Editor’s Disclaimer: This is a very early story of Wes’s, to our knowledge possibly the second book written by him. If published in the usual chronology, it would be book number three (between Rocinante and Snowplow Extra), with Forgotten Killer counted number one, which though written and published much later takes place before Rocinante. The WTLC was written and until now has never been out of very rough first-draft status. We have left a lot of the original in, so there are timing and geographical discrepancies. In fact you’ll notice that Spearfish Lake hasn’t found a home yet, as one character is mentioned as going to an out-of-state school, the University of Michigan! We’ve cleaned up some sentence structure, fixed typos, grammar, and details we saw that are easy to resolve, but left other things in that couldn’t have been done without Wes’s help. The Wikifolk will have trouble reconciling some things in this book. Scenes were lifted and used in other books, mostly Forgotten Killer and Absent Friend, which come several books later in the series. It’s still a fun rollick through the past with lots of background info on characters not well known. One editor who has obviously handled a golf club before told us that Wes (and other editors) didn’t know the game at all, and he has made the match in the story at least somewhat acceptable.

Mike McMahon was having trouble typing. His fingers kept getting snarled up and his mind wasn’t working very well. Partly, it was because it was still early on what would obviously be a very hot day, and old man Sanderson still insisted that the “front-office” staff wear ties, even though he was too cheap to put in air conditioning. Partly, it was because the story in front of him was another silly puff-piece on the upcoming Spearfish Lake Chili Festival, but mostly it was because he could see the lace of Kirsten’s well-filled bra through her thin white blouse.

He glanced up from the nearly blank brown sheet of trimmed newsprint and saw Kirsten put her hands back behind her head, lean back, and s-t-r-e-t-c-h, 110 pounds of well-stacked honey-blonde dynamite, trying to burst her blouse with those boobs. Understandably, his attention wandered somewhat.

Trying to keep from looking like he was staring, which he was, he ripped the sheet of newsprint from his old black Royal manual, wadded it up, and threw it in the general direction of the wastebasket. He loaded another sheet into the typewriter and resolved to see the story through this time, wondering if Woodward and Bernstein ever had to write stories about a chili cook-off. “Chili makers from four states will converge on Spearfish Lake next weekend for the second annual Chili Festival,” he typed quickly. An adequate lead, even though it was no better than the one he had just pitched, but he was lost on where to go from there. What the hell did a chili festival have to do with a north-woods town in the summer, anyway, he wondered, other than the fact that it was Kate Ellsberg’s big idea?

“Did you see the cute buns on that guy?” Kirsten asked the somewhat older brunette, Carrie Evachevski, for at least the sixth time that day and the twenty-first that week, wrenching McMahon’s attention from the chili cook-off story again.

“He was in here today,” Carrie told her, hoping to head off another rapturous discussion of the roofer’s great buns. Kirsten had discovered the guy when she visited the Evachevski’s summer cabin at the West Turtle Lake Club the weekend before, and she had been going nuts about him ever since.

“Looking for me, I hope, I hope?” Kirsten smiled, putting her arms down. “When I saw him up on your roof, all I could think was, ‘Wow!’” McMahon abandoned all notion of working on the chili cook-off story.

“No, bringing me the bill,” Carrie said, looking up from the blue and gray Compugraphic typesetting machine, even though her fingers kept going at their same furious rate. “A hundred and nineteen dollars for seventeen lousy shingles, and I’ll bet the damn roof still leaks.”

“Did you tell him that I think he’s cute?”

Carrie shook her head, and glanced briefly at her copy, continuing to type. “I told him that he’s a chiseling crook.”

“Carrie, you didn’t!” Kirsten exclaimed, aghast.

Over in the corner, Virginia Meyers was monitoring everything that happened around her as she said to the woman on the phone, “That was a Chantilly lace bodice, wasn’t it, dear?” After forty years of writing up weddings and social notes, Virginia could have done it in her sleep, but if it came out in the paper that the lace was Chantilly, rather than, say, Alençon, there would be hell to pay. Every detail of the wedding gown had to be reported perfectly, right down to the bride’s underwear.

In her many years at the Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, Virginia had attained the reputation of being the one person who knew absolutely everything about everybody in Spearfish Lake.

It was said, and there was more truth than fiction, that Virginia could walk through the junkyard out beyond the D&O tracks and point out who got pregnant in which back seat, how much the baby weighed, what part the kid had played in the kindergarten extravaganza, and who the kid was hopping into a back seat with now!

Virginia heard most everything, forgot nothing, and could add up odd, unconnected events so precisely that she was considered psychic. She could take two totally unconnected pieces of information – say, the list of participants at a bridal shower and the price of spare ribs at the Spearfish Lake Super Market – and deduce correctly the latest catty name that Kate Ellsberg had heard Donna Clark call Helga Matson over sherry after a meeting of the Spearfish Lake Woman’s Club. So, while Virginia was checking her facts on the style of the bride’s underwear, she was carefully monitoring the events in the front office, knowing more about the seemingly normal situation than the participants themselves, not that she would necessarily tell anyone until the time came right.

