There were times when the Spearfish Lake City Council had important things to discuss and weighty issues would be decided.

There were also times when, with a council meeting scheduled and nothing much on the agenda, the councilmen would squabble bitterly all evening over nothing in particular.

This was going to be one of those nights, Mike McMahon knew.

It was the year before Spearfish Lake built their new city hall, and the council was still meeting in the old building downtown. The place was such a firetrap that the council had banned smoking in the building several years before, and Mike stood outside with several of the councilmen who were having a last cigarette before the meeting started.

“Anything else on the agenda except for this business about cleaning up after the chili festival?” Mike casually asked Mayor Pro Tem Mike Johansen, who would chair the meeting with the mayor gone for his summer vacation.

“Not a hell of a lot,” Johansen admitted. “I’d kind of like to get this over with early. The Cubs are playing tonight.”

“About time for the Cubbies to curl up and die,” Councilman Sam LeBlanc said.

“Naw, too early,” Johansen said. “They don’t do that until they’re in the stretch.”

“We’re not going to get this over with early,” Councilman Roger Augsberg said. “We got Kate Ellsberg and Donna Clark here tonight, and you know they’ll bend your ear off unless we pass this.”

“Donna can kiss my ass,” Ryan Clark, the youngster on council said. “I have a policy that’s worked well for me all my life. If Donna is for something, I’m against it, and vice versa. It’s worked pretty well.”

“She was in favor of the new city hall,” Johansen commented.

“She was in favor of it, but not ready to bitch about it,” Clark said. “That’s two different things.”

“Well,” Johansen said, glancing at his watch, “Might as well get it over with.” Slowly, the group began to file into the council chambers, with the peeling paint, open windows, and overhead fans that barely stirred the hot, moist air.

Two weeks earlier, the council had approved a $600,000 bond issue for the new city hall in three minutes flat. Now, after an hour of wrangling, they were still split two and two over an overtime expenditure for the Department of Public Works about cleaning up Webster Park following the chili festival. Conservatively speaking, there might have been a hundred dollars at issue.

“This is the Woman’s Club deal,” LeBlanc said for the fourteenth time. “They should clean it up.”

“This is for the betterment of the community,” Kate Ellsberg argued, for the seventeenth time. “We feel that the city ought to be able to make some contribution toward its economic growth.”

Mike McMahon had long since lost all touch with the discussion; it had all been boringly repetitive after the first ten minutes, with the same garbage over and over, and the council was no nearer to reaching a decision than they had been before.

Johansen looked at his watch again. The game had to be in the third inning by now. “What say we just vote to table the damn discussion until the mayor gets back from vacation?” he said.

“You can’t do that,” Kate Ellsberg complained. “The festival is Saturday! Then who will clean the place up?”

“Tell you what,” Johansen said, “how about if we have the crews go ahead and clean the place up, and if we can’t get three votes for the city to pay for it when the mayor gets back, then the Woman’s Club pays for it?”

“Sounds reasonable,” LeBlanc agreed. “I can live with that, if the Woman’s Club can.”

“I think you should make a decision tonight,” Donna Clark said. “There’s no reason that you should have taken so long to decide a piddling little deal like this. All you do is sit and talk and talk, and never do anything that helps the community. You can vote yourselves some soft new chairs for the new city hall, but you can’t vote on anything that helps the people of the community.”

“All right, that settles it,” Johansen said. “Betty, call the roll.”

“Clark,” the clerk said.

“No.” He had voted against the measure twice before, so this was no surprise.

“LeBlanc.”

“No.”

“Johansen.”

“No!”

“What!” Donna yelled, jumping to her feet.

“If you don’t want to compromise, even a little,” Johansen said, “then there’s no reason for us to. Betty, let’s finish this up and get out of here.”

“Augsberg.”

Roger knew that the measure was lost, and although he agreed with Johansen that the gabble had gone on long enough, it left him in a position to cast a safe vote that would leave him out of firing range from his wife, a Woman’s Club member. “Yeah, what the hell.”

There were a couple briefer items of business to finish up, and Johansen got through them in two minutes. LeBlanc moved to adjourn, and the Mayor Pro Tem dropped the gavel and was out the door in the same move.

Outside the council chambers, it was cooler. The temperature had dropped a little bit from earlier, and after the humidity in the building, stepping outside was positively refreshing to Mike. He stopped to take a deep breath.

“Young man,” he heard a voice say.

Mike turned, to see Donna Clark speaking to him. “Can I help you?” he said.

“You’re McMahon, from the Record-Herald, aren’t you?” she asked. Mike admitted that he was, and she went on, “Do you think that when you write your story tonight, that you could ask the public to help with the clean-up after the Chili Festival?”

“Sure, I can do that,” Mike said. “It’s no big deal.” There were a lot of questions that Mike wanted to ask this woman, and he knew that a small favor could help ease the way toward a favorable response.

“Thank you,” she said. “I appreciate that.”

