On the road

John Arends (’77 journalism) has devoted much of his life to telling the Jack Trice story. And now it’s one step closer to getting the national attention it deserves.

We profiled John as part of the VISIONS Across America project back in September 2012. Since then I’ve eagerly followed his progress toward getting his Jack Trice movie screenplay produced.

Just last week it was announced that John was chosen as one of six screenwriters to travel to Las Vegas for the second-annual Black List Screenwriters Lab. Hosted by Tony Hsieh’s Las Vegas Downtown Project, the lab is a week-long intensive workshop with professional mentors focused on elevating the writers’ work and preparing them for the “realities of life” in the profession.

The Black List is an online community where moviemakers find scripts to make and writers to write them … and where screenwriters find moviemakers to make their scripts and employ them. John says Trice has been trending on the Black List website for more than a year.

The inside of the abandoned Anheuser-Busch distribution center is warm and dark. Theaster Gates struggles to lift one of the enormous garage doors a few inches to let in enough light to illuminate the exposed brick walls and hard-worn concrete floors.

Built in 1907, this building is more than 100 years old. But it’s easy to visualize its potential: 25,000 square feet of artist’s studio and a collection of small neighborhood shops.

This is the south side of Chicago, Theaster’s hometown. It’s here that he created the Dorchester Projects: buildings located on Dorchester Avenue and 69^th Street set aside to celebrate the work of artists of color and to honor art as a function of its environment.

The Projects started simply enough. In 2006 Theaster was looking for a home to buy, and he found one that looked like a good candidate for conversion to an artist’s live/work space. Three years later, his neighborhood deteriorating, he began to think he could transform the whole block.

By then, the ISU graduate (’96 community & regional planning, MA ’05 interdisciplinary graduate studies) was an arts administrator for the University of Chicago as well as a rising star in the art world. (The Chicago Reader called it “a meteoric rise.”)

“As my ambition increased, my access to funding increased,” Theaster said. In addition to the Anheuser-Busch building, he’s working to transform 36 Chicago Housing Authority units into artist live/work spaces.

“I have a really great job,” Theaster says of his position as director of arts program development in the University of Chicago’s Office of the Provost. “Being an artist at an academic institution, they value my time in the studio. The way I solve problems is different than other people.”

The story of John Arends and the story of Jack Trice are very much interconnected.

Of course, the Trice story is well known to those of us familiar with Iowa State University history. But John’s story is no less passionate and dramatic: It’s a behind-the-scenes push to tell the Trice story to a broader audience.

Let’s start where the stories begin to overlap.

John was an undergraduate at Iowa State in the 1970s when a debate began on campus and in the local media about whether to name the new football stadium in honor of Jack Trice. Despite strong support by students to name it Jack Trice Stadium, university officials stayed with the name Cyclone Stadium.

John says he was “just a spectator” in the Trice naming controversy during those years. But later, as a graduate student at Iowa State in the 1980s, he attempted to write a play about the Trice story for his master’s thesis.

He never finished the play. However, he did write a guest editorial for the Des Moines Register just as the campus was again debating the stadium name (this time, he said, the university “cut the baby in half” by naming the stadium “Cyclone Stadium” and the field “Jack Trice Field.”) It was 1983, the 60^th anniversary of Jack’s death. John’s editorial caught the attention of Newsweek, and the magazine’s Midwest bureau chief wrote an article about Jack Trice titled “Once upon a time in Iowa.”

About that time, a Hollywood producer called John and the two discussed turning the Jack Trice story into a movie. But nothing ever came of it.

Fast forward a couple of decades. Iowa State’s football stadium is now, finally, named Jack Trice Stadium. John (who graduated with a degree in journalism in 1977) and his wife, Anne (’78 physical education & dance), have raised three children (all of whom attended Iowa State). John is the president and CEO of ARENDS, a communications and marketing agency in Batavia, Ill.

And then John turned 50 and it hit him: He still wanted to write a screenplay to tell the Jack Trice story.

“I didn’t want to do the ‘what if?’” he says. So he studied the craft. He wrote two unrelated screenplays (one of which won a writing contest).

It was time to write about Jack Trice.

Now the story comes full circle. As I sat with John at his Batavia office, located in a 1870s windmill factory situated on the banks of the Fox River, I could feel the emotion in John’s voice as the words began pouring out:

“It’s such a great story,” he says. “It’s a coming of age story: taking a stand as a young man on the football field. So many Iowa State students – hundreds, thousands – have embraced this story. It would not go away. Jack died, and it was a horrific thing, but the university has honored him with [the stadium] name.”

John’s treatment of the story could best be called historical fiction. It’s based on the events of Jack Trice’s life, but it’s been embellished.

“It’s inspired by true events,” John explains, “but no one could know what was in Jack’s heart. No one could know what his coach felt.”

John invented a mentor for Jack who was African American. (“There’s always a white protagonist that saves the day. I wasn’t going to do that.”) There’s also a dual love story between Jack and his wife and Jack his mother.

