Iowa Life Episode 303

[Charity Nebbe] Coming up on this episode of Iowa Life, we'll travel the Back Roads with JayJay Goodvin of the Iowa Gallivant.

[JayJay Goodvin] Whoa.  

[Server] There's the burger.

[JayJay Goodvin] Nice.

[Nebbe] Step inside the studio of artist Rose Fransen.

[Rose Fransen] I think that we found that you could actually, in a small town, start to make a difference.

[Nebbe] And we'll meet the Tremble Clefs, a choir for people with Parkinson's and their loved ones.  

(music) 

[Nebbe] It’s all coming up next on Iowa Life.

[Announcer] Funding for Iowa Life is provided by the Lainie Grimm Fund for Inclusive Programming at the Iowa PBS Foundation. And by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation.  

(music)

[Nebbe] Hi, I'm Charity Nebbe and this is Iowa Life. Today we're at New Wine Park in Dubuque County. And for nearly 50 years, tree expert Mark Rao has been coming to places just, just like this to survey and certify Iowa's champion trees. We'll find out more about the champion trees in a moment. But first, we're going to meet another very well traveled Iowan, a man whose enthusiasm for exploring Iowa's culinary landscape has taken him down nearly every road in the state.

[Nebbe] JayJay Goodvin is a man on a mission, crisscrossing the state on a quest to visit as many Iowa towns as possible. He is always on the lookout for great food, good stories and interesting tidbits of state history.

[JayJay Goodvin] This is the marker of the old railroads that went through Orient. So yeah, it's one of your classic railroad towns.

[Nebbe] JayJay documents his tastes and travels for his blog, the Iowa Gallivant. He shares his love for his home state and encourages people to explore new communities.

[JayJay Goodvin] That's really good.

[Nebbe] I caught up with JayJay at Baxa's Sutliff Store and Tavern in northeast Johnson County.

(music)

[Nebbe] I want to ask you, you are the chief explorer for Iowa Gallivant. How did that start?

[JayJay Goodvin] It started out as a family scrapbooking project that turned into a travel blog and has turned into this monster that you see now. So, it's like we specialize in a lot of small towns. We, you know, promote communities, businesses, organizations and events. It's going in all sorts of avenues and that's just kind of how I travel too.

[Nebbe] Every year, JayJay has what he calls. pet projects where he tries food just for fun, be it sausages, sandwiches or tacos.

[JayJay Goodvin] One down, 98 to go.

[Nebbe] In April 2024, JayJay set off on a 10-month quest to eat a pork tenderloin in all 99 counties.

[JayJay Goodvin] Iowa county locals, I see why you love this place.

[Nebbe] So if you eat 99 pork tenderloin sandwiches and you're trying to keep track of what makes them all special and different. How do you do that?

[JayJay Goodvin] Well, I've always said there's a difference between your favorite of something and the best of something.  Anything that makes my big melon look smaller is always a good thing, and this is doing a great job. So here we go. And they put four pieces of cheese on it, Max.  The best of something always needs a panel, always needs judges to say, you know.

You know what I mean? Whereas your favorite, you know, your favorite baseball player might not be the best one.  You've heard the buzz. We have picked our favorite pork tenderloin.  I said my favorite one was at the Landmark in Grundy Center, Iowa. And of course, you know, the Internet broke because everybody's like, oh, you know, either they went there to get it, or they're, like, disagreeing with me, which I love, by the way.

You should always be, you know, loving your local tenderloins. Locals very rarely will steer you in the wrong directions, no matter what size of community it is. And they know where the best places to eat are.

[Nebbe] You know, I mean, most of us, when we're on vacation, we, you know, go to our phones and we say, where should we eat? And our phones give us a list. But that doesn't mean that that's the best place.

[JayJay Goodvin] Yeah, barbers, stylists, Uber drivers, and taxi drivers, they all have the best suggestions because they get all the gossip.

[Nebbe] Now JayJay has a new endeavor. He calls it 99 Specials.

[JayJay Goodvin] I'll take the chicken fried chicken special, please.  

[Server] Would you like that with corn or green beans?  

[JayJay Goodvin] We're going to go green beans today, but don't tell anybody I denied the corn. I love corn.

[Nebbe] You're going to all these different restaurants, 99 counties, and you have to get there on the day that they have the special that you want to try. And you're trying to do 99 different dishes.

JayJay Goodvin] Yeah, so I want to — 

[Nebbe] Are there 99 different specials?

