Recipes for Living David Twombley

I was born in Osceola, April 11, 1941. My parents often remarked about the fact that in 1941, Good Friday fell on April 11. At that time my father owned the Twombley Standard Oil station, which he bought in 1933. When they were first married, in 1926, my parents moved to Washington, D.C. and Dad worked for the Department of Agriculture until 1931. They really liked Washington, but Mother, who had thyroid problems all her life, was developing health complications. They decided it would be good to be closer to family, so they returned to Iowa.

Dad became the bookkeeper for Ed Swain, who had a general store - a combination of meat market and a little bit of everything - on the east side of the square. The location would be the north part of the present Clarke County State Bank. The person who was managing the Standard station wanted to make a change and a representative from Standard Oil approached Dad because they knew he was a good bookkeeper. That was Dad's entry into the oil business.

My parents' first child, Conda, was still-born in 1929, so there were just Don and I. Don is nine years older than I, born in 1932. He married Joyce Cole, who grew up in Osceola, the youngest child of Forrest and Marie Cole. She had two brothers and a sister - Jack, King, and Virgene. Joyce was a year behind Don in school. Don lives in Des Moines and retired in 1995 from working for Standard Oil, which later became Amoco, and now is British Petroleum.

I went all through school in Osceola, graduating in 1959. I started school at the old East Ward and missed the new building by two years. Then I attended South Ward, which was where the United Methodist Church now stands, and to high school in the building which later became North Elementary. I also missed the new high school by two years.

That became the pattern, because when I went on to Drake University, I missed the new Fine Arts building by two years. I was born two years too soon; all the way around I majored in music. Even as a child, I always liked to sing and I was undoubtedly influenced by my aunt, Amy Ruth Harlan, who was a fantastic organist. She was the organist at the Christian Church and for many funerals for the Webster Funeral Home. I remember asking Mother who would play for Amy's funeral when she died. It used to worry me to death.

In addition to encouragement from my family. I was extremely fortunate that my vocal teacher, Shirley Sutton, who was born, raised, and educated in Osceola, and my band director, Ed Hargrove, were excellent teachers. Both of them graduated from Drake, and they were the primary reason I chose Drake for my continuing education. Additionally, when I was a high school sophomore I was in an Honor Band, and the director was Don Marcouiller, who also directed the Drake bands. He was excellent, and I liked him so much - that was the clincher.

I graduated from Drake in 1963, with a Bachelor of Music Education degree. Clarinet was my instrument of performance. I had an opportunity to apply at Anamosa, where their music department was expanding from one person to two. I also had a very good friend in college from Anamosa, Richard Stanaway, who was two years behind me in the music department. I went home with him one weekend, was interviewed and accepted. I had a job two months before I graduated from college. I taught there for two years and will always be grateful to Richard's super parents who took this new teacher under their wings and saw me over the hurdles. Richard graduated, took my job in Anamosa, and has been there ever since.

I went back to Drake, took an apartment, and enrolled in graduate school. I taught for the Des Moines school system, giving private lessons, while working toward my Masters degree. I did that for one year, had everything done except one class, when a job at Murray opened up. I needed money, so I went there in the fall of 1966. I graduated in 1967 with a Masters in Music education and Masters in Music Performance on clarinet. I was very fortunate to have attended Drake when I did. It is still an excellent school, but at that time they had an outstanding, very stable, music faculty. It was an honor to have studied with them.

I was at Murray three years and thoroughly enjoyed it. Along with the academics, lots of the staff was about my age, so we did a lot of fun things together. The only reason I left was that they were undergoing budget cuts and doing away with one music position. I would have had to do both vocal and instrumental teaching and felt there was no way I could do justice to both. In the fall of 1969, an Osceola High School position opened up, and I took that position for three years. At that time Phil Manahl, junior high band director, moved to Des Moines. His position looked very attractive. Directing the high school band demanded lots of nights and weekend work. I am not lazy, but I have always enjoyed the junior high age group. I decided to go there and have never regretted it. They are at a very special age. They can drive you nuts in two minutes, but at the same time they are so much fun. Diana Blake remarked that at about seventh grade, the kids go brain dead, and about the time they are sophomores in high school, it begins to return.

