they have not spent enough time thinking about or pursuing their goals. They may need to develop the habit on an ongoing basis rather than pretending that the start of a new year will make things different. Will power and commitment matter. Do you really want to make things different? If so, then why not make the decision on February 4, or your birthday, or even the Fourth of July? Any day of the year will do, as long as the commitment is real. That commitment may arise out of a life-changing event, but it does not have to. New Year’s resolutions often fade into the ether of our dreams because those making them have not developed an adequate habit of connecting their dreams with a determination to make them happen.

All that said, on this particular trip around the sun, New Year’s Day seems for me a perfect day to launch some resolutions, even if many are focused on unfinished business. But I don’t just want to pick up the pace in 2024. I want to be metaphorically shot out of a cannon on New Year’s Eve. I want to start the new year with a passion.

I say this not because I changed how I feel generally about new-year resolutions. It’s because, for me personally, January 1 is a remarkably convenient opportunity for reclaiming lost energy. What happens a year from now may be different.

For one thing, although I don’t want to overemphasize this, as early as April, there were signs that I was facing a reckoning with regard to a medical problem that had been dogging me in one form or another for about a dozen years. Somewhere back then, my physician referred me to a urologist because of high PSA scores. PSA refers to prostate-specific antigens, antibodies that fight cancer or infections in the prostate gland. That led to a long series of periodic biopsies to monitor the possibility of cancer serious enough to merit surgical attention or radiation treatment, but doctors found only the slightest trace of an indolent cancer and never acted on it. Over time, it became harder to take it seriously, but such monitoring at least produced reassurance nothing disastrous was happening.

But that is not the whole story. In 2012, during a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles for the annual APA National Planning Conference, I became very ill. It felt like influenza, but by the time I left the plane, my only priority was to find a taxi for a quick trip to the hotel, where I promptly became seriously ill after checking in. Only a long-distance consultation with my primary physician, followed by a visit to a nearby urgent care center, confirmed that what I thought was the flu was actually prostatitis and required a major regimen of antibiotics for the next two weeks. I spent much of the conference in bed, sweating through a fever and visiting the bathroom frequently, occasionally struggling to attend events, only to succumb again. Fortunately, the antibiotics salvaged a post-conference road trip with my wife, Jean, to visit relatives in northern California and return to LAX along the gorgeous Pacific Coast Highway.

As for my urologist back in Chicago, when I later recounted these events, his eyes widened, and he said emphatically, “People have died from infections like that.” I did not, and I think I was otherwise far too healthy for that outcome, but it was unquestionably one of the worst experiences I have had with any sort of illness. Prostatitis is simply not fun. It is a bacterial infection, not cancer, but it can drive up PSA scores to drastic levels.

Prostate cancer drives them up much more slowly. It is a grinding menace, and because I have known people who died from it, I took it seriously all along. In the meantime, however, a less potent but serious problem developed called benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). Basically, it involves the enlargement of the prostate gland, a process that is typical as men grow older, but the big question is how big and how rapid the growth. By April, one of those periodic biopsies produced very uncomfortable impacts just as I was about to undertake a full week of online teaching for the Emergency Management Institute, for which I am a certified instructor for courses related to post-disaster recovery. The biopsy occurred on Friday. I was in miserable shape on Saturday, and I was already exhausted when I logged on with the class, another instructor, and our course supervisor at 7 a.m. on Monday. Although the course supervisor said he did not notice much difference in my delivery, it was a case of only making it look easy. When the day was over, Jean could see that I was thoroughly exhausted. It got a little better later in the week, but it was still a struggle.

My new urologist, Dr. William Lin, who had performed the biopsy (the original one retired in March), chose in a follow-up visit to refer me to a specialist who was highly trained in a new surgery called HoLEP (holmium laser enucleation of the prostate), for an evaluation of my suitability for this treatment of a prostate gland that was now about three times normal size. Other than aging, I have not found any indication that the medical profession knows precisely why this happens. It was just my bad luck, I suppose. Dr. Amy Krambeck did not have an opening until August 10, but at that appointment, she and her team made clear that I was well above the threshold for the surgery, and we scheduled it for September 29 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I also learned that she was regarded as quite possibly the best in the nation at this relatively new procedure, which basically uses laser treatment to hollow out the prostate gland, leaving the shell, thus drastically reducing bladder pressure, the main problem connected to BPH. I’ll let those interested follow the links to learn more. My focus here is still on New Year’s resolutions.

Why? Because the first thing I learned was that for at least a month afterwards, I was expected to adhere to some strict dietary limitations (mostly avoiding acidic foods and beverages) aimed at avoiding bladder irritation and allowing my internal organs to heal as well as possible. I was instructed to avoid most physical activity and not lift anything above ten pounds. The key was an intense focus on compliance, a self-discipline aimed at ensuring the best outcome.

Those who have been following the many blog video postings here in recent months will know that I spent much of my summer on trips designed to develop content for a documentary film about planning for community resilience in the face of natural disasters and climate change. By September, such travel became challenging, underscoring the real need for treatment. I had previously scheduled one more trip for early November in Texas—those blog videos are still coming—and deliberately asked Dr. Krambeck about the wisdom of its timing, which was tied to a Texas APA conference in Corpus Christi. She said I should be fine. I did get through it, but setbacks in the first week of November made me wonder as I worked with one of her assistants to determine their likely cause. They were ultimately blamed on inflammation, which could be addressed with Motrin or Ibuprofen. The trip took place, but not without its own challenges.

The reality is that recovery is often a bumpy road. Dr. Allison Shafron, who will see me on January 2 to assess my progress, texted a patient-portal welcome to “the roller coaster of recovery.” That struck me as curious because we use that same phrase in helping communities and local planners prepare for the long road to recovery after disasters. We even have a graphic slide in the EMI courses to illustrate the idea. By December, some other troubling personal matters were also seizing much of my attention, and I was feeling significant fatigue, sometimes as a result of a bit of sleep deprivation. I was also trying to rebuild strength and stamina by resuming a workout routine that I had suspended for nearly three months. I had to temper them initially to avoid overdoing it, but have gradually ramped up much of the exercise to pre-surgical levels. Some people might wonder if that might wear me out, and the answer is yes, but only temporarily. I have pursued fitness goals, on a noncompetitive basis mostly related to personal health, for years and know that the long-term benefits completely outweigh any short-term fatigue. That includes recovering from medical setbacks and injuries.

The reason for describing this at all is that it relates to my stated desire to be “shot out of a cannon” on New Year’s Eve. During much of 2023, I was decidedly passive about pursuing the sort of consulting work I have done in recent years because I was not confident about meeting the challenges involved while awaiting or recovering from the expected surgery. It did slow me down in ways that I am not used to. But I have also grown impatient to get on with normal life, to tackle new professional and volunteer challenges, and to achieve personal goals. These include raising money for and producing the HMDR documentary film, Planning to Turn the Tide; completing redesign of the disaster planning course I teach for the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs; possible additional course instruction for EMI; and finally, outlining and moving forward on some long-planned book projects. That is to say nothing of reinvigorating this blog with new content, as well as planning at least one personal trip to relax and see the world.

On December 20, I became only 74 years old. I expect to be around for a while, and I don’t plan to occupy a couch. For the first time in years, January 1 seems like a perfect time to fashion some resolutions that I will pursue with joyful vigor. Happy New Year, everyone!

Jim Schwab

Striving for Flood Resilience in Iowa

Posted on September 26, 2023 by admin

Collapse of the CRANDIC railroad bridge during the 2008 floods in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

In 2008, much of Iowa experienced such massive floods that 10 percent of Cedar Rapids was evacuated, books were being rescued from the basement of the University of Iowa Library, and homes were under water in Cedar Falls. Dozens of other Iowa communities faced flood waters to varying degrees, all remembering that it was only 15 years earlier that they had dealt with another massive emergency in the Midwest floods of 1993. After billions of dollars of damage and thousands of lost homes, Iowans were forced to confront the fact that so-called 100-year floods might in fact be far more frequent events of the future and that climate change was a reality for the Midwest as well as coastal states.

It was in this environment of concern about how Iowa would cope with future flood emergencies and disasters that the Iowa Legislature decided in 2009 to establish the Iowa Flood Center (IFC). Born of cooperative discussions between IIHR—Hydroscience and Engineering at the University of Iowa and state leaders, the Iowa Flood Center became a leading model for state technical outreach to communities regarding flood mitigation, flood awareness, and warning systems, including an extensive system of stream gauges. Centered at the Stanley Hydraulics Laboratory along the Iowa River, the Center manages the Iowa Flood Information System, a platform that gives communities across the state easy access to inundation maps, alerts, and real-time data on stream conditions.

Over intervening years, I have occasionally worked with staff at the Iowa Flood Center. In addition to their collaborative work in one flood recovery consulting project for the Iowa Economic Development Authority in which I participated, I also have hosted Associate Director Nate Young as a guest speaker in my University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs class, “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery.” In every instance I have seen, IFC has been a class act. Visitors from other states have been intrigued with the Center as a model for their own states.

It should be no surprise at this point that I decided early on that our film project, Planning to Turn the Tide, needed to include some content about the work of the Iowa Flood Center and the changes it has introduced to flood preparation and recovery in Iowa. On July 17, as David Taylor and I were making our way back east from Colorado, we stopped in Iowa City for the purpose of taping an interview with IFC Director Witold Krajewski, a veteran environmental engineer who has become intimately familiar with the hazard mitigation and planning needs of the hundreds of small communities, as well as larger cities, throughout a state that has seen more than its fair share of flood disasters. We also met with Kate Giannini, I owa Watershed Approach Program Manager, about access for our film project to flood footage and other resources from the Iowa Flood Center that would help tell the story visually as well as in words.

Click here to watch the blog video about our visit to Iowa City.

As always, if you wish to support the Planning to Turn the Tide documentary film project, use this link or the QR code below to access our donations link on the APA website. We can use your help and will truly appreciate the support.

