Iowa City to South Bend

We're crossing the Mississippi! But not until we talk about wrestling and why Iowa. After we'll talk about John Deere and flat states vs pancakes before passing Chicagoland and ending near Notre Dame!

Transcript

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Hello everybody and welcome to this the 10th episode of the second season of the Nifty 50 Show. Today we are headed from Iowa to Indiana. We will only go through states that start with the letter I, so that's exciting. Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and it's the Midwest. I know we've been talking about. Nebraska and then Western and Central Iowa. But this is where I think it gets really exciting and really Midwestern. And we pick up speed, not literally, because the fastest speed limits in the United States are in the west side, notably in the Interior West, Utah, Nevada, Idaho. But uh, we're gonna just. Get going in Iowa City. That's where we ended last time. Iowa City is a fun little university town. I shouldn't say little. It used to be the state capitol until Des Moines said, thank you, but you're done. And today it's very quaint. It's very picturesque, and I don't know, it's just a very pleasant place, much like all of Iowa. However, there's one thing that every time we go through Iowa City or Iowa in general, and I've even seen a lot of it outside of Iowa, notably two weeks ago when we saw a car that was bedecked in University of Iowa stuff, and I don't mean, oh, license plate cover a decal here or there? No, there was. Mascots, the Hawkeyes, the license plate was personalized. The license plate cover, there were decals, there were stuff inside the car. There might've been stickers on the windows all around the car. It was basically a mobile spirit car for the University of Iowa. However, what interests me the most about it is wrestling, and I find it extremely fascinating that certain places in the United States become known for. Certain sports and not just kind of like, oh yeah, blah, blah, blah. That's really great, and uh oh, they do well there. No, I mean like it's so ingrained in the culture. The only one that I can really think of that's very similar would be Indiana and basketball. The rest of it, it seems very, the playing field, if you will, seems very, even for most sports, but wrestling and basketball, it's easy to point to. They're respective states and I've always been interested because why Iowa and wrestling was not obviously invented there. It's a very ancient sport. Iowa was not the first university to do it. Anyways, we're gonna get into it because there's lots of articles and there's a whole book on it. And I actually bought one in, was it Iowa City? I don't know. It might have been Davenport. That was the history of wrestling in Iowa and focusing on the coaches that made it big, and then the big names, and then wrestling today in Iowa. It's just really interesting to me. So there were three reasons that a Des Moines Register article wrote that they, well, they. Basically argued were why wrestling was so big in Iowa because they had, they basically wrote the article because everybody from out of state or who are just moderately clueless like me and being like, what? Why do I see all this wrestling stuff everywhere? And so this is the three reasons that they say are the. Best explanations for why wrestling is so big in the state of Iowa. The first one is that it's a blue collar sport, and this helps they say because it doesn't require any fancy equipment. It doesn't even really require a lot of fancy training and. When you have a sport that's very easy to enter, and then a lot of young men who are working on farms doing physical labor, it's sort of a match made in Iowa wrestling heaven. So you have all of these young men who are already physically strong working on the farm, and hey, when you want to have a good night out, I guess you wrestle with the other farm hands and then you get together and then you say, well, I bet we could beat the other guys on the other farm. It just grows. The second they said is that the history of wrestling in Iowa is particularly important because it's successful, which sounds kind of circular, but they say that early on in Iowa wrestling history, there were very big successes is, and so then it became a center for wrestling in the United States. This is very. Very much proven by the fact that Iowa Collegiate programs have produced 41 Olympic wrestlers and 176 NCAA Division one national champions. That is an impressive set of statistics. This, however, is not the place with the most titles. Oklahoma State University claims the most titles with 34, but combined. The University of Iowa, Iowa State and Northern Iowa have 58 titles, so I guess they have to pull together, which would be very Midwest. Nice. Anyways, and they say that the successes are owed to Martin Farmer Burns and Frank Gotch. Martin Burns. He was nicknamed Farmer Burns and he was a professional wrestler starting as a teenager, but then he became a successful wrestling mentor, and this is where the other man comes in. Frank Gotch. Was essentially his star pupil. And Frank Gotch was one of the first