John Arends ’77: Bringing the story of Jack Trice to life
John Arends
John Arends was an Iowa State journalism student in the mid-1970s when naming the football stadium after Jack Trice was first floated on campus.
“It was the ultimate underdog story,” says Arends, who at the time was features editor at the Iowa State Daily and a varsity gymnast. He was fascinated with the story of Trice, the first African-American football player at Iowa State who died from injuries suffered in a 1923 game.
As a graduate student in English in the 1980s, Arends, a 1977 alum of the Greenlee School, wrote a play about Jack Trice for his master’s thesis. He tinkered with it over the years but got serious about it a few years ago when he turned 50. He revised his screenplay, Trice, and entered it in the prestigious Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting competition run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Of the 6,000-plus submissions, it finished in the top 30.
“That told me there was enough of a story there,” says Arends, now president and chief executive officer of ARENDS, a marketing communications firm in Batavia, Illinois, which his father Don Arends, a 1952 Greenlee grad, established in 1958. Arends and his wife, Anne (Butler) Arends, a ’78 ISU grad, sent all three of their kids through Iowa State. Arends has also served on a Greenlee School advisory council.
Practice for the upcoming presentation of the screenplay Trice (L to R): Patrick Doolin, Tim Musachio, Eric Simon, David Goodloe (as Jack Trice)
Trice caught the eye of Chicago Scriptworks, a non-profit theater group that produces four staged readings a year. On September 15, Arends’ screenplay will be performed at the 95-seat Theater Wit in Chicago.
“It’s so exciting to see professionals take your work off the page and give it life,” says Arends, who has helped with casting and has been tweaking the dialogue as the 20-member cast and crew rehearse for the big night.
Short-term, Arends hopes the audience members walk out of the theatre moved by the courage of Trice and will want to share his story. Long-term, he’d like to see the story become a movie.
“I hope it does lead to a filmmaker wanting to tell the story in the way that does Jack justice and does Iowa – and Iowa State – justice,” says Arends. “It took a long time to get there, but Iowa State has something that no other university has, and it’s because of the heart of university and the people of Iowa.”
–By Caralee Adams