Jim Schwab

Going Viral

Posted on November 27, 2022 by admin

Now I know what it feels like, or may have felt like. Kind of. Sort of.

I will never experience, in all likelihood, the very worst the COVID-19 virus can inflict on human beings. I was lucky in many ways. First, the virus just never found me as a target until early October of this year. Second, I am very physically fit for my age, and I don’t suffer from any chronic conditions that often expose people to more severe reactions to the virus. Third, by the time COVID-19 found me, I had the two initial shots of the Pfizer vaccine, and later a Moderna booster. My only failing was not having obtained the more recently released Omicron booster, but there is no question that vaccines made my path far easier than was the case for those who suffered earlier in the pandemic.

I spent most of my COVID time not knowing I had it, though there were indications that aroused my suspicions—just a bit. Late Sunday, October 9, I experienced some mild cold symptoms, but I sometimes have sinus problems that become more persistent as Midwest weather changes in the fall. On Monday, I began to experience more of a cold and struggled through online meetings, two about a video project, one preparing for an upcoming online training workshop. In the evening, I was supposed to volunteer with

It’s a lot easier to get a test now than at the height of the pandemic, when tests were as scarce as the places that provided them. Now you just pull up for an appointment, take the kit through the window, tickle your nostrils with a swab, and hand it all back to the pharmacist.

signature collection to help place our incumbent Chicago alderman, Daniel La Spata, on the municipal ballot next spring, but I called it off because I was not feeling well. By the next morning, I took a nasal swab COVID test at Walgreen’s, but the test came back negative the following day. As a result, I assumed I simply had what I called “the ordinary crud” of a normal cold. Just deal with it for a few days, I thought, and get over it.

I made no real changes to my plans and tried to maintain my normal pace. The previous week, curiously, had included my participation as a consulting expert in two online symposiums, both lasting two and three-quarter hours, on Tuesday and Thursday for a project at Johns Hopkins University addressing pandemic community recovery. I moderated the final panel on Thursday, dealing with the use of metrics, which are essentially statistical targets, for tracking the many variables concerning social equity and public health factors that would guide such recovery. In other words, COVID-19 already had my intellectual attention. I had no reason to suspect It would seize my medical attention as well.

But I was wrong on that count. By that Tuesday, some of the infamous COVID-19 fatigue was settling in, and the cold was tightening its grip. I had planned to attend a program of the Society of Midland Authors at Cliff Dwellers in downtown Chicago that evening. As on Monday night, I never made it. It seemed wiser to stay home. It was becoming a pattern.

Nonetheless, I spent Wednesday morning at a dealership service department. While in the waiting room, I met online with two planned guest speakers for my online University of Iowa class, which meets in the fall semester on Thursday evenings. I was very much looking forward to letting Linda Langston and Kehla West take over the class a week later because, in my opinion, both are impressive members of the natural hazards professional community and could share valuable insights. “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery” offers graduate planning and public affairs students serious comprehension of the natural-hazard threats facing our communities. Linda is a former county supervisor of Linn County, Iowa, who had helped lead her community through the 2008 floods that overwhelmed Cedar Rapids and into the recovery that followed. She later worked nationally on resilience issues with the National Association of Counties before returning to Cedar Rapids as a consultant. Kehla works with Region 5 of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Chicago. Although she was doing me a favor by sharing her federal government experience, she regarded it as a great honor to be asked to speak to a class in which she was once a student. I was enthusiastic about sharing my virtual stage with them for two hours. The meeting was a breeze.

All right, this is a simulation of what I may have looked like, but it’s probably close. I found myself waking up in a seated position on the couch more than two hours after falling asleep early in the afternoon.

But most days that week, with increasing frequency, the afternoon was not. I no longer even remember which day was which, but I know that on several occasions, I would hit a wall of fatigue by late morning or early afternoon, and work would grind to a halt. One day, this happened around 1 p.m., and to regain some energy, I went downstairs from my home office to sit on the living room couch. I simply disappeared into deep slumber, with no recollection of anything. Sometime well after 3 p.m., I woke up, looked at the clock, and wondered where my day had gone. For someone very conscious of pending deadlines and obligations, it was deeply frustrating. At the end of the day, I like to know what I have accomplished. I did not want to find that I had lost a major chunk of my day to exhaustion. It became hard to believe that a mere cold had done this, but I kept thinking about that negative test. It was not COVID. I was just worn out fighting a cold. But day after day, I watched in growing alarm as the number of tasks falling behind schedule kept growing. The will power and drive that sufficed in normal circumstances to overcome such deficits never materialized, and the gap widened instead. The spirit was willing, but the flesh fell asleep, day after day.

That Thursday evening, I taught my class as usual. But it was not so usual. It became patently obvious that I was struggling with my voice, with sinus difficulties, with watery eyes, with fatigue, but I plugged away for two hours. By Saturday, in a phone conversation with someone about a potential film grant proposal, I struggled again in the conversation because my voice was weak, but I pushed ahead because the call was important, and the proposal deadline was at the end of the month, just two weeks away.

And so it went. If a meeting was on the telephone or online, I could make it work even if I was exhausted after it was over. If it was in person, I would cancel. Fortunately, most meetings, including a debrief with Johns Hopkins about the symposium two weeks earlier, a HUD guidebook review panel, and a Midland Authors board meeting, were online, usually via Zoom. I had contacted my doctor over the weekend of October 15-16 through a patient portal, and he asked me to come in, which I did by Wednesday, October 19. He made some suggestions but accepted the negative COVID test result. Following his advice, I began using a Neti pot to control the sinus congestion—and it works, by the way. In combination with Flonase (after the Neti pot), it has been effective. The fatigue, however, took its own good time to fade away.

The next day, Thursday, I had class in the evening, the one at which Linda and Kehla would speak in tag-team fashion about local and federal perspectives on planning for disaster recovery. That afternoon, Jean tested positive, much to her surprise. In our pre-class banter on Zoom, I mentioned that to Linda, who repeated it to Kehla when she logged on: “Jim’s wife tested positive for COVID.” Kehla immediately expressed her regrets. They taught the class, I offered occasional commentary, and for the most part, I got to rest my voice and conserve my energy.

But I had also decided at that point that getting another test the next morning was imperative. By mid-day Saturday, a Walgreen’s e-mail informed me that I had tested positive. I discussed it with an emergency room doctor, and later my primary physician, who said the symptoms we discussed just a few days before sounded a lot like COVID to him at the time. The ER doctor stated that, based on our discussion of what led me to get tested again, I had probably had COVID all along and may unwittingly have infected Jean. The verdict of these two men made sense to me, but of course, it was now after the fact. I was actually near the end of my COVID experience before I ever knew for certain that I had it.

Alex, to right of candle, after baptism service, with me at far right, Pastor Nancy Goede, Pastor Matt Stuhlmuller, Alex, sponsor Kornelius, and members of my family, including Jean, far left. I later wondered about any unintended exposure I may have cause through unawareness that I even had COVID at that point.

If there was one situation that brought some regret–it seems not to have produced any adverse consequences that I am aware of–it was that, not believing I had COVID, I joined others at our church for our grandson Alex’s baptism on October 16. Mass spreader events were at one time rather scary propositions. But there I was, unaware, part of a ritual and celebration that was a happy event but could have infected others. The following Sunday, I stayed home because by then, I knew I had contracted COVID.

Although I am certain that skeptics of the vaccines (and I know some) would say this was just one man’s opinion, the ER doctor stated that the vaccines had surely helped make my case milder (and Jean’s was milder still), and that the vast majority of those now being hospitalized or dying from the virus are unvaccinated. The statistics I have seen on the subject seem strongly to suggest as much. But people love to argue from anecdotes, which are easier to understand than statistical data, and the resistance will surely continue. The COVID-19 pandemic seems closer to having run its course after nearly three years. All pandemics eventually lose steam.

COVID is no longer half as scary as the ghost lady and her companion on Halloween. Okay, just kidding. But that guy is freaky.

By the following week, with minor help from a cough suppressant the ER doctor prescribed, I was able to regain energy and focus on the tasks that I had neglected for almost two weeks. They were too important to me to do otherwise. One was completing a grant proposal for a film project I am leading under the auspices of the Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division of the American Planning Association. The deadline was October 31, and with significant money at stake, I was not about to blow it. We had been laying the groundwork for weeks, but I needed to write some powerful explanations of our project and submit all the necessary documentation, which I did by that morning. I was able to walk our grandson through the neighborhood for Halloween and pass out candy afterwards, while triggering the spooky voice of our alabaster “ghost lady” without being noticed. She impressed only the very young, drawing only amused yawns from tweens and teenagers.

But that was just the beginning of a list of tasks and projects needing my urgent attention. I had promised to create a case study of Hurricane Michael recovery to present to my students on November 10. I finally completed it just an hour before class. On Saturday, November 12, I hosted with Amanda Torres, formerly the city planner for Rockport, Texas, an all-day training workshop on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery, offered as part of my teaching commitment with the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs. I had two documents I had promised to review, for which I sought and received additional time.

During the illness, I stopped my exercise routine. I currently visit the gym twice weekly with a rotating routine of exercises. After the illness had run its course, I still missed the workouts in favor of catching up on work. Before Christmas, I will turn 73. I find the exercise vital to good health at this stage of life, and I became anxious about the six-week gap that developed before I finally resumed the workouts on November 16. I have taken to them with relish. I simply feel better because of it, and I can finally spare the time again. Two days after Thanksgiving, I ran into a former trainer I worked with at X Sport, Michael Caldwell, who told me about his new work with companies on employee fitness and ergonomics, noting the serious toll on many people of failing to pay attention to such issues. I wished him well in his new enterprise. He seemed pleased that I was returning to form, just as he had always respected my resilience in the past after some injuries and surgeries.