professional wrestlers to win a championship, and so he became an idol for plenty of young men. And being from Iowa, they wanted to emulate him. So those two successes with Frank, with Martin Burns and Frank Gotch. The third reason that the Des Moines Register says, is. It contributes to the popularity of wrestling in Iowa is public television, Iowa public television, and they say it is, quote, the most important piece of the puzzle. Wrestling has always been being in Iowa in that sense. But it wasn't until the seventies when high school wrestling became broadcasted on public television that it took off. And then in 1976, they followed up with collegiate wrestling and. This also coincided with Dan Gable winning the Olympic Gold Medal, who went on to become the head coach of the Hawkeye wrestling team. And after that, the rest is history. So we can probably expect Oklahoma State to lose their most titles because Iowa is just wrestling crazed. It's very interesting to me, just why wrestling? Uh, just. As a side note, because this sticks in my mind a lot because my school Miami University is known as the cradle of coaches. A lot of very famous football coaches have come from Miami University. However, Miami is not a football school. The football stadium sits off on the north end of school. No one really goes. There's always plenty of tickets. It's always super cheap. Once again, nobody goes. However, Miami, everybody goes to the hockey games. I'm mystified still by it. I never made it in because the lines literally stretch out the door and they turn away. Students, the season tickets sell out every year. It's, and it's fascinating that so many football coaches come from there, but the football not as popular as hockey. So now we're just. Draping through Eastern Iowa, so pretty flat. Well, not as flat as it's going to get today in this episode, but the corn, when they say it that the Midwest is corn, if you haven't seen it in person, it's kind of like, oh, it's cliche. It's cliche because it's real and it's very, it's stunning to see just fields and fields and fields of corn. And it's also really humid. And when it's fall, that's a whole other story about corn. But we're arriving at the quad cities shortly after Iowa City and we're gonna cross the Mississippi River, which obviously is the most important river in the United States. Well, it's the most important river in the United States in the sense of commerce. Just a quick run of facts. The Mississippi River is 2,340 miles from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Delta in Louisiana. It is one of the most fertile areas in the United States and the world, the watershed, and of course it's iconic in American cultural history popularized by Mark Twain's novels and also the idea of manifest destiny and going beyond the river. I do have to say that it's lodged and family's cultural memory as well. My grandparents lived in North Dakota for a year and a half. And we went to visit them. We went to the headwaters of the Mississippi. As one does. When you go to Bismarck, just drive four hours or so and go to Bemidji. However, they have this really cute little state park like Itasca, and you can just tiptoe across. They have these stones set out. It's really a neat place to be like, oh, here's the Mississippi River. It's very small. Yeah, probably about the size of a king bed across, or king bed and a half maybe. This is all messed up in my childhood memory, and once again, you can just walk across and then you walk back over. My sister and I did it and I slipped. Obviously there's water and rocks and I grabbed onto her. She helped steady me, but then in my motion to steady myself, I pulled her down into the river. She does not let me forget it to this day. And she said it was cold despite it being July or June or whatever month of the summer it was. But now that we've crossed the river, we are no longer in Iowa, which is kind of sad because now it's time for the music man to be turned off. I did listen to the first song from that while I was getting ready for the recording of this episode. Just for old time's sake, but now we're in Illinois and we're in the Quad Cities, and I feel, I hope not wrongly, and I hope this isn't offensive, but the Quad cities just kind of feel bleak to me more so on the Illinois side. The Iowa side, Davenport's really cool, but as a whole it just, it feels like it's supposed to be big and then it's not. And maybe it's because it's stuck in between Chicago and Des Moines. I don't know. Just for where it's located on the river, the four cities, it's a whole thing in my head. I don't know why I have yet to figure it out and get to a place where I'm comfortable. But one of the most important stories of the Quad Cities is intricately tied to a very famous American company, John Deere. Now, I know that for many people, farming equipment and who you buy from is an extremely divisive topic. It's a very funny story. My cousins are farmers in Idaho, and my mom would always tease them about it being John Deere or not to the point where they cried. Anyways, so I know that this is an extremely touchy topic for many people, so I hope. If you're not on the John