- Irving Weber
Irving B. Weber (
December 19 ,1900 —March 16 ,1997 ) was a local athlete, businessman, and historian inIowa City, Iowa .He was the first athlete at the
University of Iowa to make theAll-American Swimming Team .He joined
Sidwell's Ice Cream Company in Iowa City and later became one of its owners. He later organized the firm and four other independent producers of ice cream into theQuality Chek'd Dairy Association .Beginning in the 1970s, his weekly Saturday newspaper articles in the
Iowa City Press-Citizen under the title "Irving Weber's Iowa City" were what led to his greatest renown in the community as a local character. While not considered a literary stylist on a par with Proust or Dickens, his articles regularly informed readers about odd byways of Iowa City history, teaching about both lost and still-extant historic structures and the mores of another age.The articles were collected in various bound paperback volumes that were sold to benefit the local Iowa City
Lions Club .His name was later memorialized in the
Irving B. Weber Elementary School , which opened its doors in 1994.There is also a statue of him in downtown Iowa City.
External links
[http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm4/index_weber.php?CISOROOT=/weber Irving Weber's Iowa City Digital Collection] , part of the [http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/ Iowa Digital Library] , features the complete set of Weber's newspaper columns.
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