But I also know that I am very fortunate. I find absolutely no evidence that I have developed any long-term COVID symptoms. I never fell victim to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic despite a short-term hospital stay in May 2020 on the only floor with non-COVID patients. I have even discovered the accidental grace of hundreds of presumed strangers who, in successive waves in October and November, registered as new subscribers to this blog at a time when I was seldom posting anything. I wanted to change that but just could not get it done. Their attention to my blog despite several weeks with no new posts encourages me to get back into the ring. I must have offered something in earlier posts that still attracts readers, and I hope to keep it that way for a long time. I hope this humble story adds to the blog’s overall value. I shall certainly try my best.

Jim Schwab

Collateral Damage

Posted on January 13, 2021 by admin

For those who have noticed, it has been more than five weeks since I last posted to this blog. It has been a rough stretch, but it could have been much rougher. At least to my knowledge, I never have contracted COVID-19. Not that people weren’t asking, especially relatives.

There were the holidays, of course, and who wouldn’t take it easy for at least a few days?

Then came the call on Christmas Eve, around 8 p.m. CST. It was my younger sister, choked up, reporting that our mother had died about an hour earlier at 8 p.m. EST. It was not entirely unexpected. She was living in a small nursing facility near Cleveland. My younger sister and brother live nearby. At 103, our mother had lived a very long life, overcoming more obstacles and health threats than I could imagine, but time takes its toll on all of us. In her last few days, she could barely speak, was on oxygen, and finally on morphine as hospice nurses took charge of her situation.

My mother, Hazel, at 100th birthday in 2017.

Still, Christmas Eve is not an ideal time for such news. It completely dampened the tenor of the evening at our house, as I shared the news first with my wife, and then with six grandchildren who were present. We all went to sleep that night knowing that my mother, who survived our father by more than 13 years, would no longer be a presence in our lives, though she would certainly be a memory. Losing a parent is almost always a tectonic shift in one’s life. Losing a parent in the midst of a pandemic, even if not to the pandemic, adds an extra element of sadness to the event. Funerals have become small events since last March. There is no need to add to the death toll.

We celebrated a slightly subdued Christmas, but we wanted to maintain the joy for the grandchildren, who range from 6 to 17, and their mothers. There was a more than ample dinner, much of it planned before the news arrived, and the kids played with their new gifts. Nonetheless, two of them, Alex, 11, and Angel, just two days away from his 17^th birthday, made clear they wanted to come with Jean and me to Cleveland for their great-grandmother’s funeral. That was already a full load for our 2018 Chevy Malibu.

Christmas, of course, was on Friday, which meant that my siblings in Cleveland would not meet with the funeral home staff until Saturday to settle on plans. Over the weekend, they learned that, because of COVID-19, the funeral home was backed up, and the funeral could not occur until Tuesday, December 29. Their pastor had another funeral Tuesday morning, so he could not arrive until later, so, while visitation was permitted to begin at 11:30 a.m., the service began around 1:15 p.m. Pastor Brad Ross, of Triune Lutheran Church in Broadview Heights, Ohio, kept it reasonably short out of necessity. The cemetery was also backed up, and we would need to complete the interment service no later than 3 p.m. That meant we were all leaving the funeral home no later than 2 p.m. This was a very different environment from the more relaxed and expansive schedule that accompanied my father’s funeral on a sunny May day in 2007. The last pandemic that had ever ravaged the world on the scale of COVID-19 had occurred in 1918 and 1919, just a year or so after my mother was born. I kept thinking of all the changes she had seen in her lifetime, but they were often hard to imagine. The best I could do was try to broaden the lens of my own 71 years, but it never seemed like enough. Cars were new on the city streets when she was born, and she graduated from high school during the Great Depression. Our nation was already sending men into space while I was still in elementary school. We can imagine, but can we relate?

My niece from upstate New York, Cheryl, provided the one family contribution to the service, which was otherwise a short homily and some scriptural readings from Pastor Ross. Cheryl has a beautiful voice. With instrumental accompaniment from a recording, she sang “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Through it all, and it was brief, I had flashbacks to moments of both separation and engagement with my parents, particularly my mother. I was always well aware that she was less than pleased when I said I was moving to Iowa in January 1979, at age 29 taking the helm of a small nonprofit public interest advocacy organization. In her mind, such a move could be justified if I were working for some large firm that wanted to transfer me there, but the type of job I had sought was, in her mind, a waste of time and talent. I stood my ground because I knew already that I was profoundly restless in Cleveland, striving to redefine myself and find a new role in life, and this modestly paid position posed a challenge to my intellect, my moral fiber, and my emerging sense of identity. I was a “child of the Sixties” who believed passionately in positive social and political change, but it was more than that.

Even while in Cleveland, I had often written and spoken in ways that revealed some innate, but not yet well-developed, skills at communication. I had published several op-eds in The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s major daily newspaper. But I did not feel that anything I was doing was plumbing the depths of my skills and beliefs, so it was time to move on and immerse myself in an entirely new environment. Had I been more daring, I might have joined the Peace Corps, like my long-time college friend, Jim Quigley, who spent two years in the Marshall Islands. That surely would have driven my mother over the edge. “Why do you want to do that?” would have been her first question.

Within three years, I shifted gears in Iowa to become a graduate student at the University of Iowa, pursuing two Master’s degrees in urban and regional planning and journalism that have become the cornerstones of my career for four decades. She first greeted that, too, with some skepticism, wondering why I wanted to “struggle” for a few more years like that, but she acquiesced. She had no choice because it was all on my own dime or with my own student loans. To be fair, however, I must emphasize that both my parents strongly encouraged all of us to attend college.

She may also have feared that I would never return to Cleveland. I visited often, but she was right. Cleveland no longer held much allure. In the end, with Jean, who was from Omaha, I ended up in Chicago. Life offered a far bigger palette here on which to paint my career.

A long-time high school friend of mine who also now lives in Chicago, Larry Barr, theorized recently that middle-class parents of our generation—and my parents were blue-collar middle-class—tended to want success for their children through conventional careers. Getting hired by a big company was a sign of economic security. Many of us Baby Boomers had a more creative streak and wanted to discover who we were. That made our parents nervous about our prospects in life. My extended search stretched into three and a half years of graduate school because I used the journalism training to refine what I had always sensed were powerful writing skills that had not yet been refined and tested, and I wanted to push the development of those skills as hard as I could while also refining a clearer sense of my own values in life. I emerged from the University of Iowa, not a different person, but a far more mature and determined person than when I started. In the years that followed, I turned a Master’s Project in Journalism into my first published book, followed by book tours and a review in the New York Times. I was far more confident than when I had enrolled, and my vision of what was possible grew exponentially.

That was the point, Larry suggested in a recent conversation. Skeptical at first of such personal searches for self-definition and meaning, our parents could nonetheless embrace success when it was staring them in the face. The kid is getting published. He’s an author, and a planner. He must have known what he was doing.

A few years later, a second book emerged, my role at APA had grown, and things just kept evolving. During one visit to Cleveland, they listened as I was interviewed with another panelist on the local NPR station. Not everybody’s kid gets such positive public attention. They reported enjoying the discussion.

There was no denying that, whatever differences of opinion we still had—and there were plenty—I seemed to have planted my stake in the world. I might not have become an automotive engineer for Ford or GM, but their doubts had been resolved. (My father would love to have been trained as an engineer, but college seemed out of reach in his youth, which is sad. He had some amazing mathematical and mechanical skills, and the world would have benefited from providing him such an opportunity. He worked as a truck mechanic in a chemical plant, but was a beacon of stability throughout his life.)

Those are the essential reminiscences after all these years, and they all passed through my mind during the funeral. I was a pallbearer and took my place in the procession with nephews and my brother, but before we left, I asked for a moment to grab my overcoat, as I was feeling a bit cold. We loaded the casket into the hearse, and our parade of cars followed to the cemetery.

It was about 23°F., a damp, chilly day as we reached the cemetery in Hinckley, about a 20-minute drive from the funeral parlor. I was not especially comfortable as we brought the casket to the burial site and listened as the pastor intoned a final prayer before we all left, most of us for my brother Jack’s house, where he and my sister-in-law, Tina, had a casual dinner of sandwiches and pasta salads ready for all of us. They also had a small cake for a joint birthday: Mine had been on December 20, and my other sister, Nancy, who lives in Pennsylvania, was born on New Year’s Eve.

I struggled to enjoy it all, but it soon became apparent to everyone—most notably, Tina and Jean—that something was wrong. I was looking pale, feeling cold, and lacking energy. I sat near the fireplace and simply watched a movie, The Princess Bride, that was on the living room television. It was still early in the evening when we left for our hotel room with Angel and Alex, and I fell asleep beneath the covers not long after 8 p.m., a remarkably early time for me. There was by then no question that I was ill.

The hotel, relatively empty and operating post-holidays in pandemic mode, offered a simple complimentary breakfast of either a bagel with cheese, egg, and sausage, or without the sausage, and orange juice in a small plastic bottle. The dining area had been closed months ago. Amenities were minimal. Alex went to the lobby to get the breakfast for all of us, but I passed on the bagel and simply drank the orange juice because I was feeling queasy. Even that proved a big mistake. By the time we had packed the car and checked out, I was getting nauseous. As Jean, who had committed to driving the entire trip without my help, pulled out of our parking space, I said urgently, “Pull up to the front door.” She looked puzzled, and I repeated, more firmly, “Pull up to the front door!” She did so, and in a moment, I was racing for a bathroom, and the orange juice departed my stomach like a liquid missile. Now I knew I was in trouble, and a six-hour drive down the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes, plus I-90 in Chicago, lay ahead.

On the way home, we discussed what to do about my situation when we got there. I avoided both food and drink the entire time in order not to test my stomach. If it was empty, there would be no emergency. I was decidedly uncomfortable when we visited service plazas to use the bathroom because the weather was at first rainy and cold, though it improved in Indiana. I used her cell phone to call an urgent care center near our home and was told that, unless I needed a COVID test, I could be treated as a walk-in.

In Chicago, however, I discovered that one needed to get the attention of someone inside the urgent care center for someone to come to the door to let you in, and two ladies standing outside indicated they had been waiting a half hour for someone to respond. I said I would become a wreck if I stood outside that long, so I drove home.

