CLAYBORN COUNTY, IA — The Clayborn County Historical Society’s inaugural Dignified Presidents Day Observance, convened Monday evening in the basement meeting room of the First Methodist Church, was attended by fourteen area residents, of whom fourteen told Society president Dale Krumpf afterward that they had primarily come for the coffee.
The event was billed on a hand-lettered flyer at the IGA as “a solemn counterweight to the commercial flattening of our nation’s executive heritage,” a phrase Krumpf later confirmed he had workshopped for nine days. Attendees were promised a reading of excerpts from Washington’s Farewell Address, a slide presentation on the lesser-known Whig presidents, and, per the flyer, “refreshments.”
The refreshments were the draw. They were leftover heart-shaped sugar cookies from the American Legion Valentine’s social, re-iced by volunteers with small blue stars and the words WE REMEMBER, which several attendees assumed referred to someone recently deceased.
“We wanted folks to sit for an hour and think about the office of the presidency without somebody trying to sell them a box spring,” said Krumpf, 68, a retired agronomist who has served as Society president since 2019 and who wore, for the occasion, a tie. “I understand that sounds ambitious for a Monday.”
Across town, Baumgartner Furniture & Flooring reported its strongest single-day sales figure of the first quarter, moving eleven mattresses, two recliners, and a credenza that had been on the floor since the Bush administration. Owner Lyle Baumgartner, reached by phone, said he had not been aware of the Historical Society’s event but wished them well. “We had a sheet-set giveaway,” he added, in the tone of a man explaining why his team had won.
Krumpf’s keynote, delivered from a lectern borrowed from the church’s Wednesday youth program and still bearing a laminated sign reading GOD LISTENS, ran forty-two minutes. It covered the Adams administrations (both), the reasons James K. Polk should be more famous than he is, and a digression on Millard Fillmore that Krumpf introduced by saying, “Bear with me,” and which several attendees later described as the part where they checked their phones.
Mrs. Peterson, who sat in the third row and has attended every Society function since 2004, said the evening was “very educational, and I learned that my left knee does not do folding chairs anymore.” Asked whether she felt the observance had successfully reclaimed the holiday from commercial interests, she paused for a long moment and said she had, in fact, bought a mattress that afternoon. “It was already on sale,” she clarified. “That’s not the Society’s fault.”
The slide presentation experienced technical difficulties at the twenty-three-minute mark, when Society treasurer Marlene Ostby’s laptop displayed a notification from her grandson’s Roblox account, prompting a brief intermission during which Krumpf announced there would be “a few more cookies, if people wanted to stretch.” Six people stood up. Four left.
Of the ten who remained, three were Society board members contractually obligated by dues structure to stay, two were the couple who run the Nextdoor page and were taking notes, and one was Doyle Fenwick, 71, who explained he had come in from the cold and did not fully understand what was happening but was enjoying it. “The man up front knows his presidents,” Fenwick said. “That’s more than most of them knew.”
Krumpf concluded the evening by inviting attendees to sign a guestbook and consider a $5 donation toward next year’s observance, which he said would feature “actual parchment.” The donation jar collected $11 and a button.
Over at the Skylark Diner the following morning, waitress Rhonda Teel, who was not in attendance but had heard about it from three separate customers before the breakfast rush ended, offered the prevailing local verdict while refilling coffee at the counter. “Dale means well,” she said. “Dale has always meant well. That’s sort of Dale’s whole deal.”
Krumpf, for his part, pronounced the event a success and announced plans to expand next year’s program to include a moment of silence for the Whigs. Asked whether he had considered moving the observance to a Saturday, when attendance might be stronger, he said he had not, and that Presidents Day is Presidents Day, and that the country’s problem, in his considered view, is that everyone wants everything to be more convenient.
The heart cookies, thirty-one of which remained at the end of the evening, will be served at Wednesday’s youth group under a new laminated sign.