If there were any nooks and crannies of gossip in Spearfish Lake that Virginia Meyers might have missed, they probably got aired out over the breakfast table at Rick’s Café.

The big table, covered with oil cloth, was in the back of the room. It could seat sixteen, and from about six-thirty until ten on weekday mornings, all seats were usually filled, and the waitresses could set their watches by the changing of the occupants of the chairs.

However, the character of the table changed as the morning went on. Early on, it was loggers and factory workers, but by 7:30, it was teachers and factory managers. Starting around eight o’clock, retailers began to filter in, but anyone still there at 9:30 was a retiree. Yet the table was highly democratic; seniority, not social status, ruled who got seats at the table, and a factory worker could sit elbow-to-elbow with the factory owner or bank president, discussing politics, movies, women, or the latest Marlins game.

Since the breakfast table at Rick’s was an all-male affair, the conversation ran heavily to sports. Professional sports, however, were rarely a topic, due to the location, which fairly evenly divided fans of several large cities; the state college, universally called “Moo U,” was such a nonentity that no one ever entertained any positive feelings for it.

High school sports, though, were a different story. Every bit of gossip about the Spearfish Lake Marlins was tossed around the table until it was beaten to death, and this morning the debate was how much the Szczerowski kid rendering his girl friend pregnant was going to affect his quarterbacking, once the season got under way.

George Webb always sat down at the breakfast table at Rick’s at 8:15, and he was always gone at five to nine, unless it was a Thursday. On Thursdays, if no one was waiting for a seat, he would sit around and drink an extra cup of coffee, or even two.

Since the Record-Herald was published on Wednesdays, Thursdays were Webb’s easy day. As the editor of the weekly, he liked to sit around and gauge the reaction to the week’s paper. Right now, across the table from him, Bud Ellsberg was glancing over the front page.

“Now, isn’t that a bunch of shit,” the grocer commented.

Webb lifted his eyebrows. Had that kid screwed up the story about the chili cook-off? If he had, Ellsberg’s wife would go up like a Saturn with five burning.

Ellsberg turned his attention back to the paper, carefully reading the story; Webb couldn’t make out which story. As the grocer read on, Frank Matson came in and sat down next to Ellsberg. Sharon, the morning waitress, wordlessly set a cup of coffee down in front of Matson and signaled for his regular order.

“Would you look at that horseshit,” Ellsberg said to the new arrival. “Damn railroad’s going to yank up the tracks.”

Webb relaxed. Apparently the chili cook-off story was all right, or at least Ellsberg hadn’t seen it. Now, if that little blonde tease in advertising had managed to get the prices right in the grocery ad, he might be able to have an enjoyable breakfast.

“Damn shame,” Matson agreed. “There’s two, three, maybe four outfits up here that are really going to hurt if that happens. Somebody ought to do something about it, but I don’t know what.”

“Hey, George,” Gil Evachevski said, “is the Szczerowski kid going to be able to run with the ball, or what?”

“It’s all up to his girlfriend’s daddy,” Webb said. “It depends on whether he peppers the kid’s ass with a shotgun, or what.”

“This new McMahon kid of yours has been going to the practices, hasn’t he? What’s he think?”

“Hell, he’s so new he ain’t figured out how to spell ‘Szczerowski’ yet. He’d better learn, though; opening kickoff’s only a couple weeks off.”

Evachevski snorted. Though the appliance dealer was a local kid, and had been a halfback for the Marlins, he had spent twenty years away from Spearfish Lake, in the army. A master sergeant, he was thinking of going for thirty when the army got to talking about Vietnam again. He’d done his twenty; he and his wife Carrie, Frank Matson’s half-sister, had moved back to town about four years before, and they’d worked hard at becoming locals again. Gil had earned his seat at the breakfast table by now. “Where the hell do you dig up those kids, anyway?” he asked.

