From three years experience in making the Camden run every month or so, Kirsten knew this day would be a snap. It was not a cold winter’s day on snow-filled roads; on those days, the trip back with the van loaded and handling like a hog on skates was no fun at all.

Today wouldn’t be like that. It was another nice summer day, though still cool in the early morning. Mike, Kirsten, and Carrie had been at the Record-Herald office early, shortly after dawn, to finish up the front page. It wasn’t a big job; then there was nothing left to do but go, and a little ahead of schedule, at that.

“Want me to drive?” Mike offered. Kirsten said she didn’t mind, either way, so he hopped up into the driver’s seat. The start of the drive south was quiet, and no conversation really got under way until after Mike stopped in Albany River and bought each of them paper cups of coffee.

Mike was one of those people who is never at their peak in the first hour or so after getting up, and once he got the van out on the road, he just kind of told his subconscious to drive along and keep a reasonable space on the car ahead. While his attention was more or less concentrated, it was not on Kirsten, but on the dream he had been experiencing an hour before.

In the dream, he had been in a motel somewhere, and had met an interesting couple: a Jew who was a convert to Islam, married to a Catholic girl who had become a convert to Judaism. This couple was waiting for some friends of theirs, who turned out to be another couple with equally patchwork religious beliefs.

While he pondered the significance of this dream or whether it had any significance at all, which didn’t seem likely, he just buzzed along with about two percent of his brain giving any attention to what his subconscious was doing as the miles rolled past.

“Do you really have anything to do down in Camden?” Mike asked finally, trying to start a conversation. “Or are you just going along to show me where to go?”

“There’s a couple of calls I wouldn’t mind making,” Kirsten said, “but they’re not important. We have a couple of hours to kill while they’re printing the paper, and sometimes it’s hard to find something to do.”

“Well, what say we drop off the paper and go have a late breakfast somewhere?” Mike offered. “I’m buying.”

“That would be nice,” she agreed. “There’s a little mom-and-pop place not too far away that has good food.”

Over their late breakfast, Mike was able to pump Kirsten for more details of the Matson-Clark business; with what he had been able to pick up from talking to various people over the last few days, he thought he had a pretty good idea of what had been happening: a very messy custody battle, that had washed over onto the community, forcing people to choose up sides. Even though the custody battle had been over for fifteen years now, they still fought from habit. Colonel Matson obviously ducked out to that country club out north of town to stay out of the squabbles, as much as anything.

As far as details go, Mike had been able to pick up a few. He had learned about the pressure applied on the Methodist Church back in the fifties, and he had learned about the battle over trusteeship of Frank Matson’s stock in Clark Plywood back when he had been in college, and a couple of other episodes.

Mike knew he wanted to talk to Donna Clark about the battle, but was scared to, as he didn’t want to appear too snoopy. Perhaps he could figure a way, but he was getting to the point where he didn’t care. He might lose his fifty bucks, but a month at his higher salary would pay that back. Fair trade.

In only a few minutes, Mike had asked Kirsten about all that he thought he could get away with along that line, and he carefully guided the discussion to different areas.

After Carrie Evachevski told him the story of Henry Toivo the day before, Mike thought he had at least a part of Kirsten figured out, but still didn’t know what to do with the information he had. Finally, he decided to just remain friendly and non-threatening and available, and hope that sometime Kirsten would light on him. With the kind of emotional baggage she was carrying, he didn’t really care if she did or not, he had resolved; but the resolve had lasted all the way until the next time he had glanced at Kirsten’s slim body.

Even as he looked across the table at her, sipping at coffee and talking, his conscience was telling him he didn’t need it, while subconsciously he was thinking, yeah, but you want it! Bad!

Eventually, the two got back in the van, went back to the printing plant, which was located in one of the grubbier parts of town, and with help from the press crew, loaded the bundles of newspapers, each quarter-folded and neatly tied in stacks of fifty. “You drove down,” Kirsten said. “I’ll drive back, if you want.”

“I can drive,” Mike said. The van was heavy with papers, 6,800 twenty-page issues. They drove back up route 4 to Frontier, and then up 93 to Spearfish Lake, getting back about eleven in the morning.

Carrie and a couple of other Record-Herald staffers were waiting for them, dressed in grubby clothes; the rest of the afternoon would be messy. Mike had been through this every week since he had come to the Record-Herald. Circulation was only a one-day-a-week job at the Record-Herald, and George Webb felt that the front-office staff needed to spend at least part of their time on the dirty side of the business, so as to not get into an “ivory-castle” mindset, and each week they took their turns at the mailing and distribution jobs.