Deere side, you can just wait it out for a hot second. John Deere isn't like Betty Crocker. John Deere is a real person. He was born in Vermont, but moved to Illinois to escape bankruptcy. Must have been really great in the 19th century that when things didn't go right, you literally just packed up and moved before anybody could find you. And then it was like, well, good luck finding me wherever I go. That was John Deere. He settled in Illinois as a blacksmith and a general repairman. This went okay for him. And in 1837, he took a highly polished piece of steel and some people differ if it was actually a pitchfork or a saw blade, and he turned it into a plow. And I think it is important to point out here that he comes from one of the first farming centers of. The United States today, we drive through New England and it's all forested and it's beautiful and it's leafy. New England used to be bare because they cleared the entire land. You can go out and there's many places where you can go on hikes through the forest and you'll just come across foundations, stone foundations of barns and homes. And it's because that up until the, pretty much the migration westward into the Midwest and the west. New England was a huge farming place. Now the soil is poor in New England. It's very rocky. It's just terrible. People may do with what they could, so obviously when they get out to the Midwest where you literally just throw something out there and let nature take its course, it's gonna grow row. Now I'm probably glossing over that. You do have to take care of it and all, everything. But the Midwest is extremely fertile compared to New England. So John Deere had an idea of what was going on, and he saw that one of the problems with farming in Illinois in particular, but also the whole entire Midwest, is that the soil would be kept together by the grassroots. So it's very dense and it's very hard to cut. So when he takes this steel and turns it into a plow, he revolutionizes farming and it's revolutionizing farming everywhere. But in places in particular with a difficult soil. You have to cut up the grassroots that have been left over there after it's been burned and cleared and all that stuff, but it's a very dense clay.'cause you have to remember that the best soil is always near a river for obvious reasons. But think about like Egypt and the Nile. When it floods, it deposits a ton of silt and clay, which is great. But then when it. Compacts. It's extremely hard to work. However, John Deere and his steel plow revolutionized that. They changed that because also steel plows do not have to be cleaned as frequently as iron or wooden plows. Obviously with wooden plows, the clay would stick to it and clump, and so you're sitting there probably going a few feet, and then you have to scrape it all off. With steel, it just glides on through the soil like butter. John Deere may have been a great inventor, but he didn't have the know-how to, I guess, share his new invention. So he entered into a partnership with a man named Leonard Andres to build a factory along the Rock River. But this partnership failed within five years. So John Deere once again packed up and he moved to Moline to be close to the railroad and the Mississippi River. Obviously where there's rivers, there's transportation, there is power, and especially when the railroad crosses it as well. So he entered into a new partnership with two men, John Gould and Robert Tate, to open the Deer Tate and Gould company, which produced over 200 plows a month in their initial years, which was really great. That's really, I guess, successful at the time, especially in the time when. The industrial Revolution and the mass production factories haven't really come to town yet, and you see this in a lot of Midwest literature. See, for some reason I'm thinking Little House in the Prairie and even Willa catheter, that often the new equipment would be shared that families in entire area would go and pitch in, and then they'd move on to the next family's land and then move all around. Which when you have great equipment like a steel plow, it makes the work a lot easier because of his success and his growing success. John Deere, bought out the other two men, and then brought in his son to help him. Then he decided to branch out into other farm equipment and not just plows. They did make a probably ill-advised, detour into bicycles during the 1890s. But soon stuck to their roots in farming equipment. They began to produce bigger machines, such as combine harvesters in 1927, so farmers could use John Deere combines to harvest grain on hillsides with a 50% slope gradient, mind blowing, which if you're driving through a lot of the Midwest, Iowa is a very good example of this. Illinois, not so much, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. But there's sometimes where you're driving through hilly farmland and you're kind of like, how do they farm that? How does the machine not tip over? John Deere. John Deere had a combine that could safely go up a hill with a 50% gradient, mind boggling. John Deere today now sells agricultural equipment, construction equipment, forestry equipment, as well as