Diana has been a great friend for 63 years. I was born in April before she was born in August, so we grew up together, went through school in Osceola together, to Drake together, and she ended up teaching the same age group as I. She retired this past year, 2003. She and I met for lunch in Ames yesterday. It is about halfway for both of us. She was just back from South America, where, for the first time, she visited her sister Susan.

I retired in 2000, and have had no problem filling my time. I have always been interested in lots of things. My parents were great readers, especially Dad. He always read the U.S. News and World Report, the Washington Post, and similar material. I love science, and might have chosen a science-related career if I had been more comfortable with math. I could get through math classes, but I never felt like I really knew what I was doing.

In the fall of 1969, I began taking flight lessons from Don Swanson of Creston and got my pilots' license in 1970. Two years later I got my instrument rating and ground school requirements so I could teach. I flew one time to Dallas, once to the Denver area, and several times to Minneapolis. For 10 years I owned a plane with Bob Horton and Jim Schaeffer, but it became too expensive to continue.

Then I got hooked on running. The summer of 1988 was horribly hot and dry. I've always had asthma and my allergies were bothering me. I had gone to my allergist, who suggested that, to supplement my medication, I take some aerobic exercises to build up my lung capacity. All I could think of was how I hated that in school but Diana came to my rescue. She started running in her early 20's and runs two miles a day. I thought that was fine for her but I wanted no part of it. Knowing I needed to do it, she said, "Go out with me.” I remember huffing and puffing, looking at my watch thinking we would never get through it. But I got through the two miles with her, went out the next day, and within a week it didn't seem so bad.

As with any new interest, I really started getting into it. I consider January 1, 1989 my official beginning. I read that there would be a training group at Drake, for anyone who was interested in the marathon. I had only been running about six months but I thought it might be interesting. I went in every Saturday beginning mid-January, preparing for the Drake Relays at the end of April. They said we should be running at least 35 miles a week and at that time I was running about 40. The first run was 10 miles and we eventually worked up to two 20 mile runs.

I ran my first marathon in April 1990. It took me four hours. The route ended in downtown Des Moines. I got to about 17th and Locust, where Betts Cadillac used to be, and it was literally like someone had turned a switch. I stopped. I didn't plan on it, I just stopped. My blood sugar had gotten too low. One of my brother's friends saw me and gave me a candy bar, so I did finish. I felt like I'd gone to the moon when I did that.

My second experience was Minneapolis in October. They have a marvelous Twin Cities' Marathon, and I ran that in four hours. In the meantime, I saw a friend of mine whom I had met in the training group. I noted that he had really improved. He had qualified for Boston, which was my goal, so I got more serious about training. I ran my next marathon in April at Drake and came in ½ hour faster than I had the other two. In the fall of 1991, I ran Twin Cities. At that time, for my age group, they had changed qualifications for Boston. I had to run under three hours and 25 minutes, and came in at 3.17, so that led to my first Boston. I remember getting really excited when I looked at my watch about mile 25 and thinking, "I believe I can do this!"

I ran three Boston marathons in my career. I went to London in 1995 and did the London marathon, which was very exciting because the finish line was in front of Buckingham Palace. I ran the London marathon the first weekend in April, came back and ran a ½ marathon at Drake three weeks later, and one week later went to Lincoln, Nebraska and ran a full marathon over there, so I did 2 ½ marathons in five weeks. I'll never do that again. I was younger then, and much stupider. (While I was in Lincoln, I stayed with John and Jean Dale. He formerly was the Christian Church pastor in Osceola.) I did 10 consecutive Twin Cities marathons, for a grand total of 21 marathons.

I have participated in a lot of shorter races - several half marathons, and 11 Dam to Dam races, starting at Saylorville Dam and ending in downtown Des Moines - about 15 miles. My fastest dam to dam is an hour and 28 minutes. Today I am doing them in about two hours. One reason is that the body slows down with time, and secondly, I'm not nearly as competitive as I used to be. At first you get really competitive, but then you begin to think, "Well, I still want to do this but I won't take it so seriously." I have kept a log ever since I started running, and at the end of each year, total up the miles. At the end of 2003, I had totaled a little over 26,000 miles. At one time I was running over 2,000 miles a year but I'm not running nearly as much as I did. Now I am down to 800 or 900 miles a year.

