PANORA, Iowa, February 21, 2011 — A sell-out crowd of more than 200 people helped the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association raise a record $17,776 at its 4th annual membership banquet held Saturday, February 19, at the Lake Panorama National Resort Conference Center here.

Association president Carla Offenburger, of Cooper, reported the total in a message to board members Sunday night, adding that the total was $7,172 more than was taken in at the 2010 banquet, which had been the record holder.  “Isn’t that astounding?” Offenburger wrote to the board.  “I’m very pleased.  You should be, too.”

The crowd at the banquet heard a funny & poignant speech from former Iowa First Lady Christie Vilsack, who explained to the trail supporters just how much bicycling means to her.  “I think each of us bikers love going out to reprise what Walt Whitman called ‘the song of the open road,’ ” Vilsack said.  More about her speech here in a few paragraphs.

The revenue from this year’s banquet breaks down this way, she noted: $7,830 from the “live” auction, $4,128 from the “silent” auction, $3,500 in cash donations before the banquet, $1,314 profit from ticket sales (above the cost of the dinner), $984 in the various raffles held during the banquet, “and, finally, $20 we got for two of the raccoon tails we had used in displays.”

The items auctioned are for the most part donated by businesses and organizations located along the trail and by individuals who are supporters of the RRVT.  A full listing of this year’s donors will be posted on this Internet site in coming days.

One donation not counted in the $17,776 total from the banquet is an additional $15,196 from the estate of Alice Ann Andrew, of Jefferson, who died last year.  Her son Jim Andrew and his wife Jacque were recognized at the banquet for Alice’s bequest to the RRVT Association of 200 shares of McDonald’s restaurant stock.  That money is already committed to help build the new showers & restrooms in the trailside campground being constructed this spring at the RRVT trailhead in Jefferson.

The banquet is the only fundraiser that the RRVT Association has each year, and the proceeds go to pay for the marketing and promotion the group does touting the trail and its communities.  That includes advertising on websites, in magazines, newspapers and other media in Iowa and beyond.  At the banquet, Offenburger held up the new edition of The Iowan magazine, and told the crowd it has an example of what the trail association does, because the back cover of this edition is an RRVT advertisement.

You can see 23 color photos from the banquet in a special sidebar story by clicking here.

Christie Vilsack framed her banquet speech around tales of “the five bicycles I’ve owned in my life, unless you also count the one my husband bought for himself on my birthday.”  That’s Tom Vilsack, who served as governor of Iowa from 1999 to 2007 and is now U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, based in Washington, D.C., where the Vilsacks live.  She said she now keeps one bicycle in Washington and one in Des Moines, where the Vilsacks have a trailside condominium they use on their frequent trips back to Iowa.

She said she is amazed as she reflects how much cycling in Iowa has changed in her lifetime.  “When I was growing up in Mount Pleasant, I can’t remember a single adult around me who rode a bicycle,” she said.  She said when she purchased the first bicycle of adulthood, she ”bought it with my paychecks from my job as a news stringer for the Des Moines Register.”  That was when she and Tom had settled in Mount Pleasant, after college in New York state, and were becoming very active in the southeast Iowa community. She said she “started riding my bike all over town, for errands and for fun, and I’ve been doing that same thing ever since.”

She said she “can see one of the Des Moines trails from my house in Des Moines,” a condominium the couple has there for their frequent trips back to Iowa, ”and my son Jess and his family live five minutes down that trail, so I’m frequently riding it to go see my 18-month-old grandson Jake.”  She added that she often rides the RRVT between Adel and Redfield, and is probably most frequently on the Great Western Trail, which goes southwest out of Des Moines through Cumming to Martensdale.

“I can still remember my first trail ride — to Cumming and back – on a hot Sunday afternoon in 1999,” she said. “I had decided to see if I could get ready and ride RAGBRAI that summer, so this was my first training ride.   When I got back to Des Moines, I called Tom at Terrace Hill and said, ‘Did you know the bar in Cumming is open on Sunday afternoons?’  And he said, ‘I thought you were training for RAGBRAI!’ I’ve been back there many times since then.”