Using two-wheeled carts, Kirsten and Mike took a stack of papers over and set it by the Addressograph machine, where Carrie started in on a tray of plates. About 5,700 papers would have to be addressed by the one machine, and they would have to be done by five in the afternoon, or the post office would get nasty. The post office liked to have the 1500 or so papers for Spearfish Lake routes in hand not later than two or so, when the carriers came in off their routes and began to set up for the next day.

Soon, Carrie had the Addressograph thumping away, while Virginia Meyers, spelled occasionally by Webb himself, tied the bundles on a Saxmayer bundle-tyer, and cursed at it when it jammed. Mike had been surprised to learn that Virginia, the sweet little old lady, could get extremely foul-mouthed at a twine jam-up, but when he’d taken his turn on the Saxmayer, he found himself using words he never thought he’d be uttering in the presence of ladies.

It was Kirsten’s turn to watch the front office this week. With Bailey out of the office on vacation, the back-room crew had been one person short, so Webb helped Mike run the dealer route. “I’ll drive, you count and run,” Webb ordered. “My asthma is acting up today.”

Mike thought sarcastically that Webb’s asthma seemed to act up whenever there was work to be done, but he kept the thought to himself.

It took about three hours to run the dealer route. The driver had the easy part of the job; all he had to do was drive from store to store, first in Spearfish Lake, then in Albany River, and then finally take the long run out to the three stores in Hoselton and Warsaw. The counter had to count out each bundle from a draw sheet on a clipboard, take the bundle into the store, count the previous week’s returned papers, and get the clerk to pay them ten cents from each paper sold.

It was a real hassle in Spearfish Lake, where there were about a dozen stores that sold the paper near to each other, too near to count papers between each stop. While Mike ran into the store, Webb, still in the van, counted papers for the next stop.

When they got to the Spearfish Lake Super Market, where 250 papers (in their pre-counted bundles of 50) were to be dropped off, Webb told Mike, “Don’t bother counting the returns. They probably got shitcanned anyway. Just charge half price for the whole drop and call it good enough.” Inside, Mike could see that the place was pretty well cleaned up, although the shelves still seemed a bit bare. He looked around for a moment to congratulate Ellsberg, but he was nowhere to be seen, and Mike didn’t have time to look for him.

After the Spearfish Lake Super Market, the distance between stops lengthened out, and Mike had to do his own counting. They worked their way slowly though the south outskirts of Spearfish Lake, then Webb got out on the highway for the few miles south to Albany River. For the first time since leaving the office, Mike could get into the passenger seat of the van.

“This is a real bummer,” he complained.

“How’d you like to be the poor bastard on a daily and have to do it every day?” Webb asked, then continued, “That’s why we all pitch in on this, take turns at it. I’ve worked at dailies where the reporters think the day is over with when the paper goes through the door to the back room. Hell, that’s where a newspaper really starts. If I ever publish a daily, I won’t allow anyone to be hired into the newsroom unless they’ve worked a spell in advertising or circulation.”

“I feel like I’ve served my apprenticeship already,” Mike said.

“Not yet,” Webb told him. “Reporters need to learn where their paycheck comes from, and that a newspaper is a lot more than their babblings. Virtually everybody else on a paper sees the paper as a whole, but reporters are too damn self-centered. Here we don’t really have any choice, of course; the front office has to pitch in. But that’s what makes a weekly interesting, anyway. No one day is like the next. I told Virginia years ago she was getting old enough to take herself out of the rotation, that we’d get one of the ad makeup girls to take her place, but she likes it. She understands what I’m talking about. You got thirty for McKee’s Standard counted out?”

“Whoops,” Mike said, furiously breaking open a bundle of fifty and quickly counting out twenty papers, putting them in the back, leaving him with thirty to take into the store.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 20, 1975

SUPER MARKET GETTING BACK TO NORMAL

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

At the middle of the week last week, things were getting back to normal at the Spearfish Lake Super Market, following the flooding by a malfunctioning fire sprinkling system on August 10; by the end of the week, most shelves were pretty well stocked, although there were still some signs of the flood from the sprinklers that swept the store, surprising a crowd of Saturday shoppers.