“Moo U J-School,” Webb admitted. “Got a prof down there who keeps an eye out for me for some kid who needs a turn in the minors. McMahon’s just the latest.” Webb didn’t comment that he had first come to the Record-Herald for a year on the farm club himself, like his young reporter and a lot of other kids just out of journalism school. They were all looking to get a little experience and a line on a résumé that might get him in the door of a bigger newspaper. He had, and then had discovered he wasn’t a city person. When, a few years earlier, he had heard that Old Man Sanderson was slowing down, Webb had come back to stay. He’d liked it here. “Seems like a good kid.”

Sharon brought Matson his breakfast. It was the same thing, every morning, five days a week, like clockwork: two eggs over hard, sausage patties, American fries. Matson didn’t have to order it anymore, and all Sharon had to say to the cook by now was, “Frank’s here.”

Sharon was a good-looking blonde who had held her age well. Though now on the far side of forty and a grandmother to boot, there wasn’t a man at the breakfast table who hadn’t harbored fantasies about her at one time or another over the years. Those ideas had never gone beyond thought: Sharon’s husband had the disposition of a gorilla with hemorrhoids and was just about as big. Gil Evachevski was about the only person who stood a chance of making a pass at Sharon in safety, and Gil never had.

“Heard from your dad?” Sharon asked, conversationally.

Matson looked pained. Eight months of the year, in the winter, Garth Matson was a regular at the breakfast table. “I’ve got to get out and see him one of these days.”

“Supposed to rain and turn cold this weekend,” Evachevski snorted. “Might be a good time.”

Down the table, Sam LeBlanc said to Howard Meyers, “I don’t care if Nixon was a crook, at least he could walk down the street without falling down.”

“What do you care?” Meyers replied. “You’re a damn Democrat, anyway.”

“You know, I really miss Nixon,” LeBlanc replied. “But then, hell, I even miss Johnson.” He changed the subject: “You know what you call a colored person that’s …” LeBlanc said. He followed it with another black joke, followed by a queer joke for good measure.

With Evachevski at the table, LeBlanc laid off the Polack jokes. After a string of them over the breakfast table one morning a couple years before, Gil had asked, rather pointedly, “Hey Sam. What’s black and blue and floating face down in the lake?”

“What?”

“The next son of a bitch I hear tell a Polack joke.”

Sam had never had to be reminded; Evachevski was a retired Green Beret master sergeant with Combat Infantry Badges from Korea and Vietnam, and it went without saying that he was not a man to tangle with. Gil had also convinced him to curtail the use of the “n” word but hadn’t gone so far as to totally forbid the jokes.

Glad of the interruption, Matson turned to Ellsberg. “That’s a damn shame about the railroad,” he said. “What the hell is the paper plant up in Warsaw going to do? They must run a trainload of stuff by here each day.”

Webb looked at his watch. If LeBlanc got to telling ethnic jokes, he could go on for hours. It may have been Thursday, but Webb still had things to do. He polished off his coffee, left Sharon a nice tip, and headed for the Record-Herald.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

MARLIN SPORTS TALK

by George Webb
Record-Herald News Editor

Coach Harold Hekkinan says that the Marlin football team could be headed for one of its best years since the days when Mike Johansen was the quarterback, and Gil Evachevski and Roger Augsberg were halfbacks – in other words, one of the best teams since the late ’40s and early ’50s.

A big hope for the Marlins is the quarterback, Denny Szczerowski, a senior this year. “He’s got a real good arm and a lot of accuracy,” Coach Hekkinan said proudly of the q’back. “If he can keep his concentration and avoid injury, he ought to have a great season.”

Things look good in the rest of the backfield for the Marlins, as well …

Caleb Matson had suffered a stroke in the spring of 1945, and he was never in good health after that. Though he was well enough to sit in his wheelchair and wave a flag that November day when Battery D marched home, he was much relieved to have his son home to pick up the reins at the bank.

Garth, ever after called “The Colonel” by most of the townsfolk, no matter what they thought of him, wouldn’t have minded a few days off to get adapted to civilian life again, but the bank had been running more or less on habit for several months. Consequently, the morning after the parade, he was in his office at the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank, throwing away forgotten papers that had gathered dust since 1940, happy to pick up his life again, and take care of unfinished business.