I mentioned my blood sugar getting low during one race. In training to run long distances, you get up in the morning and drink orange juice or something to produce instant energy. Then your body has to learn how to break down fat to provide additional energy and that happens to most people about mile 10 or 12. The body kind of shifts over from glucose that has been stored in the liver and starts utilizing body fat. The claim is that if you could get your body to do it, every person has enough body fat to run three marathons back to back without taking a bit of nourishment. It's called the breakdown process and that is part of the training.

To me the most difficult part of a race is from mile 17 to mile 20. Some people call that "the wall," but if I can get to that, it becomes a little easier. "Hitting the wall" is an apt description for when the blood sugar goes, and you are into another source. It isn't a gradual thing. It hits all of a sudden, and your body lets you know it just doesn't want to do this anymore. Ninety percent of it is mental. You have to train your mind to overcome your body saying, "Stop, stop,, when you are determined to go on. I call the mental part of it focusing.

I think running is one of the best things I could ever have done. It's a spiritual thing, an emotional thing, and a physical thing, all tied together. My health is excellent, and it is a great self-confidence builder to know "I can do this. If I can get through a marathon, I can do this." I've done a lot of runs by myself, 10 or 12 miles, in which case the mind is free to consider whatever pops into the head. It's a great stress-handler. I usually ran in the morning but if I came home from school stressed out, it was a great way to sort things out. The morning runs made me feel quite virtuous. I could walk into school thinking; "While everyone else was still in bed, I did a six-mile run."

But I have also had a lot of running partners. Especially on a really long run, it is much more fun to have a partner. One of the running partners I particularly think of is Denny Wheeler, a contractor in Des Moines – we trained and ran our first marathon together. I’ve even run with Governor Vilsack a couple of times. He runs a lot of Dam to Dams. I’ve met up with a lot of my friends from college.

My brother Don and I started doing bike rides together in 1999, and this leads into the exciting places I have been. I've been to Hawaii three times. Don and I have done four or five bike trips in Europe. On one trip we went to Denmark the first week and Sweden the second. We've covered the Netherlands by now in four trips. We did one last summer starting at the extreme southeast end of the country, Maastricht, which is near the borders of Germany and Belgium. Most of Holland is so flat that it is like riding around on your tabletop, but the first two or three days of that ride, we had some pretty decent hills in the sand dune area, Wik an Zee, which is near the North Sea. We have been there twice.

Don Benson is the one who started us going to Europe. He worked for the Des Moines Register for years - was one of the co-starters of RAGBRAI (Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa). He attends the same church as my brother Don and I - the Covenant Christian Disciples Church in Des Moines. Don and his wife have good friends who have now become our good friends – Rein and Rose Winter. Rein is a retired newspaper man and they now live about 20 kilometers outside Amsterdam. Just last year they built a gorgeous new home, which is a house boat, so we took the train out and had dinner with them.

I am also interested in automobiles, specifically Cadillacs. I have a 2003-STS but my “baby" is a 1992 Allante, two seat roadster convertible with removable hard top. There were only 25,000 Allantes made from 1987 through ‘93 and there were only 16 made of the color of mine in the ’92 model year. It is becoming a classic. Through this interest, I have come to know a gentleman in Des Moines who, about two years ago, started Crossroads Region Iowa, a local region of the national Cadillac LaSalle club. This gave me an opportunity to meet a kid from the Netherlands, Likele DeBoer, who last year was a foreign exchange student for a semester at the University of Iowa in international business. He's nuts about cars, saw a little squib about our club, and joined. That was the way I met him, a delightful young man. He had just graduated from a university in the Netherlands; and has his dream job working for Cadillac Europe. He was chosen from 12 finalists competing for the job. His dad died when Likele was young, but I met his mother when she and Likele came to the States last year while he was on spring break. She has a sister who immigrated to the United States in 1980, and they have a dairy farm near Dallas. Likele and his mother came to my home and I took them out to the boat for dinner. We let him know when we are traveling in the Netherlands, so when we were last there they invited us to their home one night and took us out to dinner. So Don got to meet him, also. Our club is hosting the National Cadillac/LaSalle meeting in 2005, so Likele is coming to help us with arrangements.
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Even though I am retired from teaching, I am still involved in music. I am judging for the Iowa High School Music Association. Now, the spring of 2004 is contest time so I have several judging dates. Adjudicating requires taking a class every five years and I have one coming up next year. I will do that because I want to continue. Maybe at that point I will reevaluate. I am Clarinet Adjunct for Graceland University. I started that last year. I go down on Wednesday afternoons and presently have three students. It is fun working with college kids. I’ve never done that before.

