Herb Owens Print, Ideal Cafe & Hardware Store

This painting shows the corner of South 1^st street just south of Greenfield’s square.  The main buildings are a hardware store and the Ideal Café where the youth of the day stopped to share rainbow sodas and French fries. 

Herb Owens was a reporter for the Des Moines Tribune, a companion afternoon paper to the Des Moines Register.  He wrote the “Along the Way” column that featured stories about Iowa people in small towns.  After he retired in the early 1960’s, Owens took up painting.  Greenfield native Hugh Sidey, a Time magazine journalist who covered the White House for decades, commissioned Owens to paint a number of favorite local scenes.  The Greenfield Chamber selected six of these paintings to reprint on watercolor paper.  Each print measures 11x14 inches and is unframed.