Clark Plywood was pretty much a family business; though it was a stockholder company, the stock was closely held in only a few hands, most of them related in some way to Wayne Clark, who had founded the place more than half a century before.
Although it was a stockholder corporation for tax purposes, Wayne Clark held the vast majority of the stock up to his death in 1958. When he died, thirty percent of his stock went to his second wife, Donna; thirty percent to his son from his first marriage, Brent; and thirty percent to Frank Matson, Donna’s son from her first marriage. There were a few minor shareholders, mostly employees, but Ryan Clark held five percent of Wayne’s stock, voted for him by his father, Brent, until he reached 21.
After an initial round of trying to bully both Frank and Brent, neither of which particularly wanted to be bullied by her, Donna took little interest in the plant. She turned her interest to good works and trying to take a chunk out of the hide of her first husband, Garth Matson, who had obviously set Frank and Brent against her.
To be honest, neither Frank nor Brent had a lot of interest in it, either. Frank was headed for the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank, and Brent had started a successful construction business right after World War II, and that took up much of his time. But, since Brent was a lot older than Frank, he got stuck with being chairman of the board. So, for many years, the plant got along with a series of professional managers who didn’t hold any stock.
Ryan had no particular interest in the plywood plant when he graduated from high school in 1965. He had no particular interest in going to college, either; he mostly felt he’d been sitting in classrooms too long. There was a war going on, and he’d been filled full of stories from his father about his service in Italy with Battery D during World War II, so he figured the Army would be a good way to decide what he wanted to do with his life. Within weeks of his high school graduation he was in Basic Training at Ft. Knox.
Afterward, Ryan sometimes wondered what had gotten into him when he’d volunteered for the Infantry, right from the start. Full of youth, piss and vinegar, he conceded; he wanted to be where the action was. He found it, in a battalion of the First Infantry Division, the Big Red One, then busy with professional activities in central Vietnam.
Much as the rest of the men on the Toivo expedition, Ryan had some hairy experiences and some hard ones, first as a simple private, and later as a corporal and a section leader. Toward the end, he made buck sergeant. By some miracle, he had made it through without a scratch. All the guys who had gone in-country with him made it out, although a few made it early with wounds.
Ryan got back to the states in early ’67, toward the end of the time when there was still some honor in people’s eyes for having done his duty. Since he’d gone in for three years, he still had a year and change to do, and he spent it working with the training detachment at Ft. Gordon, GA, mostly supervising rifle ranges filled with basic trainees heading where he’d been. He actually ran into Joe Krebsbach on a range there one day, as Joe was getting set to go to Vietnam – the only time any of the Toivo Expedition members actually met while any of them were in uniform.
It was a dull time, and Ryan knew he had no interest in staying in the Army or going back to Vietnam, so he loaded up on college classes that were available through the Army. When he got out, in the summer of ’68, he already had enough credits to be a sophomore at Athens, where he did run into Rod Matson once or twice.
It was not a happy time to be a Vietnam veteran on a college campus, and Ryan knew it from the start. He basically kept quiet about having been there, and was a little ashamed of it – not the being there, but the having to be quiet about it. He was about as anxious to get out of Athens as he had been to get out of the Army, so he lived off-campus, piled on the summer classes and the credits, and graduated a year early, in 1970. By then, he had a little better idea of what he wanted to do, and there was a place at Clark Plywood for him. Ryan came back to town, went to work at Clark Plywood, and soon married Linda Caserowski, who had just come back to town after getting a teaching certificate.
Given the family connections, they moved him up fairly quickly, through many positions – assistant expediter, assistant production manager. He had just been named personnel manager when he put Steve Augsberg to work in 1972, and actually stayed in that post for a couple years, before becoming production manager in 1974. Part of the reason that he – and Steve – moved up fairly quickly in the organization was a lot of the senior administrative people dated from the big expansion of the plant in World War II, and now they were retiring, leaving holes to fill. Ryan and Steve were basically at the right place at the right time.
Ryan was Vice-President, Operations, although in practice actually running the place, at the time Donna Clark died in 1983. She’d been unhappy, if not to say estranged, from both Brent and Frank ever since 1958, for more reasons than just the split of Wayne Clark’s shares, but Ryan had stayed in her good graces for some reason. In her will, she settled all her Clark Plywood shares on him, possibly because she thought that since Ryan would have more shares than either Brent or Frank, he might take them down a notch. She had other assets, notably her house she’d shared with Wayne but others as well. Brent and Frank had to dispose of the assets and give the earnings to the Donna Clark Memorial Foundation, which she’d set up, and nominated her longtime friend Kate Ellsberg to administer. Ryan and Jane Masterfield, another long-time friend, were named trustees of the foundation.
For many years, Wayne Clark had long considered it good policy to have at least one administrator from Clark Plywood sitting on the Spearfish Lake City Council, if for no more reason than they might be able to get early warning if the council was up to something, like an increase on industrial property taxes, and perhaps head them off. In 1974, Ryan found himself volunteered to run for Council and he was elected in November. He was to serve as a council member until 1982, when he was elected Mayor, and would continue on Council for another six years when he finally had Binky Augsberg find him a house on Point Drive outside the city limits so he’d have an excuse to leave.
To top off everything else, with the stock shifts and the natural aging process, the President of Clark Plywood retired in early 1984, as well. Though it was a few years earlier than he’d planned, and came at what was becoming a bad time, when everything settled Ryan became the President and CEO.
