RAGBRAI co-founder and syndicated columnist Donald Kaul sees the end of the road approaching

I’ll try to put this as bluntly as he might have in one of his columns, although I lack his caustic wit and lean prose.

Donald Kaul, the journalist renowned both for his polarizing columns and for co-founding the cultural institution that is the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI), is dying.

Of course all of us inch closer to the grave with every breath. Some of us have felt the end was nearing as we gasped up RAGBRAI’s steepest hills. And I can imagine Kaul feeling like he wants to die each time our president goes on Twitter to brag about his bigger button.

Sadly, I mean that Kaul is sick, so sick that he expects to die within the year. The prostate cancer that he has battled finally metastasized into his skeleton. Treatment has ended.

Kaul is spending his time at home in Ann Arbor, Mich., with his wife, Sue. Their family convened over the holidays.

He's low on energy but also feels little pain. And he remains a lively conversationalist.

“I’m 83 years old,” he said last week. “I’m playing with house money.”

Such are the glib one-liners tossed out by an agnostic born on Christmas. He always has written as if irreverence and irony were buried within him as bone deep as the cancer now killing him.

Kaul’s regular columns in the Des Moines Register and other newspapers nationwide typically were drenched in satire. His readers followed with a religious zeal that few modern journalists can hope to inspire.

He was twice a Pulitzer finalist, losing in 1987 (while writing for the Cedar Rapids Gazette) to Charles Krauthammer and in 1999 (for the Register) to Maureen Dowd.

“There’s a certain air of unreality about it,” Kaul said last week of his dire prognosis. “Because you can’t imagine what life is going to be to other people when you’re not there anymore. So, while I accept that this is coming on me, I don’t really accept it. It’s a curious thing. I don’t walk around depressed.

"What happens, happens."

He said the hard stuff

Kaul became a towering figure in a heyday when metro newspapers left their readers with ink-stained fingers, not ones sore from tapping smartphones.

At the start of the 1960s, he was a young reporter who chased fires and other breaking news for Des Moines' afternoon daily, the Tribune. By the end of the decade, he took glee in setting rhetorical fires by following his own whims.

He churned out as many as five columns per week. At his height, he was syndicated in 150 newspapers.

“He was always incredibly, courageously kind of honest in his satire,” said daughter Rachel Kaul, a disaster analyst for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “I don’t think he ever shied away from saying the hard stuff that a lot of us were thinking.”

Kaul in 1965 took over “Over the Coffee,” a column that had traded in light quips and society gossip.

He bent it to his will to rail against the Vietnam War and take up countless other causes — but always with his barbed humor. Many of the butts of his jokes remained devoted fans.

“Don, as much as anybody, taught Iowans to laugh,” former colleague Norm Brewer said. “I really think he did have an impact on the state in that sense.”

Yet one of the most blistering voices in Register & Tribune history also helped to create perhaps the sweetest Utopian version of Iowa: RAGBRAI.

The bike ride sprang from the close friendship of Kaul and fellow Register journalist John Karras, who were among a circle of what Kaul called “big city boys” in the newsroom.

Kaul hailed from Detroit. Karras from Cleveland.

"You know how you can tell you're on RAGBRAI and not in New York?" Kaul later wrote. "When you see somebody bungee jumping in New York, he doesn't have a bungee. Also, when you see somebody lying bloody on the pavement on RAGBRAI, you know he or she has suffered an accident. In New York, he or she has suffered New York."

"We both had a weird sense of humor," Karras said.

In the summer of 1973, this Lennon-McCartney of bicycling published a casual invitation for a handful of readers to join them along the rural byways. They stumbled into a Midwestern Woodstock on two wheels.

RAGBRAI, in Kaul’s words, “was just waiting to happen, and we uncovered it.”

“My ambition was to be a nationally known Washington columnist,” he added. “Unfortunately I would imagine the first line in my obit will read ‘one of the originators of RAGBRAI.’ It just took over my career — brutally.”

Five years into the ride Kaul already was lamenting that what he once had dubbed “the Olympic Games of the Ding-a-ling Bicycle Set” had outgrown him.

The RAGBRAI duo “didn’t figure on it being a life sentence,” Kaul wrote in 1980. “We thought of it as a one-shot deal with two or three riders accompanying us across the state on a semi-private ride. Now we feel like Dr. Frankenstein."

But there he sat at a typewriter in some remote Iowa farmhouse. He pecked away at the keyboard on the kitchen table as a dozen or more family members and neighbors lined the room for the bizarre spectator sport.

“There I was,” Kaul said, “like a zoo.”

Kaul and his aching back retired from RAGBRAI in 1983, making way for Chuck "Iowa Boy" Offenburger to join the ride alongside Karras, who maintained a consistent presence.

Kaul revisited RAGBRAI in later years and wrote fondly of it. But he always has been more comfortable poking holes in institutions than building them up.

Take Iowa’s beloved bygone sport of six-on-six high school girls basketball — a sort of genteel version with each team's offense and defense confined to its own half court.

The game was so dull, Kaul wrote, that it was “like waiting for a bus, only with cheerleaders.” And he couldn't help but gloat in a front-page column in 1993 when the state's athletic union voted it out of existence.

"I never got enough credit," he wrote. "I was once hired by a radio station to do color commentary for the broadcast of a game, but I came down with laryngitis and lost my voice. So they let me do the play-by-play."

