03 Ottumwa, Iowa If bookstores are rare in Iowa, personal libraries are therefore slim and eclectic by nature of inheritance. I’m shown a prized old book, an 1895 tome on medicating oneself with wild herbs. I check out the sections on laudanum, jimson weed, and bleeding oneself to relieve headaches. I am curious how many people in the Midwest accidentally killed themselves after using this book, companion to their bible, as a guide to remedy their ills. The section on tansies is pointed out as an herb recently found effective against ants. I’m offered borrow of the book during my visit, but decline on the basis that I will not want to give it back, will read the whole thing instead of looking at the soybean and corn, and will feel guilty for not returning a singular collection of one book per family. The most interesting building in Ottumwa is one that has been gone for more than a hundred years. The Ottumwa Coal Palace existed from 1890-1891 as a promotional building veneered with coal and paper mache made to look like coal. There is currently a scale model (made from plaster painted to look like coal) of the gothic structure along with information pertaining to the southeast Iowa coal industry housed at the Wapello County Historical Museum. Every farmer in southeastern Iowa had their own coal mine. The museum is very well organized, and occupies the second and basement floors of the Amtrak and Trailways station in downtown Ottumwa. The building is made of coarse limestone cut into ashlar blocks. There are several buildings faced with terra cotta in Ottumwa, though of modest proportions. In 1916 was built the now restored six-story Renaissance Revival brick and terra cotta Ottumwa Hotel south of Central Park. The architects were Proudfoot, Bird & Rawson of Chicago. The most outstanding building today I think is the First National Bank of terra cotta in a Neo-classical style. Ottumwa also sports an historic horse trough with lion’s head and spigots. Iowa is friendly and consoling in an odd way. I’m sitting on the sidewalk, which appears to be a native custom, and this gray haired fellow walks toward me. He is wearing a resplendent silver long-horned steer belt buckle and a monster of a turquoise and silver bolo tie clasp. I’m in admiration despite the fact that he looks like he might have fallen off too many mules and is missing his wife. As he gets close by he says, “I won’t give up. I’ll never give up.” Not knowing what else to do I tell him I’ll never give up either, even if I’m not too sure right then what I’m not about to give up on. I much enjoy the Canteen, a yellow painted cement block building the size of a three-car garage where I purchase loose meat on a bun with onions and mustard and stick a pushpin into a map of America to show where I am from. This is a happening place in Ottumwa and where I learn from a proud grandmother that Iowa girls as young as four years of age shave their legs. For souvenirs we go to O’Leary’s Hardware where they have a bridal registry and I try to by a coffee mug with pigs on it. They have nearly run out, but think that there is one cup left in the back that they go looking for. Mug in hand I move on in quest of a cold beer. -- ][<en Follett SOS Gab & Eti -- http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/5836