Needless to say, what with a wife and a family to boot, the early eighties were a busy time for Ryan Clark. He had as much interest in the Toivo expedition as anyone else, but with everything he had going, some things got a lick and a promise, and the expedition was rather far down the priority list.
Things hadn’t been quite as bad when the expedition was first dreamed up back in ’81; in fact, since it had been his suggestion, he started to work on his Emergency Medical Technician card, and for a while was even on the Fire Department’s ambulance crew. But, as the time pressure built, he decided that, while he could make the runs, he didn’t have the time for the ongoing training, and let it go by the wayside. While he’d been active in the founding of the AVVW and in the friendly takeover of the Amvets, he just didn’t have time for that. He showed up for the annual elections, just in case the Post decided they wanted to take another run at a hostile takeover, but otherwise took little interest in the activities there. A few times a year, he tried to make it out to help with the chili suppers, but often they fell on a bad night, especially as his kids got older.
By late 1982, after the Labor Day weekend session with Rod Matson, the Toivo expedition was about as ready to go as it ever would be; from that point on, it was mostly a case of trying to stay ready, rather than to get ready, and sometimes things suffered. There were interesting times, like when Dennis Conant came in for a weekend and gave them a thorough briefing about his experiences in the area. There were more archaeology sessions with Rod, who once brought a forensic physiologist to a Labor Day session to go over the things to look for in finding body parts to identify. Rod said he learned a lot he hadn’t known, either, out of that one – but more often it was a routine refresher of the same old stuff.
As the time pressure built on Ryan, his involvement with the expedition understandably suffered. On several occasions he was about ready to tell the guys to take his name off the list, but his wife, Linda, told him to keep with it if he could. She’d been a childhood friend of Betsy Toivo, and had been present with Betsy and Steve and the others in the sauna the night Kirsten had gotten to going with Henry. That made it a lot more personal for the both of them, so he hung in there the best he could, and continued to request visas with the rest of them.
Along about that time, Joe Krebsbach had to drop out of the expedition. With Mark’s help, he’d cleared up his problems with the bottle, and put his life and his marriage back together. But, along in late 1983, a job offer came along that was just too good to refuse – but it was down in Decatur, a good 500 miles away. That meant there was no time to stay current with expedition affairs, and he reluctantly told the guys they’d better take him off the list. He was going to be a loss – he had one of the better sets of eyes for finding things in the woods in the recurring exercises that Rod Matson set up for them. In the years to come, he still made it up to Spearfish Lake at least once or twice a year. The group always tried to get together with him for a few hours out at the Amvets, just to renew old ties and bring him up to date a little.
After that, Ryan tried a little harder to stay current with the group, now short a valuable member. Fortunately, he was getting the hang of things in the top job at the plywood plant a little, the Donna Clark Foundation affairs had pretty well fallen into place after Binky managed to sell the rambling old mansion, and a quiet time on Council came along, so Ryan was able to keep at least fairly active with the Expedition activities. Even so, he conceded if the thing ever did come off, he might well have to give it a pass due to his tight schedule.
Other people had tight schedules, too, and might have to give the expedition a pass if it came at the wrong time. Bud Ellsberg was probably going to be out of it if it fell in the summer at all, especially after the railroad picked up the limestone traffic out of the Kremmling pit. Rather than selling engines after the Warsaw fire, he wound up having to buy some, and they ran sometimes twenty hours a day, six days a week to keep up with the increased traffic. But, when the pits closed down in the winter – and he had increased traffic from Big Pit, up by Walsenberg, too, as an indirect result of the Kremmling contract – things got deadly slow. If it should happen that the expedition fell then, Bud could probably disappear for a month without being missed much. And, the expedition members really hoped the expedition would fall in the winter, since that was the dry season in Vietnam, and offered much better promise of finding things.
Or, maybe not. Bud had other things going then, too. He and Kate never had any children of their own, but Kate’s sister had two girls, and a host of problems, including one with the bottle. After several run-ins with the law, Kate got alarmed for the girls, who were approaching teen-age years, and she and Bud took them in as sort of an informal adoption – it had been in the works at the time of the Warsaw fire and happened shortly afterward. So, all of a sudden Bud found himself an unexpected father of sorts. The girls had some problems of their own – not surprising after living with their mother – but things were pretty much straightened out in the Ellsberg household. Especially in the early years, though, Bud would have been reluctant to leave the two with Kate for the month or more it might take for the Toivo expedition. But, like the others, he committed himself to the idea that if he were to be the only one to get a visa, he’d go.
They kept trying to get visas, too, applying at the UN and at Ottawa, and by mail elsewhere. In 1983, and then again in 1986, Gil, Rod, Mark and Steve took advantage of cheap air fare specials to make fast trips to Europe, just to put in visa applications at embassies in Europe, especially Paris and Bern, Switzerland. Nothing ever came of it, but at least it was a different approach to the problem that seemed to have merit at the time.
By the mid-80s, then, the Toivo expedition was about as “locked and cocked” as it could be. The equipment was ready, the members were ready and tried to stay ready, and, in general, their paperwork was ready, with the exception of the visas, the permission to go and search. They occasionally got a polite negative response back, but usually there was no reply at all. It was hard to keep up enthusiasm, hard to keep up interest, but somehow, they managed to stay as ready as they could for the permission that never came.