He's Never Done Just One Thing.
That's the Whole Point.

The first time Kurt got paid to play drums, he was 14 years old — sitting in the pit orchestra of The Purple Cow Dinner Theater, a professional theater that operated out of a barn at Cutty's Campground just north of Des Moines in Grimes. He played the show. He took home a check. He also had to wait tables before the show, during intermission, and after. He hated every single minute of it, vowed on the spot never to wait tables again, and to this day tips generously at restaurants — a habit he traces directly back to that barn.

That was 1976. Fifty years later, in January 2026, he performed two shows at the Ingersoll Dinner Theater — the same company, a different stage, and a lifetime of everything in between.

"Fifty years," he said, pausing. "Bookends."

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PHOTO: Kurt with Joan Rivers

Fill This Page

Kurt grew up in West Des Moines, the son of a man who put himself through the University of Iowa playing on the road with big bands in the 1950s and became a national rudimental drumming champion. He was at WMT Radio and Television in Cedar Rapids when TV was brand new.

Later, he moved the family to Des Moines for an ad agency job — advertising executive by day, and as a drummer led the West Des Moines Dixieland Band at nights and weekends. The band became Iowa Governor Bob Ray's official campaign band throughout his career, which greatly influenced Kurt. He took his band to Ireland as part of the Friendship Force — a diplomatic exchange started by Jimmy Carter's mother, Lillian. Their first night in Dublin, the band appeared on the Late Late Show, the Irish equivalent of Johnny Carson. After that, everywhere they played, they were celebrities. Every pub. Every concert. Red carpet treatment.

Kurt's dad gave him one piece of advice that stuck. "He said, get as much experience as you can. Somebody may have you sit down and say, fill this page with your experience." Kurt has been filling that page ever since.

Seven Shows a Day

Right out of Valley High School, Kurt and a friend put together a Dixieland band and landed a summer residency at Adventureland Park — seven shows a day, seven days a week, with a rotating cast of 30 to 40 musicians cycling in and out as bandmates left for college.

"We learned about managing a band, managing musicians, making payroll," he said. "What a great experience."

He was 18. He had a music scholarship to Grandview, then transferred to Drake to study journalism and advertising. He played clubs downtown with musicians from Drake and met his wife that way — she was in the audience at the Soup Kitchen, a club in the old Shops Building downtown. She was studying journalism. He was on stage.

The Skywalker

While still at Drake, Kurt became the first advertising director of a scrappy new paper called the Des Moines Skywalker. The year was 1983. They worked out of a basement apartment in the Elmhurst building on Sherman Hill, modeled the paper after a publication in Minneapolis, and set out to give small downtown businesses a way to reach customers without paying Des Moines Register rates.

Early on, they stood at the top of a mall escalator and tried to give the paper away.

It caught on. The paper was eventually bought by Connie Wimer, owner of Business Publications and publisher of the Business Record, and became CityView — the publication Des Moines still knows today. Kurt has every original issue from 1983 to 84 and talks about them the way people talk about family photos. "You go back and look at it — Younkers was a major advertiser. Bankers Trust. So many of the businesses that defined downtown Des Moines at the time." He'd love to put them on display somewhere, or maybe a website, so people could see that slice of Des Moines history.

After That, More

The chapters kept stacking. Marketing Director at Capital Square. Community Marketing Director at the Ingersoll Dinner Theater — a full-circle moment he recognized at the time. Communications Director at Adventureland. Director of Media and Public Relations at United Way of Central Iowa. Through all of it, the drums kept going. He played pit orchestras at the Des Moines Playhouse for years and performed with national acts — Tiny Tim, Little Anthony and the Imperials at the Minnesota State Fair, and a band that opened for the Kentucky Headhunters. He played with Joan Rivers' show band.

One of his first big projects at the Ingersoll Dinner Theater was launching the theater's Saturday morning Children's Theater, with a giant pink rabbit named Hoppy as the host. For the debut announcement — the president of Blank Children's Hospital on stage, cameras rolling, press in the seats — Kurt misjudged the edge of the stage and went off it entirely, landing directly on the drums in the pit. The crash was magnificent. Out front, Hoppy was simultaneously fighting his way through curtains that hadn't gotten the memo to open. The audience howled. Everyone assumed it was part of the show.

He also invented a horse racing board game, pitched it to Drake's entrepreneurship director, who loved it — but said he'd need deep pockets to produce 100,000 units minimum. "The game is still sitting on my shelf," Kurt said. "Maybe my grandson will get it to market someday."

And he designed an entertainment shuttle — a hop-on, hop-off bus loop running Court Avenue to Beaverdale to Sherman Hill to East Village, Friday and Saturday nights until 3am. The city loved it, the police loved it, and Kurt had investors lined up — but the commercial transportation insurance costs made the numbers impossible to work, and the idea never got off the ground. While he was still trying to make it happen, he enrolled in a CDL program with Des Moines schools, figuring that if he was going to own a shuttle company, he ought to know how to drive the bus himself.

53 Kids on Board

He drove school buses for Des Moines and later drove 45-foot motor coaches for CIT Signature Transportation, taking tour groups around the United States and Canada. He was good at it. He liked it.

Then one morning, he was driving 53 students from Lincoln High School to Central Campus downtown. He had a green light and was moving at about 20 miles an hour when a flatbed tow truck ran a red light directly into his path. He hit the air brakes, but there wasn't enough time — he collided with the back of the truck, and five of his 53 students ended up in the hospital. So did Kurt. He came away with a major concussion and eventually needed three surgeries. The front end of the bus was badly damaged and every fluid was on the ground. It was a major news story — kids had their phones out before the dust had settled, and parents were showing up at the intersection before anyone had made a call.

Lawyers, doctors, and insurance companies followed, and eventually so did a permanent disability determination from the federal government.

"That was really devastating," he said. He wasn't talking about the accident itself.

Ice Cream and Encores

He started Ice Cream AHOY because he couldn't sit still, and because it gave him something he hadn't had in years — control over his own schedule. When a migraine comes, he can take the day. There's no one to answer to but himself.

And now, after multiple doctors and physical therapists and three surgeries, he's playing drums again. He plays with several groups around Des Moines, and in January he performed two shows at the Ingersoll Dinner Theater — the company where his career began 50 years earlier, now in a new home on Ingersoll Avenue, doing the math in his head.

His three grandchildren are 6, 5, and 3, and he's already working on them, teaching them to look at a restaurant and wonder why they don't do things differently, encouraging them to stay curious and keep moving.

PHOTO: Kurt with his grandchildren

"Fifty years," he said. "Bookends."

Kurt's Favorite Places

The spots in Des Moines that show up in his story — and that he still talks about.