Crawford Petterson, a senior at Greene County High School, has spent his high school years researching solutions to problems in the developing world through his involvement in the World Food Prize Global Youth Institute. He was selected to present at the institute in October, where the DIY hydrogen fuel cell running his 13-year-old pickup truck also got lots of attention. ANDREW McGINN | JEFFERSON HERALD

ONE TO WATCH

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com Crawford Petterson was enjoying his breakfast when a stranger asked to join him. The woman seemed nice enough — she had an accent, but on this October morning in Des Moines, Petterson explained, everyone seemed to have an accent.

School board member can’t attend school events

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com A school board member banned from attending sporting events in his own school district will have to be chaperoned by the school board president Jan. 15 in order to attend senior wrestling parents’ night.

Just a normal day at Genesis Development: Ashley Coil (left) and Brandon Murphy, who oversee the recycling center at Genesis, want people to be more mindful of what they’re leaving inside cardboard boxes. Increasingly, Genesis is getting stuck with plastic packing materials that can’t be recycled. ANDREW McGINN | JEFFERSON HERALD PHOTOS

A PRIME PROBLEM

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com It’s bad enough that Amazon and a cabal of e-commerce copycats have managed to so effectively weaken physical retail that shoppers often have no other choice than to buy from Amazon and other online stores.

EMS to become public entity in 2019

By RICK MORAIN For The Jefferson Herald The Greene County board of supervisors is discussing a transition from a privately owned ambulance service to a publicly owned one.

P-C will pay more to play sports, take classes in Jefferson

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com It may actually be easier to persuade North Korea to denuclearize than to convince the Paton-Churdan Community School District to enter into whole-grade sharing with its neighbor to the south.

Newspapers in April 1897 called the nimble craft that crashed north of Jefferson an “airship,” but dirigible balloons were still highly experimental, as shown in this 1883 image of a French airship powered by an electric motor. And they were slow.

Close encounters of the Greene County kind

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com One hundred and twenty-one years ago, an 8-year-old girl named Virginia O’Hanlon wrote to her local newspaper after being told by her friends (little snots, all of ’em) that Santa Claus didn’t exist.