Mike wanted to ask her something anything that could get her talking, but he sensed this wasn’t the time. He watched as she and Kate walked up the street, got into Kate’s car, and drove off.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

COUNCIL DENIES CLEANUP REQUEST

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

The Spearfish Lake City Council, at their Tuesday meeting, denied on a 3-1 vote a request by the Spearfish Lake Woman’s Club to provide overtime payment for city work crews to clean up Webster Park following Saturday’s Chili Festival.

After more than an hour of discussing the item, and two previous votes, Councilmen LeBlanc, Johansen and Clark voted against the request, which would probably have cost the city less than $200.

“We cannot waste taxpayer’s money,” Councilman Ryan Clark said at one point in the heated discussion.

“This is the Woman’s Club project, they should clean it up,” Councilman Sam LeBlanc added.

Donna Clark, spokesperson for the Spearfish Lake Woman’s Club, requested volunteers from the public to help clean the park up after the Saturday afternoon festivities.

In spite of all of Helga’s urgings and force of example, Frank Matson was not cut out to be a vegetarian, and, if there was any one thing that kept him from drifting even further from his mother, it was the knowledge that almost every weekend, he could have his fill of what he called, in his high school years, “Real food.”

Real food: steaks, pork chops, roasts, hamburgers, the stuff of Helga’s nightmares.

It was not out of the ordinary for Frank to drop by his mother’s house on the way home from school, to have real food before he went “home” to face whatever concoction of “rabbit food” that was on the evening’s menu.

Every minor affliction that Frank came down with at any time during his boyhood be it a cold, or the sniffles, or warts or acne, Helga blamed on meat, and Donna blamed on not enough of it.

In addition, in his youth Frank shoveled down a lot of food, and even the rabbit food from home helped to feed his growing body. Somehow, he managed to avoid becoming fat and remained a thin, quick quarterback.

As he grew older, old enough to have a car and some change in his pockets, he got into the habit of stopping by a restaurant or the Spearfish Lake Super Market if he didn’t stop off at his mother’s house after school. Sometimes, he’d buy a package of hot dogs, wrap them in tinfoil, jam the package into the exhaust manifold of his ’55 Chevy, and drive around town for a while, until they were warm, then stop and eat the whole package without bothering with a bun. This gave his car an aroma that was unique for ’55 Chevies, to say the least.

Apparently Helga never caught on to this stunt, although once or twice she asked what Frank was doing carrying a bottle of ketchup in the car.

Helga had never fully been able to convert Frank’s father to vegetarianism, though she tried hard. Garth, at least, didn’t bother to cover up the fact that he liked his red meat, though he never flaunted it in Helga’s face.

In 1957 when Garth scored his first deer in more than ten years, and Frank scored his first ever, from Garth’s old hunting camp south of Hoselton, it provided a magnificent excuse for both of them to load up on venison. There was a freezer in the hunting cabin, and on occasion Frank and his father would take an evening drive out to the hunting camp and fry some up. It offered release, if nothing else, and a chance for a father and a son to share something special with each other. Garth waited until his son was in college before he sold out of the old camp, and instead started hunting out of the West Turtle Lake Club.

It was at one of these father-son venison fry-ups, in Frank’s senior year, that the two got to discussing Frank’s future.

They had, of course, discussed this subject before, but now, it was with a different slant. Frank had long determined that he was going to college, and out of state, at that; he had a leaning toward Michigan State University.

“I can get you into one of the Ivy League schools in the east, if you want.” Garth told his son. “I don’t think you want to even think about playing football in one of those Big Ten schools.”

“It’d be fun,” Frank said, “but I know I’m not that good. Michigan State is far enough away to be away, but not so far away that I can’t get home once in a while.”

“Yeah, I’d miss you,” Garth agreed. “It’s been a tough row, kid, but we’ve had our share. I expect that when you get out of college you’ll want to get as far from Spearfish Lake as you can, and I guess I don’t blame you.”

“I don’t know how bad I want to move that far away,” Frank admitted. “I’d kind of like to come back to Spearfish Lake. Mr. Clark said that if I came back, he could get me into management at the plywood plant.”

“Study business, and come back to the bank,” Garth offered. “You’re a sharp kid, and you understand this town. I won’t last forever. I’ll find a place for you.”

“It could cause problems,” Frank said.

“Oh, yes it could,” his father said. “I can see them better than you, I think. You’re going to continue to be right in the middle, pulled both ways. But, like I said, if you want to come back to the bank, there’ll be a place for you, and a nice block of stock, as well.”

That put an entirely different spin on things than there’d been before. Given a good start, Frank could wind up owning a good share of the bank. Frank knew his father was a rich man – how rich, he wasn’t sure but he wasn’t hurting, and Frank, though he had never been spoiled, had never been hurting, either.

“You’re right, it could cause problems,” Frank said, “but it could be interesting, too. Do you think I ought to go somewhere else, other than Michigan State?”

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, April 11, 1958

VALEDICTORIAN NAMED

The Spearfish Lake Area Schools have announced that the valedictorian for the Class of 1958 is Frank Matson, son of Garth Matson and Donna Clark of Spearfish Lake.

Matson, an all-A student, has also been quarterback of the varsity football team for three years.

The top student of the class of 1958 says that he plans to attend the University of Michigan, to study business finance.

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