After I rested a bit and warmed up, Jean took me to the emergency room at nearby St. Mary’s Hospital. I expected that they would test me immediately for COVID-19, as they had done last May, but to my surprise, the admitting clerk simply asked about symptoms and referred me to a nurse. Within minutes, I was in a treatment room with a doctor. No COVID test ever happened. Dr. Jorgensen ascertained instead that I had a viral sinus infection. Because the infection was viral, not bacterial, they could not administer antibiotics but would have to let me wait it out, while advising that I continue using Flonase to clear the sinuses and Tylenol for headaches or fever. He prescribed Zofran for the nausea, which I used for maybe two days before that symptom disappeared. An attending nurse attached saline fluids intravenously to relieve dehydration that, no doubt, had materialized from my precaution in not eating or drinking during the trip. “We’re putting the fluids where they matter without testing your stomach,” he assured me.

I spent the New Year’s weekend either in bed or lazily reading newspapers and books until I got drowsy. My siblings and in-laws were calling and texting to find out how I was doing, and to make sure I had not contracted coronavirus. I reassured everyone that no such diagnosis was in the works, but some worried anyway. You never know, and we all know someone who has suffered, and one illness can lead to another. But in my case, it did not.

What it led to is my current anxiety. Work piled up as the first week of January rolled on and I struggled to regain my normal energy level, which happened but far too slowly for my satisfaction. I never lost my sense of taste or smell, a key COVID trait, and when feeling energetic enough, I continued to craft some wonderful meals as my inner chef, another part of my creative identity, reasserted itself. Lord, I would hate to discover someday that ginger/sesame-marinated salmon tasted like paste or wallpaper!

By January 6, I was more or less back to work, albeit at a slow pace. Then came another opportunity to feel sick, but the symptoms were emotional and were triggered by the President himself, inciting an angry, deluded crowd of supporters to attack the nation’s Capitol, killing a Capitol police officer, and creating a new day that will live in infamy, alongside Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That some Americans were proudly doing this to their own country was by far the worst part. I found the news consuming what little free time I had mustered by then. Emotionally, it felt like collateral damage to a political system gone badly awry.

By Friday, a new disturbance arrived, though I was able to take it more in stride. I received a notice from the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) that an unemployment claim was filed in my name at a local sheet metal manufacturer, where, of course, I had never worked. It was clearly a fraudulent claim and was followed the next day by a benefits debit card from a bank in Cleveland. I spent Monday of this week requesting cancellation of the claim at IDES, taking other protective measures, and filing a financial fraud report with the Chicago Police Department. I do not believe in letting this activity go unreported. Providing evidence may add ever so slightly to a case against some perpetrator somewhere who needs to be brought to justice. I learned that IDES had been hacked in 2017. If so, although it happened under a prior administration, Gov. J.B. Pritzker needs to take ownership of the solution. Too many such issues in Illinois linger from one administration to the next, with computer systems not updated, problems not fixed, issues unresolved. The avalanche of claims under the current pandemic-caused recession has only exposed existing vulnerabilities. It is time for states and the federal government to get serious about addressing these challenges.

As for me, I am feeling better and getting more done every day, though I am still checking in with doctors in the near term. As for the nation, I hope we can all feel better after January 20, but I don’t envy President-elect Biden or his administration for the work that lies ahead. We have a viral infection in the body politic for which the only vaccines are truth, respect, and common sense.

Jim Schwab

Charting a Path to Sustainability

Posted on November 23, 2020 by admin

A presidential transition has always been a time to look forward in American history, anticipating change, contemplating new directions. Sometimes we like the new direction, sometimes we don’t; sometimes we think it just doesn’t go far enough to remedy the problems we face. But never have we faced the narcissistic spectacle of a president unwilling to release his grip on power. Every president before Donald Trump has been enough of a patriot to cooperate with a new president of the opposite party, and losing candidates who never ascended to the White House have been willing to concede. It is extremely unfortunate that some Americans are trying to deny others the right to focus on defining a more positive future.

But they are only trying because the right to map out an alternative future is still ours. The capacity to imagine a different future is one of the defining characteristics of a society that is capable of renewal, resilience, and sustainability. It is vitally important that civic leaders, academics, and authors help us clarify the truth of our past and map out paths to a better future. And, presidential transitions notwithstanding, it can and should happen below the national level, to help states and communities explore their unique history and their opportunities.

It is in that context that I wish to introduce readers to Green, Fair, and Prosperous: Paths to a Sustainable Iowa, the work of Charles E. Connerly, who by next summer will be retiring as professor and the director of the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning, recently renamed the School of Planning and Public Affairs after Connerly’s successful push to incorporate a Master’s in Public Affairs to the program’s offerings. Connerly has been at Iowa since 2008 since migrating back to his Midwestern roots after a long tenure at Florida State University in Tallahassee. As a matter of full disclosure, he was also responsible for hiring me as an adjunct assistant professor to teach one course each fall that has come to be known as Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery. His many years at Florida State, working alongside Robert Deyle, a colleague who worked with me on disaster issues as far back as the 1990s, made him supremely aware of the importance of addressing hazards in the planning process. I was hired in the immediate aftermath of the massive 2008 floods in Iowa.

Connerly (in gray jacket) during a 2014 field trip of post-flood redevelopment in Cedar Rapids.

Connerly is truly a comprehensive thinker in the best planning tradition, and this book shows it. While I am certain, because of publishing schedules, that he had completed his manuscript before the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over the Memorial Day weekend, his book is incredibly timely in the fall of 2020 because of his focus on the history of racial and ethnic disparities in Iowa. In fact, Chapter 4 is simply titled, “Why Is Iowa So White?”

Indeed, that is a very good question. It is not just a matter of Iowa being farm country. After growing up in the Cleveland metro area in Ohio, then moving to Iowa in January 1979 before ultimately enrolling in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I remember being struck by the apparent lack of diversity, especially outside the handful of cities above, say, 50,000 people. There is, after all, industry in these cities, and industry has often attracted multiracial work forces. Unless, that is, political and social forces intervene to prevent such an outcome. Most people, however, never notice such forces at work and never learn about them in school. History can be very silent about such matters unless diligent researchers insist on exposing that legacy to sunshine, aka “the best disinfectant.”

Connerly digs deep on this topic, all the way back to antebellum Iowa politics. Sitting just north of Missouri, a slave-holding border state, Iowa was both a frontier of the Underground Railroad and a harbor of typical northern mixed feelings about African Americans. In 1850, Iowa was no less than 99.8 percent white, and did not dip below 99 percent, Connerly notes, until 1970. Since then, there has been a substantial growth in minority populations. But African Americans have historically been concentrated in just four urban counties. All that said, it was also the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2008 that launched Barack Obama on a streaking path to the presidency. What accounts for this paradoxical history?

From the early days of statehood, Iowa suffered from a typical northern moral conflict between supporting emancipation and not particularly wanting too many blacks in the neighborhood. That is not putting too fine a point on the matter. Connerly notes that before the Civil War, Iowa had enacted laws banning blacks from the state. The territory avoided enacting such black codes to win statehood, but once that was achieved, Iowa legislators had no problem backtracking on the issue. The bottom line was that Iowans, overall, opposed slavery but did not necessarily favor civil rights for freed slaves.

That changed somewhat after the Civil War, with Radical Republicans pushing through changes that liberalized matters considerably, but it was only following World War II and through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that serious, permanent change began to occur. By that time, however, previous history had done its work in making African Americans largely feel unwelcome. Iowa stayed overwhelmingly white, but not entirely by accident. At the same time, the state has been receptive to refugees, for example, after the Vietnam war, and remarkably progressive on some other issues. Northwest Iowa elected the remarkably ignorant Steve King to Congress, but Republicans themselves dethroned him in this year’s June primary.

Prior to white settlement and the rise of modern agriculture, much of the Iowa landscape enjoyed by Indians consisted of prairie. Photo by Suzan Erem

Connerly writes that African Americans were not the only minorities to feel the impact of 19^th-century American racism. Before European settlement, which took place in earnest only after Iowa became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase, fourteen Native American nations had, over millennia, occupied some part of what became Iowa. Before the 1800s, their interaction with Europeans was largely through trade, but eventually their land ended up in the hands of white settlers. The short answer as to how that happened is simple: “We took it from them.” Today, only the Mesquaki settlement in Tama remains as a reminder of the formerly dominant Native American presence.

The Hispanic presence, and that of various Asian minorities, is a product of more recent history, some of it involving the evolution of labor relations, particularly in agriculture and meat processing plants, but today there is a distinct, but distinctly disadvantaged, Hispanic presence. It is no accident that earlier this year, some of the most intense controversy over coronavirus spread in states like Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota involved minority workers in the meat-packing industry and deficiencies in safety protocols among the companies involved. In a whole chapter dealing with labor issues over time in both the food and agricultural equipment industries, one can see the steady decline of leverage among white-dominated labor unions and the rise of cheap labor and mass production within the industry as it is today. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that these social and economic changes have had profound impacts on, and implications for, the future of Iowa’s economy and society. Iowa did not shift from supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012 to Trump in 2016 and 2020 without some massive strains within the body politic. How those tensions are resolved will go a long way toward determining whether Iowa can chart a successful path to a sustainable future, as Connerly’s book suggests. Iowans will have serious work ahead in improving social equity while adjusting to a changing demographic makeup across the state.

But I do not wish to create the impression that the book is strictly focused on such demographic issues, as important and critical as they are. It is important to notice that Connerly has tied together the issues of environmental health, fairness, and prosperity in his title. His larger point is that all these questions are inextricably related. To quote some planners I have known, “Everything is connected to everything else.”

Connerly takes us on a detailed, well-documented tour not only of Iowa’s demographic history, but of its environmental and economic history as well. Iowa clearly entered statehood as a predominantly rural, agricultural state, though not necessarily producing the corn and soybeans that predominate now. Originally, in fact, it grew more wheat, but trends shifted to corn and hogs. But the state is still heavily dependent on agriculture, with 43 percent of its 2015 manufacturing centered on either food processing or machinery used in agricultural production. These two gave rise in the twentieth century to some powerful unions representing workers who were largely able to achieve a blue-collar version of middle-class prosperity. Hogs, supported by state laws exempting agriculture from county zoning laws, gave rise to the growth of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the past 40 years, and the meat-packing industry itself became more concentrated and able to mechanize increasingly and replace high-wage jobs with lower-wage mass production and weaker unions. The people working in the newer factories are definitely more racially diverse but definitely not more empowered and definitely paid less. The growing inequities have resulted in a shrinking middle class.

One factor that distinguished the Iowa packing plants prior to the major, union-busting shifts of the 1970s and 1980s was that the plants were closer to the farms, and thus, unlike larger plants in Chicago and Kansas City, bought animals directly from farmers. Connerly maps out the consequences in urban development for Iowa, namely, that Iowa never developed the metropolitan magnets of neighboring states like Minnesota, Missouri, and Illinois because of the dominance of the Twin Cities, Chicago, and Kansas City, and instead has a number of smaller cities, the largest being Des Moines, which has about 215,000 people, though the entire metro area is about three times that size. Smaller cities have mostly grown around agriculture-related industries.

All this has had significant consequences not only for quality of life but the quality of the environment, with water quality problems arising from rural land use issues such as CAFOs, soil erosion, and nitrate concentrations in groundwater. Connerly’s final chapter asks whether Iowa truly is the “best state in the nation,” a title bestowed in 2018 by U.S. News and World Report. As a former Iowan, I do not offer this review as a way of trashing the state, nor does Connerly offer his book in that spirit, but the question is an opportunity to explore the complexity of a state that too many elsewhere see as simply white and rural. Iowa, with the right policies, the right incentives, and the right opportunities, has the potential to create a healthy environment and economy, but it must examine current trends and determine how to reverse those that are moving the state in the wrong direction. The last chapter is a succinct compendium of recommendations for moving Iowa toward a growing middle class, a healthier environment with better recreational opportunities, and a progressive approach toward making agriculture more ecologically sound and resilient in the face of natural hazards, most notably, floods.

Testing facility of the Iowa Flood Center, 2019.

The state has created some interesting mechanisms for doing this, but has a stubborn habit in recent years of shooting itself in the foot. In 1987, the legislature wisely passed the Groundwater Protection Act, which created the Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, which has done remarkable research on establishing a balance between economic and environmental needs in agricultural practices. Yet, in recent years, the legislature has significantly limited state funding for the center at the behest of corporate agricultural interests. In 2010, following the devastating floods in 2008, the legislature funded creation of the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, which has become a model in advancing flood prediction and mitigation that other states are considering copying, yet some question the need for continued funding. It is almost as if Iowa wants to replicate the larger national battle between science and an increasingly poisonous distrust of “experts.” Would it not be better to marshal and support the best intellectual resources Iowa can muster for an assessment of the opportunities that lie ahead?

Connerly points out, in contrast, how Iowa could take the lead in solving problems like climate change and excessive nutrient runoff in the Mississippi River basin that leads to both groundwater contamination locally and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. This last chapter is the biggest single reason to read the book, but its logic is only fully clear after reading the thorough research that precedes it.

My final comment is that it may seem that this is a book that is primarily or perhaps solely relevant to Iowans. I think that conclusion, however, would be short-sighted. While I am profoundly aware of the many books others have produced about other states, regions, and metropolitan areas across the U.S., I think it is vitally important that other scholars across the nation undertake similar efforts to assess the path to sustainability for their own states, regions, and cities. We could sorely use such a book in Illinois, and the same is probably true for every neighboring state. As I suggested at the outset, it is not enough to chart a new national path. We need these serious explorations at subnational levels as well. In that sense, I believe Connerly has done a major service for the Hawkeye state. I’d like to see more such books.

Jim Schwab

Truly Hard Wind

Posted on August 30, 2020 by admin

What in the U.S. Midwest would spur comparisons to a hurricane? What could spread damage over an equally wide area? It is a good bet that most people are unfamiliar with the word “derecho,” which comes from Spanish, meaning “straight,” but such a storm made itself felt just three weeks ago in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, as well as parts of Nebraska and Wisconsin. The Spanish word with an adopted meaning in English refers to such a storm’s powerful straight-line winds, as opposed to another adapted Spanish word, “tornado,” literally meaning “turned,” which, of course, refers to a cyclonic, or spinning, meteorological phenomenon.

The Event

On August 10, a derecho took shape in eastern Nebraska and the southeastern corner of South Dakota early in the morning. The city of Omaha suffered some of the initial damage, with an estimated 57,000 people losing power. But as it roared across the center of Iowa, the storm, as derechos often do, rapidly gained wind speed until estimated winds of 140 miles per hour struck Cedar Rapids and surrounding Linn County in eastern Iowa. Nearby Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, also suffered extensive damage. Derechos can and typically do strike with little warning, unlike hurricanes, but even at speeds of 90 to 100 mph, in this case, it still takes hours to cross Iowa from west to east, and even longer to reach Illinois and Indiana.

Thus, my first warning of what was to come, sitting here in Chicago, was a telephone alert from the University of Iowa around noon that day. I get such alerts because I am on the faculty, although I now teach remotely as an adjunct. But our landline and my cell phone are on the system, so the alerts come automatically. Fortunately, that gave me most of the afternoon to prepare for what was coming, which arrived in our area around 3:45 p.m. Winds and rain pounded on our skylights for nearly 45 minutes, leaving numerous branches and twigs on the ground from our stately American elm, which towers above our house and garage and has probably withstood other storms for at least a century. It was already huge when we built our house in 1994, and we chose to make it sure it remained. Even this storm caused it only minor damage.

The same could not be said of many street trees in parts of Chicago. Trees often collapsed on top of parked cars, leaving many owners to bemoan what became of their vehicles—or, in some cases, the roofs of their homes.

Even the repose of the dead was not left undisturbed. Graceland Cemetery, one of the more famous in Chicago, faces months of repairs and replanting and is closed for six weeks. The storm uprooted about 40 trees and damaged numerous gravestones and monuments. It had become a popular place for peaceful strolls and contemplation during the months of coronavirus-induced shutdown. After the storm, it was a visual mess that will cost about $250,000 to repair.

Removing damaged trees in Chicago’s Rogers Park.

One lesser-known by-product of derechos is tornadoes, which can be spun off from the shelf cloud as it moves through an area. In Chicago, two tornadoes, one EF-1 in the Rogers Park neighborhood along Lake Michigan near the city line with Evanston, literally buzzsawed trees in an area of densely built multifamily housing and small

Insurance claims agents inspect building damage in Rogers Park.

businesses. A few days later, I visited the area to shoot photos that appear here. At first, driving up Greenwood Avenue, I wondered where the damage was. But as I drove further north and approached W. Jarvis Ave., the answer became starkly obvious. I could not drive beyond that corner because the street was blocked; Jarvis was one way going east, but Jarvis east of Greenwood was also blocked. City trucks were removing damaged trees. After finding a way to park without impeding traffic, I encountered insurance agents on the ground shooting outside photos of nearby buildings, presumably for damaged masonry. Any damaged cars had already been removed.

That tornado, and another that reportedly skipped across the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) on the West Side, dramatically demolished for some an old urban myth that tornadoes don’t strike urban areas. People believe this for various reasons, including how they think tall buildings disrupt wind circulation, but trust me: I’ve been involved in disaster recovery long enough to know that tornadoes do not discriminate against smaller towns. Rogers Park is very urban. Tornadoes go where they please. This specific tornado eventually skipped out over the lake, becoming a waterspout. But it left its mark.

The storm, by the way, ultimately spun off at least 17 documented tornadoes, mostly in northern Illinois, but a few in Wisconsin and Indiana. All were either EF-1 or EF-0 on the Enhanced Fujita scale. But by far, most of the damage resulted from the straight-line winds themselves, which were often in the range of 90 to 100 mph, with a top measured speed of 126 mph in Atkins, Iowa, making them basically of tornado or hurricane strength. And they sped, over the course of a single afternoon, across all or parts of several states.

By 4:30, the storm had continued its march into northwest Indiana, where it finally petered out. But what happened along the way?

Iowans can attest that it functioned across much of their state like a Category 2, maybe even Category 3, hurricane. Lyz Lenz, a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, noted in a guest column for the Washington Post four days later that the winds had damaged “more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s corn and soybean crop.” The reduction in harvest in Iowa is likely to be between one-fourth and one-half. The heading on her column referred to the storm as an “inland hurricane” that most people had not heard about. The damage was massive enough to be visible in satellite images.

The damage was not just to crops on the ground, but to hundreds of millions of bushels in storage bins on farms and in commercial storage facilities, according to the Iowa Department of Agriculture. Toppled grain bins were a common site.

Damage to Chinese House roof in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Despite those staggering figures, that was only the beginning. Between Indiana and Iowa, four people died from either falling trees or electrocution, and, in one case, a mobile home tipped over by high winds. Losses of electric power affected approximately 585,000 Iowans, or roughly 20 percent, while 1.9 million lost power in neighboring Illinois. Tree damage in Linn County totaled in the hundreds of thousands, and most buildings suffered anywhere from mild to catastrophic damage. In small towns, like Grinnell, building damage and tree damage to cars was also extensive. Here, I wish to thank Rachel Bly, director of Conference Operations and Events for Grinnell College, for sending me dozens of photographs she shot after the event. Bly, I might note, has a certificate in emergency management from Park University in addition to her MPA from Drake University. The images she shared help convey some reality to the trauma that occurred. Hundreds of other small communities suffered similar impacts. Not surprisingly, Gov. Kim Reynolds issued a state disaster declaration by August 14 for 25 counties, and has sought a federal declaration from President Trump, citing an estimated $4 billion in damages. By August 19, Trump had signed a declaration for Public Assistance (PA) but not Individual Assistance (IA) for Iowa. PA provides aid for restoring public infrastructure, such as roads and bridges and community facilities, while IA provides direct aid to individuals for reasons such as loss of housing.

