Out in Greene County, Iowa

The treasures of southeast Iowa -- from corn meal mush to meditators who have helped lift Fairfield

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
May 4, 2003
FAIRFIELD, IOWA

Oh, what a beautiful, mind-stretching day we had to open our Offenburger.com “Treasures of Southeast Iowa” tour.

In perfect spring weather on the last weekend in April, we first dipped deeply into traditional Iowa fare.

I mean, how much more traditional can you get than eating a lunch featuring corn meal mush – a cheap, filling food staple born out of the poverty and desperation of the Great Depression – at a 75-year-old café on the town square in a place like Washington, Iowa?

Two records were established during our visit to Winga’s Café, which was “retro” before “retro” became cool.

First record: Owner John Winga, 68, had never cooked that much mush in one day – enough for two strips for all 51 folks on our tour, each strip being three inches wide and six inches long. Second record: Our pal Carter LeBeau of Davenport ate 13 strips of it. “What!” gasped Winga when he learned of LeBeau’s feat. “I’ve never heard of anybody eating that much of it.” Responded LeBeau, “Yeah, but that’s all I ate.”

The rest of us also had sandwiches, Winga’s famous potato soup and homemade pie that was mouth-watering.

Our visit came one week to the day after Winga’s had celebrated its 75th anniversary and had 500 customers come through to celebrate. But we ate more corn meal mush.

Then we loaded back on our Windstar Bus Lines cruiser, which was piloted on this tour as on our earlier ones by Don Granstra of Carroll, Ia.

On the one hand, our quick trip on south to Maharishi Vedic City and then Fairfield may have been only 25 miles. On the other hand, it was like a cosmic odyssey.

By bedtime, we had learned about Transcendental Meditation, Ayurvedic health practices, the beautiful Sthapathya Veda architecture, exotic vegetarian cuisine, mud baths, milk scrubs, massages with herbal oils and even “mild herbal enemas.” Maybe some of it hit some of our tour group’s ears as a little strange.

But we also thrilled in the stories of how practitioners of TM have, over the past three decades, delivered a real creative energy to the Fairfield economy as well as to the local arts, culture and music scenes.

Meanwhile, the traditional industries here have done a good job of embracing the latest advances in communications, science and capital investment while continuing to benefit from the renowned Iowa work ethic.

The result? This whole area is humming, a fascinating place to live and work.

I don’t know how many other tour groups have come to the Fairfield area to explore the vast changes that have happened here since the early 1970s, but I’m predicting they’re soon going to be lined up on U.S. Highway 34 and Iowa Highway 1 waiting their turns. This is one hell of a good story here, and folks who come here from other small towns in rural Iowa will go home saying, “Our town needs some of that.”

We had some excellent guides.

Bob Phipps, the Fairfield Chamber of Commerce executive who earlier worked in radio and insurance here, rode the bus with us from Washington, and told of the growth in population to 10,000 in Fairfield itself, 16,000 in Jefferson County. About a third of the town’s population is now made up by TM practitioners.

He told of the incredible diversity in the Fairfield area’s industrial line-up.

There are nationally and internationally known firms producing washing machines, outdoors gear and plastic fittings. There are innovative new companies marketing books, selling global long-distance telephone service, and doing high-tech engraving of everything from steel to stone to glass.

Another company has its people traveling the U.S. doing photo shoots of major university graduation ceremonies and marathon races, then selling the pictures to the participants. One is doing stained glass windows and art, both creation of it and repair. Another publishes “Pocket PC” magazine, which has circulation around the world.

As we entered Maharishi Vedic City, which became Iowa’s first new incorporated town in 20 years when it was formally organized two years ago, we were joined by Chris Johnson. He is a 51-year-old contractor and developer who came here in 1989 from San Francisco to become a part of the meditating community. He’s one of the founders of Vedic City, as it’s called in the short form, and now serves on its first city council.

Located about five miles northwest of Fairfield, it is like the ultimate “planned community,” with all homes and commercial buildings conforming to the beautiful architectural principles which meditators have found in the ancient history and culture of India. By new city ordinance, only organic food can be sold in commercial establishments in Vedic City.

The city limits currently cover 1,400 acres. The population is now about 200 residents, but another 600 work in large business offices and at two gorgeous resort hotels that have been built. The total number of residents could grow to 10,000 over the next 20 years, Johnson predicted.

