Under the bridges of Polk County: A laboratory for teaching and research

The obituary was short, to the point. It noted that he was thirty-seven yea rs old, had died of pneumonia at Broadlawns Medical Center and was survived by a wife, a daughter his mother five brothers and two sisters. Nine of th e twenty-two lines that appeared on June 1, 1993, in the Des Moines Registe r reported on demographics about these relatives. Between the middle and la st name was inserted, in quotation marks, the word "Wolfman." The informati on, squeezed in with other similar summaries about other people who had die d recently, noted that he was a "self-employed carpenter," that he was from and his family continued to be in and around, Fort Worth, Texas, and that the services would be at Hamilton's Funeral Home, with burial at Resthaven Cemetery in West Des Moines. It is not possible that twenty-two short lines could do justice to thirty-s even years of any person's life. Yet that is what he was allotted. The summ er after he died was the summer of the Great Iowa Flood Wolfman, as everyon e called him, never lived to experience the natural event that brought noto riety to the city and devastation to the lives of so many people who shared his community but never knew he existed I doubt that many people in Des Mo ines who brushed against his life even knew that his real name was Billy De an Roberts.