One of Kaul's former Register editors, Michael Gartner, now the owner of the Iowa Cubs, said Kaul's main flaw was poor spelling.

RAGBRAI may make it into the first sentence of Kaul's obituary, Gartner said. But to his readers, “it will be he had a take on the city and the state and the nation and the world that was thought-provoking.”

The rise, fall and return of Kaul

As a defining voice of Iowa, Kaul wrote most of his columns outside the state. He first moved to the Register's Washington bureau in 1972.

The same summer of 1983 that he retired from RAGBRAI also saw him locked in a bitter power struggle with editors over whether his columns should focus more on Iowa than on national affairs.

"They think I quit, and I think I was fired," Kaul said. "We both have some evidence of that."

A chorus of outrage, threaded with some glee, rained down on the editorial pages in the wake of Kaul's departure.

"I feel that this is all part and parcel of a plot to drive me mad," was one reaction from Manchester, Iowa. "All the formative influences of my youth are gone: ‘M*A*S*H’ is off the air, Kaul is leaving, and Garry Trudeau and George Lucas are taking extended vacations."

Later that decade, when Geneva Overholser became Register editor, she lured Kaul back into the fold. His return in 1989 was feted with the Register’s own line of $7.50 Kaul T-shirts.

"A lot of people were worried what would happen to the paper," said Overholser, now in New York City. "Bringing him back spoke to a yearning on the part of a lot of people for the paper to remain strong and exceptional."

Kaul elaborated a little on his liberal (and often contrarian) worldview in his return column.

“I still believe in making rich people pay taxes, letting people read what they want, registering handguns and making rude faces at the television set while the president is making a speech," he wrote. "I’m against the National Rifle Association, wearing a white vinyl belt (unless you happen to be wearing a white vinyl suit), racism and broccoli. And if I had my life to live over again, I’d do everything just the same except I wouldn’t see 'The Sound of Music.'"

READ SOME OF KAUL'S FAVORITE COLUMNS:

Kaul remained in Washington, where through the years the bureau where he worked brewed a cauldron of ideas and banter with close friends and fellow journalists such as George Anthan, Jim Risser and John Hyde.

At one point Kaul and Anthan allegedly sneaked out in the dark of night with cement and added bicycle-friendly ramps to the curbs for several blocks along the embassies of Massachusetts Avenue.

When Kaul retired yet again in 2000, he figured that he “wrote 6,500 columns, give or take a couple of hundred, and used up 500 ideas, give or take a couple of hundred.”

"Writing a daily newspaper column is a strange way to make a living," he explained. "A well-known columnist once likened it to being married to a nymphomaniac, and there's something to that.

"It can be a thrilling and even ecstatic exercise, but there's no respite from it. No matter how well you do on a particular afternoon, by the next day your muse is asking: 'What have you done for me lately?'"

'A soft spot for crackpots'

Kaul might have been ahead of his time. Some of his most cutting lines from the '70s and '80s no doubt today would receive thousands of retweets.

“I do call attention, from time to time, to the fact that our president is an ignoramus,” he wrote in 1983, “but that’s the least a political commentator can do and still serve the truth.”

President Donald Trump ultimately convinced Kaul to retire from his latest columnist outlet, the nonprofit distributor OtherWords.

First, Kaul opined that Trump had no chance to win the Republican nomination. And then he never thought Trump would get elected.

“I give up,” Kaul said. “If you can’t be any closer than that, you don’t belong in the column-writing business.”

Kaul’s last major appearance on RAGBRAI was in 2012, when the ride celebrated its 40th anniversary in downtown Cedar Rapids. His face loomed over the throng in the form of a prerecorded video greeting, the same month he commemorated the Fourth of July by suffering a heart attack.

"My wife and kids, that’s what important to me," Kaul said of his plans for 2018, "and not much else."

Kaul's grandfather emigrated from Ukraine, worked 30 years in a Detroit steel mill and managed to retire in good health at an early age to be able to enjoy decades of leisure. This is where Kaul would be able to insert the perfect wry remark at his own expense that you wouldn't forget for the rest of the day.

I emphasized with Kaul and other fellow members of the extended Register & Tribune alumni family that I wasn’t trying to be morbid or premature in writing this. But I know that legions of readers and bicyclists still care about him.

And if journalism has taught me anything, it's to beat a deadline when you can.

Karras’ wife, Ann, 88, a linchpin of RAGBRAI’s early era, died last month. Her memorial will be from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Jan. 20 at Scottish Rite Park, where Karras still lives.

The 46th annual RAGBRAI route is unveiled Jan. 27 in a raucous party in downtown Des Moines.

Longtime RAGBRAI Director T.J. Juskiewicz continues work to establish a statue of Kaul and Karras along the river in downtown Des Moines.

If leaving this Earth with Trump still in the White House will rankle him, I'm sure that Kaul won't mind ducking out before he's immortalized in a public art piece.

If I harbor any ulterior motive with this column, it’s to give Kaul ample time to be so thoroughly dissatisfied with these words that it spurs him to take up the keyboard one last time.

You can thank me later for my clever ruse.

Kaul wrote in his 2000 farewell, “It's been more than a career; it's been fun. I don't know if you'll miss me, but I'll miss you, even those of you out there who are rejoicing at my departure. I always had a soft spot for crackpots."

I will add only this: What happens, happens.

I think I heard that once from a guy on RAGBRAI.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson).