School days and school meals
Marion Historical Society adds tasty component to exhibit
MARION — What better way to promote Iowa school history than with chili and cinnamon rolls?
On Sunday, the Marion Historical Society held a fundraiser offering the common school-lunch favorite along with talks from author Helen Hunter about her youth-oriented books. The event at the Marion Heritage Center & Museum was designed as an extension of the center’s exhibit on one-room schools.
The idea for the exhibit came from executive director Robyn Ireland. While brainstorming ways to promote it, museum board member Amy Olson suggested the school lunch. Inviting Hunter to talk about her books was a natural fit, Olson said.
The second-floor exhibit, which runs until April 26, has photos and memories from Iowa’s one-room school era. The Marion area had 20 one-room schools, some of which came together in 1946 to form what became the Linn-Mar school district.
As schools consolidated into larger and farther-away sites, those students had to eat. The solution was hot lunches prepared by lunch ladies, themselves often farm wives who knew how to make a filling meal.
Beans and bread
Enter chili and cinnamon rolls.
The tradition is claimed across parts of the Midwest, especially Iowa and Nebraska. Cornbread and cheese sandwiches are/were alternative companions. A few years ago, after Iowa writer (and Writers’ Collaborative member) Darcy Dougherty Maulsby included a story about it in her book A Culinary History of Iowa, the phenomenon Iowans accept without a second thought got some sideways glances nationwide.
“What’s Up With the Pairing of Chili and Cinnamon Rolls?” asked a writer for Smithsonian magazine in 2022. The writer mentions a Seattle transplant by way of Pittsburgh whose “jaw just about hit the floor” when a Wyoming resident1 asked if anyone had had the combo.
Maulsby has been interviewed about the tradition for many articles, including in the Des Moines Register and Cedar Rapids Gazette. Her theory about the meal is that schools worked with what was available through bulk ingredients supplied by commodity programs.
A check of Iowa newspaper archives found two appearances of chili with cinnamon rolls on the school lunch menu in Lamoni in the first half of 1959. “Chili or potato soup” with cinnamon rolls was served at the Conesville school on April 8, 1959.2 Chili as the only entree, with a cinnamon roll also served, showed up on students’ plates in Paullina twice in early 1960, in Lockridge on Dec. 17, 1961, and at NESCO (Zearing) on Jan. 6, 1964.
A story about National School Lunch Week in the Mediapolis New Era on Oct. 8, 1964, calling that week’s menu “typical of every week,” included chili and school-baked cinnamon rolls.3 By the time “chili soup” with a cinnamon roll first popped up in Rock Valley on April 15, 1970, the idea was statewide.4
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 tightened federal nutrition requirements on school meals. Hot school lunches, once largely made from scratch by local lunch ladies, now have more commercial distribution. The tradition hasn’t ended entirely5, but the combo appears less often and in smaller portions.
Hunter on hunting
Helen Hunter published two children’s books, Duck Hunting with Grandpa and Turkey Hunting with Grandpa, in 1998 and 2000. She initially planned a longer series but lost interest in the necessary repetitiveness of the stories. The illustrations were done by Grant Rozeboom, who was a child himself at the time.
Hunter thought of the books as a way to teach children about hunting and good hunting practices. Her husband, Bud Hunter, was the model for Grandpa. The book included vocabulary explanations and she had Richard Bishop of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources check it for accuracy and safety. Ironically, while marketers saw the book as a way to get boys to read, they didn’t want to touch it because it had guns. She ended up self-publishing through an experienced press and sent out her own promotional packets.
Hunter’s big break came when she had a dentist appointment the same day proofs of Duck Hunting with Grandpa arrived. “If you think God doesn’t orchestrate things, let me tell you this,” she said in Sunday’s talk: Her dentist, a Wapello native, was familiar with the setting of Lake Odessa in Louisa County. He passed the book on to his mother, a teacher at Wapello Elementary School.
The result was a decade of Wapello third-graders taking field trips to Lake Odessa to see wildlife and learn about hunting. Stations offered lessons on duck calls, decoys, and hunting dogs, and students got to hear Hunter read from the book and meet “Grandpa.”
In her talk, Hunter said turkey hunting was her husband’s favorite sport. “He said that if a turkey could smell, man would never harvest one of them, because their sight and their hearing is so good it’s almost supernatural.”
Too bad the turkeys can’t smell cinnamon rolls.
My other work can be found on my website, Iowa Highway Ends, and its blog.
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That resident was Piper Singer, with the Wyoming Department of Tourism, who the author happened to meet at the Lincoln Highway Association conference in Indiana in 2024. Small world!
At the time, each of the four locations in the Columbus Community School District (Columbus Junction Elementary, Columbus Junction High, Conesville, and Cotter) had a lunch different from the others every day.
The story also said the Mediapolis and Huron school sites served a combined average of about 800 meals a day, and more than 27,000 milk cartons had been consumed in one month.
Although it didn’t show up in Rock Rapids until 1982. Go figure.
In an amusing conjunction, the Northeast Hamilton, South Hamilton, and Stratford school districts and Webster City Congregate Meals all independently served chili and cinnamon rolls on Oct. 12 or 13, 2010.
The chili/cinnamon roll combo bypassed Independence, I never heard of this till recently. On the menus you posted, the big-boy sandwich sounds tasty. I wonder what "Indian coffee cake" was?