Announcer: Coming up on this episode of Iowa Life Learning about the origin of a unique town festival.

It's a small town celebration with the Star Trek theme and the only one like it on the planet.

What it takes to restore farmland to prairie.

I thought what else could it be?

What could it become.

Prarie came to mind.

And launching a printed newspaper to serve black Iowans.

The black Iowa newspaper is for those times.

You read a news story and felt excluded or othered.

This and more coming up next on Iowa Life.

Funding for Iowa Life is provided by...

The Gilchirst Foundation.

Founded by Jocelyn Gilchrist, furthering the philanthropic interests of the Gilchrist famil in wildlife and conservation the arts and public broadcasting and disaster relief.

Mark and Kay De Cook Charitable Foundation.

Proud to support programs that highlight the stories about the people and places of Iowa.

The Strickler family.

In loving memory of Lois Strickler, to support programs that highlight the importance of Iowas natural resources on Iowa PBS.

And by The Lainie Grimm Fund for Inclusive Programming at the Iowa PBS Foundation.

[music] For over three decades, thousands of Star Trek fans, also known as Trekkies.

They don't even feel like they're on Make their way to the small Iowa community.

They come to celebrate the birth of a fictional captain from a sci fi TV show.

That won't happen for another 200 years.

And it's all the brainchild of this man.

I'm Steve Miller, and I came up with the idea of Riverside being the future birthplace of Captain Kirk.

In the mid 1960s, Gene Roddenberry created the science fiction TV show Star Trek.

He assembled a diverse cast of characters where humanity set aside their differences to work toward scientific discovery.

The show captured imaginations of countless people across the world and sparked enthusiasm to create over a dozen movies, several spinoffs, fan clubs, conventions and even a small town festival.

Steve: came out in 1966, and I was a senior in high school.

Usually when you're a senior in high school on Friday night at 8:00, you're not home watching television with your family.

But I like the show.

It was a show that captured a lot of people of my generation of my age at that time.

Star Trek was there and pervasive Enterprise.

Log: Captain James Kirk, commanding.

I read the book The Making of Star Trek by Stephen Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry.

And Roddenberry, of course, created Star Trek.

There was a biography of Captain Kirk, and it says he appears to be about 34 years old and was born in a small town in the state of Iowa.

Well, being born in a small town, the state of Iowa, that, of course, was something I latched on to.

And so the evolution of that came when I was on the city council.

And the mayor, Robert Schneider, asked us to come to the next meeting and discuss how we would promote our community.

And so I had this low hanging fruit out there.

So I brought it up at the council meeting.

The rest of the council, there was only three other members there.

Then one guy said, you know, there's not much going on here now, this might help.

So he seconded the motion and one motion passed.

And the next day I called a friend, Tom Walsh, who was a writer for the C Rapids Gazette, and told him, This is what we've done at the council meeting the night before.

He ran a front page story on the Cedar Rapids Gazette the next day, and then it took off.

This final frontier starts in Riverside, Iowa.

There it is, a monument honoring the future birth of Captain James T Kirk.

Every television station in Iowa came.

Radio stations were calling.

I don't want to say it was a slow news time, but it was kind of a fun thing.

Claiming to be the future birthplace of Captain Kirk was the easy part.

Convincing the community and Hollywood lawyers proved to be a different challenge.

We hadn't really prepped the community for what was going on, and so the first response was a little out there.

I've said the most difficult thing I had to do when I first came up with this was go down to our senior citizens dining, our congregate meal program and explain to people in their seventies and eighties a fictional character in a television show they'd never paid any attention to is going to be born here in another 238 years.

Hard concept to get out there.

In the meantime, Paramount Studios is offering to sue me into poverty and the community because they think we're stealing something.

And so we exchanged certified letters and things back and forth.

I had told the city council that I'd take responsibility for any legal action, not realizing that there would be any.

So this then became incumbent on me to figure out.

Steve was facing an uphill battle and Riverside's claim was in a tenuous position.

But with the continued media attention, Steve's idea eventually reached the ears of Mr. Gene Roddenberry.

But once it started getting into the bigger newspapers, Gannett News called him and got a hold of him, and he thought it was a his quote was, It's a very enterprising idea.

And as far as I'm concerned, the first volunteer has it.

But I've been in discussion with their attorney.

And I said, you know, we're not ever going to do anything to harm Paramount or the Star Trek franchise.

We're giving you millions of dollars in free publicity.

And she goes, you know, you're right.

And so that was the end of it.

that summer of 1985 was the first trek fest, it's a small town celebration with the Star Trek theme and the only one like it on the planet.

This is an event, like I would say, no other convention that takes place, Star Trek wise, throughout the whole entire year.

The locals, this is for them, the Trekkies.

This is also for them.

If you're not a Trekkie, don't worry about it.

This is home for everybody.

We're just here to have a good time and celebrate.

Like I said, the future birthplace of Captain James Kirk.

For me, IDIC it infinite diversity and infinite combination that everybody just accepting of everybody.

And the fellowship over the years, you build with everybody.

I mean, we've known most of these guys for decades.