At the head of his mental list of unfinished business were items titled “Donna,”“Wayne Clark,” “Barbara,” and “Frank.”

In the negotiations leading up to the divorce, on the grounds of Donna’s adultery, Garth had made it clear that while Donna could have custody of the children until the war was over, things were expected to be different after that.

To serve notice that he meant business, one of the first things the Colonel trashed was an application from Clark Plywood for a loan for an addition to the factory, Wayne Clark having correctly foreseen a postwar building boom that would carry with it an increased demand for plywood.

Clark was able to recognize a shot across his bow when he saw one; taking up with Donna had caused him trouble from the bank for years, but since the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank was the only bank in town, he’d had to live with it as best he could. He had fully expected trouble from the Colonel, so he’d hoped to slip the application past Caleb on one of his worse days.

The plywood mill owner was no fool, except perhaps where Donna was concerned. When he got the notice of rejection, he called Garth to complain: “You know I can go to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and get the loan,” he said.

“While you’re telling that to your board,” the Colonel replied, “tell them that the RFC has about a three-year backlog.”

“I’d hoped we could keep business away from our personal differences,” he said, trying to make peace.

“Sorry, Wayne,” the Colonel said. “I’ve been sitting here, cleaning off my desk, finding a lot of stuff dated 1940 that needs to be dealt with.”

It was a short war, but a quiet and bitter one. To perhaps simplify the issue, the Colonel had done the equivalent of stashing the Clark Plywood expansion out in an old and unknown mining shack and then stated his ransom terms: Barbara and Frank.

Donna knew, of course, about the circumstances of Garth’s courtship and wedding, and she figured that they rather balanced off the details of her own affair and later marriage to the elder Clark. She was prepared to fight, and Clark knew right from the beginning that he was right square in the middle.

While Garth had been at war, Donna had used her status as the former wife of the bank vice-president, and now the wife of one of the community’s leading employers, to cement her position in the social standing of the community. She was president of the Garden Club, vice-president of the Woman’s Club, an active church worker, and social lion.

In those days, too, giving custody of the children to the father, even if he was the aggrieved party in an adultery, was all but unheard of. Donna figured that, while she didn’t hold all the cards, she had a pretty good hand.

But the Colonel held a pretty good hand, himself. Donna had been the one stepping out when he left for the war; his honorable war record didn’t hurt, nor did being the de facto bank president.

And, though Donna may have had the law on her side, he had the judges.

The winter of 1945-46 closed in hard on Spearfish Lake, which was much more isolated during the winter in those days than it was to become later. Lawyers from both sides threw briefs and depositions at each other, and never seemed to get any closer to an agreement.

February in Spearfish Lake is still the dead of winter, and the squabble between the Colonel and Donna was starting to wash over into the rest of the community. Donna never missed a chance to badmouth her ex-husband, and Garth never missed a chance to remind people how he’d barely gotten over the hill to go to war before he was stabbed in the back. Lawyers increased their billings, as is their historical prerogative, yet nothing seemed any closer to solution.

It was not a lawyer who finally settled the affair, but Brent Clark, who was about the only open channel of communication left. With difficulty, he was able to get his father and his good friend to sit down to lunch at the Spearfish Lake Café one February afternoon.

“Look, Colonel,” Brent said. “This has gone on long enough. You know as well as I do that if we don’t get on with this expansion at the plywood plant, then we can’t operate economically in this postwar market. We’d hate to have to shut down the mill. We need to bring jobs into town, not drive them out. We really need to break ground this spring.”

“I never disagreed,” Garth stated. “The only thing is, that’s not the issue.”

“I know what the issue is, and you’re both going to have to give a little,” the younger Clark replied. “Why can’t you come up with a custody agreement where you keep the kids during the week, and Donna on the weekends? Anybody else who gets into this kind of a mess would agree to something like that.”

