Coolest 90-year-old in Iowa?
Evelyn Birkby's story on Iowa Public TV
By Chuck Offenburger

Evelyn Birkby, of the southwest Iowa town of Sidney, is the coolest 90-year-old I know.

And this month, everybody across the state is going to be able to see why I think so much of her.

Birkby, a columnist and author and “radio homemaker,” is the subject of a new documentary that Iowa Public Television has just completed, “Iowa’s Radio Homemakers: Up a Country Lane.”

It will be the featured new production during the network’s annual fundraiser, “Festival,” March 6-21. I’ve seen an advance copy of the documentary, and you don’t want to miss it if you love Iowa history, radio and heart-warming rural sociology. Can I say that, even though I’m interviewed in it? I hope so.

The “Radio Homemakers” feature actually premiers on March 11 at 8 p.m., and the plan is for Birkby and some of her family to be in the studio in Johnston for it. It will be repeated several times over the 10 days that follow.

So what makes Evelyn Birkby worth this kind of attention?
Well, there’s this: In November, 1949, she started writing a chatty weekly column, “Up a Country Lane,” for the newspaper in my hometown of Shenandoah, first The Evening Sentinel and much later its successor the Valley News Today.

She has never missed a week since—never! That’s more than 60 years of unbroken weekly columns. By my estimate, they would total about 3.1 million words. That is a record I’m sure has not been topped in American journalism.

Hasn’t she ever wanted to take a week off? “If I really had to be gone and wouldn’t have time to send a column in, then I’d write one ahead of time,” she’s told me. “Through most of the years, I was afraid that if my column wasn’t in the paper, people might not miss me and the editors might decide they could just as well go without it.”

That reflects the lack of confidence Evelyn initially had about writing. She was a young farmwife and mother who hadn’t given a thought to media work until her husband Robert Birkby suggested it. Before they married, she’d taught school and led church youth programs, and he was concerned she might not find farm life sufficiently fulfilling. She’s always said her husband “put my hat on my head and pushed me out the door” to go apply for the job.

Soon after she started writing, the KMA radio bosses in Shenandoah noted the popularity of Birkby’s columns. They invited her to become one of the “radio homemakers” the following spring, in May of 1950. As in her columns, she would talk on the air about all aspects of homemaking—her family, activities in church and community, cooking, cleaning and always including a recipe.

That kind of programming proved so popular with listeners, especially from the 1940s well into the 1960s, that the two Shenandoah radio stations—the other one was KFNF—at one point had 14 radio homemakers on the air for their weekly chats. The stations would have such events as KMA’s legendary “Cookie Festival,” which would draw several thousand women to Shenandoah from all over the Midwest.

Birkby continued her 15-minute broadcasts for 40 years. In a few periods, they’ve been daily, but more typically they were weekly. And actually, she still does one of her chats monthly on KMA.

She is the author of seven books, including two that have been huge sellers for the University of Iowa (U of I) Press—“Neighboring on the Air” and “Up a Country Lane Cookbook.” And her personal papers are now part of the Women’s Archives at the U of I.

But if you’re beginning to think this is merely a case of small town and country folks being smitten by a local media person way back a half-century or more ago, consider the following.

In the latter part of 1990, nationally-known food writers and broadcasters Jane and Michael Stern called the U of I Press from their home in Connecticut and asked if the editors there by chance knew of any new book about Midwestern food traditions. They were just then finishing pre-publication work on one of Birkby’s books and provided the Sterns with page proofs.

The couple came to Sidney, spent three days visiting with Evelyn and her husband Robert Birkby, and had what the Sterns later described as “a fabulous time.” And they also wrote a pretty fabulous profile story of Evelyn­—so good that it covered 15 pages in “The New Yorker” magazine, one of the most esteemed publications in the world.

When that came out in early 1991, everybody else in big time media seemed to want to re-tell the story of Evelyn Birkby and the other radio homemakers. In a period of about three months, all three of the major news networks at that time had crews in Sidney for interviews with her—or flew her to New York to appear live on their studio shows. Reporters from lots of other newspapers and magazines made their way to Sidney, too.

“It was just like the wagons coming over the hills,” Birkby later told me. “It was very exciting, very thrilling, a world I’d never had a part of at all.”

Subsequently, best-selling novelist Fannie Flagg became aware of Birkby’s story, visited with her several times by phone and had Birkby join her at a book-signing event in Kansas City. Flagg developed a character “Neighbor Dorothy,” based on Birkby and wrote her into three novels.

A year ago right now, Deb Herbold, a producer for IPTV, was doing research for another production at the U of I Women’s Archives. “I came across a file on ‘Radio Homemakers’ with a picture of Evelyn Birkby on it,” said Herbold, who is 44. “I grew up in Chicago and didn’t know anything about Iowa until I came to Des Moines to go to Drake University. I had no idea what a ‘radio homemaker’ might be. But soon after that, I found Evelyn’s ‘Up a Country Lane Cookbook’ at our studios. I read it and was fascinated by it. And that led me to Evelyn’s Web site.”

A 90-year-old with her own Internet site? Oh, yeah, www.evelynbirkby.com, and it’s a dandy with collections of her columns, broadcasts and much more. She is certainly not cowed by technology after wearing out four computers. She sends her columns to editors via e-mail, and she shoots, edits and sends digital photos to go with them.

But Herbold didn’t realize all that at first.

“I called Evelyn on the phone at the end of March last year and didn’t know what to expect,” Herbold said. “I knew she was 89 then, and I wondered how sharp she could be and what kind of energy she’d have. Well, her energy on the phone that day was terrific, and our conversation led to us going to Sidney in April for the first of four interviews with her.”

Still, Herbold wondered how much she could ask of Birkby. On the way to Sidney for the first time, she told IPTV videographer Rick Fuller, that “we need to be real careful on this. At her age, she might get tired, maybe even need a nap before we can finish an interview.” Herbold now laughs out loud about that concern. “Oh, brother!” she says. “Evelyn didn’t wear out a bit. I think we were tired before she ever was.”

IPTV eventually shot 27 hours of video interviewing Birkby, her husband, one of her three sons, friends, neighbors, co-workers, a historian, a sociologist and others. Herbold said she made dozens of phone calls back to Birkby, asking her to help round up historic photographs, documents and other details.

Birkby’s tenacity and work ethic continue to “inspire” Herbold. “Look, I work pretty hard myself,” the TV producer said, “but I really think I’m a cream puff compared to her. She never gives up.”

At 90, Birkby is just as forward-looking, people-oriented and engaged in her writing as ever.

She’s concerned about the current state of the nation and world. “I am not happy with the way this decade has started,” she said. “I did not like going to war. I thought we’d surely gotten ride of our aggressions, but back to war we went. It is time for peace! And I hate the polarized political atmosphere. And our racial attitudes and our attitudes toward gays concern me.”

As for writing, “it’s always hard. It’s a task that requires a lot of concentration and discipline. But I enjoy it more all the time, too. I get excited about all the different stories that are still out there to tell, more of them all the time. So I plan to keep writing as long as I can. And if nobody was reading a word I write, I’d keep writing anyway, because I know it makes my mind stay alert.”

Huh? Nobody following Evelyn Birkby? It’s just the opposite that seems to be happening.

You can reach the columnist at (515) 386-5488 or chuck@Offenburger.com. You can follow his daily commentary at http://Twitter.com/chuckoburger.