Long-time Linn County Auditor Linda Langenberg, now a deputy secretary of state in Des Moines, grew up in the home and old general store where Robert Sallis ran the prostitution ring that’s been the subject of a two-week Gazette series authored by Jennifer Hemmingsen.
Langenberg said Cosgrove, an unincorporated village southwest of Iowa City, was a wonderful place to grow up, and it’s “creepy” what happened to her childhood home.
“My dad owned the grocery store which was in the front part of the house, and our family of 9 lived in the rest of the house,” Langenberg wrote in an e-mail.
She lived there from the age of 4 until she was a senior in high school.
“It just makes me feel so sad,” she said. ”I had such a terrific childhood there – just hard to believe, that’s all.”
She has family buried in the town, and she travels there now and then.