She knew, for example, that Mike was wondering why Kirsten kept brushing him off on the average of twice a week, while the little hot pants chased after every unmarried man in town. Virginia didn’t have to wonder why; she knew that Kirsten was keeping Mike stashed for a rainy day. She knew that despite an age difference of several years, that Kirsten and Carrie were the best of friends, and it wasn’t the first time Kirsten had gotten the hots over some guy while visiting the Evachevski’s summer cabin, which she often did in the summer. Virginia also knew that Carrie thought that her daughter, Jennifer, aged fourteen, knew more about catching a man than Kirsten did, and she could calculate, from past experience, that Kirsten, less than a week into her crush, was already about forty percent of the way through her infatuation with this young roofer.

So, as she noted the half-sentence that would be devoted to the groom, in reality there was only one thing that Virginia was curious about:

She wondered what Mike would think if he knew that the West Turtle Lake Club was a nudist camp.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

SECOND ANNUAL CHILI FESTIVAL THIS WEEKEND

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

Chili makers from four states will converge on Spearfish Lake this weekend for the Second Annual Spearfish Lake Chili Festival.

Highlight of the weekend festivities will be the Chili Cook-off at Point Park, sponsored by the Spearfish Lake Woman’s Club. Kate Ellsberg, spokesperson for the club, said that last year’s winner, Ronald Lawson of Camden, will be back to defend the title with an improved version of his “Thunderbutt Chili.”

He’ll face lots of competition from other entries, such as “Forked Tongue Chili,” “Buzzard Breath Chili,” “Smoke in the Hole Chili,” “Thundering Herd Buffalo Tail Chili,” and “Lutefisk Chili” offered by various competitors both from Spearfish Lake and elsewhere …

The existence of the West Turtle Lake Club northeast of town had vexed the residents of Spearfish Lake for almost thirty years, and who was ultimately to blame had yet to be settled.

Some people were sure that it was all the result of communist influence; recalcitrant Republicans were even now to be found who thought that is was somehow the result of the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt had let things go to hell. On the other hand, the Democrats in town laid the blame square on the shoulders of Adolph Hitler.

There was a little truth to every viewpoint, of course, but everyone agreed it wouldn’t have happened if “D” Battery of the 144th Artillery, the local national guard unit, hadn’t been called up in the fall of 1940.

The commander of “D” Battery was Captain Garth Matson, executive vice-president of the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank, and son of old Caleb Matson, the bank’s owner.

A tearful Donna Matson, Captain Matson’s wife, waved in sorrow as the Decatur and Camden mixed train, with flatcars loaded with the battery’s old Great War 75’s and its six-by-sixes and a couple of old day coaches carrying the company pulled out of the Spearfish Lake station. The distraught Donna had found sympathy from Wayne Clark, the owner of the plywood mill, whose son Brent was also a passenger on that same train. By all the accounts that Virginia Meyers had been able to confirm in the years since that fateful day, the train couldn’t have made it to Albany River before Donna was finding comfort in Clark’s arms out at his hunting cabin north of County Road 919.

As a one-time thing, considering the heat of emotional stress and all, Captain Matson would probably have been willing to overlook his wife’s deviation from the straight and narrow, but it didn’t stop there. It did not take long for word to reach the commander of “D” Battery, down at Camp Knox, that the two were shacking up at the cabin two and three nights a week.

Since he was away, getting ready to fight a war, Captain Matson was concerned about his two small children: Barbara, who was six, and Frank, who was only six months. Resolving to bear his cross in silence and get on with the subject at hand, Matson decided that if he came back from the war, he could then deal with Donna appropriately. Stringing her up by the thumbs seemed like a good idea.

It was the spring of 1942 before his resolve weakened. Three hurried trips back to Spearfish Lake from Camp Knox, and later Camp Dix, had not settled anything. Captain Matson had long given up on the idea of saving his marriage and was talking with his lawyer about the best way to wrap things up. His was not an uncommon story in those days.

Much to Captain Matson’s credit, according to “D” Battery veterans after the war, he never allowed the troubles he had with his wife to affect the relationship he had with young Lieutenant Brent Clark, Wayne’s son; an extremely green second lieutenant when he joined “D” Battery, Matson took him in hand and helped him become an effective soldier and leader. When Matson was promoted to Major and became the Battalion Operations Officer, he was happy to recommend that Clark receive command of the battery.

Thus, it was not with anger, but just a desire to make things go smoothly, that Major Matson caught up with the “D” Battery convoy on maneuvers along the south Jersey shore, to settle a dispute over where the company’s fire base was to be set up. He found young Clark arguing the subject with a remarkably beautiful young lady who was mad as hell, and totally naked.

They say that lightning struck that warm spring Jersey day; certainly, the thunder was still heard in Spearfish Lake, more than three decades later.

Major Matson managed to maintain a properly military composure, in spite of the obvious distraction caused by the sight of this buxom lass, entirely in the buff. Matson was soon able to work out the problem; though Lieutenant Clark had come to the correct map coordinates, the coordinates were wrong. They put him square in the center of a nudist camp. Some typist had slipped up. The battery moved down the road a mile, placating the hardheaded young woman, and Matson, liking what he had seen, offered to buy her dinner sometime.