[JayJay Goodvin] Oh, yeah, there are totally. I mean, gosh, there's, like, there's the hot beef sandwich. There's the hot pork sandwich. There's the hot ham sandwich. There's a hot with, you know, with the mashed potatoes and, like, the wheelbarrow of gravy over it. The thing is, is, like, whenever we put something with gravy on our videos, it just flies.

But, yes, there is. There's definitely 99 specials I up there.

[JayJay Goodvin] We're at The Dugout here in Orient, Iowa. This is our Adair County special for our 99th county extravaganza. Oh, it's so tender. I don't even. I don't even need the knife. Wow, that's really good.

[Nebbe] I'm not going to ask your favorite at this point, but can you tell me about some of the places you've really enjoyed?

[JayJay Goodvin] As we're speaking, we're over a third of the way, like 36 counties in and one of the places I knew we had to go to, and I've been wanting to get there for a long time, was the Triple View in Little Rock, Iowa.

[Cashier] Hi. Welcome to you.

[JayJay Goodvin] So I know I want the boss's burger, and I also want a black raspberry malt, please.  Triple View, where it's located, is just quintessential Iowa. It's right on the blacktop. The livestock that's getting raised there, the pork and the beef that's going on into their food is raised. I mean, it's right there. The table you're sitting at is just yards away, and it's just has that amazing Midwest feel.   Oh, whoa.

[Server] There's the burger.

[JayJay Goodvin] Nice. Let's do this, Mark.

[Mark] Got it.

[JayJay Goodvin] I'm in Lyon County for our Lyon County special, far northwest Iowa. And I'm at the Triple View. And this is my friend Mark. How many steps is it to the cattle and the hogs that are getting raised right here on your farm that's going in this burger?

[Mark] 226 feet. 

[JayJay Goodvin] That's right. 226 feet.

[Nebbe] So you're putting all these miles on your car. You're traveling all the time. You're not too far from home, but you're not at home. What drives you?

[JayJay Goodvin] Well, it's — I've always loved a good road trip. I think it's just a natural part of me, like I love any kind of story, book, movie when it comes to maritime. So, it must be like that sort of captain/pirate part of me, you know what I mean? We're setting sail in Iowa every day, and it's just like that adventurous, wanting to see more and knowing that even when you go to the smallest of communities, you're still probably going to see something different every now and then.

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[Nebbe] This eastern cottonwood is Iowa's largest tree, rooted between the edge of a cornfield and a gravel road near Otranto in Mitchell County. Its trunk is almost 30 feet around, and it stands 102 feet tall. But how do we know which trees are the biggest? Who measures and who keeps track of that?

[Mark Rao] 74.3 for the total height.

[Nebbe] Meet Mark Rao, Iowa's unofficial giant tree hunter. For nearly 50 years, he has traveled extensively throughout the state, carefully measuring and documenting Iowa's largest trees for the DNR's Big Trees of Iowa program. And he does it all simply for the love of trees.

[Rao] The first thing we need to do is determine the circumference.  Every state has got a big tree program. And so, in Iowa, I'm trying to find the biggest ones that we have here in our state. I usually refer to it as big tree hunting. I've been measuring trees since about 1972.  This extreme flare here.

I started out with just learning to identify trees, and then I started noticing some of the really big ones, which impressed me. I'm the only one, really, in the state of Iowa that has devoted this much time and energy to looking for and finding big trees.  Okay, so take a look through there.

Keep both eyes. I'm a volunteer for the DNR, but even if I wasn't, I'd still be doing it. I love trees, so it's just perfect fit for me. When I see a big tree, there's that sense of awe. It's just so impressive. By measuring them, it's a way to quantify how big a tree is.

So, without those measurements, it's just a big tree. With the measurements, we know exactly how big it is. And then it gets interesting because you can compare similar trees that are also big.

[Nebbe] In the 1940s, the American Forestry Association came up with a point system for measuring tree size. One point for each inch in circumference, one point for each foot in height. Then you take the average spread of the crown of the tree in feet, divide that by four, add all of those numbers together, and voila. That is quantifiably how big your tree is compared to other big trees in Iowa.

[Rao] One of the things that's rather exceptional about this site is there's two American elms here, and they have survived all the waves of Dutch elm disease, which is pretty interesting. We had a circumference today of 17 feet, 5 inches. When I first measured this tree in 1979, it was 12 feet something. So, it's grown a lot.

It's always exciting to update measurements and find an increase in size. I kind of view myself as the guy here in Iowa, and I'm getting older, and I would like to pass some of the knowledge along to somebody that's interested. That's one nice thing about trees. We never have any arguments. We always get along. And I always miss them when they're gone.

