Boone, Iowa — The 2025 Iowa All-State Music Festival November 22nd, marks the 79th anniversary of the prestigious statewide event. On Saturday, October 25th, District auditions for the 277-member All-State Band, 220-member All-State Orchestra, and 601-member All-State Chorus were held at high schools in Le Mars, Hampton-Dumont-CAL, Independence, Atlantic, Indianola, and Iowa City West.  Approximately 17% of the students who audition are selected for membership in the All-State ensembles. Selected students will rehearse in Ames on Friday and Saturday, November 21–22, culminating in the All-State Festival Concert at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 22, 2025, in Hilton Coliseum, Iowa State University, Ames.

Atlantic Band Director Jarrod O’Donnell reports the Following Students were Selected to participate in the Iowa All-State Band & Orchestra, this past Saturday:

• Gabrielle Engler on Bass Clarinet (1st Year),
• Michael Hocamp on Tuba (1st Year),
• Katrina Williams was selected as an Alternate on Violin
• and Grace Mitchell on French Horn (4 years).

Mr. O’Donnell congratulated Grace Mitchell for Making All-State on French Horn all four years of her high school career. Of the 17 percent of students that are selected for this ensemble, O’Donnell said less than 1 percent of those chosen make it all four years. (All photos courtesy of Mr. O’Donnell)

Iowa PBS will record the concert for later broadcast. Broadcast dates and times will be available on the Iowa PBS website at www.iowapbs.org. The Iowa All-State Music Festival is presented under the auspices of the Iowa High School Music Association (IHSMA) and the Iowa Music Educators Association (IMEA).

(Atlantic, Iowa) – Here’s a reminder: The Atlantic Rotary Club will host its annual Charity Dinner and Auction on Saturday, November 1, 2025, at the Cass County Community Center. The event will begin at 5:30 p.m. and will feature dinner, a cash bar, and both silent and live auctions. Dinner tickets are $50 per person and may be purchased by contacting Ted Robinson at First Whitney Bank. Community members are encouraged to secure their tickets as soon as possible. All are welcome to attend this community event.

The Rotary Charity Dinner and Auction serves as a major fundraiser for the Atlantic Rotary Club, with proceeds reinvested into the local community. Funds raised through past events have benefited numerous organizations, including the Nishna Valley YMCA, area schools and preschools, the Cass County Health System Foundation, and local scholarship programs for high school seniors and Iowa Western Community College students, among many others.

In addition to the dinner and auction, a raffle will be held in conjunction with the event. Proceeds from the raffle will support the Atlantic Food Bank in purchasing a commercial refrigerator/freezer to enhance its capacity to serve local families. Raffle tickets are available for $20 each or six for $100. Prizes include:

First Place: 2025 Hustler Raptor XD 54” Mower

Second Place: $500

Third Place: $250

Tickets may be purchased from any Rotarian, Food Pantry volunteer, or from David Schwab at Modern Woodmen of America, 14 W. 4th Street. Raffle tickets will also be available for purchase at the event. For additional information regarding the Rotary Charity Dinner and Auction, please contact Dolly Bergmann at 712-249-9275 or Tori Gibson at 712-254-1070.

(Radio Iowa) – Engineers at Iowa State University are developing a computer game to help emergency responders think on their feet in crisis situations. In the game, players are assigned to different roles like fire, E-M-S or county emergency managers, as a derecho rolls through an urban setting. Players have to make decisions about how to respond and effectively allocate resources. I-S-U engineering professor Cameron MacKenzie is leading the project and says the game offers an immersive, yet flexible training option. “That’s kind of more or less the overall goal of what Polk County wants to achieve with it,” MacKenzie says, “creating a different type of training tool that’s engaging, that’s perhaps easier to conduct logistically than some of these large-scale exercises.”

MacKenzie says people running the game can make it more challenging by adjusting different variables, like the number of ambulances. He says people could play the game multiple times and get different outcomes.”They’re kind of doing a ‘choose your own adventure’ because they have different decisions, and based on their decisions, that influences how the game unfolds and develops,” he says.

The National Science Foundation is supporting the project through a 700-thousand dollar grant.

(Atlantic, Iowa) — The Atlantic Public Library will receive a $10,000 gift from Carnegie Corporation of New York, the foundation established by Andrew Carnegie. The award is part of Carnegie Libraries 250, a special initiative celebrating the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and honoring the roughly 1,280 Carnegie Libraries still serving their communities across the United States.

Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of 1,681 free public libraries nationwide between 1886 and 1917. Approximately 750 of them continue to use their original buildings, while others have moved to new locations. Opened in 1903 our library is one of 93 public libraries in Iowa built through this historic program. 48 are still in use as their local public library today.

“This gift is truly unexpected. I even spent a few minutes researching if it was real when I opened my inbox earlier this week,” said Michelle Andersen, director. “The staff and library trustees will discuss how to use the over the next couple of months before making a final decision.”

