An August 17 program at the Greene County Historical Museum in Jefferson will focus on two POW camps in Iowa during World War II. Camps in Algona and Clarinda housed German, Italian and Japanese soldiers. The 2 pm program is free.
Presenter Chad W. Timm, director of honors education in Simpson College’s Department of Teacher Education, has been interested in the camps since he was a boy listening to his grandmother tell about the Japanese POWs who worked at the Earl May Nursery in Shenandoah during their imprisonment.
Timm is a former high school history teacher. His PhD. dissertation, “Working with the Enemy: German, Italian and Japanese Prisoners of War in Iowa during the Second World War,” earned an award in 2009 from the American Educational Research Association.
“This event almost wasn’t going to happen,” said Margaret Hamilton, the Historical Society’s program director.
For the past several years, Humanities Iowa has underwritten the cost of such programs, paying professional speaker’s fees, which usually are $400. Because of cuts last spring to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) budget, Iowa Humanities lost its funding (which trickles down from the NEH), and the local Society feared it would have to cancel the Aug. 17 program. It did.
Timm agreed to do the program for the $100 the Society could afford, but then an “angel” appeared with a $300 grant.
The “angel” is the McShane Family Endowment for the Arts.
Barbara Vonderhaar McShane, a retired National Institute of Health breast cancer researcher who lives in Harrisburg, PA, heard about the grant loss from her longtime friend, Denise O’Brien Van of Jefferson.
A few days later, a $300 check made out to the Society from the McShane Family Endowment for the Arts, arrived in the mail.
“The Society is the first recipient of a grant from our endowment,” says McShane. “We hope to make this an annual grant.”
The donation will allow Timm to receive the stipend he deserves for his research that has allowed him to present an interesting program on a little-known part of Iowa history. “The Museum is extremely grateful for this unexpected grant,” says Hamilton. “Museums like ours depend on funding from individuals and foundations. The McShane family made this previously scheduled event possible.”