So, yeah, I consider a lot of my trees that I've been monitoring for many years to be close friends.  

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[Nebbe] Rose Fransen is an internationally acclaimed oil painter living right here in Eastern Iowa. Her work, featuring the landscape and people of Maquoketa, has even been shown in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In fact, I once had the opportunity to sit for a portrait by Rose, and it's one of the greatest honors of my life.

Today we'll learn more about her process and the stories she captures on canvas.  (music)

[Rose Fransen] I grew up here in Maquoketa, Iowa. I'm one of six kids. I wanted to be an artist. I think the way — I have lots of ways I tell that story. When I first decided to be an artist, I think the first time I remember saying I wanted to be an artist when I was seven.

[Nebbe] Rose Fransen has gained national and international acclaim for her oil paintings. She attended art school in Chicago, where she met her mentor who would help shape her future as an artist.

[Fransen] The mentor that really inspired me, Richard Schmidt, his quote was, I don't paint what I think, I paint what I see. So, a lot about the way I learned to paint is by learning to see. And you allow yourself to interpret the world that you're seeing through your brush. But now, 40 years into it, as a teacher myself, I say I don't paint what I think, I paint what I see. But it doesn't mean I can't think about what I see. And that's not only to understand it technically, but it's also to understand it emotionally, spiritually, philosophically, and thoughtfully.

[Nebbe] In 1991, Rose and her parents, Wayne and Ellen, purchased the Old City Hall building in Maquoketa. Today it's a fine art gallery, featuring works by Rose and her husband, artist Charles Morris.

[Fransen] You know, it's interesting that what you're seeing here today in the gallery, you're seeing kind of decades of work. You're seeing work from my earliest years all the way up until a couple of months ago. And you're going to see lots of different styles. I use objects that we can recognize. I paint them in a relatively loose but yet at times tight style.

So, you could say gestural brushwork, colorful. So, people used to call that, like, realist impressionist. I'm not quite sure that's what you would call it anymore, but maybe a representational painter. And then there's other paintings that I do in the gallery that are called Trompe-l'oeil, Trick the Eye, where you actually make the object look like it's real.

So, my range is pretty broad now, if you think about it over the decades, which is, I think, kind of fun, kind of interesting.

[Nebbe] A highlight of Rose's work is Portrait of Maquoketa, a collection of 180 portraits that she painted of people in her hometown over the course of one year.

[Fransen] So basically, that project, what we did was we had people come and sit in a space on Main Street for four hours. It was a pretty profound experience, sitting across from my neighbors. And it was interesting. I thought at the beginning, one of the things is that I would be giving Maquoketa something.

But I realized that I had the best seat in the house. The people that I painted sitting across from anybody every day, it was as if you can really second guess or change your mind about what you think of people when you give them some time and some space, where you just engage.

[Nebbe] Portrait of Maquoketa was exhibited at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery and is now a part of the permanent collection at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport.

[Fransen] One of the things I learned from Portrait of Maquoketa that people suffer from the most was they don't feel seen. And what Portrait of Maquoketa was, was a chance for somebody to feel seen for four hours.

[Nebbe] While she continues to travel the country and world for her work, there are many reasons, both personal and professional, why Maquoketa remains her home base.

[Fransen] I think that we found that you could actually, in a small town, start to make a difference. And Chuck and I both, my husband and I both wanted make a difference, right? We want to be people who feel like we're contributing, and we want to feel like we're contributing to community. And I think Maquoketa is a place where we felt like we could do it.

[Nebbe] Rose often ponders how art best serves the community and strives to bring her work to people who don't always get a chance to experience art.

[Fransen] When I started painting, I started painting by looking at objects and painting them as I saw them. And it wasn't too long that I wanted to tell a story that would wake me up in the middle of the night and paint from that story, which would be a world you don't see. And I would say that would be the driving factor of my work since I learned to paint.

So, some of the work in the show here is work that I think is kind of addressing, like, some. How do I address the national conversation? Like, how do I talk about all the conversations that are happening around us? Or how we treat each other, or how we see other people, how we don't see each other.

It's as if questions drive my work and my work, my skill of painting has had to change and evolve by the questions that I'm asking myself. So, whatever's going on internally, externally, I like to put it on the easel.

[Nebbe] Rose's paintings impact and inspire those who witness them. Something she never takes for granted.

[Fransen] There's something about this witnessing of the world that we live in and trying to figure out how to capture it and put it down that is so, so, so fundamentally human and so available for all of us to do. I like the idea that when you're creating, you're not destroying. It's the opposite of destruction, isn't it?

