(Radio Iowa) – A writing assignment for a University of Iowa honors class turned into a novel that caught the attention of movie producers and resulted in all 19 students signing a film option with two Hollywood studios. U-I Professor Harry Stecopoulos says he’s delighted by the development and while he couldn’t disclose the terms of the contract, says his students were thrilled with the deal they brokered. “There was a little bit of wrangling, as you might expect, and I should say, to the students’ great credit, they did their own negotiations with a little bit of advice from an Iowa alum who works for an agent in Los Angeles,” Stecopoulos says. “The undergrads all did their own negotiations and did them very well indeed.”

The students’ collaboration, “Gilded in Ash,” is a new version of what many regard as the greatest novel of the 20th century. The copyright on “The Great Gatsby” expired last year, so Stecopoulos had his students create a completely new telling of the classic 1925 story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Never did he dream it would result in a film option. “I had no expectations of this kind whatsoever,” Stecopoulos says. “I hoped they would do a good job and I had no expectations. I’m doing it again with a Hemingway novel in the fall and I fear that the students will expect a similar result, which I can’t guarantee, obviously, but it’s been a wonderful surprise.”

The original plan called for an electronic version of the students’ novel to be released in January through the University of Iowa’s Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, with a paperback version this spring. That didn’t happen. “The producers, for understandable reasons, didn’t want a free copy of the book circulating in case, I guess, someone else might want to make a similar film,” he says. “Some of the students are interested in revising, tightening the existing manuscript and then submitting it to conventional publishers, seeing if they can get it in book form.”

The film option was signed with Independent Pictures and Fugitive Films, but there’s no guarantee “Gilded in Ash” will ever become a movie. “The film business is fickle,” Stecopoulos says, but he’s confident the movie will be made — eventually. The characters in the new story are “largely the same but it’s a different plot,” Stecopoulos says. “For example, Gatsby is an African-American woman who is an art forger, so a major change there.” The U-I students’ story is still set in the 1920s and in New York City but he says it’s very much an original account. So what’s the next writing project involve with Hemingway?

“It’s ‘The Sun Also Rises,’ published in 1926, and that copyright expires on January 1st of 2022.” Expiration of the copyright means anyone can publish the book, write a prequel, or adapt it however they’d like. Stecopoulos notes, there is no payday for him with the upcycled Gatsby tale, as the only reward he craves is in his students’ success.

(Radio Iowa) – An immigration amnesty bill is subject of a hearing before the U-S Senate Judiciary Committee today (Tuesday) but Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says the panel is “focused on the wrong thing.” Grassley, the committee’s ranking Republican, says they instead should be concentrating on finding solutions to the “border crisis.” “It’s this administration’s new policies, promises and rhetoric that have created the crisis,” Grassley says. “You see it every day, hundreds wading the Rio Grande to come to this country in violation of our laws.”

Grassley quoted reports that said on one recent day, people from 35 different nations crossed into the U-S illegally along our southern border with Mexico. Iowan Michelle Root is scheduled to testify during today’s hearing. She’s the mother of a young woman from Council Bluffs who died in an accident five years ago in Omaha. “You may remember that her daughter, Sarah Root, was killed in a car crash by a drunk driving, undocumented immigrant,” Grassley says. “He’d been released by federal law enforcement because of some legal loophole.”

The crash took place on January 31st of 2016, a matter of hours after Root graduated with honors from Bellevue University. Omaha police said 19-year-old Eswin Mejia, a native of Honduras, was drag racing and caused the crash, but he was released on bail and disappeared. Grassley says he probably fled the country and likely will never be brought to justice. New legalization measures with no discussion of border security, Grassley says, are “a recipe for an even-longer crisis.”

“We should be sympathetic to the circumstances of young people who are illegally brought to this country as children,” Grassley says. “That decision wasn’t up to those children. Their parents violated the law.” Such measures, he says, need to be considered alongside legislation that promotes the rule of law and that would prevent future tragedies like what the Root family has endured.

Officials with Guthrie County/ISU Extension and Outreach report the US Sunbeams 4-H Club was the winner of a “Random Acts of Kindness” drawing. The club won $257.50 from one of the members aunt’s workplace.  The club in-turn used the money to “Pay It Forward” with the 15 Summer Activity Bags.

Meredith Arganbright presenting 15 Summer Activity Bags to Rhonda Huggins of New Opportunities Family Development Center in Guthrie Center. (Photo & information submitted)

With Ric Hanson.