“Why don’t you come out for dinner this weekend?” the statuesque brunette offered. “That is, if you’re willing to take your clothes off.” Matson went away, thought about it, then took a pass for the weekend and borrowed a car. He didn’t bother to pack a bag.

When he came back Sunday night, he wrote a letter to Spearfish Lake, telling his lawyer to get on with the divorce.

If Adolph Hitler was ultimately responsible for bringing Garth Matson to a New Jersey nudist camp that spring morning, he was even more directly responsible for Helga Inghulsen’s presence there.

Helga was twenty-one that summer, watching the camp during the week for her parents, who owned it. Helga and her parents were all shaped by the unsettled years after World War I in Germany. Her parents, sickened by the war and what it had done to Germany, set out to lead a life that would be above such squalor and pain. At first they were “Wandervogels,” young idealists who embraced naturalism and pacifism and vegetarianism and nudism and communism (in its purist, not Russian sense), They strove to instill the virtues of their beliefs in their young love-child and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The Inghulsen family’s beliefs would have made them highly unpopular in Germany after Hitler took over in 1933, even if they had not also both been partly Jewish. Fortunately, Doctor Inghulsen had some money, and his mother died and left him some more. They wound up in New York, just as the American nudist movement got under way in the early 1930s. Even in the depression, a skilled physician could make a decent life. In 1939, they had taken over the struggling young south Jersey camp, where they met Major Matson when he showed up the weekend following “D” Battery’s inadvertent invasion.

Though pacifism was still much in the Inghulsen heart (Dr. Inghulsen fervently and idealistically believed that wars would be impossible if all armies were naked), kicking Hitler’s ass was the exception, and Helga, who had been much impressed with how open-minded and gentlemanly Major Matson had been, was rather taken with him.

Though lust is not supposed to be present among nudists, no one said anything about banning love. As a romance, it was a bit hurried and frantic, but so were many in 1942, and few could have been more intense.

In those days, Battery “D” of the 144th Field Artillery was still almost all Spearfish Lake men, and virtually everybody in the battery had witnessed the incident when Major Matson and Helga met. Even thirty years later, there were still a lot of men around Spearfish Lake who could honestly say they had seen Helga in the nude, and could praise Matson’s taste. Some of them had actually been present at the original meeting, but for others, that sight would not have occurred until after the WTLC had been formed.

Lieutenant Colonel Garth Matson and Helga Inghulsen were married in the spring of 1943, just days after his divorce was finalized and not too many days before the 144th Field Artillery shipped out.

Wartime being what it was, no one was surprised that Virginia Meyers’ Record-Herald story on the wedding was a little sparse, and it didn’t mention the usual details of the bride’s wedding dress for the simple fact that there was none, and Virginia knew it. She also knew about and failed to mention the groom and wedding party’s similar lack of attire, which included as the best man Captain Brent Clark, and all the guests, several of whom were officers and troopers from Battery D.

Looking clearly into the future, Virginia not inadvertently failed to mention that First Sergeant Howard Meyers was one of the groomsmen.

In the miserable Italian winter of early 1944, Matson, now a Lieutenant Colonel and second in command of the battalion and soon to command it, learned that his daughter Carolyn had been born.

November in the north country around Spearfish Lake is usually pretty gray and uncomfortable, but Veterans’ Day of 1945 was an unseasonably nice greeting for the men of Battery D, Major Brent Clark, and Colonel Garth Matson, as they marched home again. In spite of the fact that from late 1943 until the spring of 1945, there were only nine days on which Battery D did not fire a mission, most of the men that had left with the unit came home with it. Sadly, there were a few exceptions; Sergeant Rodney Sanderson, son of the Record-Herald publisher, was one of them, killed when a counter-battery round hit his jeep outside of Rome in the spring of 1944; Colonel Matson would eventually name his son after him.

Virginia Meyers’ story of Garth and Helga’s wedding pretty much set the standard for coverage of the couple’s avocations. Everybody in town knew what had happened as the men of Battery D had written home regularly, but in print it was as if none of it had happened. Most people figured that Garth and Helga would put away the obvious excesses of their wartime fling and become normal, respectable people.

All of which proved that no one knew Helga, or not yet.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, November 14, 1945

SPEARFISH LAKE NOTES

by Virginia Meyers
Record-Herald Social Editor

*   *   *

Among the spectators in the Veteran’s Day parade welcoming home our boys from Battery D was Mrs. Helga Inghulsen Matson, wife of Colonel Garth Matson, and their daughter, Carolyn, 1½, on their first visit to Spearfish Lake. Mrs. Matson, who married Col. Matson in the spring of 1943, remained with her parents in New York for the duration.

Mrs. Matson said that she had a favorable impression of Spearfish Lake, and said she hoped to help make Spearfish Lake a nice, healthy place to live.

*   *   *

Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Clark, hosted a reception on Friday night for Mr. Clark’s son, Brent, and the officers from Spearfish Lake who had served under him in D Battery during the course of the war.

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