When Mr. Richards first came to Ames in 1950, he started a restaurant business where Woodland Dairy had operated across the street from the Highway Commission. Read Tom Richards' account of the Richards family business.
Weary, Hungry Soldiers on Way to Flood Area
Highway 30 in Ames had its first military traffic tie-up since World War II days here Tuesday as hundreds of soldiers from Camp McCoy, in Wisconsin, stopped briefly on their convoy route to Omaha for an emergency assist in the flood area there. City police un-snarled traffic as fast as it wound itself around the intersection near the highway commission offices, as the convoys stopped for brief periods. But all was not going as scheduled, according to two of the officers accompanying one of the convoys.
The soldiers were alerted at 4:03 Monday afternoon at the Camp McCoy base. They were fed, and then started piling into the open trucks for the overnight trip. At about 9:30 they cleared their base, stopping first at Albert Lea, Minn. at 9:30 Tuesday morning for breakfast. However, facilities there were not equal to the need, and the dehydrated eggs failed to go around, leaving some with only coffee. Again into the trucks for the men, and on to Ames, where the convoy pictured above stopped for a few minutes.
Asked about "who would pay for the soldiers' luncheons here in Ames," the officers said that each was spending his own money, and if one had no money and couldn't borrow it he would probably be hungry before he got to Omaha where the convoys were to "await further orders."
Except for the apparent failure to provide for the soldiers along the way, there seemed to be little else SNAFUED. But the officers were wondering what the army would do when the soldiers got to the emergency area.
Generally, to the Tribune reporter, it looked like a typical army maneuver, tough on the boys who were sitting up in the open trucks for the long ride, but with the Yankee spirit of making the best of things evident as the boys joked about the situation and looked foward to being able to help the homeless along the Missouri river basin.