Donald kul
RAGBRAI co-founder and syndicated columnist Donald Kaul sees the end of the road approaching
Of course all of us inch closer to the grave with every breath. And I can imagine Kaul feeling like he wants to die each time our president goes on Twitter to brag about his bigger button. Sadly, I mean that Kaul is sick, so sick that he expects to die within the year. The prostate cancer that he has battled finally metastasized into his skeleton. Treatment has ended. Kaul is spending his time at home in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Their family convened over the holidays. Such are the glib one-liners tossed out by an agnostic born on Christmas. He always has written as if irreverence and irony were buried within him as bone deep as the cancer now killing him. His readers followed with a religious zeal that few modern journalists can hope to inspire. Kaul became a towering figure in a heyday when metro newspapers left their readers with ink-stained fingers, not ones sore from tapping smartphones.
At the start of the s, he was a young reporter who chased fires and other breaking news for Des Moines' afternoon daily, the Tribune.
I was Donald Kaul's last editor, and the job was memorable in every way
By the end of the decade, he took glee in setting rhetorical fires by following his own whims. He churned out as many as five columns per week. At his height, he was syndicated in newspapers. Department of Health and Human Services. He bent it to his will to rail against the Vietnam War and take up countless other causes — but always with his barbed humor.
Many of the butts of his jokes remained devoted fans.
Donald Kaul, longtime Register columnist and RAGBRAI co-founder, dies at 83
In New York, he or she has suffered New York. In the summer of , this Lennon-McCartney of bicycling published a casual invitation for a handful of readers to join them along the rural byways. They stumbled into a Midwestern Woodstock on two wheels. Now we feel like Dr. But there he sat at a typewriter in some remote Iowa farmhouse. He pecked away at the keyboard on the kitchen table as a dozen or more family members and neighbors lined the room for the bizarre spectator sport.
But he always has been more comfortable poking holes in institutions than building them up. So they let me do the play-by-play.
As a defining voice of Iowa, Kaul wrote most of his columns outside the state. He first moved to the Register's Washington bureau in The same summer of that he retired from RAGBRAI also saw him locked in a bitter power struggle with editors over whether his columns should focus more on Iowa than on national affairs. A chorus of outrage, threaded with some glee, rained down on the editorial pages in the wake of Kaul's departure.
Later that decade, when Geneva Overholser became Register editor, she lured Kaul back into the fold. Kaul elaborated a little on his liberal and often contrarian worldview in his return column. Kaul remained in Washington, where through the years the bureau where he worked brewed a cauldron of ideas and banter with close friends and fellow journalists such as George Anthan, Jim Risser and John Hyde.
At one point Kaul and Anthan allegedly sneaked out in the dark of night with cement and added bicycle-friendly ramps to the curbs for several blocks along the embassies of Massachusetts Avenue. No matter how well you do on a particular afternoon, by the next day your muse is asking: 'What have you done for me lately?