Iowa State has many loyal employees; faculty and staff who have dedicated 20-, 30-, 40-plus years to educate, support, and uplift the university’s innovative students and research. When you work alongside these individuals, the topic of retirement can come up and there always seem to be two camps: those who haven’t given retirement a thought, and those who know exactly what they’ll do with the free time. (Though decades away, I fall in the latter category.)
Enter Tom Kroeschell, who worked at ISU for 36 years. As a director of communications in the athletics department, Kroeschell says he always lived in the present (there’s always another game in another sport to pay attention to). So years ago, when Kroeschell saw a photo of President Wendy Wintersteen (’88) with ISU alumnus and philanthropist Tom Smith (’68, ’71) holding a 1941 student-athlete letter blanket, he filed it away as a potential story for another day.
That nugget of an idea stayed with Kroeschell, and when he retired in 2021, he soon began diving into the history of that photo. Who was the athlete behind the blanket?
Kroeschell has spent several years digging through newspaper and university archives learning the story of Tom Smith’s life and legacy. An avid archive reader (each day, he wakes up and reads the Des Moines Register and Ames Tribune daily paper from 100 years ago), Kroeschell was pleasantly surprised to find enough information to begin to really understand the character behind the man.
“Tom Smith had a really surprising number of quotes and documentation,” Kroeschell says. “It’s very rare to find so many quotes about someone at that time. And part of it was that he was kind of a character; he was funny and he attracted attention.”
This issue’s feature tells the story of Tom Smith, but also of what can come from patience and dedication to an idea. I hope you enjoy it, as well as the rest of the fall magazine.