Power line damage in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Photo by Rachel Bly

Roof seen through the window. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Inside a damaged salon in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Derechos as a Natural Hazard

All this raises the question of what we know about derechos as a wind-related hazard. I will confess that I spent most of my life never having heard the word, let alone understanding what it meant. It is not the most common occurrence, but it certainly ranks among the most destructive. To my surprise, I learned from Wikipedia that the term was coined in 1888 by a German-American scientist, Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs, who had emigrated to St. Louis just before the Civil War. He wrote in the American Meteorological Journal about a storm that struck Iowa in 1877 and described its unique characteristics. Nonetheless, even in the Midwest today, many people are unfamiliar with the term—until they hear it on the news, as they did on August 10 amid storm warnings.

The gust front “arcus” cloud on the leading edge of a derecho-producing storm system. The photo was taken on the evening of July 10, 2008 in Hampshire, Illinois. Credit: Brittney Misialek. From National Weather Service website.

There are several types of derechos, but the National Weather Service describes a derecho as a “widespread, long-lived windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers as thunderstorms.” More specifically, it defines the phenomenon as a swath of damage that “extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length.” In plain English, this is a huge, regional storm, not some localized thunderstorm. It exhibits straight-line winds that can be at least double the minimum in the definition, and the August 10 event involved winds far above 58 mph in most locations. Like all such storms, it is a product of unstable atmospheric systems, in this case typically involving a bow-shaped front in a large squall line.

The storms are typically a mid-latitude phenomenon, making North America and the Midwestern U.S. particularly susceptible, but they occur elsewhere in the world as well, including southern latitudes (southeastern Brazil and Argentina), South Africa, China, and even eastern Europe, where a derecho struck parts of Estonia in August 2010, and near Berlin in Germany in 2002. The August 10 event was not the first one I have witnessed in Chicago—another struck in July 2011 and disabled electric power for nearly a million people—but it was certainly the largest in a long time.

70% of all derechos occur between the months of May-August (the warm season). The other 30% occur during the cool season. From National Weather Service website.

As a mitigation planning response, almost no hazard mitigation plan (produced for FEMA approval as a condition of eligibility for federal hazard mitigation grants) for any state or community east of the Rockies (with the possible exception of Florida) should fail to identify derechos as a potential hazard. Moreover, especially in the Midwest, it may be time for states and communities to reexamine their building codes for wind resistance as a means of limiting future damages from derechos. Finally, it may also be time for many communities to examine more closely their urban forestry programs for adequate attention to hazardous tree management. That does not mean refusing to plant trees or removing them unnecessarily as a mindless precaution. It does mean engaging professional urban foresters in an assessment of the urban tree canopy with an eye to ensuring forest health and removing those trees that are most likely to fail under severe wind pressure. Already, the call has arisen for such reforms in Chicago. It is time for planners, environmentalists, disaster professionals, open space advocates, and concerned citizens to seize the moment while they have the public’s attention.

Jim Schwab

Well Done, Faithful Servant

Posted on May 26, 2020 by admin

Poster for a presentation at which John Fuller discussed his experiences at La Universidad de los Andes in Venezuela in the 1980s.

Starting this summer, John Fuller will find something new to do with his time. He is retiring after 41 years on the faculty of the University of Iowa, where he has been a professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) since 1979. But he has been much more. He had cross-postings in the Departments of Economics and Geography. He was the resident expert on transportation planning. At times, he chaired the planning school, and from 1979-1995, he was executive director of the Legislative Extended Assistance Group (LEAG) of the Iowa Legislature, which initiated policy research on issues of legislative importance. He also directed the Institute of Urban and Regional Research from 1979-1983. That is where I began working for him.

I have known John for nearly half his life. When I entered the planning program at Iowa in January 1982, he immediately hired me as a graduate research assistant, probably recognizing talents I did not yet know I had, and trusting that high GRE scores portended success. By the time I left in the spring of 1985, just before marrying my wife in Omaha that June, I had completed one of those LEAG studies, possibly one of its most consequential ones, The Farm Credit Crisis in Iowa, examining a financial meltdown in the farm sector and its consequences to communities in rural Iowa. John was aware that I already was undertaking a Master’s Project in Journalism on the subject, which I would ultimately turn into a published book (Raising Less Corn and More Hell, University of Illinois Press, 1988), and convinced legislative leaders to engage me on a policy study. It was a highly formative experience that allowed me to exhibit writing skills that became a cornerstone of my career as it evolved.

John was big on creating opportunities like that for people in whom he had confidence. I am proud to this day that he had such confidence in me. I know that other such expressions of confidence made a similar difference for many others over the decades that followed.

John had already had a meaningful career before he ever arrived at the University of Iowa. He completed a bachelor’s degree in economics at San Diego State University in 1962. He went on to earn a Ph.D. at Washington State University before undertaking a winding path through the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, initially as chief of economic analysis, until he was secretary of the Wisconsin Highway Commission in 1976-1977, just before becoming deputy executive director of the National Transportation Policy Study Commission during the Carter administration in Washington. From there, he moved to Iowa City, where he has remained. He has, however, become a long-time fixture at the federal Transportation Research Board, where he has served on many committees and in many capacities. Often, if I came to Iowa City and John was not there, it was because he was at a TRB meeting in Washington, D.C.

John escorts youngest daughter Elizabeth (Libby) in 2016 wedding.

By the time I met him, John was married to Kathy Fait. They have four children who are today scattered across the landscape in places like California, Houston, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Retirement may afford them both the chance to visit children and grandchildren more often than they already do. That will surely be appreciated. Meanwhile, they can enjoy their large home on a hill in West Branch, whose primary claim to fame is that it serves as the home of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, just a short bicycle ride away. Not surprisingly, John is the chair of the West Branch Planning & Zoning Commission.

At the University of Iowa, he found his lasting home, but he may also have found himself. In fact, he and Kathy may have carved out a joint mission that made them unique. Increasingly over time, John found ways to connect with students, and Kathy assisted by making their home a place where foreign students particularly felt welcome. Charles (Chuck) Connerly, who became the SURP director in 2008, states:

John spent his career dedicating himself–through his teaching and his kindness–to his students. In the classroom, John was always staying abreast of the latest trends and issues in transportation so that his students were always well aware of the key issues in this important field. He dedicated his career to transportation, and his students greatly benefited from his commitment.

John was also committed to the welfare of our students in planning, especially our foreign students. As a Fulbright scholar himself, John worked very hard to bring Fulbright students to our planning program. Every year there would be at least one Fulbright scholar and often two or three. These scholars, from all over the world, contributed greatly to the quality of our student body and to the overall quality of the educational experience for all our students.

But John, along with his wife Kathy Fait, also made sure that foreign students felt welcomed at Iowa. They would pick students up at the airport, help them negotiate the first few days of their time in Iowa City, and would provide them with stuff that these students, often from warmer climates, would need–such as winter coats and luggage. As an advisor and Director of Graduate Studies, John worked hard to make certain that each of our foreign students was able to complete their studies here, even when some of these students got off to a rocky start. Because of this good care, Fulbright has always looked to us as a good program and university at which scholars can be placed.

John Fuller with me at his daughter’s wedding.

I can attest to much of what Chuck says. He arrived amid the infamous 2008 floods that forced the evacuation of more than 10 percent of nearby Cedar Rapids and wrought damage to the Iowa City campus totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. The school contemplated how it could play a bigger role in assisting Iowa communities with hazard-related problems and considered adding material to its Master’s degree curriculum. Long after most professors would have lost touch with their students, John was very much aware of my work on the subject for the American Planning Association. “Why not bring back Jim Schwab?” he asked, and urged hiring me to teach such a course. I hurriedly designed the course that summer for the fall semester. I have been teaching variations of it ever since.

Of course, I needed to drive out from Chicago to do so. John and Kathy offered their home as a place to stay while I was in town, usually the spare bedroom in the basement. Often, in breakfast conversations, I learned from Kathy of the latest delegation of foreign visitors they had been entertaining. I also learned during that first fall course of a flood refugee named Fred from nearby Coralville, to whom they provided emergency housing for several weeks. The door seemed always open if they could find a way to help.

Badminton, anyone? John found ways to stay fit, including playing in a badminton club.

The Fullers also have an abundant garden in their ample backyard, and I am sure I was not the only one who sometimes drove away after a visit with bags of apples and vegetables they had deliberately picked for me in order to share their cornucopia. It is just part of who they are.

As a result, even classmates of mine, like Kirk Bishop, now a planning consultant in Chicago with Duncan & Associates, who never took a class with Fuller, can say, “I remember him well. Even in our occasional passing in the hallways he was always quick with a smile, a nod, or a hello. A good soul. Fond memories indeed.” It is a rare occurrence when someone can distinctly remember, more than 35 years later, a professor who never taught them. It is a level of personal impact that is exceedingly hard to achieve.

In ordinary times, under ordinary circumstances, a long and distinguished career would likely be celebrated with a farewell gathering of students and faculty and staff, perhaps in a restaurant or some party setting, perhaps at some university facility adequate for the purpose. People would mingle, share stories, and salute the honoree with best wishes for a healthy, happy retirement. Unfortunately, these are not normal times, and no such gathering would have been safe or appropriate.

Chuck Connerly and others did the next best thing, at least for the time being: They hosted an online happy hour via Zoom, which I mentioned in my last blog post. That too was unfortunate, because, while I am told that at least 40 colleagues and SURP alumni joined the discussion, I was not only unable to do so because of my sudden hospitalization, but unable as well to even tell anyone why I was not there. I still regret that, even though I could do nothing about it.

