Frank was a little late getting to his office, but it was a nice day, and he’d enjoyed the casual stroll from Rick’s to the bank. Summer would soon be over, and nice days to enjoy a casual walk to work would soon be a rarity.

The bank was quiet as he walked in, and he was surprised to see that his secretary, Jane Masterfield, had come in. “Didn’t figure I’d see you here today,” Frank said.

“I came from the hospital a little while ago. They took his appendix out last night,” Jane told him, “and he’s out like a light. I’ll slide over later in the morning if he’s come around.”

“You take off whenever you think you have to,” Frank told her. “It’s not like anything that important is happening. Anything come in for me?”

Jane looked at her pad. “Right after I got here, Brent called to remind you of the Clark Plywood board meeting this afternoon. One o’clock.”

“Any conflicts?”

“I don’t see much on your schedule today,” she said.

Frank nodded. “OK, I ought to be done with that by three. I’ll be expecting Bud Ellsberg in then.”

“I’ll put him on the schedule,” Jane confirmed, adding, “quiet day, otherwise.”

“Yeah, it’ll probably be pretty dead from now till Labor Day,” Frank agreed. “Did you tell mother or Kate that Harry won’t be able to judge the chili festival?”

“Didn’t even think about it,” Jane said, surprised that she had forgotten something. “I’ll call right away.”

Frank shook his head. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ve got to call mother in the next few minutes, anyway. I’ll take care of it.”

In his office, Frank leafed through his mail. There wasn’t much there that needed his attention. Might as well get it over with, he thought, reaching for the phone.

“I hear that the council was the usual bunch of idiots last night,” Frank said, correctly gauging his mother’s attitude.

“Those cretins. Those imbeciles …” Donna started out. “I mean, I expect that of Ryan, and LeBlanc is an idiot, anyway, but I never expected Mike Johansen to treat me like that.”

“Mother …”, Frank tried to interrupt.

“I don’t know what got into him. Your father must have put him up to it, to embarrass me.”

“Mother …”

“That’s the only excuse he would have for acting like that. And why would the mayor be out of town, anyway? Tell me, why would he?”

“Because he always takes the first two weeks of August for his vacation,” Frank responded. “He goes out to California to see his kids, and you know that. But that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, this morning, after I found out what happened last night,” he continued, talking fast so his mother couldn’t get a word in edgewise. “I read off Sam LeBlanc pretty good, and a bunch of us got together and agreed we’d pay for the cleanup. Going to see if we can maybe get the fire department to do it for a donation to their benefit fund. That keeps the city out of it entirely.”

This was news that Donna hadn’t expected. “Why, that’s nice of you,” she said. “Who volunteered?”

“Bud Ellsberg, Gil Evachevski, and me,” Frank said. “I think George Webb will go in on it, too. It’s not worth getting into a hissing match over.”

“That’s very nice of you,” Donna replied, a bit cooler, now. “That’s one big concern of mine off my mind.”

“Didn’t think you’d mind,” Frank said. “By the way, did you know Harry Masterfield is in the hospital?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Appendicitis. Jane says he’s not going to be able to judge the chili contest.”

“I’ll call Kate and have her find someone else. Do you have any suggestions?”

Frank thought for a moment. It was not a job that he really wished to stick somebody with. “There’s two men on the board now,” he said finally. “Since this is the Woman’s Club’s project, why don’t you find a woman?”

“All the club members are pretty well tied up with other things to do this weekend,” Donna said. “I don’t know how they’d be able to work it in.”

“Doesn’t have to be a Woman’s Club member,” Frank said. “There ought to be a woman in town who’s maybe prominent in business and available. Maybe you ought to think of somebody on the young side, too. This is kind of a youngster’s event, anyway.”

Donna made noises indicating doubt. “I don’t know of anyone right off the top of my head.”

“Maybe Kate can think of someone,” Frank said, thinking that perhaps a young stomach could take the beating better than someone his age.

“I’ll call her and see,” Donna said. “Thanks for helping us out on this cleanup thing. I really appreciate it. We shouldn’t have to put up with those idiots on council, anyway.”

Call over with, Frank hung up the phone. Well, at least Harry was off the hook. Absently, he wondered who would get stuck with being Harry’s replacement as he dug out the folder on the Clark Plywood expansion and began to review the figures. The board would probably rubberstamp what Brent Clark wanted to do, but it was always good to know what they were rubberstamping.