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DES MOINES, Iowa —  Eastern Iowa Democrat Representative Ras Smith, Tuesday (today), officially announced his bid to become Governor. He becomes the first person to announce they will challenge Governor Kim Reynolds in advance of the the 2022 mid-term elections. Smith currently represents Iowa House District 62 at the statehouse, which covers the northern part of Waterloo. He’s held that position since 2017 and has run unopposed since the 2016 elections.

Iowa Dem. Rep. Ras Smith, from Waterloo,

State Rep. Smith is expected to make a formal announcement Tuesday at 4:30 p.m.

The Creston Police Department reports two separate arrests took place, Monday. At around 10:30 am, 34-year-old Jeffrey Drake, of Afton, was arrested at the Union County Law Enforcement Center on a Union County Warrant for Failure to Appear on the original charge of Driving While Barred. Drake was being held in the Adams County Jail while awaiting bond hearing. And, at around 12:39-p.m., Monday, 41-year-old Sheri Watters, of Creston, was arrested on a Union County Warrant for Failure to Appear on the original charge of Assault Causing Bodily Injury. She was being held in the Adams County Jail on a $1,000 bond.

The 7:06-a.m. Newscast w/News Director Ric Hanson.

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(Radio Iowa) – After last year’s pandemic-related cancellations, all of Iowa’s 100 county fairs are a go in 2021 and five will be held this month. “Not to beat a dead horse about last year, but it was tough. This year, everybody’s back,” says Tom Barnes, executive director of the Association of Iowa Fairs. “…We’re hearing a lot of positive talk about people wanting to get back involved, be at the fair, help with the fair.” Barnes says the “curve ball” of last year’s pandemic prompted fair managers to improvise. For example, many staged competitions for the livestock 4-H and FFA members raised last year. “I believe the count was 85 or 86 fairs in Iowa did not happen at all, but did some sort of youth show-and-go type of event,” Barnes says. “…Early fairs in June was basically the guinea pigs of trying to make that happen and our later fairs learned by what the early fairs did correctly and did not do correctly.”

Barnes is also secretary of the Howard County Fair, which starts next week. Barnes says after years of emphasizing concerns about the spread of diseases among livestock, county fairs are being proactive about the human side as well. “We still have the sprayers and the hand sanitizers and all that. We’ll be utilizing that kind of stuff here during our fair, spacing things out as best as we possibility can, but what’s really helped the fairs be able to kick off this year is the vaccination,” Barnes says. “…There were skeptics three or four months ago. Whether you believe in the vaccination or not, it did change the public’s perception of getting back into a norm.”

The Wapello and Worth County fairs start this Wednesday, June 16. The Linn, Jefferson and Howard County Fairs begin on June 23. There are 99 counties in Iowa, but 100 counties fairs since Pottawattamie County holds two — one in Council Bluffs and the other in Avoca.

(Radio Iowa) – Iowa State University Extension crop specialist, Joel DeJong, says northwest Iowa crops are showing signs of stress from the dry conditions. He says they need around 25 inches of moisture during the crop development stage. “We still need to have about 12 to 15 inches of rainfall during this season. You know, if we have slightly about average we’re probably going to reach that — otherwise, we are going to put some stress on our yield potential through the year,” DeJong says.

DeJong says stress is already showing up in the corn leaves.”If you take a look at the cornfields recently, you’ll see that almost every day we have a lot of cornfields rolling,” according to DeJong. “And it is an indicator that the root systems of those corn plants — even if there is water in that soil — the root systems right now aren’t deep enough to keep up with daily demand with low humidity and high temperature.” He says the rolling has been evident the last week in the afternoons and some mornings during the mid-90 degree days. DeJong says the humidity that we try to avoid is a good thing out in the field.

“It’s kind of unique to have 20 to 25 percent humidity and 90-some degree temperatures. That makes it seem a little more cooler for humans — but that is the opposite of what we want to see for a crop,” Dejong explains. “We want to see high humidity to go with those temperatures if they are going to be that high, because high humidity means less water demand in those plants.” The crops specialist says if the issue continues, farmers may see a drastic yield loss. The corn ear now is starting to fill in rows. “All this stress is probably reducing some of the rows we are going to have in some of those ears — might only be a few rows less, maybe it’s a few more. We still have the potential to continue to form the length of that ear all the way to the length of that corn. We’re still in that process,” he says.

DeJong says the next thirty days will be critical to the corn development as the corn begins to pollinate. He says soybeans are also showing some signs of stress, but soybeans have a way to delay the need for moisture until later in the year.