When I retired, I was ready to quit teaching fulltime, but I am glad to have some teaching opportunities. It helps me stay young. It keeps me in contact with what is going on, and I would hate to loose contact with the kids. Someone asked me the other day if I have regrets for having chosen a teaching career and I absolutely do not. I’m sure there were days when I didn’t like it and it drove me nuts but I’m truly glad I did what I did. For instance, last night I had a call from Tyler Patterson who is home on spring break. Over the years, kids have stayed in touch and that's neat. There were Bob Hettinger's twins, Denise and Diane - Denise is going to be a judge here this weekend. She was my star clarinet player when she was in junior high and here she is coming back to be a judge in her home town. That type of thing means a lot! Every career has its rewards but there is something special about teaching.

There is a facet of my life that I have come to grips with in the last four years. Beginning when I was about five years old, I have known I was "different." Now I know I was gay, but at that time it wasn't a sexual thing. I just knew I wasn't like other boys. As I grew old enough to realize it, I knew I was gay, but I suppressed it. I went through all the stages of denial because it is hard to know there is something "wrong" with you. Probably each person handles it differently, but I became an over-achiever. I tried for perfect grades, got into all kinds of activities, and tried to do each one perfectly.

About four years ago I came to the point that I felt I could no longer deny who I am. I found the courage to tell my brother, who said, "So? You are still my brother." In the meantime on the internet, I had found a chat-room for men going through what I was going through - the struggle with sexuality. I talked to a man named Larry, who had also just come out to his brother. We began e-mailing back and forth, and to make a long story short, we met and I found him to be a wonderful man. His father was a Methodist minister; he was married to a Methodist minister for eight years. He has two children - a daughter who is a junior in college and an absolute delight, and a son who is a freshman in high school.

Larry is still very active in the Methodist Church in New York State, about an hour out of New York City. He's on a task force dealing with the struggle going on right now as the Methodist Church attempts to formulate their position on homosexuality. Larry and I became partners in a civil union in Vermont two years ago. He is coming this fall and we will probably move to Des Moines.

This has been the best thing I have ever done in my life. It took courage but I finally reasoned that God made me this way for whatever reason. I'm still the same person I've always been. I did not choose to be gay any more than someone else chooses to be straight. I get so angry and so upset with people who infer that I am some kind of second class citizen. Larry and I have gone through exactly the same things, and firmly believe that God knew what he was doing that we met each other.

I am very active in several gay groups in Des Moines - the First Friday Breakfast Club that meets at Hoyt Sherman Place the first Friday of each month. There are lots of professional people, publishing people, lawyers, etc. who attend. They give scholarships in the name of Matthew Shepherd, the boy who was murdered, to students who are openly gay and try to do something to promote understanding in schools, etc. The recipients get full ride, four year scholarships. Talk about bright kids! One of them this year was a National Merit Finalist. I presented a scholarship to a young man at Pella last year.

I am also a member of the Des Moines Gay Men's Chorus, a group of ninety people. We just had our spring concert Friday and Saturday nights and have another one coming up in June. We have a marvelous director who is the Director of Music at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Des Moines.

So this is a whole different phase of my life, but it is part of my story. It's hard but the hardest person to come out to was myself. Looking back, I see this as a possible reason I participated in all these different activities, but for some reason, about four years ago I decided that I just couldn't keep it inside me any longer. I had to share it with someone. I'm so glad I did. Some people I've told really didn't have a clue but others have said, "Oh, I've known that for years, but so what?" I guess they thought I'd figure it out sometime. But everyone who has known me and been my friend has been so supportive. That has helped.