Bud Ellsberg, manager of the Super Market, said that there were still a few places where stock levels were not up to their normal levels, and odds and ends of cleanup could take weeks. “We’re about 95 percent back where we should be,” he said.

Though much damaged merchandise had to be destroyed, Ellsberg said that it was covered by insurance.

George Webb’s only visit to the West Turtle Lake Club came at the Ashtenfelter cottage fire. He arrived about the same time as the fire trucks, and, though he kept his eyes open like any reporter would, he arrived long enough after Harry Masterfield’s warning to Brent Clark that he didn’t see anything. Like many of the firemen, he sort of regretted what the young fireman had done. He wasn’t married yet, and it had been his one chance to scope the place out without Kathy getting upset.

He did make the suggestion to his fiancée that they had a nice place there, and that they should go out some weekend and visit. Though Kathy was rather open-minded in those days, and had proved it often enough in George’s bachelor pad in a converted hunting cabin in the woods southeast of the lake, the suggestion plopped, “like cow crap on concrete,” George related years later. Kathy’s mother was a childhood friend of Donna Clark, and was in the Spearfish Lake Woman’s Club, so it wasn’t funny, even if he had been joking.

Although George got a couple of good pictures of the fire, old man Sanderson overruled their use, and told George to keep the fire story down to a liner: “I don’t need Donna Clark in here raising hell,” he said. “My wife raises enough hell with me as it is.”

Like Mike, fifteen years later, George had come to Spearfish Lake out of Moo-U Journalism School. George had one advantage, though; he was a small town boy himself, from downstate, and he had an idea of how small towns worked. Kathy had been an ad rep at the Record-Herald, hired out of high school, and shortly after his arrival at the paper, things got interesting, romantically speaking.

In those days, the existence of the West Turtle Lake Club was slowly becoming less of an issue around Spearfish Lake. People had come to learn over the years that the existence of the club itself didn’t have much of an effect on the town. Attitudes of the townspeople themselves, as well as those of society in general, were changing at the same time.

George had a good look at this. In late 1961, when he left the Record-Herald, many people there would still get incensed at the existence of the place. When he came back to be the editor in 1968, the main topic of discussion was why the Marlins hadn’t won a football game in three years. George finally had to ask if the West Turtle Lake Club was still going, and the first person he asked said, “Yeah, I think so.”

Webb left the town just at the peak of the squabble over the trusteeship of Frank Matson’s share of the Clark Plywood stock, a battle that only died out after someone realized that Matson had turned twenty-one and the trusteeship had dissolved. George came back at the height of the football battle; the first school board meeting after his return, in the middle of the football season, was the one when a shouting match turned into a fist fight, which turned into an outright riot.

The end result of the infamous school board meeting was the resignation of the school superintendent and the old football coach; the board decided to end the season with the assistant coach, Harold Hekkinan, then a first-year teacher, but a revered former Marlin star. Hekkinan’s Marlins somehow managed to win their last three games of the season including the season finale against longtime rival Coldwater, and nobody protested when Hekkinan was offered the job permanently.

The paper had changed a lot, too, in the seven years that Webb had been away from Spearfish Lake. When he left, it was still pretty primitive; when he returned, they had changed from the Linotypes and hot type to offset printing and cold type, but the paper was still being put together pretty much the same way. In the years after he left, Webb had learned a lot about how to spruce up the appearance and content of a paper, and he was able to put some of that knowledge to use.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, October 7, 1968

SIX HOSPITALIZED AFTER RIOT AT SCHOOL BOARD MEETING

by George Webb
Record-Herald Staff

Six Spearfish Lake residents were hospitalized following an outbreak of violence at Monday’s meeting of the Spearfish Lake Area School Board, when protests erupted over the extension of the contract of Lawrence Meredith, the football coach.

Observers called the incident, “Disgraceful,” and “A poor example to set for our young people.”

The outbreak of fighting followed several profane protests to school board members over the lack of success of recent Marlin football seasons.

Hospitalized during the incident were: Samuel LeBlanc, Donna Clark, Howard Meyers, Hjalmer Lindahlsen, Roger Augsberg and Bill Caserowski, all of Spearfish Lake. All but Mrs. Clark were kept overnight for observation; Mrs. Clark remained in the hospital as the paper went to press, suffering from a broken leg received as she attempted to escape the fighting. Several other people received various cuts and bruises during the incident, but were treated and released at the emergency room …

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