From Denison to Eternity, It’s Still a Wonderful Life

By Catherine Collison

This February, far away from the annual red carpet rolled out under the Academy Awards spotlight, when the only carpet is a white snowy one stretching down the Lincoln Highway, a marquee will be lit up on Broadway — in Denison, Iowa. Lights will shine on a stage first lit as the Germania Opera House in 1914 and since 1995 the anchor of the Donna Reed Theatre and Center for the Performing Arts.

While it’s no longer decorated as a billboard greeting visitors to Donna Reed’s hometown, the water tower that rises from the landscape along Highway 30 does carry a familiar motto — It’s a Wonderful Life.

Denison’s younger generation and recent immigrants may be unfamiliar with the talented actress who graced the silver screen and television screens for more than three decades.

They may have never seen the long-running Donna Reed Show or the Oscar statuette that distinguished her award-winning performance in From Here to Eternity. Still, what’s happened here in this western Iowa small town is right out of a Frank Capra movie.

Denison City Manager Kevin Flanagan refers to that touching scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, the one in which George and Mary Bailey (Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed) offer blessings and congratulations to an Italian immigrant family moving into their first home in Bailey Park, a brand-new residential development offering affordable starter homes. 

Flanagan sees a parallel in Denison, a place where Hispanic immigrants can find affordable housing, good schools, and a solid community.

He expects more housing developments to be underway this spring.

“It’s the American story here,” says Flanagan, who estimates a population close to 10,000 now, up 2,000 since the 2010 census.

That growth has been led by Hispanic immigrants drawn to work in agricultural and meatpacking industries in Crawford County.

Denison isn’t the same town that Donna Belle Mullenger left by train in the 1930s, en route to pursue her dreams in Los Angeles. But it is, says Flanagan, a place where dreams can take root.

In 2012 it’s neither Bedford Falls nor Potterville but instead a community where you can lunch on pork tenderloin at local icon Cronk’s on the Lincoln Highway or a cheese-topped burrito at El Jimador, one of the town’s popular Mexican restaurants; where you can treat yourself to a Chocolate Mint Marble Sundae at Reiney’s Soda Fountain or fresh-baked bread from Panaderia Pan de Vida, a new bakery in town.

 

(Read more about Denison's Wonderful Life)

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