It was already getting hot when George Webb walked into the Record-Herald. George went straight to his office, and turned on the air conditioner.

Having an air conditioner in his office, even though he had bought it himself, made George feel just a little bit guilty; his employees would have to get along without. However, George had not been above letting old man Sanderson know that he had an asthma problem that caused him to have to take to his bed in the summer if the heat got out of hand, and, though fictional, it made a good excuse. At least old man Sanderson didn’t bitch about the cost of the electricity.

Old Man Sanderson was hardly ever in the office anymore, but the employees still got jealous, and the asthma still made a good excuse.

George set the window unit to humming and began to pick through the pile of the day’s mail. As always, it was about ninety percent garbage, and he wasn’t paying much attention to it. Checks and other obvious payments were set aside unopened for the bookkeeping department to look at, and anything for the editorial department mailed at bulk rate got immediately pitched. Mail for other departments was sorted out, though advertising got most of the mail that didn’t go to editorial or bookkeeping, and that pared the pile down to about a fifth of its original size. Those letters Webb actually had to open, but he threw away about two-thirds as soon as he glanced at the contents.

As he opened the mail, Webb kept looking up through the glass that surrounded his office, glancing at some of the people in the front office. Webb appreciated the sight of a good-looking woman, and both that little tease from advertising, Kirsten, and the typesetter, Carrie, were good-looking women. Carrie was more on his side of thirty, but looked a lot younger than she was. She had boasted earlier in the year that she had been carded in a Camden night club, and Kirsten could give cute lessons to kittens. They both looked exceptionally pretty this morning in their summer outfits.

George allowed himself a moment to imagine what they might look like without them. Carrie, of course, was Garth Matson’s daughter, and had grown up at the West Turtle Lake Club. He knew that Kirsten hung out at the club with Carrie some weekends, so it gave his imagination a little more basis of reality to work with. He wondered for a moment if nudists got the same charge out of mentally undressing a pretty girl. Probably not, he decided; too little room for the imagination to work.

Not that he’d ever find out, either. The one time he reported to his wife, Kathy, soon after they’d moved back to Spearfish Lake, that they’d had a casual offer to spend a weekend with Brent and Ursula Clark at the club, she’d had a shit fit.

Damn shame, too; he’d heard many times that they had a good golf course out there.

He knew he could sit there and pursue that line of reflective inquiry all day without getting anything accomplished. Booting himself mentally, he gathered up the mail and began his rounds of the front office, first leaving a stack with Betty in bookkeeping. “We get anything from the Spearfish Lake Super Market?” she wanted to know.

“Not that I saw,” Webb admitted.

“I’ve called up Ellsberg at least a dozen times,” he said. “Maybe you could call him up and see if you can get some money out of him.”

“I think he’s kind of strapped for his new sprinkler system,” Webb replied.

Betty snorted. “Tell him if he doesn’t come up with some money then I’ll burn the place down myself.”

Since World War II, the Spearfish Lake Super Market had burned down three times and been flattened once by a tornado, and Bud, who had bought the place about six years before, was believed to be Spearfish Lake’s leading pyrophobe.

However, it did mean that the insurance companies had, not once, but several times, built Spearfish Lake the largest and best-equipped grocery store for miles around, and, at least theoretically, the most fireproof, which was probably true. A tornado may have flattened the place the first year Ellsberg had owned it, but it didn’t catch fire. While Spearfish Lake now had an even nicer grocery store than the one that had been blown away, everyone figured that it was just a matter of time.

Next, Webb left several social notes with Virginia. “I see we got another wedding announcement for Barb Matson, or whatever the hell her name is now. That’s what, her seventh?”

“If you count the first one, which she doesn’t,” the elderly lady said.

The editor shrugged. “Well, I guess just run it straight, like the others. You know what I mean.”

Virginia nodded. “I’ve done it often enough before,” she agreed.

Webb left several pieces of advertising God-knows-what for Kirsten, who was filling in for the ad manager. He was on vacation with his wife and hellion kids and was probably wishing he was back home by now. The young blonde was gushing on about some guy, and Webb made a mental note to mention it to the ad manager; all that girl seemed to do was to chase after guys and never get serious with any of them.

On second thought, why bother?