Donna called Kate Ellsberg right away; they had already conferred three times that morning about the idiots on council. She passed along the news about Harry Masterfield, and Frank’s suggestion.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Kate said. “Some woman who’s young, and in the business community. Maybe not someone running the business, but who has a high profile.”

They threw around two or three names, but there was always some reason why the woman wouldn’t do. She’d be out of town, or working, or was related to someone in the West Turtle Lake Club or the North Spearfish Lake Woman’s Club.

“There’s someone who I’m trying to think of,” Kate said. “I can see her face, but I can’t put her name to it. She was in the store yesterday, talking to Bud about advertising … that young girl from the paper. One of the Langenderfer kids. Kris, or something.”

“The Langenderfers are good, solid people,” Donna said. “She probably would do fine.”

“I’ll call over to the paper and see if she’ll be willing to do it,” Kate agreed.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 20, 1975

CLARK PLYWOOD EYES EXPANSION

by George Webb
Record-Herald News Editor

The Board of Directors of Clark Plywood announced last week that the company is giving consideration to an expansion plan that would add twenty to thirty employees to the company’s work force.

“With the state of the economy being what it is,” Board Chairman Brent Clark said, “We don’t want to get too heavily into expansion at this time. But the economy will improve, and we want to be ready for it in the future.”

No final decision on the expansion has been announced, and time frames for the work are only tentative, Clark said.

Getting Harry Masterfield onto the Spearfish Lake Volunteer Fire Department was a stroke of genius on Donna Clark’s part, as it turned out. For an offhand remark, it was to develop a lasting effect, and only once was she known to regret her action.

Firefighting, and the amount of training and preparation involved, turned out to be an admirable sponge to soak up Masterfield’s excess energy and he still got to drive fast on occasion, and now even legally, with lights and siren, which was even more fun.

In an era when Spearfish Lake was rapidly losing its young people due to limited job opportunities, it gave Masterfield an extra incentive to find some way to stay around town and marry his high school sweetheart, Jane. When it became known that this promising young firefighter on a department largely filled with older men was thinking about leaving town to look for work elsewhere, the rumor got to Garth Matson, and Jane soon found herself working at the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank, tiding the young couple over until Harry was able to find a job with Northwoods Fuel, making fuel oil deliveries.

Around that time, fire departments were getting away from sirens being the only warning call for the firemen as radio alert devices and portable radios were starting to make their appearance. Masterfield soon had one in his oil tanker, so he could go directly from a job to the fire.

Every fireman always has stories to tell of interesting fires, sometimes scary ones, but occasionally funny ones, too. There was one, in 1961, that was obviously going to be a legend in the Spearfish Lake Fire Department for decades to come, the time the Ashtenfelter cottage caught fire at the West Turtle Lake Club.

It was a weekday in late August, and Masterfield was out in the truck, delivering a load of fuel oil to Heikki Tovio, out in Amboy Township. He had no more than pulled into the Tovio driveway when he heard the warbling noise on his truck radio, calling the Spearfish Lake firemen to the station for a fire at West Turtle Lake.

“C-35 responding to the scene,” Masterfield radioed back, then fired up the tank truck and headed for the fire.

Things were a little hectic around the West Turtle Lake Club that day. The fire which was eventually traced to a faulty electric stove had been going for a while before anyone noticed, and, with no phones at the club, someone had to pull on a pair of pants and race three miles to the pay phone at Shaundessy’s Bait Shop on East Turtle Lake to call in the fire to the department.

It was sometimes difficult to get a full fire crew out to a fire during the day on a weekday. Very often, firemen would be at work and not hear the call, or be out of town. After the previous big daytime fire, Wally Dellenbach, then the Fire Chief, had given the department hell because only five people, including Masterfield and himself, had responded to the first call, barely enough people to run the tanker and the pumper.

Somehow, response was not a problem this time. Nineteen firemen responded to the first call, enough to fire up the antique Studebaker pumper that was kept around as a backup, and Dellenbach was getting offers of assistance from as far away as Meeker.

Masterfield was fully professional as he pulled up to the scene with his truckload of fuel oil. Even as he was pulling in, he could see that the fire was bad. He radioed back to the station, “We’ve got a worker here, fully involved, and we’re going to need help with protection. The fire is close enough to the lake that we can drop a line in the lake with a booster pump.”

