Once they had gotten the last papers dropped off in Albany River, Webb drove farther south and dodged down a back-road Mike had never noticed before. Always before, when he had made the run from Albany River to Warsaw, he had gone up the state road and around the north end of the lake, but now Webb was taking some short cut around the east side of the lake.

In short order, he had Mike thoroughly lost in seemingly changeless woods. “Jesus, I’d never be able to find my way out of here,” he said. “I hope the hell you know where you’re going.”

“You don’t want to go this way in the winter,” Webb said. “Another couple miles, and they don’t even try to plow it out. Spring, there’s too damn much mud. But, in the summer or fall when it’s dry, it makes for a nice drive. I used to hunt deer out this way, I know it like the back of my hand.”

Mike shook his head. “Just so you know where the hell you’re going,” he said, and continued, “you get a deer last year?”

“Naw,” Webb said. “I gave up deer hunting after I left here the last time. Too damn much work, too expensive.”

“Everybody around here either seems to talk football or deer hunting. I figured I’d have to get a rifle and take it up, just to see what all the talk is all about.”

“Won’t hurt you to have the experience,” Webb admitted. “But, unless you’ve been brought up to really like it, it’s really a pain in the ass.”

Mike held on for a bump. “How so?” he asked, as the van, now lightly loaded again, rocked over the rough road.

“Look at it this way,” Webb said. He had given this speech before, even written the essentials of it as a column. “Ignoring the expense, which is considerable, let’s say you decide to go deer hunting. That means you have to go out in the woods. Now, around here, the woods get full of hunters around rifle season, and I don’t care what the deer hunters say, it’s goddamn dangerous, especially when you consider that there are a minority of hunters who consider it a badge of honor to go out in the woods with a high-powered rifle and a snoot full of booze. The only way to get away from all the people is to hike back in off the roads about four miles, through swamps and over ridges. Say you shoot a deer. That means you have to gut it out, then drag it out. That’s four miles, through swamps and over ridges towing a deer. If you don’t have a heart attack on the way, then you have to find someone to butcher the thing, unless you only want one good cut and maybe eighty pounds of deer burgers. Then you have to find a freezer large enough to cram in all that meat in. Then, worst of all, you have to eat the stinking, foul-tasting stuff. God, I have to duck venison dinners every month of the year.”

“When you put it like that,” Mike said, “It does make it a little less appealing.”

“Oh, it’s fun, to a degree,” Webb admitted, “especially if you don’t bother to take a rifle. It’s kind of fun to get out with the guys in a deer camp and drink and cut wood and eat your own cooking, and play cards and drink beer and fart and stink along with everyone else. It has to be a crowd of darned good friends to make it work. I kind of miss it, but since I’ve been up here, I’ve always kind of figured that I ought to hang around the office, since about half the staff is out in the woods.”

They rode through the woods for a half an hour or more, talking about hunting and fishing, before they finally emerged on County Road 451 south of Hoselton, and Mike had some idea of where they were. “We don’t really make out on sales out this far,” Webb admitted, “It doesn’t pay for the gas for the trip out here. But we put the papers out anyway, for the sake of the advertisers. OK, we’ll be needing twenty-five for the Hoselton store.”

Quickly, Mike serviced the Hoselton store. “We need to spend more time out here, in Hoselton and Warsaw, especially,” Webb said. “We have correspondents out here, but they tend to talk about who had dinner with who, and not look at the township or village governments, or the fire runs, or that sort of thing. I’ve been meaning to have you get over this way once in a while, but you’ve been busy just getting your feet under you in Spearfish Lake. About a third of this town is Borcks, and a third of it Breges. I’ve heard at least three pronunciations and five spellings of Borcks, and at least six different pronunciations among the Breges, and God help you if you mix one up with the other.”