His junior reporters had a tendency to last about an average of a year and a half, and ad reps about three. About half the time, they left married to each other. Kirsten’s been here over two years, now, Webb thought, So Mike had better keep his pants on or he might get more than he bargained for.

Webb knew the situation well. It had happened to him.

There were several odds and ends for the back room, mostly concerning machinery that Webb knew the boss would never buy. He put the back room mail in its pigeonhole, were he knew it would gather dust until thrown out wholesale.

Turning around to Carrie, sitting at the Compugraphic, he handed her half a dozen releases and notes that could be typeset without further attention. Carrie was continuing to carry on her conversation with Kirsten without slowing her typing speed, and Webb knew that, if asked, she would not be able to recall if she had typeset something or not. Most of the time, she just typed what was in front of her eyes, without actually reading it; if she actually read something as she typed it, her typing was much slower.

Finally, he dumped a pile of leftovers on Mike’s desk to see if the youngster could make sense out of any of them, and glanced over the kid’s shoulder to see what he was working on.

The damn chili cook-off. Well, he couldn’t blame the kid for struggling with it. Maybe it was time for a talk.

“Let that go for a minute, Mike,” he said. “Let’s get some coffee, and go on into my office where we can listen to the air conditioner run for a minute.”

A few minutes later, Mike settled into the big chair in the across from Webb’s desk as the editor asked, “So now that you’ve been here a while, how’s it going?”

“It’s not what I expected,” McMahon admitted. “It’s kind of dull.”

Webb shook his head. “I know this isn’t exactly the Washington Post, but it’s only dull if you don’t see some of the things going on around you. You ever hear of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise?”

“I had a professor mention it once, I think.”

“There’s a book in the library about it, and in it is a story by Bret Harte or Dan DeQuille or Mark Twain, or somebody. But anyway, this story is about someone complaining to a reporter that nothing ever happens around town. And the reporter says something like, ‘Nothing ever happening? I looked up and down Main Street. Two dogs were brewing up for a fight in front of a plate glass window. Mrs. Someone, the social lion and prohibitionist, was turning into the saloon where her husband was having his morning eye-opener. A maid was getting set to empty a bucket of mop water out of a second-story window just as a gentleman in a silk hat was walking past. Some kid had just tossed a firecracker under a horse’s tail, and the fuse was burning, and this person said that nothing ever happens around this town?’”

They both laughed. “I never heard that one before,” McMahon said. “That’s great.”

“You ought to read that book sometime. They had some great writers,” the editor said, and added, “That story ought to be required reading for every journalism student, especially before he goes to work in a small town. Anyway, what you got on the hook for next week?”

“Not a heck of a lot more than the chili festival stuff. Where the hell did they ever come up with that crazy stunt, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Webb said. “I’ll be the first to admit that it’s dumber than dishwater. It might make a fun thing to do in the winter, but August?”

“Then why have it?” Mike asked.

“The answer to that is a little complicated,” Webb admitted. “When you understand the way small towns work a little better, you won’t have to ask. The Chamber of Commerce has been groping around for some kind of a summer activity for years. Now, every town around has a Lumberman’s Days, or Paul Bunyan Festival, and they decided they had to be different. Which, when you look at the logic of it, I guess I agree with them.”

Mike nodded his head and the editor continued. “Now, anyway, the Spearfish Lake Woman’s Club kind of went along with the idea of some kind of a summer festival. The problem was that the idea for a festival came out of the Chamber, which means that Brent Clark must have been involved somewhere along the line. Now, Donna Clark and her buddies are pretty much the Woman’s Club, and Donna doesn’t want anything to do with Brent, who happens to be her stepson-in-law, since Brent is good buddies with Colonel Matson. So they decided they had to beat the Chamber to the punch. Does that make sense?”

“Absolutely not,” the young reporter replied.

“Good,” Webb said. “See, you’re learning about small towns, already.”

“I’ve never met Colonel Matson,” McMahon said.

“He probably won’t be in town until fall, unless he needs to get a toothache fixed or something,” the editor mused. “You ought to get to meet him sometime. He’s an interesting guy.”

“Somebody told me he’s Donna Clark’s ex-husband.”

“He is,” Webb said. “A long time ago.”

