Megan Bannister is a 34-year-old Chicago native who has lived in Des Moines since attending Drake University for college.
Iowa gets unfairly maligned as “flyover country.” But the Hawkeye State also has been immortalized as “heaven” in the 1989 classic film Field of Dreams, which was shot in Dyersville.
Megan Bannister is firmly in the latter camp, as the bubbly Chicago native turned willing Iowan has traversed our divine cornfields and assembled 84 quirky, fun places to stop in her 192-page paperback book Secret Iowa: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, & Obscure.
This fascinating, full-color book presents each place over a two-page spread, with generous photos, along with nuts and bolts of what makes each interesting. For most long-time Iowans, most of these attractions – including Isabel Bloom in Davenport, the Buffalo Bill Museum in LeClaire, and the World’s Largest Truck Stop in Walcott – are hardly secret. But Bannister tried to include little-known information for them all.
Now 34, she grew up in the Chicago suburb of La Grange and went to Drake University in Des Moines to study journalism. She has lived in Iowa’s capital city ever since. She met her husband Josh (an IT contract manager) after college; he's originally from Urbandale. Bannister has worked in marketing for the Des Moines Art Center for five years, as an agency copywriter for about four years, and has been a full-time freelance writer for three years.
Bannister started her Olio in Iowa blog (OlioInIowa.com) in 2012, originally as a way to get out and explore her new hometown. “But along the way, the blog has become a home for all of my roadside adventures and a way to share the stories that make me love road-tripping,” she wrote, noting “olio” means a miscellaneous mixture.
“Since then I’ve driven coast to coast discovering unique small towns, roadside attractions and ‘world’s largest’ things along the way,” Bannister says, “No matter the destination, I firmly believe that getting there is half the fun.
“I truly believe that boredom is in the eye of the beholder,” she wrote for the Secret Iowa introduction. “Whenever someone questions why I’m ‘bothering to visit’ their small town, or complains that there’s nothing to do where they live, I’m reminded that finding something ‘interesting’ is all a matter of perspective. Most often, we’re bored because we’re not being curious enough.”
Her first book, Iowa Supper Clubs, was released through Arcadia Publishing in August 2020, and her second, Secret Iowa: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, & Obscure, was published by Reedy Press in September 2023, among a series of Secret books by Reedy for a variety of cities and states.
“I first discovered my love for roadside oddities when I was 22,” Bannister wrote. “It was early spring and a group of my friends had decided to embark upon the 23-hour drive from Des Moines to San Francisco. We were less than two hours into our trek when I forced a detour in the suburb of Boys Town, Nebraska, to see the World’s Largest Ball of Stamps. Weighing in at 600 pounds, that quirky mess of stamps instantly stole my heart. It was my first world’s largest thing, and it certainly wouldn’t be my last.
“I'm a planner for sure,” Bannister said. “But I love discovering things that I didn't plan on. That's why I really love to drive versus flying; you can find something, pull over, see what I find along the way.”
For Secret Iowa, she includes nine “World’s Largest” things, including the world’s biggest Cheeto, at Emerald’s Fine Food & Libations in Algona (about two hours north of Des Moines). It weighs 0.6 ounces and is around the size of a silver dollar.
“I've always loved the world's largest things,” Bannister said. “They're always silly and goofy.”
One of her current projects is offering a printed passport for people to visit all 21 “World’s Largest” things in Iowa, a list that's available on her Web site. In addition to the World’s Largest Popcorn Ball (Sac City), World’s Largest Strawberry (Strawberry Point), World’s Largest Swedish Coffee Cup and Coffee Pot (Stanton), World’s Largest Wooden Nickel (Iowa City) and World’s Largest Concrete Garden Gnome (Ames), there is the World’s Largest Truck Stop (off I-80 in Walcott), the World’s Largest Roller Dam (connecting Davenport and Rock Island), and World’s Largest Watermelon (Muscatine).
Though not in Secret Iowa, the largest roller dam in the world is Lock and Dam 15, which spans the Mississippi River between Davenport and Rock Island – measuring 1,203 feet long and consisting of 11 roller gates.
Bannister includes the World’s Largest Truck Stop in her book mainly because of the free trucking museum next door. The truck stop (which welcomes an estimated 5,000 visitors every day) was established in 1964, before I-80 was completed and Bill Moon (a former truck stop manager there) helped them choose the site and bought the truck stop. “He was really passionate about trucking, preserving that history, and wanted there to be a museum,” Bannister said, noting it opened in 2008, 15 years after his death. “It's a really cool museum. They throw birthday parties for the trucks,” she said.
For Secret Iowa, Bannister took the vast majority of photos herself, with a few from a photographer friend. For the Buffalo Bill Museum (199 Front St., LeClaire IA), she offers the pro tip that you can also visit the Buffalo Bill Cody Homestead, 13 miles northwest of LeClaire, to see his boyhood home.
Many of the Iowa sights Bannister already knew about, and others she learned about from friends or family members. The start of the book features the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed hotel remaining in the world – the Historic Park Inn Hotel, in Mason City, which opened in 1910.
For the famous “Field of Dreams” in Dyersville located about 25 miles west of Dubuque, the book offers tidbits about the (then newly-constructed) baseball field and filming. To make the field look its best, the production team used crushed red brick to make the infield pop, and to capture crowds drawn to the magical field, the surrounding county wrangled more than 2,500 cars and drivers to line the rural roads and make the final scene of headlights trailing into the night.
“We're used to having movies with CGI, and the end shot of all the cars winding through were all real cars,” Bannister said, adding that one of her friends who was in college got to be in the line of all those cars.
Bannister's family is from Connecticut, so many vacations as a child were out East, and they spent a lot of time in southwest Michigan growing up. One of her favorite Iowa sites is the Salt and Pepper Shaker collection in tiny Traer, northwest of Cedar Rapids.
“If you have time, it's such a cool collection,” Bannister said. “I always really love to talk about that one, I have a soft spot for weird collections.” A particular Des Moines spot is Riverview Park, which first opened in 1915 as an amusement park inspired by Coney Island. It went through many iterations, and after Adventureland opened in the '70s, it closed. The park sat vacant for decades, and owned by the city, it finally was renovated and reopened in 2021.
Bannister said it was difficult to restrict the book to 84 things of interest. “Every time I do a book event, somebody asks, 'Hey have you heard about this thing?' I could probably have an entire list of 84 other things.”
The item on the book's Isabel Bloom segment explains the acclaimed artist’s history and legacy, noting she studied with Grant Wood in summer 1932 (at age 24) in the Stone City Art Colony, where she also met fellow artist and future husband John Bloom. The tip for the Isabel Bloom production studio (736 Federal St., Davenport IA) is that while tours are free, reservations are required, typically held on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
Bannister’s upcoming events include a book signing October 6 at the Marion Public Library, and a virtual book event October 23 from noon to 1 p.m. at the Iowa State Historical Museum. You can take part online in the free event (with advance registration required) at History.iowa.gov/events/iowa-history-101-secret-iowa-guide-weird-wonderful-and-obscure. For more information on Bannister, visit OlioInIowa.com/about.