It took some talking, but eventually the ex-Major Clark was able to get his former battalion commander to agree to that much.

“I’m perfectly willing to buy off on it,” the elder Clark agreed. “I just want to see this thing settled. But you know Donna as well as I do. She’ll never give in if there’s any hope of winning at all.”

“Let me bum a cigarette,” Garth said. Helga had made the Colonel give up smoking, but he still sneaked one when he could. When he had it lit, he had some advice: “You’re going to have to make her give in. Tell her she’s going to hate summer in Alabama, what with the heat and the bugs and the humidity and the coloreds.”

“Alabama?”

“Alabama.” The Colonel replied. “That’s where you’re going to move your plant if you can’t get your financing here.”

“We’d been looking at North Carolina,” Wayne admitted.

“Yeah, but a little bird said the tax breaks were better in Alabama,” the Colonel replied, suspecting that the Clarks could guess that the little bird was Virginia Meyers. “You’d hate Alabama, too. All those hillbillies. Your work force will be so damn dumb they won’t be able to find their ass with either hand, so you’ll be turning out a crappy product that won’t be able to compete. Plus, no deer. Most especially, no trout fishing, just wormy old bass and carp and catfish you go dunking for with a cane pole while the sweat rolls down your face in a river. You know, it’s so hot and humid down there, you can sweat the armpits right out of a business suit in a week. Rot them right away.”

“I wasn’t really looking forward to it,” Wayne admitted, shuddering at the thought.

The Colonel took a puff on his cigarette (God, how he missed that!) and added casually, “Oh, and I can get an injunction to keep Donna from taking the kids out of the state, too.”

“I suspected that, too.”

“You’re going to have to be the one to convince her,” the Colonel said, suddenly feeling guilty, and stubbing the cigarette out in the ash tray.

“It’s not going to be easy,” the plywood mill owner said. “You know that as well as I do.”

The Colonel studied the back of his hand for a moment, thought of asking for another cigarette anyway, guilt or no guilt. “Tell you what,” he said finally. “I’ll throw in a little something to sweeten the pot if we can get this settled in the next couple weeks.”

“What might that be?”

“You still got that stump farm out in Amboy Township?”

The elder Clark nodded. “You mean out around West Turtle Lake? Sure. Couple of square miles of it.”

“Got any use for it?”

“Naw, we cut it over pretty heavily during the war, and even chipped up a lot of the stumps and brush and shipped them to the paper mill in Warsaw. Totally useless piece of land. I can’t sell it; nobody else wants to pay the taxes on it, and I don’t either, but I can’t let the taxes go, or the damn county would attach the plant.”

The Colonel grabbed a cigarette and lit it. “Get this settled, and I’ll take it off your hands for one dollar, and take care of the taxes.”

“Dollar an acre?”

“One dollar, period. When we get a permanent custody order from the judge.”

Probably it was the prospect of rooking the Colonel on a land deal, and not having to pay taxes, that turned the tide for Wayne Clark. He knew it was going to be a hell of a battle to sell the custody agreement to Donna, but finally he put his foot down, and she reluctantly agreed. In the middle of March, 1946, old Judge Stone issued a permanent custody order, and Barbara and Frank went to live with their father and stepmother, at least part of the time.

“The hell of it is,” Wayne said to Brent out in the plant office one day while they were going over the plans for the delayed expansion, “I can’t for the life of me figure out what he wants that shit land for. There’s not a dollar’s worth of timber left on it. You can’t farm it, it’s too sandy. It’s absolutely, totally worthless.”

That summer, the Clarks would find out why Garth wanted the land, and Donna never let Wayne forget the deal until the day he died.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, March 22, 1946

CLARK PLYWOOD TO RESUME PAYING BY CHECK

Wayne Clark, president of Clark Plywood, announced Monday that the company will resume paying employees by check, rather than in cash.

The company began making cash payments in 1942 as “a war economy measure,” according to Mr. Clark.

Clark said that the cash payment system, “made sense at the time it was instituted,” but that it had now outlived its usefulness.

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