But we are assured that, when the day comes that such a gathering can be done safely, the School will honor John with an in-person gathering for those able to attend. When that day comes, I will drive four hours to Iowa City to attend. After all these years, and all the kindnesses he and Kathy extended, it will be the least I can do. It is especially important to recognize when someone has turned a career into a mission to serve.

Jim Schwab

Inside the Hospital in the Time of Coronavirus

Posted on May 13, 2020 by admin

It started last Thursday evening after dinner. By 8 p.m., suffering shivers and chills and fatigue, I retreated to bed, unsure what was affecting me but hoping a solid night of sleep might provide some respite. I was near the end of two busy weeks. The previous week, I had been deeply involved in a huge experiment by the American Planning Association, which it called NPC20 @Home, a three-day online professional conference that would replace its canceled National Planning Conference, which would have taken place in Houston April 25-28. Instead, on opening day, April 29, I was moderating a session with three speakers[i] on “Demanding Equity: Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery.” We had rehearsed our approach, and it came off seamlessly before more than 1,600 participants, which made all of us very happy.

The following Monday, as chair of APA’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division (HMDR), I led our annual business meeting, which also had gone online after the NPC was canceled. With the support of our executive committee, particularly Christine Caggiano, our secretary-treasurer, who played the Wizard of Oz for our Zoom controls, it too had been a remarkable success with attendance spread across four time zones. So it went through Thursday, when two other speakers[ii] and I presented a webinar for APA’s Michigan chapter on the 2020 update of APA’s Hazard Mitigation Policy Guide. That was over by mid-afternoon; we patted ourselves on the back, and I went on to other business, such as a blog post that remains unfinished. I will get to it, I hope.

It was only as the evening progressed that I sensed something was wrong.

My wife, Jean, began to share fears that I was the latest victim of coronavirus. She, of course, was simply reacting to visible symptoms and venting her worst fears. But as the night wore on, my intuition led me in other directions, and I was unwilling to succumb to simple answers. Only I could experience and report all of my symptoms, which included a few trips to the bathroom, and it reminded me too much of previous experiences with prostatitis. In April 2012, on a flight to Los Angeles, I experienced chills and fever somewhere over the Rockies. Chicago to Los Angeles is about a four-hour flight, so I had to endure two hours of personal deterioration before landing at LAX, where I struggled to hold myself together as I grabbed my luggage and found a taxi to the hotel, where I could check in for that year’s National Planning Conference at the nearby convention center. At the hotel, I was already sweating as I checked in and found my room, where I remained for the evening, under bed covers, skipping nearly every event at which I was expected.

I was basically a physical wreck throughout the five-day conference, but, on the advice of my primary physician, found my way to a nearby urgent care center, where I was diagnosed with prostatitis, an infection of the prostate gland that can, under the worst conditions, kill the patient, as my urologist in Chicago later explained. I will say it was one of the worst experiences of illness in my entire life, and people who saw me when I made an occasional appearance outside my room uniformly commented on how awful I looked, and asked what was wrong.

Thursday night was nowhere near that bad, but still, it reminded me symptomatically of that experience.

Yet, by Friday morning, I thought I had perhaps gotten past it all. I felt reasonably okay, ate breakfast, dressed, and joined an online faculty meeting for the School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP) at the University of Iowa, where I teach a course on disaster planning. Our discussion with the dean of the Graduate College, John Keller, focused on what might happen with on-campus instruction this coming fall, a question for which the answer was indeterminate.

Somewhere in the middle of that discussion, the malaise began to reassert itself, and I felt weak and tired. I sent a chat note to Charles Connerly, the director of SURP, saying that if I disappeared from the Zoom screen, it was because I was not well. Less than an hour into the meeting, I did exactly that, and went upstairs to our bedroom to rest. My wife noticed that my fever was not abating and worried that I needed medical attention. By noon, she insisted on taking me to the emergency room at nearby St. Mary’s Presence Hospital, and I gave in, not because I had resisted the idea but because I needed to muster the energy to get up and do it.

At the hospital door, a small group of security and admitting staff sought to ensure that I was arriving as a patient as I exited the passenger door of our car. I explained the situation. My wife and grandson could not join me because, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, and with most of the hospital devoted to such patients, no visitors are permitted. They had to wait in the car or go home, which they eventually did after picking up take-out lunch at a nearby Wendy’s. Once inside and admitted, I was on my own.

The first step by the nursing staff was to administer a COVID-19 test, putting swabs deep into my nasal cavity; it later proved negative. However, my temperature was 100.6° F. They did a battery of other tests based on my symptoms and concluded over the next few hours, as I sat in an ER unit, that I was suffering from a urinary tract infection (UTI). How I acquired it, I will probably never know, just as I never learned how I acquired prostatitis. All that matters is the treatment. I learned, to my deep disappointment, that I would be kept overnight for monitoring because of my history of prostate issues, which has included an almost fruitless search for evidence of cancer. I say “almost” because elevated PSA scores triggered the search nearly a decade ago, before the incident in Los Angeles, and on one occasion a fusion biopsy discovered a tiny sliver of affected tissue. But that finding has never occurred in all the years since. As a result, no treatment has been necessary. But still, caution was apparently in order when a UTI materialized.

The one reservation, of course, is that most of the hospital by May 8 was occupied by COVID-19 patients. One floor was reserved for non-COVID patients requiring hospitalization, and by 9:30 p.m., that is where I was sent. In the meantime, as evening approached, the attending nurse, Jesse, offered the use of his cell phone so that I could call my wife and ask her to bring my cell phone, my Nook e-reader, reading glasses, and power cords to help me escape boredom. He could see that, with nothing to do during long spells when nothing needed to be done (I already had an IV in my arm for a broad-spectrum antibiotic), I was becoming slightly stir crazy. Jean obliged by delivering the goods to the ER door, where Jesse retrieved them. My Nook contains dozens of books. They would relieve my anxiety and let me feel connected to friends and family, so that we could discuss what was happening.

One situation that disturbed me early in the evening was that I had promised to be part of two online events from 5 to 6 p.m. The first was to host the Zoom “room” for HMDR as part of a much larger invitation for members of any APA divisions to participate in a virtual Divisions Happy Hour. Given that HMDR has more than 1,500 members, and APA now has 22 divisions and eight “interest groups,” the number of registrants may have been rather large, but I never had time to check. It was surely in the hundreds, though once they were dispersed to their own groups, each division may have had a few dozen attendees, at most. At the same time, SURP was hosting an online happy hour event for John Fuller, a 41-year veteran professor of the planning school who is retiring at the end of the spring semester. I had arranged to migrate between the two events by having two other executive officers of HMDR, Caggiano and Stacy Wright, our chair-elect, take over when I moved from the APA event to the University of Iowa event. John, in his early days, had hired me as a graduate research assistant when I entered the program, supported my career for its entirety, and played a role in my being hired as an adjunct professor at Iowa in 2008. Before Jean brought my iPhone, I felt guilty about my inability to let anyone know why I was not attending, even though I could do nothing about it. Once armed with the phone, I called Connerly to explain my absence at the university event, and he promised to inform John and Kathy Fuller. I also emailed Caggiano and Wright to let them know why I had not shown up. They assured me the event had gone well. My evening would have felt much worse if I had not been able to make those contacts.

I later learned that my two daughters had unwisely come to the hospital seeking information on my condition, which they could have attempted more safely by calling. One was put off by the cold response she got from the staff at the door, but I told her the staff had bigger concerns than her hurt feelings. It could instead be a lesson in using better judgment. She had also questioned Jean about why she took me to the hospital at all because she had come to understand that no one these days comes out alive. That is clearly not true, but probably not uncommon mythology among the public.

At one point while still in ER, I heard a PA announcement barking “Code Joy!” three times, followed by the opening bars of the theme song from Rocky. I wondered what that was about but could only make lame guesses. Later, from a nurse in my room, I learned it was a celebration of a patient who was being released from the COVID wards—someone who had fought the virus and won. Before I left the hospital, this happened five times. It became a reassuring indication that people do, indeed, fight the virus and win—every day. And not just every day somewhere, but every day in the same hospital. Five times in three days while I was there. I will surely never know who they were, but good luck to all, and God bless every one of them. The Great Virus is not invincible.

As noted, late that evening, I was wheeled out of ER, through the halls and onto an elevator, and up to the eighth floor, the only remaining non-COVID section of the hospital. After being tested for vitals, I quickly fell asleep. The next morning, I awoke early, around 5:30 a.m., and began a routine that would last for nearly two days. I would alternate between using my cell phone for a small number of e-mail and text messages, and occasional calls with relatives, watching one news channel or another, reading, and taking naps. With an IV in my arm and heart monitors on my chest, I could hardly be more adventurous.

The biggest commitment was to finish reading The Great Influenza, by John Barry, a 2004 book about the 1918 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions around the world at the end of World War I. That may seem a gruesome topic for someone in the hospital, but I had read three-fourths of the book before becoming ill, and I wanted to finish. Also, I approach such information more clinically, trying to understand what mistakes were made, what changes resulted, and how people were affected, and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn so much so quickly. By noon Sunday, I finished, even perusing the photo sections and some of the author’s acknowledgments. Certainly, I could not have been reading history more relevant to our current dilemma.

My selfie in a hospital bed. Nobody said such photos would be beautiful.

Then I was faced with the question of what to read next. I had no assurance that I was going home that day, although it was possible. The hospital had received the lab results by late Saturday evening, and they indicated nothing unusual or troubling that would make mine a difficult case. But there was some question of how soon an infectious disease specialist and the doctor would sign off on my release. At that point, it felt that the real issue was more bureaucratic logjam than substantive, and I began to voice some urgency both to the overnight nurse, Klaudia, and the day nurse who followed, Katorina, that I did not wish to waste space if my staying no longer served a legitimate purpose. They could only reassure me that it would happen sooner or later, but I must say that both were extremely attentive and remarkably pleasant, even when it was obvious how restive I had become about the need to be released. Given the pressures surrounding them, they seemed like angels.

