Council Bluffs’ location has put the town into contact with a lot of history. Lewis and Clark and the Mormon pilgrims came through, as did the westbound pioneers on the Oregon and California Trails. Abraham Lincoln designated the town as milepost zero for the transcontinental railroad. The first coast-to-coast automobile trip passed through and later the first transcontinental highway. Council Bluffs was the birthplace of Omaha and first war-time mobile hospital. It also boasted the state’s…
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The Iowa West Foundation recently launched a program to celebrate some of the athletes from Council Bluffs and Pottawattamie County who have achieved national recognition in various sports. Twenty-four athletes were recognized as inaugural members of the new Council Bluffs Professional Sports Roster. Each honoree is recognized with a banner that will be permanently displayed at the Iowa West Field…
The sixth and final episode of our “Invisible Excellence” podcast series sees Council Bluffs Unit K’s remarkable wartime experience finally reaching its end. Titled “The WWI Armistice Signed, Unit K/Mobile One Returns Home,” this installment follows the nurses, officers, and enlisted personnel as they first ever battlefield hospital to move along the front lines undertake the protracted journey…
This episode looks at some Council Bluffs mysteries that have lingered through the years, yet remain unexplained. Included are the 1977 UFO Crash at Big Lake Park, the gruesome 1926 Keeline murders at the site of today's St. Paul's Lutheran Church, the 1970 Cadillac S&S Medic Mark 1 ambulance in which 495 people died, the librarians' perpetual sitings of Julia Officer at the Carnegie Building and…
Seasonal haunted houses appeared on the local scene about fifty years ago, initially fund raisers for a variety of groups and causes. Youth For Christ, Campus Life, March of Dimes, the Jaycees, and the Historical Society were early participants. From church basements and abandoned buildings to semi truck trailers in parking lots, haunted houses proliferated by the 1980s. Generally staffed by…
This installment finds Unit K/Mobile One being stationed ever closer to the perilous European front, with its attendant danger and devastation. For example, during this episode, in two different postings, Mobile One narrowly avoided being shelled. In a third, the hospital was situated so close to a gas-shell dump that an attack would have required personnel to don their gas masks in just seconds…
Is the American West a physical place or the concept of interacting with the wilderness and taming the land? Better represented by John Wayne winning the West and settling down living happily ever after, or the later Clint Eastwood version of the West as a place of drunkards and violence? Or perhaps it was as captured by Blazing Saddles and City Slickers as a wildly bigoted and backwards place…
This is episode Four of the Invisible Excellence podcast series. It takes the listener right into the operating tents of the Army’s first ever battlefield hospital that actually moved long the front lines with the action– Council Bluffs’ Unit K/Mobile #1. The group’s leader, surgeon and former Council Bluffs mayor Donald Macrae, Jr., set the tone in his notes: “The shelling was begun about…
The tale of the Army’s first functional MASH unit, Council Bluffs’ Mobile 1 (aka Unit K) continues in this episode as writer/researcher Brian Mainwaring delves into the details of how the camps were set up, how they moved from battle to battle near the front lines, and some of the day-to-day challenges they endured including shortages of equipment, manpower, fuel, and safe drinking water. If you…
Amelia Bloomer was born in New York but spent most of her adult life in Council Bluffs. Her name is associated with a garment worn by women and women’s rights, but there’s a lot more to the story than that. Amelia Bloomer dedicated her life to righting social wrongs, and when she arrived in Council Bluffs in 1855 she found a town that could very definitely benefit from her services. In this…
This episode continues the story of Mobile Hospital No, 1, also known as Unit K or the Council Bluffs Unit in World War I. In this episode writer/researcher Brian Mainwaring recounts events such as an early attempt to break up Unit K, its training and observation period with the British military, the full integration of Unit K’s roster into Mobile No. 1, preparation of the hospital’s personnel and…
