Josh Manske, a young Algona, Iowa community leader, agrees with Tip O’Neill’s famous adage that “All politics is local,” i.e., responsive to local needs. Before last month’s election, Josh identified the Iowa State Auditor, Democrat Rob Sand, as a candidate aware of that. “Rob takes the position, “I want to represent everybody, Democrat, Republican, and Independent—the exhausted majority!” Rob Sand won.
Senate Candidate Admiral Michael Franken (who did not win but came closer than any other challenger to Chuck Grassley ever) followed up his visits to Josh’s Kossuth County with a locally-attentive posting on his campaign’s Facebook website inviting statewide contributions to the new Kossuth County Democratic Party’s Dolores Mertz scholarship fund. Josh understands these local efforts as planting seeds for growing his county’s future and its local politics.
Dolores, born and raised in the county, would have been happy to attend Mike Franken’s address at the Louscher farm there, where Franken’s voice was clear, “In our democracy, the purpose of one political party is not the demise of the other. The purpose of a political party is to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens.”
Josh, working from that same belief, had led the creation of the scholarship, naming it for Delores. But with Dolores having died the previous month, he was left to applaud in her place.
As a young leader, Josh saw Dolores Mertz as a role model, keeping politics locally relevant and effectively bipartisan for Kossuth County and for the rest of Iowa. Her dedication and success were the foundation for her winning eleven consecutive elections as a Democrat in a Republican-leaning north central Iowa district to the Iowa House of Representatives, beginning at age sixty. Intrigued by the Kossuth County Democratic Party’s naming a scholarship in her honor, I enjoyed two interviews with her earlier this year. Spunky and engaged at age 94 in the rehab center in West Bend, Iowa, more than once she called me back following an interview to add a key detail about something she believed important.
“She was always so involved with things,” notes Algona, Iowa farmer Merrill Bormann. His wife Brenda, a retired schoolteacher, came up with the idea of the scholarship as a modest way for Kossuth County Democrats to return politics to bipartisan local concerns and opportunities. I called Merrill after learning Dolores had died. “She was pretty strong and settled in her own positions, and still she was able to work with people who didn’t agree with her and bring things to a conclusion—as so many politicians are not able to do now.”
He paused, reflecting on his wife Brenda’s teaching work over in the West Bend school with some of Dolores’ seven children as her students. “You know the story of how Dolores began?”
I did, from Brenda, who’d had Dolores come repeatedly to tell that story to the Child Development classes she later taught at Algona High School. “Dolores would tell the kids how she weighed one pound at her premature birth, and the doctor told the parents to have a shoe box ready at the foot of the bed to put her in since she most likely wouldn’t live until morning. But the parents put her on a cookie sheet in the oven of their coal oil stove to keep her warm”—this was in 1928—“and she survived. She would bring a very small teacup with her to my classes that her parents had saved; she was so small her head had fit into it. And she brought a size seven ring they had saved they could slide all the way up onto her shoulder, she was so tiny.”
“Maybe that’s what made her such a strong person,” Merrill observes. “She had to fight her way into this world.”
Strong indeed, strong enough to hold her own position while leading state-wide bipartisan Iowa House initiatives that leave a lasting legacy at the local level in Iowa’s rural counties. A good example in Kossuth County is its county foundation, one of the 84 created by a statewide bipartisan gambling regulation amendment that Dolores won, working in her stylish, goal-oriented fashion with Republican Iowa House representative Scott Raecker. (For its impressive state-wide results, see my “I Just Want it Done!” My Rural America op-ed from September 2. Former Representative Raecker calls it ‘pinnacle legislation’ that has resulted in over $125,000,000 of local county grants statewide.) Seventeen years later, Kossuth County’s foundation has assets above $7,000,000, with grants awarded from its annual interest of nearly $170,000 each year, supporting locally developed projects by healthcare, county emergency, and other local service groups.
Dolores lived out that old truth: the more we work together, the better the results. The scholarship in her honor, transcending election cycles, now inspires her local party to bring a bipartisan politics of hope and purpose into this tough political world—inspiring Josh, Brenda, and their new generation of local scholarship recipients, to do just that.