(Atlantic, Iowa) – Atlantic Municipal Utilities General Manager Steve Tjepkes, today (Friday), said a common telephone scam is going on in the Atlantic area again: Scammers are calling local individuals and requesting immediate payment for a past due electric bill. If payment is not made immediately, they claim your electric service will be disconnected.

Tjepkes reminds you, “AMU only calls customers during regular office hours 7:00 am to 4:00 pm, Monday through Friday and allows customers at least 24 hours to pay their accounts during regular office hours. If customers have any questions at all about a suspicious call about your utility service, immediately hang up and call AMU directly.”

(Atlantic, Iowa) – The Atlantic Chamber Ambassadors visited with Talya Kamies, Tierney Tanner and Cheryl Malzer-Kamies, owners of Lucy Mae’s Boutique, on Thursday, May 12th, 2022, to celebrate the Grand Opening of their clothing boutique in Atlantic.

The mother/daughter trio shared that their family purchased an acreage six or seven years ago and renovated the farmhouse into a beautiful boutique. They were running the business out of Talya’s home for a few years and are very happy to now have the space to display all the items and have a professional place to take photos of their merchandise. Talya describes the space as a “show room” due to the majority of their business being conducted through Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Photo/info. submitted by the Chamber

Lucy Mae’s Boutique carries a variety of clothing sizes XS-3XL, jewelry, purses, and bags for women of all ages. The boutique will be open on Saturdays from 9AM-12PM to reach those customers that prefer to shop in person.

Lucy Mae’s Boutique is located at 54166 598th Street, Atlantic.

(Radio Iowa) – An intense dust storm hit northwest Iowa in the Little Rock area late yesterday (Thursday), causing a temporary black out due to the amount of dust in the air. The word to describe this weather phenomenon was first used in the United States in 1972.  “It is pronounced huh-BOOB.”  That’s Meteorologist Allan Curtis of the National Weather Service office in Johnston. Fifty years ago, Arizona scientists began using the word to describe the dust storms that swept through the Phoenix area. The National Weather Service uses the term, but Curtis says most Iowans probably haven’t heard it because haboobs are most common in dry, arid regions in the southwest U.S. and western plains.

“Areas where typically in large parts of the year they’re very dry, but they can also get very strong storms that can produce extreme winds,” Curtis says. “…It’s quite rare to get it into what you would call the Corn Belt region just because we’re generally not that dry and even when we are dry, we have corn in the ground, soybeans and whatnot and so there’s less opportunity to kick up that much dust.”

An example of a Haboob dust storm

In the 1930s, the “Dust Bowl” did extreme damage to parts of the Great Plains as clouds of dust swept through the countryside. Curtis says it’s hard to tell with 100 percent certainty if those storms were haboobs, but it’s likely many were.  “Given all the stories that we know that have been told from the Dust Bowl and what we are able to glean from that, it was clearly an extremely dry decade, not a lot of things growing, so there was going to be ample opportunity for dry dirt, dust, other types of debris to be picked up and carried around.”

A combination of conditions in northwest Iowa yesterday — a strong thunderstorm with high winds approaching dry, barren cropland — produced the atmosphere for a haboob. Nick Stewart, a meteorologist for K-G-A-N in Cedar Rapids, captured last night’s haboob on camera and posted video of it on Twitter.

(Radio Iowa) – More than three-thousand people have signed an online petition, calling for a north-central Iowa high school senior to be allowed to cross the stage for graduation. The South Hardin School District refused to accept Jaidyn Teske as a graduate due to a technicality with her freshman year homeschool credits, according to a petition made by her older brother. Dr. Adam Sellmer, the district’s superintendent, referred to the requirements needed in order to graduate high school at South Hardin. After a petition was circulated in support of Teske, community members questioned why she can’t walk at graduation.

Sellmer noted that every year there are students who do not meet the district’s graduation requirements for a variety of reasons. While those students are not allowed to participate in the actual commencement ceremony, the district still makes every effort to recognize them in different ways throughout their senior year. As far as how colleges handle the process of accepting applicants with outside credits compared to high schools, Sellmer noted its two different sets of requirements. Teske is set to play volleyball at Northwestern College in Orange City this fall.

(Radio Iowa) – If you see green cans of Busch Light for sale, it’s part of a fundraiser sponsored by John Deere and Anheuser-Busch for Farm Rescue. It’s an organization that plants and harvests crops for farmers who’ve had a major illness, injury or natural disaster. Matt Blaylock, a manager at Deere for fundraising events like this, says the limited edition beer cans feature a Deere tractor – the 8RX model with tracks instead of wheels. “It represents modern agriculture, agriculture in the Midwest, in the areas in which we are,” he says, “and also gives more to the general public, lets them see the technology and how modern agriculture is done.”

Deere has supported Farm Rescue since it was founded in 2005. Blaylock says the group has helped more than 850 farm families in need in the past 16 years. “When you’ve got planting to be done or harvesting to be done and in a lot of farm families there’s a main person and if they have an illness or something goes wrong you only have a small window to go ahead and get a crop in the ground,” Blaylock says.

Several retired Deere employees from the Quad Cities are now helping Farm Rescue plant crops for farmers in North Dakota and western Iowa. Deere and Anheuser-Busch will each donate one dollar for each case of Busch Light sold, up to a total of 200,000 dollars.

(Radio Iowa) – About 90 northeast Iowa veterans were flown from Waterloo to the nation’s capitol and back earlier this week and the Midwest Honor Flight organization has a flight scheduled out of Sioux Falls tomorrow (Saturday). “We’ll have the honor to fly 83 veterans out to Washington, D.C.” That’s Midwest Honor Flight President Aaron Van Beek. He says the trip will cost about $150,000. “We estimate it costs about $753 for every veteran that we take along. Now this does not cost the veteran anything, of course, to travel on a day of honor with an Honor Flight,” he says. “Travel expenses for the plane ride, the busing in D.C., their meals — that’s all included in that $753 that we’re fundraising for constantly.”