They drove on to Warsaw, now a good forty miles east of Spearfish Lake. It was a fair-sized town for a small one. “We really need to work on our Warsaw coverage,” Webb said. “They’re in our county, but they’re closer to Walsenberg, and Walsenberg draws more ads. Kind of a dumpy town, but good people. Jerusalem Paper has this big, old toilet paper plant there, and if it ever catches on fire, and it could any day, they’re going to have a hell of a mess. Mark my words, though, if it ever does catch on fire, it will be at the worst possible time, either dry as hell or in the middle of a snowstorm. You want to get to know the plant manager, Chip Halsey, and the fire chief, Fred Linder. They’re both real good people, and between the two of them, I think they run the town.”

By now, Mike had realized what Webb was really doing: giving him some of the background of the rest of the county, some tips about learning what he needed to know to do reporting outside of Spearfish Lake. Reporting for the Record-Herald was turning out to be more work than he thought it would, but he could see that once he learned his way around, it would be more fun, too.

They made four drops in Warsaw, and Webb stopped off at the paper plant to briefly introduce Mike to Chip Halsey. Webb knew that Linder was a machine operator in the plant and didn’t want to bother him, but told Mike that he probably would be at any Warsaw Village Council meeting.

With the Warsaw papers all delivered, and in fact all but two stops made, Webb rolled the van across the rickety old Spearfish River bridge south of town, turned back onto County Road 451, and headed back to Spearfish Lake. It was a long run to the next-to-last store, on the east side of the lake; then, heading around the north side, Webb turned up County Road 919 for the short run to Shaundessy’s Bait Shop, the last stop. Mike was in and out of the store in a couple minutes, and Webb soon had the van turned around. “In case you’re interested, the West Turtle Lake Club is on up the road a piece,” Webb commented.

Mike made no particular reply, just a comment about the general countryside. Internally, Webb smiled with surprise, not quite believing that Mike hadn’t heard about the West Turtle Lake Club, yet. Well, it was not a subject that came up without being asked about, anymore, but it was incredible to think that Mike had yet to push the right button. Webb resolved to keep his mouth shut, to enjoy watching Mike oscillate when he found out about the nudist camp. Unless, of course, Mike already knew, and was being noncommittal. It would be interesting to wait and see.

A couple miles out of the office, Webb commented, “The girls ought to just about have the mail run done when we get back. You went late last night, and had a long day today. Why don’t you make the post office run, then get out of here for the day?”

“I think I’ll take you up on that,” Mike said. “I haven’t had lunch yet, and I think I could hack a pizza.”

“What do you like on pizza? Everything they can sweep off the floor?”

“Except anchovies,” Mike said.

“Not a bad idea, except you had to bring it up now. I like triple bacon, but I have to come up with an excuse to have it. They’ve got a good little pizza joint in Warsaw, if we had thought of it then.”

Webb backed up the van to the back door of the Record-Herald, and he and Mike commenced throwing mail bags into it. Carrie and Virginia were just about done with the mailing, and in a few minutes, Mike was on the way to the post office.

For a press day, it hadn’t been all that bad. He’d had a nice talk with Kirsten, and an encouraging talk with Webb. Next week would be bad. It was his turn to run the Addressograph, and the last time he had done that, he’d had a hell of a time, especially trying to run it as fast as the others did.

He made the post office drop, drove the van back to the office and parked it. He washed up in the back room as ink was all over his hands and clothes and then went up to his desk to grab a couple things to take back to his apartment.

In the front office, he saw Kirsten with a disgusted look on her face. “How’s it going?” he asked, nonchalantly.

“I don’t even want to talk about it,” she said.

“Trouble?” he said, concerned.

“I don’t know how she did it,” she said, “but I let Kate Ellsberg talk me into being a judge at the chili contest Saturday.”

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 20, 1975

HOSELTON CONSIDERING NEW FIRE TANKER

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

The Hoselton Fire Department is asking the village of Hoselton to help the fire department out with the purchase of a new tanker for the department, Hoselton Fire Chief Wally Borck told the village council Thursday evening.