small things like lawnmowers, snowblowers, and diesel engines. It did. For a while, get into the financial business with loans. There's that, but they are famous for their green and yellow machinery, which is a very famous logo as well. The logo has been relatively unchanged for almost 150 years. They've always had a leaping deer. Now granted it goes through different styles and iterations, but the base jumping deer. Has been in that logo for nearly the entire existence of John Deere. Crazy. So maybe you're a case person. I don't know. I have no preference to be honest. But as I mentioned before, it's better to see hilly farmland in Iowa than it is in Illinois. Now, most people will say, oh, flatter than Kansas. When you want to have this kind of hyperbolic exaggeration of state geography or flatness, like flat as a pancake, flatter than Kansas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. However, that is wrong, and I know in some future episode I'll probably reference this and talk about the, the reason behind it in depth more, but the University of Kansas. Got a team together to test out this theory if Kansas was flat within a pancake. When you blow up a pancake to a size of a state, um, computer models, it's actually extremely mountainous and Kansas itself. It has elevation changes, but it's actually a lot more hilly than we anticipate. The state that is not hilly. Florida, obviously, anybody who's been to Florida stands on a box and sees across the other side. Their highest point, it's like, I don't know, it's less than a thousand feet or maybe just above a thousand feet, which is insane for someone who lives at 4,000 feet, but the second flat state in the country. Drum roll is Illinois, and if you've ever driven across Illinois, it makes sense because you'll come up over and overpass on the freeway, manmade hill, and it feels like you see the entire world just, you just see it and it's flat, and especially when it's the farmland flat, there's places with forests and whatnot. But when you're in northern western Illinois. And it is flat and you go up. There it is paper flat. The reason for this is glaciers. There's a lot of glacial landscapes in the United States, especially along this corridor of I 80 that we drive all the way through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana have a lot of it. However, Illinois, the glaciers went very far and so it scraped it clean. It just plowed right over. It's a great pun. It plowed right over and scraped the land clean of anything as glaciers do. And then when they receded and melted away, they left behind an extremely flat and fertile land. And once again, a lot of the evidence for this is one anecdotal. You can literally stand on it, but also the study really went in depth with it. It's an extremely fascinating read, and it's great because it was a free article, which if you've ever tried to find a peer reviewed article online, you're always hoping it's free because if not, it's 50 bucks to read. So just Google, university of Kansas, Kansas, flyer within a pancake, and you'll find it in the Geography department. So shout out to them. Thank you. But now the other thing, now that our eyes are back on the road, is that we're encountering our first toll roads of the drive and not toll roads and bridges, like in California? No, I mean, just toll roads, which toll roads on the interstate are a whole other story. It's actually an extremely difficult proposition to turn an interstate into a tollway. Most tollways are, well, most tollways. Came before the interstates, which is why you see'em a lot on the east coast. The Pennsylvania turnpike, Kansas Turnpike even was there before, but a lot of those roads were toll and then became grandfathered into the interstate system. Most new interstates cannot be toll roads. There has to be an extenuating circumstance for the federal government to allow it to happen, which is another rabbit hole that we're just not gonna get into the reason. Anyways for the highway, the interstate highway system being toll-free because it's taxpayer funded, so it's a free service. Probably not free, but it's a service given by the government to US taxpayers and everybody else. Toll roads are really built by states or other governmental bodies. In fact, there's a really weird quirk. There's a toll road here in Utah that's literally privately owned, and it just goes up a hill in Ogden. I've never driven it because why? But maybe, maybe one day I'm gonna have to go drive a toll road that's privately owned. So that's why a lot of the times out West Texas is an exception to that too. But most toll roads will, if it's a toll road out west, it's probably not federally funded unless there's extenuating circumstances. It's a whole, like I said, it's a whole tangled mess. So we have to withstand the toll roads, but it does make for an exciting stop at the rest stops because some of them, much like they do back east, go over the freeway or you have to walk across the freeway, which always feels kind of illicit. I don't know if that's because generally we don't walk across interstates outside of a big city. I mean, do it all the time in Cincinnati all the