Blount: A shout out to Van Meter, Iowa

By RACHEL BLOUNT, Star Tribune

Last update: August 13, 2008 - 7:39 PM

We all dismiss the saying "it's a small world" as corny. But we all use it, because it's true. The Olympics sometimes prove it in mysterious ways and places, such as the mixed zone at China Agricultural University Gymnasium.

I grew up in the countryside in central Iowa, near a town named Van Meter. It's best known as the hometown of baseball player Bob Feller. It was a small town then, and not much bigger now; when I attended Van Meter High School in the late 1970s, there were 34 people in my graduating class, and our brick school building housed kindergarten through 12th grade.

At Wednesday's Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling competition, I was in the mixed zone, the area where athletes are brought for quick interviews immediately after matches. Someone asked me where I was from, and I said, 'A little town in Iowa that no one has ever heard of. Van Meter.'' A young man about 10 feet away asked, 'Did someone just mention Van Meter? That's where I'm from!''

David McNace is a 2005 graduate of my old, tiny high school. He is in Beijing as part of the Olympic News Service, a battalion of people who gather quotes and notes and results for the information network that serves the media here. David is among 23 University of Iowa journalism students who have studied the Olympics for the past few years, preparing for this opportunity.

Later, Craig Sesker of USA Wrestling told me that his dad taught and coached at Van Meter High briefly in the late 1960s. So there in the mixed zone, in Beijing, thousands of miles from the Iowa countryside, stood three people connected to a small-town school among the cornfields. It's a small world, indeed.

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