by Mark Tabb
Over the next several weeks, all four NFL players not only helped with cleanup in town; they helped organize fund-raising operations that raised $250,000 to rebuild the school, not just the football field. All four still had family in the area, but there was something more that motivated them to go beyond writing a check to the relief efforts. “I remember something my high school football coach, Ed Thomas, said to me when I left home,” Kampman told Sports Illustrated’s Peter King. “Never forget where you come from. Being from here, you can’t forget.” Wiegmann added, “Ed Thomas was like a second father to me.”
Tom Wilson spoke for everyone—coaches, players, and friends alike—when he told Ed, “You would do the same thing for me.” In many ways, he already had.
*No relation to assistant coach Jon Wiegmann or to A-P starting center Mike Wiegmann.
CHAPTER 8
AFTER THE CAMERAS DISAPPEAR
Take pride in what you do.
ED THOMAS
THE ALARM WENT OFF, AND ED CLIMBED OUT OF BED. LIGHT had not yet filtered through the windows of the small apartment above True Value Hardware. He stumbled over to his dresser, dug out his clothes for the day, and headed off for the shower By the time Ed came out of the bathroom, Jan was up. They exchanged a quick kiss. “What’s on your agenda today?” Ed asked.
“Pretty much the same as yesterday. You?”
“The same. Weight room at Tuve’s. Driver’s ed. Then it’s back to the school and the contractors and volunteers. Just like every day.”
“We’ll get our lives back eventually,” Jan said.
“I guess so, but sometimes it sure doesn’t feel like it,” Ed said.
Jan then headed to the shower while Ed sat at the kitchen table with his Bible, just as he had every day since he was a boy reading through the Bible with his grandmother. That summer he was spending most of his time in one of his favorite books of the Bible, the Psalms. The writers, especially David, focused on God’s faithfulness, even in times of difficulty. Ed needed that reassurance, especially now. So did Jan. She spent most of that summer in one chapter of the Bible: Psalm 121. She recited the first two verses daily, if not minute by minute: “I lift up my eyes to the hills — where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
Before Jan came out of the shower, Ed was already off to the makeshift weight room at John Tuve’s house north of town. Even though the high school was gone, Ed didn’t see any reason to cancel his off-season conditioning program. During the team’s spring meeting a few weeks before the tornado, he handed out the schedule for the “voluntary” lifting and running program that started as soon as school ended. A little thing like a tornado wasn’t going to get him off schedule.
Ed arrived at the Tuves’ horse barn/football weight room at 5:30 a.m. A handful of players were already there, even though the first of two morning lifting sessions didn’t begin until 6:00. Ed unlocked the doors of the arena and flipped on the lights. “OK, fellas, let’s get started,” Ed told the players who drifted in the door. Over the next hour, he demonstrated the proper way to do squats to one player, cheered another on as he pushed himself toward a personal best in the bench press, and ribbed another about his new girlfriend.
A few minutes before 7:00, Al Kerns came in and took over. Ed dashed over to the grade school parking lot for the start of his driver’s ed class. Only two of the three students who were supposed to drive that day had arrived. Coy Wiegmann, Ed’s backup quarterback and starting defensive back, was a little late, but only because he had to finish his reps at the weight room on the Tuves’ farm. Once Coy arrived, Ed settled into the passenger seat and said to the student behind the wheel, “Take a right out of the parking lot and go straight down Highway 57.” He then turned on the radio, which he had set on his favorite country music station, and settled back for the ride. When they came to the stop sign on the eastern edge of town where they often turned south to go to Highway 20, a four-lane divided highway, to practice freeway driving, Ed said, “Keep going straight.” Eventually he had the driver turn north just outside of Cedar Falls, then back to the east a little while later.
Eventually they ended up in Denver, Iowa. “Pull in here,” Ed said as they came to Denver High School. The student parked the car next to the football field. Ed got out and went onto the field. He walked around on the grass for a while, looking it over like an appraiser on Antiques Roadshow inspecting a Ming vase. “You can tell a lot about a football program by the way they take care of their field,” he said. The other student took the wheel, and they headed back to Parkersburg by way of Dike, Iowa, where Ed had another field to inspect.
About the time Ed arrived at the grade school to start driver’s ed, Jan was finishing her breakfast at Dutch’s, a local diner, with her neighbor and a small group of regulars. The neighbor was also living in an apartment above True Value Hardware. In fact, she had told Jan about the apartments the night after the tornado when they drove over to Cedar Falls together to buy toothbrushes and other basics they needed right after the storm. They moved into their apartments on the same day.
After a quick breakfast, Jan shot over to the house. Aaron and Todd had spent most of the previous day separating wood debris from metal so that it could be carted off. Most of the pad had been cleared, and construction was already under way. However, the task of digging through and carting away rubble never seemed to end. Given Ed’s and Jan’s schedules, debris clearing fell to Aaron and Todd, although they didn’t have much more time for it than did their parents. Even though Aaron had the summer off from teaching, he ran a corn detasseling crew through the summer. Todd’s days were filled with his work as a financial planner. On top of that, he and Candice were trying to finalize details of their upcoming wedding. Even so, Aaron and Todd did as much as they could. Later, as construction kicked into high gear, Todd stayed in constant contact by phone with the contractor.