Atlantic (Iowa) Public Library

“Our founder, Andrew Carnegie, who championed the free public library movement of the late 19th century, described libraries as ‘cradles of democracy’ that ‘strengthen the democratic idea, the equality of the citizen, and the royalty of man,’” said Dame Louise Richardson, president of Carnegie and former head of the University of Oxford. “We still believe this and are delighted to celebrate our connection to the libraries he founded.”

The library will receive the gift in January 2026, and may use the funds in any way we choose to celebrate the 250th anniversary, further our mission, and/or for the benefit of our community.

Patrons are invited to share their Atlantic Public Library photos, stories, and community celebrations at carnegielibraries.org.

(Creston, Iowa) – The Creston Police Department reports six arrests took place between last Thursday (Oct. 23rd) and Sunday (Oct. 26th). Most recently:

At around 1:20-a.m., Sunday, 18-year-old Adrian Michael Lillie, of Creston, was arrested for Driving Under Suspension – Driving While License Denied, Susp, Cancelled or Revoked. Lillie was transported to and held in, the Union County Jail.

Saturday afternoon, Creston Police arrested 43-year-old Charles Edward Keeton, of Creston. Keeton was arrested on an outstanding warrant for original charges that include two counts of Possession on Controlled Substance – 2nd Offense.

Friday evening, 21-year-old Angel Marie Egginger, of Creston, was arrested for Theft in the 3rd Degree. Egginger was transported to and held at the Union County Jail.

And, authorities said there were three separate arrests in Creston last Thursday:

• 52-year-old Jason Eugene Steiner, of Creston, was arrested (temporarily detained) Thursday evening, but then cited and released from the scene on a promise to appear at his residence. He was charged with Possession of Controlled Substance – 3rd or Subsequent Offense.
• Thursday afternoon, 35-year-old Clinton Earl Humphreys, Jr., of Creston, was arrested (temp. detained) and then cited, for allowing an animal to run at-large. He was released on a promise to appear at his residence.
• And, just before 5-p.m., Thursday, Creston Police arrested 51-year-old Dwain Michael Ripperger, of Afton, for Driving While Barred, and Operating without Interlock. Ripperger was transported and held at the Union County Jail.

(Radio Iowa) – The 100th pheasant season opened Saturday in Iowa for a sport that Iowa D-N-R wildlife biologist Todd Bogenshutz says had a humble start. The first pheasants were released from William Benton’s wild game farm near Cedar Falls in 1901 when a storm wrecked their pen. The bird population continued to grow to a point where the State Conservation Commission got complaints of crops being damaged and started to take action.”Game wardens at the time we’re asking land owners to pick up wild eggs in the field or trap wild pheasants in1925, with 60-thousand eggs and like seven-thousand wild birds that were picked up and delivered to other areas of the state without pheasants,” he says. The state also started the first pheasant hunt.

“Maybe 75-thousand people participated in that first season in 1925. It was 13 counties in north-central Iowa,” Bogenschutz says. “It was a three-day season, you could only hunt from 8:00 a-m to noon, and that was a three rooster bag limit.” Bogenschutz says they didn’t have any survey back then but he guesses around 250-thousand birds were taken. Bogenschutz says there weren’t large mechanized farms with fence row to fence row planting back then, and the landscape was perfect for pheasants to thrive. “Half the ag landscape either being small grains or hay or pasture, and then corn was the major crop,” he says. “The other crops besides the small grains were, you know, people were growing beets and sweet clover for seed, and a lot of things that you don’t see anymore today. But yeah, that combination of small fields and that much grassy cover. obviously grew a lot of pheasants.”

Surveys found hunters taking one million or more birds. Bogenschutz says soybeans started becoming really popular in the 60s and more so in the 70s and that led to a big decline in small grains and hay.  “Like from the mid 1950s to about 1980. And so now we’re kind of a corn soybean rotation instead of a corn old hay rotation, so that has impacts on the number of birds that we could grow,” he says. The farm crisis of the 1980s led to the creation of the Conservation Reserve Program that paid farmers to take less desirable land out of production, creating more grassland. “That was a big boon for pheasants and I on our harvest again approached. You know one-point-two to one and a half million birds,” he says.

Weather has been the other factor that has impacted the pheasant season. Bogenschutz bad winters and springs from. 2007 to about 2011 sent bird numbers way down. “That was a very unique time frame for us there and it really drove our populations down. We’ve kind of been on an upward trend since then and Mother Nature has been relatively cooperative to us,” Bogenschutz says.

The 100th season started Saturday and will run through January.

(Radio Iowa) – At least one Iowa-based bank is telling its customers they can no longer get rolls or boxes of pennies, and checks that don’t end in a zero or five will have to be deposited or reissued. This follows an order from President Trump that the U-S Treasury stop making pennies. Adam Gregg, president and C-E-O of the Iowa Bankers Association, says the government is expected to quit producing new pennies for circulation in early 2026, but Iowa banks are already feeling the impact. “It’s going to be very difficult — in some cases, in some places — for banks to be able to access the penny, which means it may be difficult for businesses and consumers in those areas to do that,” Gregg says. “What’s tricky about it is, there’s kind of some randomness to when a distribution location may run out.” Gregg says many other countries have gone through this process of eliminating a small form of currency, and while there may be some bumps along the way, he trusts it will eventually lead to a streamlining of cash transactions.