It was Mother’s Day, after all, and I was also feeling regret about not only missing the Friday happy hour events, one to honor a long-time friend and colleague, but now draining the pleasure out of a day that should have been spent honoring Jean. It did not seem fair that my unexpected illness should rob her of this honor. I had planned to grill steaks and baked potatoes to accompany a lush salad for her dinner, but could do none of that. I could only wait.

I made an unusual choice of my next book—a 1950s theological essay, Your God Is Too Small, by J.B. Phillips. Despite its dated gender language in the introduction, it is remarkably lucid and straightforward in explaining how we “box” God into small roles in our lives because we cannot bring ourselves to understand God’s vastness and yet God’s importance to the minute details of our lives at the same time. There was something vaguely soothing about the message, given the situation. I did not finish the book in the hospital. That task still awaits. But I put a large dent in it.

Suddenly, around 6 p.m., Katorina came to the room to provide some medicine and the news that the doctor was authorizing my release, with the understanding that I should call to set up a follow-up telemedicine appointment with him a week later. Within the space of a half-hour, the nurse removed all the equipment hanging from my arm and chest; I changed clothes, packed up my limited belongings, signed the release papers, and she was walking me to the elevator, down to the lobby, and to the front door, where Jean had been alerted to find me. She arrived within minutes. Yes, non-COVID patients are also leaving hospitals these days, though far fewer than used to be the case. Non-essential surgeries, in many places including Chicago, have been pushed aside because those ill from coronavirus need the beds. But, clearly, they too often leave and return home, just as I was doing.

I took it easy on Monday. I was still a little light on energy, so I spent much of the day reading a few newspapers that had accumulated in my absence, but I had no special ambitions and no appointments. I did cook that steak dinner as a reward for Jean’s patience and a delayed Mother’s Day. But in the evening, I had difficulty sleeping because tension in my neck and shoulders, probably the result of stiffness induced by a lack of motion with all the equipment attached to my body in the hospital, was causing a mild headache. At Jean’s urging, I took two pain pills and a sleeping pill, but then she applied some massage to bring the congested energy around my neck down my spine to my legs and feet, and I felt some relief. In the end, I managed to sleep until 6:30, which is late for me, but very good in this instance. It was refreshing.

On the trail in Humboldt Park, a day and a half after release.

I have spent part of Tuesday composing this story, but part of it further releasing that pent-up energy by hopping on my bicycle and riding it to Humboldt Park, a 700-acre expanse of municipal open space just half a mile from our home. I wandered down one path after another, past lakes and lagoons and trees in the open air of a Chicago spring morning. I had written part of this before I left. I felt more energized to complete it when I came back, once I had eaten lunch. I learned you can enjoy nature much more when you have missed it for a few days. I can only imagine the restless agony of missing it for much, much longer.

Jim Schwab

[i] Shannon van Zandt, Texas A&M; Marccus Hendricks, Univ. of Maryland; and Chrishelle Palay, HOME Coalition, Houston.

[ii] Pete Parkinson and Kara Drane, who were also co-authors of the updated guide along with George Homewood, David Gattis, and myself.

Twenty Thousand and Rising

Posted on August 30, 2019 by admin

What astounds me about what I am about to say is that the last time I posted to this blog was July 24, more than a month ago. There are reasons for that, but in the meantime, despite the lack of new articles, this blog continued to find new subscribers—and their numbers just yesterday crossed the 20,000 mark. Already, the numbers have exceeded that threshold by a few dozen. I would have expected the increase to decrease until I wrote something new. I can only assume that past writings have continued to propel interest despite my lack of activity. That fact is profoundly humbling.

I wrote twice in July. The other post occurred on the July 4 holiday. It detailed my cataract surgery in June and offered some medical history concerning the procedure. What followed, in addition to two trips to Colorado and one to Washington, D.C., between mid-July and early August, was a mad rush connected to a fall semester course I teach for the University of Iowa’s School of Urban and Regional Planning, as an adjunct assistant professor. But this year, the decision was made to move my class online, which meant a great deal of added work to make that change possible. And just to complicate matters, in mid-August, my laptop suffered a hard drive failure that delayed my timeline. I then worked to restore course-related files, an odyssey I will not detail here. It would be an overdose of minutiae.

I have been teaching in Iowa City since 2008. After the massive floods that struck much of eastern Iowa and some neighboring states in June of that year, the planning program began an urgent search for a way to add curriculum related to natural hazards and to make itself more relevant and useful to communities in Iowa needing assistance with flood recovery. It was easier to import such expertise than to develop it among existing faculty, apparently, because they soon made an offer for me to teach beginning that fall. I am an alumnus of the program, and they knew me well. At the time, I was already co-instructing such a course at the University of Illinois-Chicago with colleague Richard Roths, although that ended after the spring 2009 class the following year. But the arrangement with the University of Iowa has continued. The course has grown and evolved over time, naturally, just as the subject matter for “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery” has also changed. Every year is a new adventure and an exercise in updating teaching materials. As I like to say, it is hardly like teaching Shakespeare. The script is rewritten with each new major disaster. Recent years have added multiple exclamation points to that statement.

Thus, while the subscriber count was climbing yesterday, I was preparing for and then presiding over the first online class session for URP:6280 last night, with eleven students in attendance. I still have work to do in reformatting PowerPoint files from past years and recording lecture videos that used to be presented in a classroom. But I discovered yet again that, from the first class to the last, my students are inquisitive and thoughtful and have very good reasons for choosing this course as an elective in pursuit of their Master of Arts in Urban and Regional Planning. As before, some make clear that they see this as possibly the most important class they will take. Some past students are now in leadership roles in the field of hazard mitigation and disaster recovery planning. They are not deluded about the challenges that communities will face under the influence of climate change, demographic shifts, and other factors. They want to do the planning that matters.

Although I have not written much for this blog lately, that will change very soon. I had to keep my priorities straight, however; my students had to have their materials ready on the course website by Monday, August 26, as classes started, and it was my obligation to make that happen. After Labor Day, I can gradually shift some of my attention elsewhere. My recent travels, to San Francisco in April, Manitoba and Cleveland in May, and to Colorado and Washington in July and August have supplied me with excellent subject matter for at least several future posts. I relish the prospect of making up for lost time with subscribers both new and old. Thanks to everyone for their support and interest.

Jim Schwab

Gratitude on Parade #5

Posted on February 3, 2019 by admin

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
Along with John Erickson, Maryanne Salcetti played a key role in my early journalistic development. As the co-editor with her husband of the weekly news, a regional newspaper in Iowa City, she took me on as a part-time cub reporter while I was still in graduate school. That gave me some valuable early experience in local news reporting, mostly about small town government in the area. But she also knew and could see I had larger ambitions, and she encouraged them.

Later, after she had moved on to become an instructor in journalism at John Carroll University in east suburban Cleveland, she remained supportive when Raising Less Corn and More Hell came out from University of Illinois Press, and at one point had me speak to her class. A few years later, after my second book, Deeper Shades of Green, was released by Sierra Club Books, she secured a lecture invitation for me at John Carroll, supported by a team of three female students whom she engaged for promotion of the visit.

Unfortunately, I have not heard from him and have not been able to locate information, but heard at one point that she was very ill. I do not appear to have any photos from back then, at least any that I can access. But that does not reduce her impact. She was a fierce advocate of journalism as a profession and helped instill that and high standards. I treasure the memory as a result.

Posted on Facebook 1/27/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade

One person who was remarkably influential in helping shape my perspective on the way through graduate school at the University of Iowa in the early 1980s was not even at the university, though he worked nearby. The Rev. Roy Wingate at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Iowa City, just blocks from the campus, provided a welcome mat for unorthodox, creative thinkers like me who needed to reestablish their relationship with the church. This was not new for him. In the late 1960s, he had at one point, when seeing students arrested for protesting the Vietnam War, insisted that he be arrested too in order to support their right to free speech.

When I heard that, I knew he was my kind of preacher. Having grown up in a more conservative, suburban Lutheran congregation in Cleveland, I was not sure where I fit into the Lutheran tradition until I met people in Iowa who felt that challenging war and injustice was a part of their faith. It’s not that I thought everyone had to agree, but that they at least should allow space for that perspective–which allowed space for me too. That was Roy’s approach. He was a Big Tent Lutheran. That allowed me to find a home at a crucial turning point in my life.

Unfortunately, not long after I had married my wife in Omaha and we decamped for my new job in Chicago, Roy Wingate had a huge retirement celebration at which he announced that doctors had given him a diagnosis of prostate cancer. A year and a half later, he died. Just a few years ago, after a fusion biopsy detected a minute amount of cancerous prostate tissue, I could feel some solidarity. But fortunately for me, subsequent biopsies have never found it again. I guess I’m luckier. But I still appreciate Roy’s role in helping me find a new place in the church that I had not perceived earlier. And we will meet again.

Posted on Facebook 1/30/2019

GRATITUDE ON PARADE

#gratitudeonparade

I do not have a photo at this distance in years, but I have discovered that Richard Wentworth is still in Illinois, though he retired as director of the University of Illinois Press in 2004. The path of a first-time book author into print is generally a challenging one, and I was busy making my way through this briar patch when Dick learned of my manuscript and agreed that it should find a home at the University of Illinois Press. Like books of most new authors, mine required some nurturing, but his editorial staff stuck with me until we saw a book into print and into reviews, including the New York Times, in the fall of 1988. They hosted me in Champaign at the beginning of a promotional tour that took me through Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa and taught me a great deal about relationships with broadcast and print media for a new author. Until you take this journey, you don’t’ know how valuable an ally a publisher can be. I trust he is enjoying his well-earned retirement.

Posted on Facebook 2/1/2019

Jim Schwab

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Tag Archives: University of Iowa

Out of a Cannon

Striving for Flood Resilience in Iowa

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Collateral Damage

Charting a Path to Sustainability

Truly Hard Wind

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Inside the Hospital in the Time of Coronavirus

Twenty Thousand and Rising

Gratitude on Parade #5