THE POINT AT ISSUE4 Friday, November 16, 2018 Chronicle Times

Our Opinion

At a recent City Council meeting, Council member Will Miller made a motion to amend the minutes of the October 23, 2018, Council meeting with an insertion of comments made by citizen Rich Cook favorable to outgoing City Administrator Sam Kooiker.

Uh, OK. Council member Chad Brown stated that he

did not feel this is an appropriate reason for amending official minutes and is not in favor of changing minutes in order to insert comments to make oneself look better.

Kooiker, who pushed for the comments to be inserted into the amended official minutes, replied that Cook’s comments were heartfelt, sincere and unplanned and he thinks it is rea-sonable that they be included. He said he has spoken to Cook about the inclusion and Cook has no problem with it.

To his credit, Mayor Craig Schmidt won-dered if there had been negative comments made, would there be a similar request for inclusion? Like Brown, the Mayor was against amending the minutes for such trivia.

Brown made a motion to approve the min-utes as written, but it died for lack of a second. Miller then made a motion, seconded by Coun-cil member Emily Johnson, to approve the October 23, 2018, minutes with and an amend-ment to include the following statement: Rich Cook commended Sam for his time with the City and wished him well in his new position.

Roll call - AYES: Miller, Johnson, Jim Agnitsch. NAYES: Brown. Council member Wayne Pingel was absent.

Besides a waste of City Hall time, something about this rings hollow, self-serving and little more than a petty stroll into the beckoning bosom of Self-Aggrandizement.

(Paul Struck)

You gotta be kidding

From the Mayor’s DeskMayor Craig Schmidt

As many of you are aware, our City Administrator Sam Kooiker resigned and is heading back to his old stomping grounds in Sheldon.

The purpose of this letter is to keep the citizens of Cherokee informed as to what your Mayor and Coun-cil are doing to make sure the City stays on an even keel while we await the new Admin-istrator.

Our plan of action

falls within two cat-egories - the interim period and the appoint-ment of a search com-mittee seeking a new Administrator. Regarding the interim period, there will be a shuffling of responsi-bilities and reporting guidelines. To that end, we are extremely fortu-nate to have excellent department heads and employees. They know their responsibilities.

In regards to the search committee, I am

pleased to announce that our previous Administrator, Don Eikmeier, will assist us in the recruiting process. Don has a vast knowledge of the City of Cherokee and will represent us well. The committee con-sists of some Council members, Mayor, and legal counsel. Once we have narrowed the viable candidates down to 2 or 3, a few committee members will be added.

The City Council has already approved the recruiting servic-es contract, approved the City Administra-tor profile and we have already begun advertising for a new Administrator. The cut off date for appli-

cations is January 1, 2019 so we are well on our way to finding the best Administra-tor possible.

It is our goal to have all the patience nec-essary to select the candidate that fits the ideals, goals, and continued growth that represents the City of Cherokee. We have gained a very posi-tive momentum over the last year with the addition of new busi-nesses and the pass-ing of a $12 million school bond with a vast majority of vot-ers. Rest assured, City Hall will do all that is in its power to enhance that momentum and keep the values that so represent Cherokee.

Spending my childhood with Stan LeeBy John L. Micek

On Sunday after-noons in the late 1970s and early 1980s, long after 11 a.m. mass had finished, my cous-in and I would head down the street to a little convenience store, hard against the Berlin Turnpike, that sold milk, bread, snacks, sundries, and, most important of all - comic books.

We’d let ourselves in, the bell hanging on top of the door jingling, the traffic still echoing in our ears in the brisk snap of a New England fall, and head for the spinning rack where four-color heroes on newsprint pulled us in with gravitational force.

Our prizes collected, we’d pay, and head back for an afternoon of heavy reading, pass-ing the books between us until the sun hung low in the sky and our parents were beck-oning from the front door, the cars warm-ing in the driveway.

I’d read the Marvel titles and pretend I liked them. In truth, it was mostly to humor my cousin. I was a DC kid through and through.

Then one Saturday afternoon, I discov-ered a copy of a paper-back collection called “Origins of Marvel Comics.” It was pretty much what it sound-ed like: An omnibus reprint of the origin stories of “The Fantas-tic Four,” “The Hulk,” “Spider-Man,” “Thor,” and the mysterious “Dr. Strange.”

I finally understood the human-level dra-mas of the dysfunc-

tional “Fantastic Four.” The dangers of the nuclear age, and the Cold War, then still very real, were driven home in the tragedy of “The Hulk.” Thor’s pseudo-Chaucerian dialogue was preposterous, but I loved it anyway. The ostracization “The X-Men” endured was a metaphor for every repressed minority, a reminder of how easy it is to hate and fear someone or something you don’t understand.

A New York kid with outsized ambitions, Lee (born Stanley Liber) figured his work in comics would be a way station on the way to literary greatness. It didn’t happen, but something even more profound did.

Lee became an assis-tant at Timely Comics in 1939, which would later evolve into Mar-vel Comics. After a decade or so of post-World War II artistic stagnation, Lee helped spark what’s become known as “The Silver Age” of comics in the early 1960s. Lee rose to become Marvel’s editor-in-chief.

While he was a visionary, Lee was hardly perfect - as a unsparing 2016 profile in New York Magazine made painfully clear.

He had a nasty habit of hogging credit for his heroes. His gift for unrelenting self-promotion meant that the real talent behind the books - the great Jack “King” Kirby, Steve Ditko (who died in June at age 90) and the surrealistically stylish Jim Steranko - were unjustly over-shadowed and robbed

of the credit they so richly deserved.

“Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything,” Kirby told an interviewer in 1989, according to that 2016 New York Magazine profile. “It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things - or old things, for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told sto-ries.”

But Lee, as the face of Marvel, helped keep the company afloat through fallow times. And his high-stepping style drew in gen-erations of fans. He penned a florid month-ly column in those 1970s comics, sign-ing off with a jaunty “Excelsior!” at the end of each piece.

And even though he didn’t own the rights to his creations, Lee parted from Marvel in the early 1990s with a severance package so immense that the child of The Great Depression never had to worry about money ever again.

At the end of his life, Lee battled failing health and allegations that he was the subject of elder abuse, which played out in a Los Angeles courtroom over the course of this summer.

Even so, that didn’t keep him from hitting the convention circuit. Lee’s 2018 schedule included Silicon Val-ley Comic Con. At that convention, his health had deteriorated to the point where he was struggling to sign his name. He announced his exit from the con-vention circuit in

John L. Micek

August.Maybe it’s true that

Lee didn’t exactly tell stories. It’s more accurate to say that he provided the archi-tecture for greater writing talents to tell those stories, and for gifted artists to make them leap off the page.

But it’s also true that Lee did some-thing of equal, or, per-haps greater impor-tance: His pride in those creations and his unrelenting pro-motion of them, now means that garishly costumed heroes, whose adventures are disposable by their very nature, have survived, and have been passed down to new generations of readers.

Yes, I know, those heroes are now multi-billion dollar proper-ties that effectively print money for their Hollywood overlords. But that won’t keep me from getting more than a tad nostalgic about it.

After all, myths and legends fade from memory if there’s no one around to repeat them. And Lee, who helped give breath to our latter-day myths and legends, did that almost better than anyone.

So, one last time, “Excelsior!”

Naig comments on Iowa crop progress and condition report

DES MOINES – Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig today comment-ed on the Iowa Crop Progress and Condi-tion report released by the USDA Nation-al Agricultural Sta-tistical Service. The report is released weekly from April through November.

“Farmers have now harvested 83 percent of corn and 94 percent of soybeans, which is 3 and 4 days behind average, respectively. It has been a long and challenging har-vest season for Iowa farmers to harvest crops and complete other fall field work,” Naig said. “The dead-line to seed cereal rye cover crops has been extended to Dec. 1 statewide, so there is still time for farm-ers to get cover crops planted and complete other conservation work this fall.”

The weekly report is also available on the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship’s website at www.IowaAgri-culture.gov or on USDA’s site at www.nass.usda.gov/ia. The report summary fol-lows here:

CROP REPORTAs temperatures

dipped below normal across much of the State, Iowa farmers managed to find 4.0 days suitable for field-work during the week ending November 11, 2018, according to the USDA, National Agricultural Statis-tics Service. Activities for the week includ-ed harvesting corn and soybeans, baling

Mike Naig

stalks, applying anhy-drous and manure, repairing tile, and fall tillage in areas where the ground was not too frozen.

Topsoil moisture levels rated 0 percent very short, 1 percent short, 80 percent adequate and 19 per-cent surplus. Subsoil moisture levels rated 0 percent very short, 2 percent short, 77 per-cent adequate and 21 percent surplus.

Eighty-three percent of the State’s corn for grain crop has been harvested, 3 days behind the five-year average. Farmers in north central Iowa have harvested 91 per-cent of their corn for grain while farmers in the southwest have 36 percent of their corn for grain remaining to be harvested. Mois-ture content of field corn being harvested averaged 16 percent. Soybean harvest was 94 percent complete, 3 days behind last year and 4 days behind the average.

Feedlots and pas-tures remain exces-sively wet and frozen in some areas. Live-stock were stressed by extremely cold week-end temperatures.