“Why do they still hate each other so much?”

Webb looked at the young reporter, and thought for a minute. “I don’t think I’ll tell you,” he said finally. “You’ll learn more about how small towns operate if you find out for yourself, not that it’s any big damn secret. A week or two, you come and tell me, and we’ll see just how good at investigative reporting you are. Maybe that’ll take the edge off of this chili festival stuff.”

“Is it that big a deal?” McMahon asked.

“Not really,” the editor said. “Don’t figure on writing a story on it. Or, write it if you want, but just let me see it, and don’t expect to see it in print. You want to make this a little more interesting?”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell you what,” the editor smiled. He’d soon know if this kid had what it takes. “If you can come in here, oh, by the end of the month, with the gist of the story in, say 500 words, and I don’t have anybody named Matson or Clark or Evachevski in here bitching about you prying into something that’s none of your business, I’ll give you an extra ten bucks a week.”

“Sounds fair,” the young reporter said, taking on the challenge.

“Where do I start?”

“Well, there’s bits and pieces of it in the clip file,” Webb said. “But, I’ll tell you right now, that only tells a small part of the story, and not the interesting part at that. Virginia knows absolutely everything about it, but if I’ve ever learned anything about Virginia, she’ll only confirm the suspicions you already have. Carrie is the Colonel’s daughter, of course, so anything she tells you could be kind of biased and not always exactly the way she says. Beyond that, you’re on your own. This little deal is just going to have to be between you and me, though.”

“All right.”

“I’ll warn you right now. A lot of what you’re going to hear is going to be rumor, or sheer fiction, or biased as hell.” Webb sipped at his coffee; it was cool enough to drink, now. “Let’s make it sporting,” he added. “You like to make a little side bet?”

The reporter frowned. Maybe this wasn’t going to be that easy. “What do you have in mind?”

“I’ll bet you fifty bucks and dinner at Rick’s that you can’t come in here with one detail that I don’t know about, but that Virginia can confirm.”

Mike thought about it. It might be a good way to lose fifty bucks. But then, he might not. “Any detail, no matter how small?”

“Nothing too pipsqueak, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

What the hell. “All right, you’ve got a bet.”

“OK,” the editor agreed, then went on, “You got anything else on the hook for next week, besides the chili thing, and the parade and the band?”

“Council meets Monday, but they haven’t got much on the agenda, besides who pays for cleaning up the parking lot after the festival.”

“They’ll come up with something. They always do. Anything else?”

McMahon named two or three other stories, all of them admittedly pretty minor.

“Something else will come up, I’m sure. It always does. Don’t spend all your time on the Matson-Clark thing, though.” Webb said, then continued. “Got one thing I want you to check into. It’s nothing big, but there was a note in the mail this morning that a kid named Steve Augsberg just got home from the Army. As far as I know, he was the last Spearfish Lake kid in Vietnam. We ought to do more than just a one liner.”

“Who cares about Vietnam?” McMahon said. “It’s over, we got our butts kicked, and we deserved to.”

“You can say that to me,” Webb said, surprised to all of a sudden find himself a little hot under the collar. Maybe he’d misjudged the McMahon kid after all. “Don’t let anybody else around town hear you say that. There’s a lot of people around this town who are proud of the part they played in the service. Some of them are Vietnam vets, too, and they wouldn’t be too happy to hear you put them down.”

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

LAST SPEARFISH LAKE MAN HOME FROM VIETNAM

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

The Vietnam War ended for Spearfish Lake this week, with the return home of former SP4 Steve Augsberg, US Army, who served in Vietnam up until near the last days before the final pullout. Augsberg is believed to be the last Spearfish Lake man to have served in Vietnam.

Augsberg, a 1972 graduate of Spearfish Lake High School, served in several places around Vietnam. Toward the end, he was in an infantry unit that guarded the American headquarters, before it was evacuated.

Now that he’s home, Augsberg says he has no plans for the moment, except to get reacquainted with his home and family.

In later years, Colonel Matson was among the first to agree that he hadn’t fully thought through the problems of a nudist camp at Spearfish Lake, and had just let Helga bully him into it.