He said there has already been “about $75 million” in commercial and residential development within Vedic City over the 10 years that it has been slowly growing. Homes there are selling from $250,000 to $500,000, he said, but he also pointed out one worth $2 million. Johnson owns the Rukmapura Park Hotel there, which offers suites and four-star service.

Around the corner is The Raj, which is probably Vedic City’s showpiece – a 10-year-old health spa and hotel that attracts people from around the world.

The medical director is Dr. Nancy Lonsdorf, who has worked 20 years in Ayurvedic medicine, which aims to treat the mind and spirit as well as the body. The operations director is her husband David Lonsdorf, whose background is pharmacy.

He said residential customers pay up to $645 per day for stays of up to 10 days during which they receive daily treatments, care and counseling in the principles and practices of Ayurvedic healthcare. Local people can take the treatments for $420 per day while still living at home. The Raj has a staff of 40, but that can grow to 80 at times of full occupancy.

Lunches there are open to the public all days except Saturdays and Mondays and have become quite popular with area folks – meditators and non-meditators alike.

Just driving up to The Raj, which is built like a French estate but still adheres to Sthapathya design specs, is an experience. Its long driveway aimed right at the front door is lined with 30 perfectly-shaped Bradford pear trees.

Johnson, the city council member, said Vedic City developers “had not anticipated the media interest” that the newly-formed community attracted the past two years. More than 400 stories were published worldwide, he said, and TV crews came from all over.

“Another thing we didn’t anticipate is that after all that coverage, we are getting a whole lot of interest from the large population of people from India who now live in America,” he said. “When they hear there is a ‘Maharishi Vedic City,’ they want to come see and experience it. They are a very wealthy ethnic community in this country, and I think this will turn into an important tourism opportunity for not only Vedic City and Fairfield, but also for all of Iowa.”

All of this has come as an indirect result of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi deciding in 1974 to pay $3 million and buy the campus of the bankrupt Parsons College on the north edge of Fairfield.

The Maharishi is a tiny, squeaky-voiced holy man, philosopher and trained scientist from India who founded TM in 1957.

He became something of a celebrity in the U.S. in the late 1960s and ’70s, when such people as rock music’s Beach Boys, actor Clint Eastwood and magician Doug Henning became active TM practitioners. The Maharishi made several appearances back then on TV’s popular Johnny Carson “Tonight Show.”

By the early 1970s, he had also founded a new university, then called Maharishi International University, in a former motel complex in Santa Barbara, Calif. It quickly outgrew those quarters, and that’s why he chose to buy the large, vacant campus in Iowa.

It was an amazing chapter in Iowa history.

And our tour group relived it in a conversation we had on the campus of Maharishi University of Management, as the school is now known after a name change a few years ago.

We arranged for a panel of experts that included MUM executive vice-president Craig Pearson; Bob Rasmussen, the public relations director for Parsons College its last 15 years who then went on to become mayor of Fairfield for 28 years; Ed Malloy, the current Fairfield mayor who is president of an oil brokerage firm here and is also a meditator; current MUM students Josh Meade and Tarah Sands, who both grew up in the meditating community in Fairfield, and Jennine Fellmer, a native of New York who is a MUM graduate and is now its director of development and alumni.

The collapse of Parsons, which was a Presbyterian-affiliated liberal arts college, happened because its president, Millard Roberts, led growth that in hindsight was too fast and ill-advised. The enrollment at Parsons in the 1960s jumped from its tradition 400 to 500 students to 5,200 from all over the U.S. and beyond. Heavy investments were made in building dormitories and classrooms to accommodate such a huge population.

Not only that, Roberts, who thought higher education should operate at a profit, also started up satellite colleges in a half-dozen other locations in the Midwest and one in Artesia, New Mexico.

Roberts might have pulled it off, Rasmussen suggested in our chat, had he not run afoul of the North Central Association, which does the accrediting for colleges and universities. Parsons lost its accreditation in the early 1970s, and the students started an exodus fearing their degrees would mean nothing. The downspin into bankruptcy ensued. It was hastened by a Life Magazine story labeling Parsons as “Flunk Out U.” for its practice of giving students who had stumbled at other colleges a second chance.

Parsons closed June 2, 1973.