On this morning, and every morning, Jan came by the house to check everything out before heading to work. She would be back that evening when she finally pulled herself away from the building that was housing the temporary city hall. Then it would be off to Cedar Falls to select fixtures, carpet, and furniture. Something always had to be picked out, which made this a nearly daily task for Jan.
After finishing his morning drive time with his students, Ed darted into Dutch’s for a quick bite to eat before heading over to the high school. On his way, he pulled out his phone to make a call. “Hey, just checking in. How is your morning going?” he said to Jan. He called her every day at this same time. Since their conversation that Sunday afternoon, Ed made sure he and Jan talked several times during the day, even though the temporary insanity of the summer meant that neither of them had any time to call their own. They talked again by phone during lunch and again when Jan got off work. Once their home, the school, and the city hall were back in working order, they would get back to their evening walks around town. For now, quick phone calls throughout the day would have to do.
Once he arrived at the high school, Ed went straight to his “office.” Shortly after the tornado cleanup began, he found a teacher’s desk in one of the classrooms and dragged it out onto the hill overlooking the football field. That’s where he set up shop every morning. He pulled a large, folded-up sheet of paper out of his back pocket, smoothed it out on his desk, and got busy. That piece of paper contained the name and number of every contractor working on the athletic fields, as well as the names and contact information of his legion of volunteers. The giant piece of paper also contained a schedule of what he needed to accomplish each day.
And he had a lot to accomplish every day.
Every athletic facility at the school had to be replaced. Every single one. Obviously, the gym was gone, and so was the football field. But the baseball and softball fields had also sustained heavy damage. That presented a huge problem for Ed as athletic director, because in Iowa, high school baseball and softball start their seasons about the
time school lets out. Within a day or two of the tornado, Ed and the baseball and softball coaches held a meeting in Ed’s outdoor office to plot out revised schedules for each team, along with finding a place for A-P’s home games. In addition, the girls’ volleyball team’s practices started in early August, with their season beginning when the boy’s football season began. Ed had to find a gym for their home games, along with a place for them to practice.
Then there was football. Truth be told, time was already running low when Ed boldly declared that A-P would begin their season at home right on schedule. Playing a home game meant more than clearing the rubble off the field. Huge hunks of turf had been torn out. In addition to the gashes, the ground was uneven from the combination of heavy rain, foot traffic, and large chunks of houses that had fallen out of the sky on top of it. A turf specialist from Iowa State University came over and helped rehabilitate the playing surface.
But the team needed more than a field on which to play their game. Everything around Ed Thomas Field had been heavily damaged. The bleachers on the home side of the field had to be torn down. Every one of the long metal benches that served as the seats first had to be removed so that the structure underneath could be razed. All of the lights—poles and all—had to be replaced, and the track surrounding the field had to be scraped up and resurfaced. The press box was gone, as was the scoreboard. As if that weren’t enough, all of the concession stands, ticket booths, bathrooms, and everything else that made Friday night football games possible had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Throughout the summer, Ed had an army of school coworkers, volunteers, and contractors to help with the rebuilding efforts. Every day, parents and students showed up and asked one question: What can we do to help?
Ed’s first team captain, Dave Becker, spent nearly as much time at the football field as he did at home that summer. Dave wasn’t just a former player who wanted to help out his old coach. His youngest son, Scott, was a junior on the team. Dave, like most of the rest of the team parents, knew how much the team and its coach meant to his son. He wanted to see the team play its first game at home nearly as much as Ed did.
All three of Dave and Joan’s sons played football for Ed. Their oldest, Brad, only played one season, in 1998. That also happened to be Todd Thomas’s senior year. Scott, the youngest, was about to play his third season for Ed. And Mark, their middle son, played for four years for A-P, including the state championship team of 2001. The fact that Mark was able to be a part of that team made Coach Thomas very special to Dave Becker. Mark got into trouble during his freshman year of high school when he and two other students were caught with marijuana. According to Ed’s own team code of conduct, Mark could have been kicked off the team. But Ed kept him on the squad. He told one of his assistants, “Being around the guys on the team will be good for him. He needs that positive influence.”
Three years later, Mark found himself in trouble once again. Aaron and Todd both asked Ed, “Dad, why do you keep putting up with him?” His answer to both was the same: “Mark needs this team more than the team needs him.” Even after Mark graduated, Ed refused to give up on him. Whenever Ed ran into Mark in town or on one of Mark’s occasional trips back to church, Ed went over to him, put his arm around him, and said, “You’ve got a good future in front of you, Mark. I know it.”
Mark never came out to the football field to help with the cleanup, but his father certainly did.
Within the first couple of days Ed asked Dave and some of the other football dads to supervise the students as they cleared the field, tore down the chain-link fence, dismantled bleachers, and tended to anything else that had to be done. Once the field was back under construction, Ed asked Dave and the dads to take a crew and start clearing the space where the team’s makeshift locker room would be. That building would become the school bus barn once the school was rebuilt. In the meantime, the Falcons had to have a place in which to change clothes and take showers if they were going to play any home games. Dave jumped on it.
On this day, contractors, not volunteers, were Ed’s primary concern. He sat at his desk and looked over his schedule. Bricklayers were supposed to arrive soon to build the low walls around the back of the baseball and softball fields. Most high schools ran chain-link fence all the way to the ground for their backstops, but Ed wanted something better. He saw the rebuilding of the athletic facilities as his chance to provide the best settings of any high school in Iowa, maybe even the country. Brick below the backstops gave the A-P fields the same look as major league parks, like Wrigley Field. The school’s insurance didn’t cover such extras, which is why Ed worked so hard to raise extra money for the athletic department after the storm.
It wasn’t just that Ed wanted all the sports to have the best. Every small school district in Iowa lived in fear of being consolidated into another district. Aplington and Parkersburg lived through this once, when A-P High School was formed. By building state-of-the-art facilities for everything from a field for the girls’ softball team to a space for the wrestling team to the gym where the volleyball and basketball teams played, as well as a first-rate football field, Ed was making it harder for the state legislators to shut down A-P and move them off to Grundy Center or Dike-New Hartford. However, his passion for the best increased his workload considerably.
While Ed toiled away at his makeshift office on the hill overlooking the football field, Jan opened city hall for business — or at least the building the town used as city hall. The tornado swept away the actual city hall, and with it all the records that allowed the town to conduct business. On her first day back at work, Jan didn’t have so much as pencil and paper to work with. She had pencil and paper now, along with a computer, but she was still waiting for the town’s lost computer data to be recovered.
A line of people were waiting for Jan when she arrived at the temporary city hall, just as they did every morning. She took her place behind the counter and motioned for the first person in line to come over. As with everyone else in town, Jan had known this woman for years. “What can I do for you today, Mrs. Smith?”
“Hi, Jan, honey. I have a little problem with my water bill. I paid my bill last month, but when I got my bank statement, my check didn’t show up. I called the bank, and they said the check never came through. Now, I know I paid it, and I sure don’t want my water to be shut off.”
“When did you make your last payment?” Jan asked.
“Right at the end of May. I remember because I dropped it off in the night deposit box on Saturday morning.”
“Did that happen to be the Saturday before Memorial Day?”
Mrs. Smith’s eyes lit up. “Why, yes, it did. How did you know?”
“Your check was blown away with city hall that weekend. Don’t worry. You won’t have to pay a late charge. I’ll make a note that your last payment was lost in the tornado.” Jan recited those lines at least ten times a day, and every time she was amazed that people did not make the connection between the storm and their lost checks.
The next person in line had another familiar problem. “Hey, Jan,” a man said, “I, uh, I got a sewer bill today, but I don’t have a house. How can I be billed for a house that doesn’t exist anymore?”
“The billing cycle starts on the fifteenth of the month. The bill is for the second half of May when you still had a house,” Jan explained.
“Still, doesn’t it seem odd to you that I got a bill for using the sewer in a house that’s not there anymore?”
“The bill is prorated so that it only covers the part of the month when your house was still there. We had to estimate the bills the best we could, but it is only half of what it would have been if your house were still there.”
The man started to argue the point further but stopped short. Everyone in town knew Ed and Jan were in the same boat as the other two hundred homeowners who had lost their homes.
During her lunch hour, Jan ran over to her house to check on the builders. The walls were up, which made her sm
ile. She could see the walls three blocks away, since nothing stood to block her view as she drove up. Getting out, she walked around her lot. She nearly tripped over a piece of wood protruding out of the ground. “I don’t think we will ever get everything cleaned up in the yard,” she said.
By 1:00 p.m., she was back at her desk. By 6:00, the flow of people had slowed down enough to allow the office to close for the day. She went back to the worksite and then headed off to Cedar Falls for her daily shopping trip. Sometime around 8:00 in the evening, she arrived back at the apartment over True Value Hardware.
Ed had only been home a few minutes when Jan arrived. Before either could say much to the other, his cell phone rang. “Yeah. OK. Now? I guess now will work. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.” He hung up his phone and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to go. There’s a reporter from the New York Times over at the school, wanting to ask me a few questions. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“That’s fine,” Jan said. “I’ll be here.”
With that, Ed was out the door. After the interview was over, he went down to the football field and checked on the watering system. A turf expert told Ed that keeping water on the field was the key to coaxing grass back into the gashes left by the debris on the field. That was easier said than done. When the tornado drove boards, sheet metal, lawn mower decks, and even a trailer axle into the football field, it drove them so deep into the turf that the underground irrigation pipes snapped in two. Ron Westerman, head custodian at the middle school, who worked side by side with Ed in restoring the field, spent what felt like an eternity chasing down leaks in the pipes. Even once he had repaired every break, he periodically had to shut down the entire system to flush out rocks and dirt left behind by damage to the system.