And it's interesting because some art is like you deconstruct things in order to reconstruct it. But art is this movement that I think is absolutely fundamental to the human experience. And how can I not be lucky that I live in that, you know, make something. I get to make something all day long, right?

[Nebbe] Music has a remarkable ability to lift the spirit and bring people together. We're going to find out about a choir for people living with Parkinson's and their loved ones. They call themselves the Tremble Clefs. And through their voices they find strength, connection and joy with every note.  

(music)

[Sun Joo Lee] Look up. I'm here, everyone.  

There's a bright golden haze on the meadow. There's a —   

[Sun Joo Lee] The Tremble Clef is a choir for people with Parkinson's disease, caregivers and family members.  Everybody's voice is so awesome. Right? Jen — Oh, what a beautiful morning.

[Voice in background] Oh, what a beautiful morning.

[Sun Joo Lee] Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative movement disorder that affect motor and non-motor functioning.

[Choir] I'm alive, awake, alert, enthusiastic. 

Alive, awake, alert.

[Sun Joo Lee] More than 70% of people with Parkinson's disease experience some voice and speech related symptoms.  

[Choir] I'm alive, awake, alert, enthusiastic.   

[Sun Joo Lee] They experience some enunciation problems, the reduced volume of speech and monotone speech.

[Choir] Alive, awake, alert, enthusiastic.

[Sun Joo Lee] It's not just simply singing for fun. It's a therapy. There are lots of goals we have to accomplish.  Mama. Mama, stop. Now we go.

[Choir] (singing)

[Sun Joo Lee] We are using therapeutic group singing as a major intervention for people with Parkinson's disease   

[Choir] (singing) 

[Sun Joo Lee] - to improve their respiratory, phonatory and articulatory systems.  

[Choir] (singing)  

[Sun Joo Lee] We're using the lung muscles for breathing. We're using our larynx and vocal cords to produce the sound. We are using our lips and jaws and the muscles on our face to articulate.

In music there are so many different kinds of elements. We have melody, we have rhythm, we have tempo, and we have expression. So those elements help those people to feel better, think better, move better, and also help them to be connected with others. So, music is creating a very positive and safe place for us to communicate.

But I think it's such a beautiful thing that we can use music, especially singing. It's very flexible, it's welcoming. It's universal. It's a really easy way for people to communicate, especially people with PD. They are losing their voice to communicate. 

[Sun Joo Lee] The reason we want to include the caregivers and family members is they also need this type of therapy. Living with Parkinson's disease is not an easy journey.

[Dan Berkowitz] I was diagnosed in 2013, and I wasn't sure what to do. But when I met with my neurologist, he said, you can still lead a pretty well, normal life. And so, for several years, I did things like bike riding with a bike club.

[Holly Berkowitz] He was a very kind and thoughtful person. So, I just fell head over heels for Dan. We were very active. We both loved the outdoors.

[Dan Berkowitz] Parkinson's made me not really an active person anymore. I'd love to be able to go on a walk and feel like I'm not worrying about falling, but it just keeps happening. I then think, well, it's an old person's disease. And I say, oh, well, I'm an old person.

[Holly Berkowitz] No, you're not. Well, you're still young.

[Dan Berkowitz] I'm older than you.

[Holly Berkowitz] A whole week.

[Dan Berkowitz] We're both 72.  Well, sometimes I imagine my voice, and it's not the same as the one I'm hearing.

[Holly Berkowitz] I feel the connection.

[Dan Berkowitz] We hold hands.

[Holly Berkowitz] We hold hands, and we pay close attention to the sound and make sure it's in tune and one whole sound. 

[Dan Berkowitz] It brings us together. I think it makes you feel a little more positive. And the collective of the whole group singing all together.  

[Choir] (singing)

[Sun Joo Lee] Without the fun aspect, they are not coming back. If they do not come back to the setting, the treatment, therapy, there's no improvement. I really encourage people to consider music therapy for treating people with Parkinson's disease. It's a simple singing group, but it can provide more than that. It just gives them a chance to be more socialized and helping each other so that they can continue their life with Parkinson's disease.

[Choir] (singing)

(applause)

[Nebbe] That's all for this week. Thank you for joining me as we celebrate the people who help us see Iowa in new ways. I'm Charity Nebbe. See you next time for more Iowa Life.  (music)

[Announcer] Funding for Iowa Life is provided by the Lainie Grimm Fund for Inclusive Programming at the Iowa PBS Foundation. And by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation.