One of my goals for the Dubuquer blog is to chronicle humorous allusions or references to Dubuque.

Here’s one from Wonkette, “an online roundup of gossip from Washington, DC and the US political arena,” in Josh Fruhlinger’s satirical post, “The Foreigns Vote Early And Often.” An excerpt:

You might think of Spain as “Europe’s Mexico,” but it turns out Albania has that job wrapped up. No, Spain is actually Europe’s America, if the ongoing election season is any indication!

The left- and right-wing candidates went on the teevee for a debate! They argued about the doomed economy, and all those illegal immigrants flowing in from the south, and accused each other of being Soft On Terror.

Then the local religious types weighed in, nudging everyone towards the right-wing types. There was even a YouTube debate, where a dude wearing pearls and a dress talked about gay marriage! It’s all so familiar, it’s like you’re at home in Dubuque!

For some other recent examples of irreverent references to Dubuque, click here.

At this moment there are over 630 search results for “dubuque” on YouTube!

Click on the play button below to watch a 1:16 minute video clip about the Dubuque Pack by LCTV reporter Erin Horst.

Note: If you have dial up, try clicking on the pause button at the lower left corner of the video, wait until the red or gray bar indicates that the video has completely loaded, and then press play again. The video may take several minutes to load.

If you don’t see the video, click here.

The Sheboygan Wisconsin Press wants to know why artist Paul Noth used the name of their fair city in the caption of his recent New Yorker cartoon.

Noth’s response? “The Great Drywall of Dubuque” is just not as funny.

If you think you’d enjoy songs about “beer goggles” and “whiskey dick,” you might like the band Three Beers ‘Til Dubuque.

Described as “an 8 piece Funk-Rockin, High-Voltage, Mind-Blowin, Swinging machine,” Three Beers, a.k.a. “That Beers Band,” is based in La Crosse, Wisconsin, about 120 miles upriver from Dubuque.

Do the math: eight band members times three beers each equals twenty-four beers, or one case . . . sweet!

Examples of original songs:

Long Legged
Honkin at the Amish
Daily Buck
Get Out of My Bed
Breezin
What You Got For Me
Chicken Fried Steak

Excerpt from “Get Out of My Bed”:

You don’t have to go home,
but you can’t stay here.
Our time was special,
but I think it was the beer.
I’m no longer wasted;
Get out of my bed!

Audio and video at MySpace.

Robert Byrne. Memories of a Non-Jewish Childhood. New York: Lyle Stuart. 1970. Fiction. 192 pages.

“A most unusual novel about growing up Catholic in Dubuque, Iowa.” Author Robert Byrne explains, “The book is a blend of theology and toilet humor, as was my childhood.”

Compared in reviews to Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Excerpt, chapter one, part one:

Normally my mother had to resort to violence to get me out of bed, but one morning I was on my feet dressing with the first rays of the sun. In only forty-five minutes I would make my debut as an altar boy in the big church, having completed the initiation of serving a dozen early Masses in the nuns’ chapel. I should have been dreading the mistakes I was bound to make but I was too excited over something else for that. My mind was filled with visions of an event I had been looking forward to for months–this was the day that Porky Schornhorst would light a fart.

Porky Schornhorst lit farts just once a year and only for his closest friends. He was the only person in Dubuque County who could do it or even had the nerve to try.

Out of print. As of September 28, 2007, used copies available from $14.86 to $245.51. Also published in paperback under the title Once a Catholic.

Links

YouTube Video: Author Robert Bryne
Bryne discusses Dubuquers’ reactions to Memories of a Non-Jewish Childhood. July 11, 2007. 49 seconds.

Byrne’s Books and Billiards

Memories of a Non-Jewish Childhood: The Musical by David Resnick

Happy Accidents (2000), starring Vincent D’Onofrio and Marisa Tomei, is another quirky romantic comedy in which Dubuque is a “running gag.” It’s similar to Sex in the City, but with a sci-fi twist, complete with cameo by 80s “nerd-of-choice” Anthony Michael Hall.

Neurotic New Yorker Tomei falls for Joe Cockeresque D’Onofrio, even though D’Onofrio insists he is a time traveler from the Dubuque of the future. Due to climate change, D’Onofrio informs Tomei, Dubuque will be located on the East Coast by 2470.

Writer/director Brad Anderson explains in the DVD commentary: “People in Iowa might not appreciate the joke about D’Onofrio being a Dubuquer, but it’s funny in Manhattan!”

An excerpt:

D’ONOFRIO:
Okay, look, I’ll say it. All right? I’m not from Dubuque.

TOMEI:
Okay. You’re not from Dubuque. So where are you from then?

D’ONOFRIO:
Dubuque.

TOMEI:
[screams]

D’ONOFRIO:
I’m not from Dubuque in the way you think.

TOMEI:
How many ways are there?

D’ONOFRIO:
I’m not from your Dubuque.

TOMEI:
Since when is Dubuque mine? I’ve never been to Ohio!

D’ONOFRIO:
Iowa.

TOMEI:
Whatever.

D’ONOFRIO:
I’m just saying that my Dubuque is different from your Dubuque.

TOMEI:
How?

D’ONOFRIO:
It doesn’t exist.

TOMEI:
You just said it’s in Idaho.

D’ONOFRIO:
Iowa!

TOMEI:
So your Dubuque doesn’t exist?

D’ONOFRIO:
Yet.

TOMEI:
Yet!

D’ONOFRIO:
Yet.

TOMEI:
So when will your Dubuque exist?

D’ONOFRIO:
2470 . . . AD . . . That’s in 471 years . . . from now.

TOMEI:
471 years?

D’ONOFRIO:
Not counting leap years.

TOMEI:
. . .

D’ONOFRIO:
See, when I say “my Dubuque,” I don’t mean the present Dubuque . . . which is your Dubuque. I mean the future Dubuque, which is where I’m from.

According to The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz by Thomas Gifford (1997), Charles “Chuck” Stoltz was “the most unpopular man in Dubuque with the working man—maybe the most unpopular man in the history of Dubuque.” Considering that Stoltz faced death threats, needed personal bodyguards and off-duty police to protect his home and family, and once even narrowly escaped a roadblock meant to ensnare him, it might be more accurate to call Stoltz the most hated man in Dubuque history.

Stoltz became president of the Dubuque Packing Company, one of the largest and most prestigious companies in the city, at a time when the local pork processing operation was losing nearly $10 million per year. Stoltz closed the local hog kill and fired 1,400 workers, and then sold the entire Dubuque plant to his brother-in-law Bob Wahlert in a deal that enabled Wahlert to rename the facility and cut union wages by 40 percent. Stoltz, a “Dubuquer born and bred,” then moved the remaining Dubuque Packing Company to Omaha, Nebraska, where he later sold it to Eastern speculators in a leveraged buyout.

Stoltz got his start at “The Pack” in the 1960s by marrying the daughter of R. C. Wahlert, acting head of the family company and nephew of founder H. W. Wahlert. Frustrated by his outsider status and by resistance to change at the “tired and overconfident” pork processing company, Stoltz found his niche managing DPC’s long-neglected beef operations.

A self-styled “master of the art of the deal,” Stoltz used DPC resources to acquire several beef processing companies and plants located near cattle supplies in states like Nebraska and Kansas. By the late 70s, beef operations boomed as pork operations stagnated, and R. C. Wahlert chose Charles Stoltz over his own son and heir apparent Bob Walhert to become president of Dubuque Packing Company.

Thomas Gifford’s book, The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz, is an apologia for what happened next. According to the book, Stoltz was forced to close the Dubuque hog kill and sell the Dubuque plant to Bob Wahlert and FDL Foods in order to save the remaining core of the Dubuque Packing Company. From Stoltz’s perspective, intense competition and consolidation within the meatpacking industry made the failure of the Dubuque pork processing plant inevitable. The ultimate demise of Bob Wahlert’s FDL Foods, even after union wages had been slashed, seems to support this argument.

On the other hand, Gifford’s book makes clear that at a time when the overall company was profitable, Stoltz had no qualms about using the acquisition of efficient, modern, and non-union plants to intimidate the union at the older Dubuque facility into making difficult concessions. Gifford even seems to suggest that Stoltz had wanted to rid the Dubuque Packing Company of pork operations all along, and had planned to eventually sell the remaining company at a profit to benefit shareholders.

The book, however, favors Stoltz. The author, Thomas Gifford, was a native Dubuquer, Harvard University graduate, and best-selling novelist. Before he died in 2000, Gifford wrote a weekly column called “Jazzbo of Old Dubuque” for the Dubuque Telegraph Herald. Despite this, I could not find a review or even a mention in the Telegraph Herald of Gifford’s The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz. No publisher is cited in the book, either. Copyright, with “all rights reserved,” is listed as being owned by none other than Charles E. Stoltz.

How did Dubuque Avenue in South San Francisco get its name? The Dubuque Packing Company had a processing plant and distribution and sales offices there for many years.

According to The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz by Thomas Gifford (1997), in its heyday Dubuque Packing supplied over half of all of the canned hams sold in California.

From an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1959:

You’ll have the hit of the season on your hands when you serve this wonderful change of pace at Thanksgiving — Dubuque Ham! Skinned, boned and deliciously smoked, Dubuque Ham has already been vacuum-cooked . . . can be served as it comes from the can or cooked according to your favorite recipe. Carefully selected from the finest hams produced in Iowa, the Tall Corn Country, Dubuque Hams are famous for their tenderness, superb texture and excellent flavor.

Being a newcomer to town, I have trouble believing that less than ten years ago several thousand hogs were slaughtered each day in Dubuque at “The Pack” processing plant.

According to Dubuque, the Encyclopedia by Randolph W. Lyon (1991) and the Telegraph Herald (”The Pack” by M.D. Kittle, July 31, 2005), about 3,500 Dubuque Packing Company employees processed 9,000 hogs daily during peak production in the 1970s. If processing was continuous, as it must have been, 375 hogs were processed every hour, which is over 6 hogs per minute.

Even as late as 1997, between 6,000 and 7,000 hogs per day were slaughtered in Dubuque (”Meatpacker Weathers Controversy” by Kathy Bergstrom, TH, October 19, 1997).

It’s hard to imagine the logistics of such an operation, the semi-truck and railroad traffic, crowded stockyards, deafening noise of animals and machinery, nauseating stench, relentless back-breaking work, and so on.

Astonishingly, “The Pack” is rubble today, recently demolished to make way for a shopping center. After years of losing millions of dollars, severe pay and benefit cuts, thousands of layoffs, and a series of questionable sellouts, “The Pack” closed for good in 2001.

To learn more about the rise and fall of meat packing in Dubuque, this weekend I checked out a copy of The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz by Thomas Gifford (1997) from the library at the University of Dubuque. I’ll post a summary of this odd book in the next week or two.

For current information about large-scale pork processing, see this December 2006 video clip from PBS about the Smithfield Meatpacking Plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, a plant where 5,500 workers slaughter 33,000 hogs each day.

One of the ironies of living in Dubuque, Iowa is the immediate and frequent access to presidential candidates. In recent weeks visitors to Dubuque have included Hilary Clinton, John McCain, Tommy Thompson, and Joseph Biden. John Edwards even got a haircut here.

Today, Barack Obama kicked off his national “Walk for Change” campaign at a rally at Lincoln Elementary School in Dubuque, less than ½ mile from where I live.

I myself walked three or four blocks from my house to Lincoln School, one of many ward schools in Dubuque where African Americans were denied admission in the 1870s, and watched as Senator Obama urged a meager crowd of a few hundred onlookers to mobilize.

Why did Obama choose Dubuque as the starting point for this “historic” campaign, a nationwide event reportedly involving “10,000 volunteers from New York to San Diego“?

Yes, Dubuque is a gateway to Iowa, a key state in next year’s primary elections, en route from Obama’s home in Chicago.

I prefer to believe, however, that Obama chose Dubuque because Dubuque epitomizes Middle America. Dubuque, this now-certified All America City, is where the grass roots are, for want of a better metaphor, thickest.