time, and that's really fun to watch the cars go under. And wash the Fort Washington way, I think is what it's called. Anyways, it feels illicit to do it in the middle of Illinois and you just stand there and then you're waiting for McDonald's or Star be's and basically watching the cars go, go under you and just zip on. That's really cool. So Interstate 80 is really important in our highway system because it essentially connects New York to San Francisco. If you look at a map. You'll notice that it gets close to Chicago, but it doesn't actually go through it. One of those strange planning quirks again, like how Interstate 90 just deviates in Wisconsin and then just blows through Southern Minnesota with a, by avoiding Minneapolis or how Interstate 70 in Utah, they planned it to avoid Salt Lake. So that's exciting and it just goes straight from Denver to Los Angeles. That's the reason why it curves down. Let's see what other ones are there. It doesn't matter. There's plenty of very strange where we think it's strange, but Oh, Cleveland on Interstate 80 as well. Anyways, so Chicago, we don't see Chicago unless it's really clear, very dry day. However, we will feel Chicago in the traffic. It's a nightmare. It always is.'cause there's. Roads galore. There's people galore. Chicago really still is the transportation linchpin of the United States in terms of rail and road and airport. If you fly Southwest American or united, it's, it's always been a transportation hub. So even though we are still probably, what, 30 miles to the South, we still feel its effects. However that prepares us to then be grateful to enter Indiana, which once again, if you are a map lover and know what's gonna, what we're gonna hit, you know where we're going. Indiana, I think is overall a very pleasant state sugar cream pie. Amazing. Indianapolis. Beautiful. The Ohio River. Great. Even though that's mostly in Kentucky, but still it's part of Indiana's geography. However, Indiana's welcome when you are traveling eastbound on Interstate 80, which now includes Interstate 90, is shocking to say the least, because it is Gary, Indiana. Now we're going to carry on with the Music Man vibes because Gary, Indiana gets a whole song because of Professor Harold Hill, claiming to have gone to the conservatory in Gary, and that's where he learned how to be an awesome band leader. However, Gary and Deanna now, yikes. Should you get bored one day, just go search on Reddit, which take it with a grain of salt. But, um, if you search, what's it like to live in Gary or visiting Gary? What people say is fascinating because I think a lot of the times. Uh, uh, as outsiders, we're afraid to go to places or we hear mostly bad things about certain places, and therefore we have a bias. However, Gary and Deanna, what people say, the locals like, Hey, I, I used to live there. I grew up there. I had family there. I moved away. My family used to live there. We ended up moving away insane. Most of it is very sad, and Gary's trying very hard. And there are some really great places to go, like the Indiana Dunes and the Lake Shore and all of this other stuff. But Gary itself is the epitome of Rust Belt, and it is very sad. I would love to stop off one day and see the steel mills. I have convinced my mom to stop in Bethlehem to see Bethlehem Steel mills, and that is a 10 out of 10 stop. If you're ever driving through Bethlehem. Stop and see the steel mills. Fascinating. You can walk up on top on the old railroad tracks and look down into the foundries. It gives you a great perspective of what really built the country and especially through the boom times. However, Gary Gary's holding on and Gary holds on because Chicago's there and Chicago has never stopped. Once Chicago exploded, they are still the third largest city in the country. Not saying something, but Gary. So a lot of this I do want to read just from one Reddit thread that someone asked on the Reddit ask an American, and they said, what is wrong with Gary Indiana? Valid question, especially as we're about to drive through it, and the first comment said this quote, high crime and poverty rate ugly, polluted, and close to a much larger and more prosper city, albeit one that has its own problems. End quote. Very fair. Very objective, I would believe, and rational. The second comment is a little sadder and funnier. It said quote, it's what everyone thinks Detroit is. End quote. As someone who's been to Detroit a few times and driven around inner city Detroit, I would probably agree with that. I have not been driving through downtown Gary and around the steel mills. But Detroit has a lot going for it still. It's one of the largest metro areas in the United States. It has thriving cultural scene, a thriving sports scene. They're doing a lot to keep it relevant. And to be honest, the car industry is still huge there. Gary. Gary's left behind, and so I would agree with that, that it's probably closer to what everybody thinks Detroit, this industrial wasteland. And someone then also used this, an, um, posted this anecdote. They said, yeah, I used to think it's just an internet meme like Ohio and nothing else. But a friend of mine who lives in a