Vilsack said she has delighted in discovering “that there are raspberries to pick on the (Chichaqua Valley Trail) between Mingo and Baxter, and that at the meat locker in Mingo, you can still get freshly-rendered lard, which is great for pie baking.  I’m probably the only bicycle rider who has ridden home with a pound of rendered lard in my bike bag.”

She added that she can “always justify my love for pie eating by the fact that I’m out there riding my bicycle and getting plenty of exercise.  One of my favorite stops on your trail is at the little ice cream place the Dairy Shoppe in Redfield.  They usually have homemade pie there that’s just great.  On another training ride on a hot day, I had taken off my RAGBRAI bicycling jersey and was riding along in my sports bra and Spandex bike shorts.  I had strapped my jersey on to the rear rack of my bike.  Well, as I got to Redfield, ready for pie, I got off my bike and discovered my jersey was gone!  I thought, ‘No way am I going into that ice cream shop without my shirt on,’ so I got back on my bike and started riding home.  But just as I was on the edge of Redfield, along comes another bicycle rider, and the fellow was holding my jersey and yelled he’d found it on the trail.  So we stopped, he gave it to me and, if he recognized me, he was kind enough not to say he did.  I put that jersey on, turned my bike around, rode back into town for a piece of pie — and I had ice cream on it, too!”

She said that during her years as First Lady, when she’d ride on RAGBRAI or on the trails, she’d never pass an opportunity to promote the state.  She would stop in towns along the RAGBRAI route, and read stories to groups of children at the local public libraries, then get back on her bike and continue riding.

“One time I remember stopping for lunch in one of those small Iowa towns where, if you looked west down Main Street, all you could see was cornfields, and if you looked east down Main Street, all you saw there were more cornfields,”  she said. “So as I was sitting there eating lunch, a man who must’ve been from out-of-state sat down and we were visiting, even though I didn’t say who I was.  He said, ‘Look at all this corn around here! What do you suppose people do with all this corn?’ So I said, ‘Well, there are 3,543 things you can do with a kernel of corn,’ and I started listing them.  He got this look on his face like, ‘Who is this strange lady?’ “

Vilsack said Iowa’s trails system and RAGBRAI, too, are great showcases for the good life in Iowa.

“There are a lot of people from places that are much more congested than Iowa, who come here to go bicycling,” she said. “They sense that there is something special about life here, although a lot of them have trouble putting into words just what it is.  But a lot of them come back every year to ride again, but also to check to see if ‘it’ is still here.  Many of them are people who lead very busy lives, but when they come here they leave their BlackBerry behind, they enjoy quiet time on bikes with their family, love being in the outdoors and they love the friendliness they find here. That’s what ‘it’ is.  I know that because I now live several months a year in a city where honking is a language.  Most people around Washington, D.C., could tell you 20 different reasons why you shouldn’t eat a pork chop with your fingers, but they come out here once and the RAGBRAI experience can change them forever.”

She said she has heard such inspiring stories from some bicycle riders going across Iowa that sometimes “I’ve felt like I’d been to church.

“It’s a great democracy, riding down the road on RAGBRAI, which is like a town the size of Fort Madison on wheels.  People die, new ones are conveived.  People get married, sing, dance, laugh, drink to excess, argue politics, pee in a cornfield and tell stories to complete strangers.”

Vilsack, a Democrat, did not speak about politics at all.  But in her informal visits with people at the banquet, when they’d ask, she said she is still considering running for a position in Iowa, probably Congress, but that she won’t make a decision until after she sees how the congressional districts are redrawn with the new population informatin that’s been taken from the 2010 Census.   In addition to her activities in Washington, D.C., in support of Tom Vilsack’s duties as Secretary of Agriculture, Christie serves as executive director of the Iowa Initiative, an organization in the state that, through educational programs and counseling, is trying to reduce unintended pregnancies.  She said she continues to keep her hand in journalism by “writing occasional pieces for the Mount Pleasant News back home, just so our friends there can keep up with what Tom and I are doing.”