Borck told the council that the current tanker is a 1951 model, and extensive repairs are needed on the tank, which leaks 200-300 gallons of water a day onto the wooden floor of the fire barn.

The fire chief said that the equipment reserve fund from the fire contracts with the village and township is not sufficient at this time to allow for the purchase of a new truck, but if the village and the township can advance funds for the next two years, the department believes it can raise enough money to pay for the remainder of the cost of the truck.

“It’s time to put the thing out to pasture,” Borck said. “If we don’t, we’re going to need a new fire barn sooner than we hoped.

Having a financial interest in both Clark Plywood and the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank was, by itself, enough to draw Frank Matson back to Spearfish Lake in 1962. He had hopes that in moving back he could get out of the direct line of fire between his father and his mother. His marriage that spring to Diane gave him reason for hope that he could live his life a little more independently than he had in the past.

It had not been common knowledge that Frank intended to return to Spearfish Lake, since he did not make up his mind for sure until after his marriage, and even then, he kept his options open.

It had become clear to Frank, watching the hassle over the trusteeship of the Clark Plywood stock he held, that being in the middle was going to be his major problem, unless he did something about it early on. The trusteeship battle had been pointless from the beginning, except to someone as hardheaded as his mother; Daniel Evachevski and some of the other employee stockholders had indicated to her that they would vote their stock with Brent, giving him control even if she gained control of Frank’s stock. It was a lost cause from the beginning, but Donna was never one to give up on lost causes.

It was perhaps this fact that Frank overlooked when he moved back to town with his young wife and bought a house on Point Drive.

Donna didn’t get the message that Frank did not intend things to continue as before when it became clear that he was going to work for the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank. She didn’t get the message when he consistently voted with Brent Clark on the Clark Plywood board. She didn’t even get the message when Frank joined Battery “D”.

Joining the National Guard Battery was something Frank more or less had to do, after taking R.O.T.C. in college, and it was something of a family tradition. He joined the Battery long before the Vietnam draft calls got heavy, and was safe from the draft when he would otherwise have been eligible. The guard ate up a weekend a month, and two weeks each summer, and it had helped him carve out his own life in a situation where other people would be happy to run it.

In fact, in the thirteen years that Frank had been out of college, Donna had never given up trying to run his life, and he slowly came to resent it, though he put up with it. He often thought about moving to another job, another town, but slowly came to realize that he had a lot riding on staying where he was, especially when his half-brother Rod became an archaeology major and finally an archaeology professor at Moo U. His younger half-brother Phil, though working in the banking business, married a girl from Florida who wanted to stay close to home. If Frank could stay at the bank, he was going to obviously come out owning a large share of it when his father died, perhaps even a majority share. So it was worth the trouble of staying.

Working daily with his father, it was a constant struggle to keep some distance from his mother; his life became one of pleading phone calls, and appointments made mostly for the sake of excuses, as he slowly worked his way up the ladder at the bank. Within a few years, the Colonel began to spend more and more of his time at the West Turtle Lake Club, and Frank had to take over more and more of the operations of the bank. He often found himself wishing that he had whatever it took to tell his mother to go to hell, just like the Colonel and Brent Clark had done.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, September 17, 1969

MATSON PROMOTED TO VICE-PRESIDENT

Garth Matson, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank, announced Monday the promotion of Frank Matson to executive vice-president of the bank.

Matson, a graduate of Spearfish Lake High School and the University of Michigan, has been an officer of the bank since 1962. His duties will include general oversight of the bank’s operations, with special attention to oversight of loan activities and branch offices in Albany River, Blair, and Warsaw.

The son of bank president Garth Matson, Frank Matson comes well-trained for his duties, the elder Matson said. “The Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank has been basically a family-owned business since its founding in 1888. “This move will ensure that the bank’s leadership is well on its way to entering a fourth generation in the family. The Matson family has always been primarily interested in the welfare of the Spearfish Lake area, and we intend to continue the tradition.”

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