“Clear,” Dellenbach radioed. “Alerting backup. We are 10-8.” Masterfield could hear the fire chief radio Albany River to roll.

Masterfield rolled the tanker to a stop at a safe distance from the fire and swung down from the truck, almost into Brent Clark’s arms. “Is this what you call adding fuel to the fire?” Clark asked with a smile; he knew, of course, that Masterfield was a fireman, although there were naked spectators around lacking that piece of information. “There are some people around Spearfish Lake who would like to see that.”

It didn’t take a fire expert to see that the cottage was already a total loss, and by now, Masterfield was too committed a firefighter to make a wisecrack in return. “Everybody get out OK?” he asked, hoping he would not have to make a rescue penetration without turnout gear.

“Nobody was in the place,” Clark told him. “That’s why it got going so good.”

Masterfield reached for the radio microphone. “Confirm structure fire, fully involved,” he radioed. “Witness at the scene reports the structure not occupied, repeat, negative occupants. Surrounding structures are endangered, repeat, surrounding structures endangered. I will confirm evacuation.”

“Clear on that,” Dellenbach reported. “We’re coming Code 3.”

Masterfield threw the radio microphone on the seat of the truck, and asked Clark, “Anybody in the surrounding houses?”

“I don’t think so,” the builder replied.

“I’m gonna make sure. Get those people back from the fire. You don’t know what’s gonna let go.” With that, he ran to the nearest house to the fire, crashed through the front door, and with a quick tour around the house, made sure that no one was inside. Then, he made a quick run past the fire, and made sure the other one was clear, too. With that cleared, he went back outside, to see a growing crowd outside.

“Everybody get the hell back!” he roared with a bull voice, then added, “I know you don’t like to wear clothes, but get something on or it’s gonna cause problems when the department gets here. The firemen will be looking at you instead of the fire, and someone could get hurt.”

Clark could see the wisdom of that statement, and started working his way through the crowd, encouraging people to go get dressed.

It was probably five or ten minutes more before the fire trucks arrived, no one was sure; no one was looking at a watch but when they did, there were firemen ever after who said they were disappointed to get there and only find a fire to fight. As was the Albany River fire department, which had been called to the scene, and the Hoselton, Warsaw, and Blair departments, which hadn’t been called, but came anyway.

At fire department meetings and rallies for twenty years and more, Masterfield would be teased about his encouraging the nudists to get some clothes on: “Think of the opportunity you wasted.”

With that much equipment, and the lake close by, protection of nearby structures was not an issue for very long, even though the rural fire departments were still pretty much in the “surround and drown” era. It was all handled very quickly and very professionally, though Dellenbach said that about the only thing they could have done with the fire would have been to bring some hot dogs to roast.

Soaking the pile of rubble down so there wouldn’t be a re-ignition was completed well before dark, and the firemen coiled up the hoses and went back to the fire station, good-naturedly cursing Masterfield.

It was several days later that Virginia Meyers reported at the Record-Herald office that Donna Clark was less than happy about the outcome. “She said, ‘Everything would be much simpler if that young buck had just let the place burn.’”

Dellenbach and the firemen conceded, as time went on, that Masterfield had done the right thing, for the right motives; it gave him a reputation for giving all his attention to fighting a fire, and avoiding distractions, and, in the long run, propelled him to becoming Acting Chief, and ultimately Chief years later, jumping over other firemen with more seniority.

There was only one thing that still left people a bit uneasy: even after Masterfield bought out the oil company years later, again with help from the bank, Spearfish Lake residents never quite got used to seeing a fireman show up at a fire driving a tank truck loaded with fuel oil.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, January 7, 1962

MASTERFIELD WINS FIRE PROFESSIONAL AWARD

Spearfish Lake fireman Harry Masterfield was honored at the Spearfish Lake Fire Department’s annual banquet Friday night with the “Fire Bell Award”, a trophy established last fall by the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank to honor Spearfish Lake firemen who exhibit exceptional professionalism and devotion to duty on a fire call.

Masterfield is a five-year veteran of the department.

Fire Chief Wally Dellenbach said that several things contributed to Masterfield receiving the award, including the high proportion of fire calls the young firefighter had responded to, and the degree of attention to duty exhibited on numerous occasions, and his ability and willingness to draw attention to potentially dangerous situations.

“He’s a real good young fireman,” Dellenbach said. “I hope he’ll be with us for a long time to come.”

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