Anita: One Small Town in Iowa With Plenty To Do and See

In last summer's Lake Anita area vacation guide, there is a list of ways to know for sure that you're in a small town.

For example, "you can't walk for exercise because every car that passes offers you a ride."

And that's what Kathleen "Kat" Darling likes about living in Anita, Iowa-- about 60 miles west of Des Moines.

"This community really relies on the people here," she says. "I mean, if you get stuck in the snow, it's not going to cost you anything. In 10 minutes, someone will come along and get you out."

It snows in Anita even as late as April, according to Dwayne Littleton, a retired Department of Transportation worker. Snow flurries speckle the early morning sky the last weekend of March. Anita's large retired community especially loves it; they go ice fishing on the lake or hunting on the game reserve. There's a lot more to do than the tiny dot on the map implies.

"It's not a podunk town," Dwayne's friend Richard Peterson adds with a proud tone of authority.

Anita is more than 11 thousand miles to the nearest ocean, but residents have the same pride in their lakeside community as a California beach resort. From any direction you enter the town, you are fronted with a large, painted sign of a bear holding up a whale as his catch of the day. The signs, built and painted by Anita resident Larry Phillips, bear the town's name and slogan: "Anita, A Whale of a Town."

On the hometown newspaper, The Anita Tribune, a similar emblem can be found of a whale jumping in a nautical life preserver. Below the graphic it reads proudly, "Home of Lake Anita State Park."

Okay, so a 175-acre lake and more than a thousand acres of wildlife preserve and hunting land doesn't exactly create the perfect habitat for whale fishing. Anita earned its slogan another way-- for being the biggest small town around.

The town, population 1,100, has two insurance agencies, two banks, a municipal airport and a motel. There is a music hall of fame, museum, opry, publishing firm and recording company. More than 20 family-owned restaurants and shops dot the Anita area, selling everything from orchard-grown jellies to homemade cabinetry.

One of those homegrown businesses is The Weather-Vane-- half consignment clothing store, half coffee shop and lunch diner. Littleton says it's the only "straight" building in town. It's the only building not aligned with the crooked railroad running through town. It's also where you'll find a small family reunion.

Kat and her mother, Maggie, greet and offer you a cup of coffee as soon as you sit down. Kat's sister Laura sits across the room, helping hang clothes for the shop. Laura's son romps around the room with a stray clothes hanger and a smile.

"That's what people find interesting," Kat says, picking up her little nephew. "People walk in and find the whole family here."

Kat says Anita is the perfect place for entrepreneurs and musicians alike to thrive. She has a gig in Des Moines, but Kat often plays original music on her guitar right in the coffee shop.

"The pace is ideal [in a small town]," she says. "There is time for creativity."

Just down the street from The Weather-Vane is another café-- and batch of homegrown talent.

Joye Carr and her husband Clifford own the Anita Café. A piano and string bass sit in the corner of the eatery. An odd poster on the wall offers another hint. It reads "Just Cliff & ????, advertising the café's in-house band featuring Joye's husband.

Joye Carr says the country music band's name came out of a familiar situation for bands. Each question mark in the name stands for a band member, she explains.

"We weren't sure if the other members were going to show up," she says. "Sometimes we didn't even know if Cliff would be here!" she adds with a laugh.

Carr reaches over a big table in the middle of the café to retrieve large coffee cans of change from the morning group who frequents the place.

"After we open at 6, there will be about six or eight people sitting here," she says. "Before long, you have 12 people or so, just drinking coffee and sharing wild stories."

She is referring in part to Littleton, Peterson and their friend Dale Jensen, who seems to work around the clock. Jensen spends his time running the Anita Main Street Market and the Clubhouse at Anita's Crestwood Hills Golf Course, as well as working at several local banks. Once he sits down at the table with his friends, however, it's easy to end up talking leisure.

"You see a lot of [out-of-towners] here, but you don't give it much thought," Littleton says, sipping coffee. "You talk to them, they go about their business."

"Most of us 'wobblies' just go out to the course and play golf," Peterson says with a grin to Littleton. "All of us retirees."

The lake is another popular place for retirees and people of all ages visiting Anita. It's stocked regularly with channel catfish, bluegill and largemouth bass. Jensen, however, doesn't care much for the sport.

"I got a fishing license and only used it twice," he says with a laugh. "At the lake, we did more beer drinking than ice fishing. I saw my friend piling ice around his beer, to hold the can, but I drank mine fast enough, I didn't need to put any ice around it!"

The Darlings have their share of lakeside memories as well, but the setting is much warmer for one of Kat's tales at Lake Anita.

"We are first-time boat owners, and we could be last," she says, chuckling. She describes a time they put the anchor of their deck boat down into the calm waters of the lake as a joke. To the Darlings' surprise, it took all of the rope down with it.

"My dad jumps into the water to get the anchor," she says. "It was like something off 'Baywatch'!"

"Yeah, I wish he could have been as hot as the guys on 'Baywatch'," Kat's mother says, walking by with an armful of clothes.

Sure, there's not many surfers and sharks, but the town has a lot of recreation for its size. People come to Anita not only for year-round attractions like the lake and wildlife reserve, but also for annual events like the Whaletown Triathlon.

According to the Tribune, Anita a.k.a. Whaletown has one of the toughest triathlons in the Midwest. Participants swim for 1 kilometer in the lake and promptly hop on their bikes for a 40-kilometer ride over big Iowa hills. Finally, it's a 10-kilometer dash to the finish line. Littleton says there are activities for the less athletic, too. The fire department grills more than 1,000 steaks at the event, he says.

Just about the whole town turns out. Not bad for a town with truly humble beginnings, like the first Anita resident.

In 1869, Lewis Beason, the owner of the land that would become Anita, declined to have the area's train station named after himself. He chose instead to name it after his niece Anita, and the town officially became that in 1875.

Ever since, it's been a place to start the family business. A place to retire or just relax. For Kat, it's also a place she says would take a lot for her to leave.

"For my music, I'm kind of using the coffee shop as a base," she says. "If it's time to find an exit plan, then maybe someday I'd move, but that's more plan than I have right now."