After a long career as a feature columnist and co-host of RAGBRAI for the Des
Moines Register, Chuck Offenburger is now writing a column for The Iowan
Magazine and doing other freelance writing from his home in Storm Lake, Iowa.
Offenburger, 55, got his start in print at age 13 in his hometown of Shenandoah
in southwest Iowa.
That's when he began writing sports for the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel. He
continued throughout high school, winning a journalism scholarship to Vanderbilt
University in Nashville, Tenn.
After graduating in 1969, he returned to Shenandoah and spent three years at the
Sentinel, becoming managing editor. In 1972, he moved to the Register and became
a general assignment reporter.
In 1977, he began the four-times-per-week Iowa Boy column, which continued until
July, 1998. He was co-host for 16 years of the internationally-known RAGBRAI --
that's the Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa -- with John Karras.
In 1995, Offenburger and his wife Carla organized the "Iowa 150 Bike Ride/A
Sesquicentennial Expedition" of 300 cyclists across the U.S., promoting
Iowa's celebration of 150 years of statehood in 1996. The two of them last
summer coordinated a week-long "Pilgrimage on Wheels" bicycle ride
around northwest Iowa as part of the centennial celebration of the Catholic
Diocese of Sioux City.
From 1999 to 2001, Chuck Offenburger served as writer-in-residence at Buena
Vista University in Storm Lake, teaching classes in reporting and column writing
and advising the student newspaper.
His columns in The Iowan Magazine, which he joined in 1998 after leaving the
Register, continue to have him traveling the state.
In 2001, he finished a full-length biography of Iowa business leader Bill
Krause, best-known as CEO of the Kum & Go chain of convenience stores, head
of the Liberty Banks group and for his wide-ranging philanthropy. It was
published as Iowa's first Internet book and is available free at the website www.chuckoffenburger.com,
where other examples of Offenburger's writing can also be found.
His latest book, which came out in September, is the history of the Iowa Girls
High School Athletic Union, framed around the biography of its retiring chief
executive E. Wayne Cooley.
Offenburger has authored three earlier books -- two of them collections of
his Register columns and the other a biography of legendary Des Moines
restaurateur Babe Bisignano.
Carla Offenburger is on the faculty and staff at BVU, teaching composition and
running an endowed academic lecture series.
In 1999-2000, Chuck Offenburger served on Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack's Strategic
Planning Council, a 37-member panel the governor charged with the responsibility
of coming up with a vision of what the state should be like by the year 2010 and
an action plan of how to get there.
The Offenburgers' step-daughter Janae Learned is in sales in Scottsdale, Ariz.,
and son Andrew, is working in Tennessee on the campaign of Lamar Alexander for
the U.S. Senate.
