The Cardiff Giant was carved out of Iowa gypsum, buried in New York and “discovered” a year later. (Photo: New York State Historical Society) Editor’s Note In any group of coworkers, family members or friends, it’s useful to have someone who can reliably fill in the blank: “Remember that o ne time when ____.” Here at Business Publications Corp., we often turn to Dave Elbert, who wrote for the Business Record from 2012 through February of this year. Nearly 350 of his “Elbert Files” are archived online, and they’re full of insights he gathered from reporting and writing over the years for the Business Record and during his previous stint at the Des Moines Register, where he and I first met. He can fill in more “remember when” blanks about Des Moines than just about anybody else in town, so when he offered to shift his focus to dsm, I jumped on it. Stay tuned for more of “Elbert’s Backstories” in the weeks and months ahead. – Michael Morain, dsm editor By Dave ElbertI have a history of digging up history. It comes from my Catholic mother, who wanted to boost my reading skills when I was 9 or 10 with books about the lives of the saints. I later learned that a lot of what I read was not literally true. But the books held my attention, and it was a short jump from saints to biographies of early Americans. I was hooked, and I’ve studied history ever since, both in school and in my journalism career.Little of what I write in these “Backstories” essays will be new, but a lot has been forgotten. For example, you may have heard about the Cardiff Giant hoax. It involved a 10-foot block of gypsum from Fort Dodge that was chiseled to resemble a man. It was then buried on a farm near Cardiff, New York, in 1868 and “discovered” a year later by people who claimed it was a petrified man. The “giant” was put on exhibition and earned money for its owners long after the hoax was exposed.Eventually, the carved stone was sold to Des Moines Register publisher Gardner “Mike” Cowles, who brought it to his home on 37th Street. In his 1985 autobiography, he reported that his 7-year-old son and playmates damaged the giant when they applied a hammer to the stoneman’s anatomically correct manhood and broke off an essential piece. “I was enraged,” Cowles wrote. He added, “Eventually I found a craftsman who cemented the tip back on.”In this column, I will also occasionally share personal stories, like the fact that my father, Willis Elbert, was one of two mechanics who built the world’s first slip-form paver. Iowa Highway Commission engineer James “Jimmy” Johnson invented the machine that revolutionized highway paving in 1949 with moveable concrete forms. But my father and fellow mechanic Rudy Schroeder were the guys who put the pieces together and made it work. When Johnson died in 1982, the Register’s Randy Evans wrote that the estimated savings “from the slip-form paver may have reached the $1 billion mark worldwide.”Other times, I’ll focus my way-back looking glass on “what if” situations, like the time in 1928 when we could have had two Iowans running for president. That year, Herbert Hoover, the Republican from West Branch, defeated New York’s Gov. Al Smith, a Democrat. But Hoover’s opponent could have been Des Moines publisher Edwin “E.T.” Meredith.In addition to founding Better Homes & Gardens and Successful Farming, Meredith was a “dry” Democrat with a political itch. He made unsuccessful bids for Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat in 1914 and for governor in 1916 and served briefly as U.S. secretary of agriculture in 1920. In 1928, non-drinking Democrats promoted him as an alternative to Smith, who wanted to end Prohibition. But nine days before the Democratic convention began, Meredith died unexpectedly of heart problems.Could he have won? We’ll never know. But it’s quite a backstory. ...read more read less