As the new mayor in 1974, Rasmussen then helped negotiate the sale of the deserted campus to the Maharishi and his followers.

“One of the things we did at Parsons helped make it easier for Fairfield to accept the meditators who came in,” Rasmussen said. “We had attracted students from all over the country, too, just like they have. It was a very cosmopolitan student body at Parsons. So we knew how to welcome people who were from different places and different cultures.”

The Maharishi himself visited a couple of times. At one point, the Beach Boys were visiting frequently enough that they briefly set up a rehearsal studio in the community. Rasmussen tells a funny story about having to accompany Clint Eastwood into a local bank to vouch for him and the check the actor was trying to cash – the cashiers couldn’t believe their eyes that he was indeed Eastwood and not an impostor. Magician Henning got married on the campus in a lavish ceremony, during which he delighted the huge crowd with several illusions.

MUM now enrolls about 500 students here, with another 250 in degree programs that MUM has at other sites around the world. There are 6,000 MIU and MUM alumni.

The students take traditional academic programs – and MUM is fully-accredited by the North Central Association – while learning and practicing TM.

One thing you notice immediately about the students is they dress much nicer than most college students today. Men generally wear neckties and dress shirts, the women generally are wearing dresses or casual slacks suits. How does that happen at MUM and not at other schools?

“We want to create a success culture here,” said Pearson, the senior administrator on campus. “We want to develop a leadership culture. We teach that in our academics, of course, but we also teach it in terms of our students’ speaking, writing, appearance and good manners.”

The presence of the established meditating community at the university – which has its two famous Golden Domes where the men and women meditate separately twice a day – has drawn 3,000 other TM practitioners to the Fairfield area.

In that group are many of the entrepreneurs who helped Fairfield’s economy cruise through the 1980s with only a hiccup when the rest of Iowa was suffering through the disastrous Farm Crisis. They have started up hundreds of businesses through the years, many of which survived and thrived and a few of which tanked.

They also started an excellent K-12 school system for their children, the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, which uses TM principles. Some have their kids in the Fairfield Community Schools, which is a strong county-wide system.

It’s been a boom time, thanks in no short measure to the meditators, but also to the willingness of most native Fairfielders to be open, accepting and tolerant.

“Remember the meditators were a bunch of people with college degrees from elsewhere and a lot of energy who came in here when they were in their 20s and 30s,” said Mayor Malloy, who was one of them. “They weren’t the kind of people who wanted to take factory line jobs here. But they had to make a living, so they got out there and started forming their own companies – a phenomenal number of companies.

“The past 29 years have been very interesting and very exciting,” Malloy continued. “But in my mind, it’s only beginning here. I think Fairfield is going to become one incredibly polished star in Iowa’s array of cities.”

Not to be missed here is a dinner at Regina’s, a fantastic five-year-old fine dining restaurant operated by Regina Woodard, 33, who is from the meditating community. She is also the lead chef, and she has built a trade that is attracting customers – as many non-meditators as meditators – from a wide area. It operates in a wonderfully-renovated old factory building.

Simply put, this is one of Iowa’s very best restaurants.

Regina’s is so good, the Chamber exec Phipps told me, that “it would do well in Chicago.”

She and her staff gave us our choice of filet mignon steaks three inches thick, fresh salmon served on flaming cedar shingles, chicken breast scaloppini with caramelized onions or coconut curry-crusted tofu. And, oh my, the desserts!

On day two of our tour, we went on to the historic Villages of Van Buren County, just south of Fairfield.

We explored little Cantril, Bonaparte and Bentonsport before arriving in Keosauqua to stay in the 104-year-old Hotel Manning, with its large graceful porches overlooking the Des Moines River.

Our Saturday evening included a wonderful catered dinner in the hotel dining room. Then we pushed back the furniture and danced it up to the tunes of the – are you ready for this? – “Twin City Belated Bicentennial Bluegrass Boogie Woogie Blues Band.”

That’s a troupe of Van Buren County musicians from “Iowa’s Twin Cities” of Douds and Leando. They’ve been entertaining audiences with their lively string music for 25 years, starting up soon after the U.S. had celebrated its 200th anniversary – and now you understand another part of the band’s distinctive name.

Life is good in southeast Iowa, and we’ll tell you more about it in our next story from the tour.