I mean, just the vastness of the story that you can tell because it's like it's all the space.

Yeah.

So there's infinite stories and possibilities to capture.

Also, like Captain Kirk being just the space cowboy that he is, makes it that much more fun.

For three decades, Riverside has embraced itself as the birthplace of this iconic fictional character.

But why?

Why, of all places, Iowa?

Steve has a theory.

I was trying to get a hold of Gene Roddenberry forever to ask him why he said Captain Kirk was born in Iowa, and after he was dead, I did get a hold of Marjelle.

Barrett is his wife, but she kind of alluded to the fact that when you said you were from Iowa in the sixties and the fifties in California, that meant something.

It meant that you had a good education and B, you knew how to work.

And that's part of what of what I think was in Gene's mind to us being Iowans.

Like I said, it's it's such a rare occasion for us to feel like we're somebody this this, this really, really helps.

Don't tell me you're from outer space.

No, I'm from Iowa.

I only work in outer space.

I met David in college at the University of Iowa, and when we finished school we moved to Waterloo and he practiced law and I taugh After that, we were ready to come back to th And so I taught in Waterloo and he farmed the family farm.

When David died, it was hard for me to see a way with managing acres and acres of and soybeans.

I had good dinners, but it was still a new task for So I started thinking, What else could it be like and what could And Prairie came to mind.

John Madsen's book, Where the Sky Began, came out, a and I both read it.

We loved the idea of Iowa's hist My husband was a big fan of hist so the thought of Iowa's landsca as it was 200 years ago intrigue This beautiful landscape of nati grasses, forms kept our interest, and that was always in the backg 2016.

My husband died in May and it came to me then.

And then the next summer I contacted Laura Jackson.

We had planted some strips of pr just a couple miles south of her I didn't know her then, but something must have made an impression because a year lat after her husband had passed awa she called us up and had this id It's amazing what happens when y any small bit of prairie.

You know, the if you build it, they will come.

You know, the bees show up.

Butterflies show up.

Somehow the birds find it.

And and we'll raise a family the and try to make a go of it.

It's not easy to plant a prairie, but it can be done in one year.

But the management is forever.

They need fire.

And woody invasion is going to h And then you kind of get somethi that goes out of control.

And then a lot of times they the taking them out because they're just too much tr So we started talking in early 2 and then, you know, worked through the various hoops and logistics of working w UNI foundation so that we could get a permanent easement on the land We had to really convince the un that this was a good idea, that this is something that we could take care of prope and not just end up with an alba around our necks, you know?

So we worked out a map that said all right, we're going to do thi chunk in 2018 and then this chun and then 2021, 22.

But this field was very clean.

It didn't have a lot of issues w because it had been farmed for s So it was a ideal spot.

Now, right here is like one litt that's just encapsulates all the things that are blooming right n Pale purple cornflower is just starting to b The white is wild quinine.

The orange butterfly weed is just stunning.

It's just like neon orange.

This other white I think is wild And it is so weird.

It's got that bizarre shape and they aren't very prevalent, but when they are, they just glo I don't have children, so it's wonderful for me.

I can walk on the prairie every but I want to share it and have young people in schools come and about the history and appreciate being outside in all this beauty To work out looking a different to look for insects.

We're looking at sign of insects meaning some of the leaves that woven together or a plant is ben and we go down the stem and we find the little hole of t in the stem.

So this is a planted prairie.

How do you get the insects that need these plants?

Here They come on their own.

How do they find it?

Where's the next prairie?

Around And yet they find this.

I think it's.

Exciting.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

So it changes every day, particularly this time of the ye after the prairie was burned, that everything is starting to f It's like spring every day.

It's an unending, joyful surpris to come to the prairie every day Well, it was about 85%.

Prairie and the rest, wetlands and woodl The landscape we see today is almost entirely and soybeans, with only very tiny fractions of of that agricultural grassland that used to be there.

You know, I think we're we're doing what w in the face of some pretty stagg facts.

You know, climate change and the know, agriculture continues to i So we try to save as much as we So something makes it so.

Is the glass 99% empty or 1% ful But, you know, there are lots of who appreciate Prairie and want to have some, you know.

So I don't think anyone should be intimidated into thinking, well, I have to have to give them 300 No, You know, but it's just it's an astonishin At the dedication, I quoted Will We come and go, but the land is always here.

The people who love and understa it are the people who own it for a little while.

And then I said, my little while I'm here with you people who love the prairie and dedicating it to you and your stewardship.

But I want you to remember that the original people who loved and understood it cared for it for thousands of years and maintained it as prairie.

The black Iowa newspaper is for those times.

You read a news story and felt excluded or othered.

It's for the Times.

You wondered why blacks dominate crime coverage, but little else is for the Times.

Our stories simply weren't covered or they got it wrong.

Again, this is for the times.

You want it to read something positive or nuanced but couldn't find it or couldn't afford it.

On top of everything else.

This is for all of those times.

People ask, Are there black people in Iowa?

My name is Dana James, and I'm founder and publisher of Black Iowa News.

blacks make up 4% of Iowa's population.

were existing within this framework that has us in a corner, has us in a box.

we know people are being facetious when they say, are there black people in Iowa, but we are here and many of us are doing great things.

We're helping our communities, It's not always seen.

And so a lot about what I do a black Iowa news is that being her piece like we we need to be her we need to be seen There's too much talent in this state for us not to have our own newspaper.

there's plenty of things that say, you know, the industry is talking about, you know, the decline of newspapers, We already know that's bad for our democracy, but it's also bad for us as black people, because now there are the even fewer opportunities for our stories to be told I started it just, you know, with friends and family and journalists, people that I knew.

It was really to keep us safe.

I was noticing what was happening with the pandemic.

And I'm reading stories from all across the country about how black families, you know, are just getting decimated, here in Iowa, the news really wasn't doing a great job of telling me how many black Iowans were being affected, So I started trying to dig through the numbers and find the numbers.

I studied Substack platform and I was like, You know what?

I can do this.

But at the same time, I'm doing it kind of in this part time way because I'm still working for this insurance company.

So then George Floyd gets murdered the protest movements and everything started.

And the CEO of that company, he sent out an email and it said, all people matter.

And I well, I cry for a long time on my husband's shoulder because I was so angry, And so that is really what I want is to go to new heights, because I knew in my heart I could not continue to work there just cranked out story after story people just started to, you know, tossed me like $75 here, hundred dollars here, and kind of cheer me on and say, keep going.

Okay.

Okay.

There she go.

Yes.

I really want black Iowa news to be that unifying force within the black community to be a way to bring us all together I want to give black Iowans opportunity to really be seen and for the stories to really be stories that can help them improve, help elevate them, help their issues be seen.

it's just a joy working on it.

You know I could be very tired and it could be 2:00 in the morning and I'm writing stories or I'm doing layout, and I still have that giddy feeling I want to put out the most high quality, best paper that I can for black Iowans because we really deserve it.

We deserve that representation and we deserve great, high quality journalism.

And that's what it's about.

[mariachi music] I It's not my culture, so I don't know much about it, but I think that's what makes me love it even more.

It's my favorite part about the end.

Everything, Quinciaras, birthdays parties, family get together is you always have mariachi music playing.

You want to enjoy some of our culture too, because it's fun.

We can enjoy it together and connect as people.

I tell people, band actors leave college with the holy trinity of band.

You've got a concert band, a marching band, a jazz band.

But there's more to music than that.

There's just all kinds of things we can get out there and do just your comfort level and go meet the students where they are.

Denison had a very strong band tradition, but I would get up in front of the concert band and at the time there's about 110 or so in the band, hundred and 20, and I'd look out at the concert band.

It did not look like the student population.

You can see the demographics in our elementary schools and you can see the trend that was happening.

And if we didn't do something, the band program wasn't going to be what it it had been.

So I immediately started looking, Well, how can we make sure we are meeting the Community West Music, which is a big music store out in eastern Iowa, was sponsoring a clinic, and the clinic was how to start a mariachi program.

And I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw that.

And so I took took that as my sign went to the clinic, said, This is it.

We got to do this.

It was very doable.

This is our first program and it's right here in the state of Iowa.

So how great is that?

So thank you very much.

Here we are ten years later, ten, 11 years later.

But with the program, So today's our fundraiser.

It's what we do, the kind of prepare the whole year for.

It's our chance to showcase our mariachi groups, mostly for the community.

I like it, though, because at the same time it feels like everyone's family because we come to support.

Yeah, well, it feels really late in the audience.

It's great.

You look out in the audience and it is a slice of Denison.

It is everybody.

It's every walk of life.

It brings everybody together because in the end, everybody likes live music.

They like to come out and see it.

So it's it's been a cool thing to see in the community and it's a good You you have to put in that extra bit of effort to go out to people and show that I care about their culture and just like they probably care about mine.

yeah.

You know, you have to put in the effort to know what the song means so you can play it correctly and put in the effort, you know?

So you're fitting the style of each song.

If you told me and you're going to have a mariachi program and it's going to change the change the community, change the school, and for the positive, it's obviously way more than I could have dreamed.

I mean, this is the job I was hoping to have and then some But you have to accept everything you see in the world.

And my group, my top group people, the people I play with that I have practice with every Tuesday and seminar during school and outside of school is that everyone has different lives and you really don't know what's going on and how people take things and what they're going through.

So being a down to earth person is what I'll take away.

It sounds cheesy.

It's a classic or down to earth, but you don't know what other people go through or what other people's lives are like until you're put in their shoes.

And I was put in other people's shoes when I joined this program Funding for Iowa Life is provided by...

The Gilchirst Foundation.

Founded by Jocelyn Gilchrist, furthering the philanthropic interests of the Gilchrist famil in wildlife and conservation the arts and public broadcasting and disaster relief.

Mark and Kay De Cook Charitable Foundation.

Proud to support programs that highlight the stories about the people and places of Iowa.

The Strickler family.

In loving memory of Lois Strickler, to support programs that highlight the importance of Iowas natural resources on Iowa PBS.

And by The Lainie Grimm Fund for Inclusive Programming at the Iowa PBS Foundation.