RAGBRAI co-founder Donald Kaul dies at 83

Donald Kaul, a longtime Register columnist known for his passionate and unapologetic writing, has died.

He died Sunday morning, his family confirmed.

Kaul, 83, was one of the founders of the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, as well as a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1987 for the Cedar Rapids Gazette and 1999 for the Register. Kaul, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer, ceased treatment after it spread to his skeleton.

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.

KYLE MUNSON: Donald Kaul can see the end approaching

“There’s a certain air of unreality about it,” Kaul said in January 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.”

RAGBRAI emerged from the close friendship of Kaul and Register colleague John Karras, who were among those Kaul called “big city boys” in the newsroom.

The incongruity was apparent to Kaul in January, when he said, with characteristic wit, “My ambition was to be a nationally known Washington columnist. 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.”

Chuck Offenburger, who wrote the Register’s Iowa column as the “Iowa Boy” for more than two decades, remembered Donald Kaul as a mentor and a friend as RAGBRAI stopped Monday in Jefferson, a few miles from Offenburger’s home.

Donald Kaul’s career

Offenburger took over RAGBRAI co-hosting duties in 1983, the year Kaul decided his back was in too much pain to ride the entire route. For at least a few years after passing the title to Offenburger, however, Kaul came back to ride a couple days or hang out in a few of the overnight towns.

Despite his recent belly-aching about RAGBRAI leading his obituary, Offenburger said that Kaul really did enjoy the ride.

“Of course, he loved it,” Offenburger said in between helping cyclists find some dinner or a warm shower. “When the bike bomb started in the ‘60s and ‘70s for adults, (John) Karras and Kaul were some of the first in the Des Moines area to ride, and they did fairly substantial rides on their own before RAGBRAI started. I mean, for people to take interest in what you take interest in and for the event to grow and grow and grow, he couldn’t help but love it.”

He loved it so much, he could make fun of the circus that — in some ways — the ride became. But in the same way you can make fun of your brother, but you step up anytime anyone else does, if anyone took pot shots at RAGBRAI, “Kaul would be answering,” Offenburger said.

Kaul’s son Chris Kaul said Monday that his father still loved RAGBRAI and remembered it “fondly and proudly.”

Co-founder John Karras says ‘I’m devastated by his death’:

“He would have smiled that RAGBRAI started on the day that he passed,” Chris Kaul said.

While scope and organization of the ride have ballooned, the basic structure is little different from the early rides: Seven days. Missouri River to Mississippi River.

“I can’t thank him enough for what he’s done for the state of Iowa,” RAGBRAI director T.J. Juskiewicz said Monday.

Karras, who has known Kaul for decades and remained in touch by telephone, said Monday that he was devastated by his friend’s death. The two spoke by phone several weeks ago, he said.

“The last time I talked to him, he sounded quite pleasant and funny,” Karras said.

Karras said he and Kaul were bike-riding buddies for several years before RAGBRAI began. At first, Karras said, they just wanted to ride across the state and have the Register foot the bill.

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.

Chris Kaul remembers his father took him on the very first RAGBRAI “when it was just a couple of close friends riding across Iowa.” He said he believes RAGBRAI grew into what it became in large part due to Kaul’s and Karras’ personalities.

RAGBRAI director T.J. Juskiewicz on Kaul’s legacy:

“It gave everyone a chance not only to spend time with him and Karras, but it gave everyone a chance to explore and appreciate Iowa in a way that you don’t normally do,” he said.

Kaul’s newspaper career

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,” daughter Rachel Kaul, a disaster analyst for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said earlier this year. “I don’t think he ever shied away from saying the hard stuff that a lot of us were thinking.”

• Donald Kaul archive column: In God we trust? Not me
• Donald Kaul archive column: The last schlunk

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.”

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.”

This article contained excerpts from former Register Iowa columnist Kyle Munson’s Jan. 11, 2018 column. Read the full column here.

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