The Sioux City Muskateers held jersey auctions to raise some of the money for this weekend’s flight. Each veteran on a flight is accompanied by a family member or volunteer who pays their own way. Van Beek says those guardians are an integral part of each Honor Flight. “We do require mandatory training,” Van Beek says. “This is required by the Honor Flight Network, as well as for insurance, but all of our guardians are trained as well as our crew on the proper usage of wheelchairs, how to care for our veterans for the day and just, ultimately, how to take in the experience alongside a veteran.”

Van Beek started the Midwest Honor Flight chapter in Sioux Center in March of 2017, when he was still in college.  “I’ll be honest that I did not even imagine that we would do more than two or three flights,” Van Beek says. “We’ve now since taken over 730 veterans over eight different flights.”  Van Beek has quit his third-grade teaching job to work full time in organizing flights — for the waiting ist of 850 veterans from northwest Iowa, South Dakota and southwest Minnesota.

(Atlantic, Iowa) – A reminder: Cass County Master Gardeners will host their annual Spring Plant Sale Saturday morning, May 14th. Cass County Extension Director and Master Gardener Coordinator Kate Olson says you can expect to find a wide variety of perennials for gardeners looking to update their landscape this year.

Grow Another Row is a program focused on growing, harvesting and donating extra produce to local pantries and other Cass County organizations, to ensure all residents have access to fresh, tasty and local produce throughout the growing season.

The sale begins at 8-a.m. On Saturday, May 14th, and will be held in the front parking lot of the Cass County Community Center on the fairgrounds at 805 W 10th Street in Atlantic. Interested gardeners are encouraged to arrive early for best plant selection, as the annual spring and fall sales occasionally sell out before 10-a.m..

For anyone interested in learning more about the Master Gardener program and becoming a Master Gardener, the next class will be open for registration from June 3-July 1, with classes beginning in August 2022; taught as a mix of online and hands-on learning.

For more information about Master Gardener activities in Cass County, please call the Cass County Extension Office at 712-243-1132. You are also invited to follow Cass County Master Gardeners on their Facebook page.

(Rock Rapids, Iowa) – A collision between a semi and a car Thursday afternoon east of Rock Rapids in northwest Iowa’s Lyon County, resulted in the death of a woman from Sioux County. The Iowa State Patrol reports 71-year-old Carol Jo Fliear, of Matlock, Iowa, died from her injuries at a hospital, after the 2016 Ford Taurus she was driving – for unknown reasons – crossed the center line of eastbound Highway 9 and struck a 2007 Freightliner semi, head-on, at the intersection withK60/Indian Avenue. The accident happened at around 12:37-p.m.

The driver of the semi, 64-year-old Gregory Marvin Krieger, of Sibley, declined treatment at the scene. Both drivers were wearing their seat belts. The accident remains under investigation.

(Radio Iowa) – With school letting out soon, thousands of Iowa teenagers are starting to apply for their first-ever summer jobs and they may need to be aware of some common scams. Consumer advocate Michael Domke says one con that’s been making the rounds is to have a new employee cash a check and then pay back some of the money.  “To take that money and pay a vendor who they need for training or IT resources,” Domke says, “and in essence, that check was fake and then they’re taking out of their own account.”

Teens of various ages are only allowed to work a certain number of hours per week, so new workers will need to know those rules and make sure they’re not being asked to work too much. Mystery shopping might sound like an ideal job for some Iowa teens, but Domke says you need to do a little research first.  “In reality, very, very few of those mystery shopping jobs are legitimate,” he says, “and how the scam works there is they get you to pay upfront, whether it be $20 or $40, and that is kind of your enlistment fee.”

Domke says no legitimate job will require you to pay to sign up or to apply for a position.

(Radio Iowa) – An Iowa State University student who’s graduating with a psychology degree this weekend is also leaving Ames with a new title, Steak Cookoff Association World Champion. Marissa Ouverson grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, where barbecuing meat is something of an art form. During the pandemic, she decided to try her own skills at the grill, going on the road for six months and entering 54 competitions. “I got four first place, I had 26 or 24 Top 10s, and I finished 12th in the world in the points chase, and then I had the 2022 Worlds and I won the whole thing!” Ouverson says. “So, I was the youngest to ever win it and then I was also the first female. Knowing that I made history in multiple ways is awesome.”

When she was younger, Ouverson accompanied her father and older brother as they traveled to barbecue competitions, so she was a natural. Ouverson says her mother took time off from her flight attendant job to accompany her to steak grilling competitions across the country, all the while staying current with her I-S-U studies. “Her and I pretty much just packed up the car and we were on the road for six months,” Ouverson says. “It was because I was able to do everything online. I had her and my dad to really take me around everywhere and go with me so that I wasn’t alone the whole time. I got so close to my family. We have always been super close, but I mean, we got to do everything together.”

Marissa Ouverson (Photo from bbqnewsletter.com)

Her victory at the world competition in Texas led to sponsorships, prize money, and even her own online cooking class. “Here we are now and I haul a giant trailer around everywhere now,” she says. “What it turned into was wild. It’s mind blowing.” As she preps for graduation, Ourverson is focusing on the next stage of her life, using her degree to help people struggling with mental health. “I wanted to do psychology,” she says. “I wanted to help people and so I am focusing on suicide counseling, specifically for teens, and then I might end up actually going over to veterans.”

While the competition circuit may be on the back burner, Ouverson says she wants to continue improving her grilling craft — even though she’s already tops in the world and has a trophy and a ring to prove it.