Still, Gregg says the I-B-A and similar organizations in other states are asking banking regulators and Congress to provide more guidance on how the elimination of pennies will work.  “I think there’s going to be uneven access to pennies here for a while as this process plays out,” Gregg says. “I think what the Federal Reserve is finding is that while the decision was made to end production, the way it’s being implemented is restricting its circulation, perhaps more than they intended earlier on because the penny is still legal currency.” Gregg says it makes sense, with an S, to stop making cents, with a C, as one report shows the U-S Treasury lost more than 85-million dollars on penny production last year alone.

“It costs between three-and-a-half to to four cents and make one penny, which of course is only worth one cent,” Gregg says, “so it really does make sense from a government efficiency perspective, from a deployment of resources perspective, to end the production of the penny.” Gregg, who served as Iowa’s lieutenant governor until September of 2024, says businesses across Iowa may soon have to alter their pricing structure, adjusting prices to end in either a zero or a five. “What’s probably going to happen, and you’re going to start to see businesses doing this, they’ll start rounding to the nearest nickel and display some policies,” Gregg says. “This will be for cash transactions only. Frankly, any more, most transactions are happening electronically or with cards, but many people do still choose to use cash.”

A federal study finds only around 16-percent of U-S transactions now rely on cash, the rest are electronic — though some industries still rely on coins, like vending machines and laundromats. Coins have been discontinued in the U-S before, as recently as 2011 with the suspending of production of the dollar coin, and throughout history, as far back as 1857, when Congress ordered the end of the half-cent coin.

(Radio Iowa) – A top leader in the U-S House is urging Iowa Republicans to stay engaged to ensure G-O-P candidates in competitive races win in 2026. All four Iowans serving in the U.S. House today are Republicans — but Minnesota Congressman Tom Emmer notes that at this time five years ago, the Iowa delegation was split 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats.

“It wasn’t that long ago that didn’t have all of this wonderful red that you see across Iowa…The worst thing you can do is just sit back on your laurels,” Emmer said. “…You win because everybody grabs ahold of the rope and does their part. Everybody’s got to be pulling every day.” Emmer, the assistant majority leader in the U.S. House, was the keynote speaker at a Friday night fundraiser for Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

“It’s great that all of you are in this room, but you’ve got to keep reminding Republicans: ‘Yeah, we hold it all right now, but we could lose it all tomorrow,'” Emmer said. “Republicans have a tendency that when they win they suddenly say, ‘All right, we’ve got it. It’s good,’ and they don’t show up. This time we cannot take that attitude.” Miller-Meeks won in 2020 by just six votes. Last year, her margin of victory was 800 votes.

She says Democrats have already spent two-point-eight MILLION dollars campaigning against her this year. “But we’re still standing. We’re still going and we are never going to give up. We never back down. I’m like the defensive line of the Iowa Hawkeyes,” Miller-Meeks said, to chcers. “Don’t come at me. Don’t after my family. Don’t come after my district.” Miller-Meeks faces a repeat challenge from fellow Republican David Pautsch, who finished 12 points behind Miller-Meeks in the 2024 G-O-P primary.

Three Democrats are running in the district, including Christina Bohannan of Iowa City, who has run against Miller-Meeks twice before.

(Lee County, Iowa) – Two adults and three children were injured during a rollover accident Sunday morning, east of Swisher, in eastern Iowa. All of injured, including the driver, were from Union Grove, Alabama.  The Iowa State Patrol reports a car driven by 29-year-old Amanda N. Hufnagle, was traveling north on Highway 27 (The Avenue of the Saints) at around 9-a.m., when the car drifted onto the left shoulder of the road. Hufnagle over-corrected, causing the car to slid across the northbound lanes before it entered the east ditch. The vehicle then rolled-over and came to rest on its wheels,

A juvenile passenger in the car  was ejected from the vehicle. The injured included the driver, 32-year-old Nathan T. Oden, an 11, five and 3-year old juveniles. All were transported by ambulance to the hospital in Fort Madison.

The crash remained under investigation.

(Pottawattamie County, Iowa) – An adult and a child were struck and killed by a pickup struck as they stood in the median off of Interstate 880 Sunday night. The Iowa State Patrol reports 27-year-old Til Baswa and a 2-year-old, both from Des Moines, were in the median because their SUV had struck a deer and became disabled in the middle of the roadway.

27-year-old Brody Barrier, of Neola, was traveling eastbound on I-880 in a pickup truck at around 7-p.m., when he saw the disabled SUV in the traveled portion of the road and swerved to avoid hitting it. When he took evasive action, his pickup truck entered the median and struck the two pedestrians before coming to rest in the median.

Baswa and the juvenile died at the scene. The driver of the SUV (which was not hit), was not injured. He was identified as 47-year-old Om Neupane, of Des Moines.

The Patrol was assisted at the accident site by the Pott. County Sheriff’s Office and Iowa DOT personnel.