rough part of Chicago, was stopping in Gary, Indiana. He said as soon as he sat down in a diner that night, he felt extremely uncomfortable. He had attended a business conference earlier in the day and thus was wearing a suit. The waitress after escape after exchanging Pleasantry said, listen, honey. I can wait on you and ring up your order, but if you ask me, you should leave this place and drive as fast as you can to your hotel and then DoorDash your dinner on the phone end quote. Wild. See it. I have never been somewhere where someone has told me You do not want to be here. And I'm not saying that. Like I'm not one of those people who's like, oh, I'm scared to go certain places. I try to keep aware, but. Sometimes, like I said, inner inner city Detroit, not phased by the LE at the least, but to have someone else told, like they were sitting there and the waitress was very kind and said, look, you, you don't wanna be out. Which, why is she out have so many questions. How do people know? I mean, I guess there's a look, there's a way that locals distinguish. Non-locals. We all do it. But to be told, you want to DoorDash your dinner, just go. Just go eat in your sad hotel room. Mind blowing. So there are other people then that will go on in this thread that do say it is up and coming in some way. There are some nicer neighborhoods. They're trying to redevelop it and they have the beach going for it. And Midwesterners love a good lake. Everybody loves to go to the lake. And the Indiana Lakeshore and the Indiana Dunes are really close to Gary. So. Yay for Gary. Eventually, however, I would not really plan on stopping anytime soon unless you knew someone there or you just wanted a nice drive through it. I should go check up on this a little more. That's just a thought to go see if anybody I love drive through videos on YouTube. There's a really great channel called J Utah, just Capital J, space Utah, and he does it all over the world. And so that's great. But sometimes it'd be like, dude, just do America and see some of the stuff.'cause there's some fascinating places.'cause he just doesn't go around and be like, Hey, look at the touristy places. He drives through everywhere, every part of the city. So it'd be interesting to see if he had Gary. However, we are now earing nearing the end of our day driving because this is one of those hard stretches that you can really stop and short sell the day. But then you don't wanna stop too short because then you don't get enough done. And we've talked about a lot. And Chicago traffic, honestly, it wears out everybody. So we're just going to drive to South Bend and then stop by talking about Notre Dame. I am always. Blown away. One that Notre Dame has become Notre Dame instead of, we don't say Notre Dame, like very interesting how we can distinguish between the university Notre Dame and then the cathedral in Paris. All basically the Americanized way to say, is it Notre Dame? Different, very different. But why South Bend? I've always asked myself that because it's this really prestigious university, kind of in a random town in Indiana. Well. It was originally founded as the University of Notre Dame doula, so the University of Our Lady of the Lake. It was founded in 1842 by members of the congregation of the Holy Cross. This goes back to the old French forays. Up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. But the bishop of, I am not gonna say this right, because I see the French version sen, but that's not how they say it in Indiana. So, I'm sorry. It looks like Vincent's, someone can probably tell me I that this is gonna be tricky. But anyways, the Bishop of Sad Vocation now in Indiana, his name was S. Something to that effect. And he offered the land to a Mr. Edward Sorin on the condition that he billed a college on it within two years. Sounds like a very steep request, right? Two years in the 1840s to build a college. It received its charter from the state in 1844 and its first degrees were issued in 1849, and the rest is history. So the fighting Irish Go football, I guess. I'm not a football fan, but I, I am a fan of the movie Rudy, though. Great music, great story Notre Dame. So we'll rest easy tonight. Knowing some of that, I, once again, I have a hard time selling that, not a football person at all, but tomorrow. The next time we get in the car, our proverbial car, we finally get to enter Ohio. Now, I love that. One of the comments on the Reddit thread that I read said that they thought it was like an internet meme like Ohio. Let's purge ourselves of all anti anti Ohio. Thought you can't ride in me with me in the car and badmouth Ohio because it's gonna be pulling over. And walk. Just kidding. Um, I don't take everything everybody says about, about Ohio personally. I'm just extremely fascinated why everybody hates it. My theory is it's because it was the California of the 19th century, and Michigan has some really great public relations officers who are smearing Ohio constantly, which we will talk about. We are going to talk about why possibly. The first incident where Michigan and Ohio learned to hate each other. So rest up, get ready and we'll see you on the next episode.