Major league sports teams hit homeruns for Iowa Children's Museum
Small gestures from pro teams generate funds and goodwill in east-central Iowa
Sometimes — heck, a lot of the time — we need a break.
A lot is going on in this crazy country, and I spend a lot of time in this space on matters of seemingly great consternation, so I needed one.
My wife and I recently took two of our grandchildren to the Iowa Children’s Museum in Coralville. The kids’ attention spans were all over the place. Inside, they immediately went to the gift store.
Here is this amazing play space full of children’s activities, and they want to look at stuff to buy instead of the airplane room or Lego room, that room with foam building blocks or the one with skateboards.
Consumers they are, these two.
As I stood outside the store waiting, I gazed at the main lobby’s wall, where donors to the nonprofit museum are honored with plaques. I was surprised to see, in the middle of the usual collection of local corporations, nonprofits and individuals, the following:
Green Bay Packers.
What on earth made the Green Bay Packers want to help support a museum in Coralville, Iowa? I wondered. I scanned more plaques. Kansas City Royals. St. Louis Cardinals. Minnesota Twins. The Chicago Cubs, too. Say hey.
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It turns out these teams have community-building philanthropies and donate raffle items, like tickets and team memorabilia. The Iowa Children’s Museum uses the items as giveaways in major fundraising events, like the winter Celebrate Play Gala and spring Iowa Children’s Open golf tournament, Amanda Thys, the museum’s marketing and communications director, said.
“We reach out to local sports teams like the Heartlanders, like the Kernels, places like that, as well as some national organizations or larger organizations to see if we can get some donations,” Thys said, referring to the Iowa Heartlanders minor league hockey team, which is suspending operations for a year in Coralville, and the Cedar Rapids Kernels minor league baseball team.
The donations are nice gestures that connect the teams with communities — even if those communities are found in Coralville, Iowa.
The Twins baseball club has been sending silent auction items to the museum for several years, Dustin Morse, the Twins’ senior vice president for communications and public affairs, said.
“That’s just the Twins’ way,” he said. “It’s really a nonprofit emphasis. We put on anybody that applies in Twins territory, and this group has applied the last seven years. And we’ve been happy to donate different items over the years.”
I found it interesting that major league sports clubs consider east-central Iowa to be a target area worth giving attention. People in this portion of the state are fortunate if they follow professional sports because a lot of teams are within drives of five hours or less in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City.
At the flying exhibit — yes, our grandchildren finally got into the exhibits and started to play — I ran into Melinna Posey and Tyler Dusenberry, of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb in Packers country. They were visiting family in Moscow, Iowa, that weekend, and Posey’s 2-year-old daughter, Oakley, was transfixed by how air blowing from a hole kept a ping-pong ball floating in the air.
Are you surprised that major league sports clubs help raise money for the museum? I asked. “I think it’s very nice,” Posey said.
“It is kind of interesting to me, considering how Iowa is not known for a lot of major league sports,” Dusenberry said. “So, it is kind of interesting how other leagues from outside of the state are helping out events like these for the children.”
I write about a lot of heavy topics that I care about, but I thought it would be worthwhile to know that some good exists in the world, even from humongous corporations like Major League Baseball and the National Football League. We need to know this amid the bombardment of headlines about war, the abuse of Americans wanting a better life here, fights to rig congressional seats, rising prices and general displeasure with government.
“It’s very wonderful that they donate those,” Thys said about the donated items. “We really appreciate them, and it goes a long way in our ability to take those events and make them something really fun for the folks that attend. And then, to also just raise extra dollars that’ll go back to helping kids in our community. So, it’s great.”
Sometimes, the dumbest ideas, like wondering about plaques on a wall, make you curious enough that you end up finding enjoyment.
Lyle Muller is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Check out some of the collaborative’s most stories from its roster of Iowa’s finest writers in this week’s summary.
Great column and observations, Lyle. We had tickets for Packers and Vikings preseason games as part of silent auction packages at my church in Waterloo.
I'm not suprised by the Twins or the Packers. The Cedar Rapids Kernels of course are a Twins affiliate; Hall of Famer Joe Mauer's brother was Kernels manager a few years ago. And I know I had a lot of Twins fans razzing me for my support of my then-faltering Yankees when I was growing up in the late '60s when the Twins were riding high.
Recently deceased Green Bay Packers president emeritus Bob Harlan was a native of Des Moines and educated at Marquette University in Milwaukee. They've has a lot of Hawkeyes and Cyclones on their roster over the years dating back to the days of Hawkeyes Bob Jeter and Emlen Tunnell in Vince Lombardi's early years. I also remember attending a Packers game with my son at Lambeau Field in 2008 and many of my fellow Packer fans were very well aware of that year's devastating tornado in Parkersburg and New Hartford that killed nine people. Iowa Hawkeye and Aplington-Parkersburg High School alum Aaron Kampman was a Packers starter then and the team afforded him time to make a personal appeal.
And as far as the NFL as a whole, well, there's that guy from Cedar Rapids and UNI named Kurt Warner who received the NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year award for his work with Habitat for Humanity in Iowa and relief here from the record flood of 2008.
The pros know where we are even if the national sports networks frequently mix up Hawkeyes and Cyclones and cite tap water and pool tables as our main assets (well, in Ames anyway, Iowa City's far more sophisticated, right?).
And a little plug: The top minor league affiliates of the Cubs and Twins, the Iowa Cubs and the St. Paul Saints, will play at the Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville, on Tuesday August 11.