Randy Evans

On the morning of Aug. 31, shortly after 8:30, a 12-year-old boy pulled out a gun in his seventh-grade classroom in Eldridge, a community just north of Davenport. In an instant, he directed his classmates to get on the floor and then pointed the gun at his teacher’s face and squeezed the trigger. Blessedly, he…

We Americans are an impatient bunch. We typically don’t like to wait in line — unless there’s something we truly want, like much-sought-after concert tickets or whatever this year’s Tickle Me Elmo gift was on Black Friday. That’s why the scene last week was unusual — the thousands of people waiting quietly in line for…

I’ve learned a lot of lessons about money, some easier than others, in the years since I pushed a lawnmower back and forth across Mrs. Carroll’s and Mrs. Greiner’s yards in Bloomfield long ago. My start as a gainfully employed contributor to the U.S. economy was inauspicious in the grand scheme of things. But I…

We Iowans like to think of ourselves as the true occupants of middle America, the geographic and societal equivalent of Baby Bear’s porridge. We are not as conservative as some sections of our country, nor as liberal as other sections. We don’t have the wealth that some regions do. We don’t have the poverty that…

Iowa is speeding toward a dangerous crossroads this week, and there has been too little discussion about what might occur and zero discussion about what the state should do. Trustees of Iowa Wesleyan University, the second-oldest college in Iowa, meet on Thursday to decide whether the institution will close next spring. The Mount Pleasant school…

Let’s skip the debate over whether our president bears even a smidgen of blame for contributing to the domestic terrorist incidents last week in the United States. Let’s agree we are never going to agree, so there’s no use driving each other’s blood pressure higher by talking more about that. Yes, there will always be…

Each year in October, when the Iowa countryside transforms from gorgeous summer greens to harvest season hues of tan, some of the world’s top agricultural scientists and anti-hunger activists gather in Des Moines to compare notes. The occasion is the presentation of the annual World Food Prize. It’s three days of conversations about the progress,…

There’s an old expression that officials of Indian Hills Community College obviously have not heard about — or have chosen to ignore. The expression is simple: If you find yourself in a hole, stop shoveling. But the school continues to shovel — digging itself ever deeper into legal trouble and into a public relations quagmire.…

It’s confession time: I cannot say with confidence what transpired in that upstairs bedroom in a suburban home in Montgomery County, Md., on that summer evening, apparently in 1982, during a gathering of unsupervised, beer-drinking teenagers. Unless you have just awakened like a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, you know the party in question involved a…

Some of the most stressful memories I have of my school days involve the words, “We’re going to have a pop quiz today.” Don’t panic, but there’s a pop quiz today. Here goes: CASE STUDY 1: The Iowa Code says all nomination papers for the primary election for state and federal offices must be submitted to…