Fifty Years Later, I Returned to the Place I Once Called Home
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, as a boy growing up in Kansas City, Roger Rench’s life changed suddenly when his father took a job as a golf pro in the small town of Sheridan, Iowa. The move meant trading city life for a tiny community and living inside the clubhouse of the Lakeview Country Club. It also meant giving up something Roger loved even more than the golf course: his dog, Flash.
The stay in Iowa lasted only a month before the job ended and the family returned to Kansas City, leaving Roger with more questions than answers. Decades later, while making a delivery in southern Iowa, he unexpectedly found himself back in Sheridan, standing in front of the same clubhouse where that brief chapter of his childhood had unfolded. Roger shares the story of that short, bittersweet time in Iowa.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, |
| 0:18.1 | the show where America is the star, |
| 0:22.8 | or the American people of the star. |
| 0:24.8 | And we're looking for your stories. |
| 0:27.9 | Always send them to Our American Stories.com. |
| 0:30.8 | Our listener's stories are some of our favorites. |
| 0:37.0 | Which brings us to this one, a listener's story sent to us from Roger Wrench in Iowa. Take it away, Roger. |
| 0:42.2 | My father, Richard Wrench, was a great golfer. He was an amateur champion and member of the |
| 0:48.8 | Marine Corps championship team. He died in 1996 at the young age of 62. And I have a scrapbook full of newspaper |
| 0:58.3 | clippings, pictures, and awards he won as a young man. Though he never quite made it, his dream |
| 1:05.6 | was to be on the PGA tour. He loved the game and taught it to me at a very young age. When I was 10 years old in |
| 1:15.1 | the winter of 1971, my dad got a job as a golf pro at a country club. We packed up quick |
| 1:22.7 | and moved from the inner city of Kansas City to the small town of Sheridan, Iowa, population 4,000. |
| 1:31.5 | Because we moved into a small apartment in the Lakeview Country Club Clubhouse, we couldn't |
| 1:37.2 | bring our dog Flash with us, so we had to give him away. Flash was my first pet and I loved that dog. I cried for days. It still |
| 1:51.1 | hurts to think about it today. I begged my dad to let me bring Flash, but they wouldn't allow |
| 1:57.6 | a pet in the clubhouse. As much as I loved golf and the idea of living on a golf course, |
| 2:04.8 | giving my buddy away was heartbreaking. |
| 2:09.9 | Once we got there, I began to make adjustments |
| 2:12.6 | to our new home, some pleasant, some not so pleasant. |
... |
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