The finished product is Trice, an original screenplay by John Arends.

Getting Trice produced as a major motion picture is another thing entirely. John says it will be too expensive. It will probably never get made.

But then Chicago ScriptWorks chose John’s story to be performed as a staged screenplay reading. John was paired with a director and professional actors. They found a small, off-Loop theater in Chicago, and on Sept. 15, 2010 Trice was performed.

The production was more than a common readers’ theatre. It employed stage lighting and projections. Actors, dressed in black, read from the script but also acted out the football scene, the funeral scene, and more.

Katherine Hallenbeck (’02 MIS/finance) saw the show.

“It took close to 30 years to see John’s work come alive on stage, but it only took me 90 minutes and a talented cast of 15 to fall in love with the Iowa State legend and our football stadium’s namesake,” she said.

What’s next? John is encouraged by the response to the show. He still hopes to be able to tell the Jack Trice story to a broader audience and a new generation of Iowa Staters through film or stage.

“It’s Jack’s story,” he says, smiling sadly. “It has power.”

Anthony Nielsen moved from rural Iowa to the city of Chicago to work on a farm.

But not just any farm: The farm at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

That was 12 years ago.

Today Anthony (’97) is the lead keeper of the Kovler Lion House and Seal Pool at Lincoln Park, a 49-acre oasis in the middle of Chicago.

Anthony’s parents took him to Sea World when he was five years old, and he still remembers how excited he was to be there. He was an outdoor kid, growing up in rural Oxford, Iowa, and being around animals.

“I couldn’t see myself working inside behind a desk,” Anthony says.

So he came to Iowa State to major in fisheries and wildlife biology with the idea of working in a zoo or aquarium.

Lincoln Park Zoo is a perfect fit.

“I love walking around the zoo, hearing people talking about the animals,” he says. “I love the hard work that goes into it. I enjoy coming to work every morning and seeing my animals.”

The animals respond to him, too. Walking past the outdoor lion yard early one morning, Anthony calls to Myra, the 16-year-old female lion. She looks up at him expectantly. She knows his voice.

Anthony tends to the needs of each of the big cats in the 100-year-old Kovler Lion House – the African lions and Amur tigers, the regal jaguar, lynx, snow leopard, and puma, the tiny servals and hissy Pallas’ cats, and even a too-cute-to-be-real red panda – as well as the sole dweller of the seal pool, Della the gray seal. He feeds them, monitors their health, and sets up enrichment activities for them.

Between his position with the Farm-in-the-Zoo — where he worked with goats, chickens, cows, rabbits, and sheep — and his current position, Anthony worked at the Lincoln Park Zoo’s McCormick Bird House and Regenstein African Journey exhibit, which includes giraffes, wild dogs, rhinos, and more.

He jokes that his wife, Erin, can tell which animals he’s been working with on a given day by the way he smells when he comes home.

Anthony is content with his life in Chicago — where he bikes to work on a daily basis — and with his job at the Lincoln Park Zoo.

“I don’t plan on ever leaving this zoo,” he says. “I just really like the small atmosphere. It’s like working in a small town.”

Jim and I were blown away by the number of happy, enthusiastic Iowa State alumni (and their friends) who turned out for the ISUAA Club of Chicago’s “Cyclone Summertime Happy Hour” held last Friday (Aug. 10) on the patio of the Millennium Park Grill during our VISIONS Across America tour of the upper Midwest. It was a beautiful night to be in downtown Chicago, and the Cyclones just kept coming. I think all told we must have had upwards of 50 people show up between 5 o’clock and the time we left, and everyone seemed to have a great time.

I have to give a special shout-out to club leaders Scott DeKoster (’02 advertising) and Leslie Blake DeKoster (’03 industrial engineering) for helping to plan and promote the event. Scott arrived at the Millennium Park Grill TWO HOURS prior to the start of the event just to save enough space for the Chicago Cyclones to gather in the popular, no-reservations-accepted outdoor bar area (I eventually showed up with some stand-up Cys and cardinal & gold pom-poms, which seemed to help define the gathering space.) Soon Iowa Staters began arriving in droves, in grad years ranging from 1956 to 2012.

Even the band, The Walk-ins, got into the Cyclone spirit. Lead singer Joe Matise wore an Iowa State nametag and a Homecoming sticker and even joined us for a few group photos.

Here’s Jim Fancher (’56 electrical engineering) and his wife, Carol, enjoying the festivities.

Chris (’01 management information systems) and Kristen Collins (above) have one of those “mixed” marriages: Kristen didn’t attend Iowa State; she married into it. But you’d never know. She was one of the most enthusiastic Cyclones in the group.

We even had a couple from West Des Moines join our group. Kyle Nielsen (’07 journalism) and Allison Roby (’09) had just arrived in Chicago on vacation and saw the cardinal & gold, so they thought they’d stop by.

Thanks, Chicago. We had a fantastic time!