By definition, nudism requires sunshine and warmth, items in short supply most of the year in the land of the Mackinaw coat and the shoepac waterproof boot. Except for a few weeks in the summer and the odd nice day in the spring or fall, a nudist couldn’t expect to be a golden tan, but something approximating a robin’s-egg blue.

Then, there were the mosquitoes, billions upon billions of the little brown bastards. Even at noon on a warm summer’s day, members of the West Turtle Lake Club could hear them hovering in the swamps, revving their motors, tuning up for the attack. Needless to say, the members of the club were heartfelt advocates of more and better mosquito control.

The club would not have been a possibility at all, had not Colonel Matson remembered the few days he took off in Naples in the spring of 1944, when the Army Medical Corps and oceans of DDT brought a malaria epidemic under control. Liberal applications of the insecticide made nudism just barely possible at West Turtle Lake.

When it finally looked like DDT was going to be banned, Colonel Matson raided the treasury, stocking up a supply of it that would last for years.

Members of the West Turtle Lake Club tended to prefer natural foods and shied away from “chemical additives” except, of course, when it came to insect repellents, where “anything goes” was the rule. Over the years, some of the preferred concoctions had characteristics that would dissolve plastic and remove paint and, occasionally, keep mosquitoes at a distance of up to six inches.

There were other things that the Colonel admitted that he hadn’t thoroughly thought out, the golf course being one example.

Spearfish Lake had had a small golf course operating since before the war, and the Colonel had played a few rounds there; it seemed to him like the sort of thing that would make the club a financial success. However, there were about ten thousand things that made the golf course more difficult than he expected.

All of them were stumps.

General Eisenhower wrote something right after the war ended that stated one of the five things that won World War II for the allies was the bulldozer. Brent Clark wound up buying a war surplus Caterpillar D-2, partly for grading, but mostly for stumping the golf course and the airstrip: It would take years to complete the latter two jobs, with other things having priority. Then, getting a decent grass to grow on the sandy soil was a problem in itself; they had to mine peat out of a bog on the corner of the property, spread it on the sand of the golf course, then disk it in to get a topsoil that would grow enough sod to keep the course from being all part of the rough.

Mostly because of the stumps on the golf course and the airstrip, it took almost ten years before the West Turtle Lake Club was finished to something approximating the vision that Garth and Helga and Brent worked out that night in the spring of 1946, but it was in use, at least on weekends, from midsummer of that year.

Eventually, there would be about sixty summer cottages at the club, ranging from the primitive to the palatial, but only about a dozen were finished the first year.

For the people who got in on the West Turtle Lake Club at the beginning, it proved to be a great investment. Membership was a hundred dollars a year, and it was to increase steadily over the years. In 1946, eight hundred dollars would purchase one of the smallest of the standard cabins that Clark Construction built at the club. In 1975, one of those cabins, still essentially the same as it was built, changed hands for around $20,000.

Though it was necessary to be a member of the club, or a guest, it was not absolutely necessary to own one of the cabins. Some were usually available as rentals, and for a number of years, Colonel Matson kept several cabins available strictly as rental properties.

It also turned out that the Clarks hadn’t totally stripped the place of trees; there was a nice little grove near the lake, with the trees rather scattered, and it made a good place for the first cabins to be built, with the community hall nearby. Aspens and poplars grew quickly, and there was always enough shade for comfort, even though the club tried to keep things as open as possible, both for sunlight and daytime mosquito control.

But even from the first year, the club was a comfortable and relaxing place. The lake bottom was sandy to begin with, and with a sandy shore; it did not take much work with the bulldozer to develop a magnificent swimming beach.

The lake, unfortunately, offered one fly in the ointment. On the far side of the lake, there was one point where the D&O railroad tracks came close to the lake shore. In the early days, the railroad engines were all steam engines, and there was a pumping station on the far side of the lake, near the tracks. It seemed that every train that came through, the first year or two, had to make an extra long stop to top off their tenders; trainmen would skip watering at Spearfish Lake, in order to stretch out the time at the West Turtle Lake water pump, and binoculars became an important fixture of every train engine and caboose.

That was only an irritant for the first couple of years, though; the trains were far enough across the lake that little could be seen even with binoculars. In time, diesel locomotives and fast-growing aspen planted alongside the tracks soon removed the temptation.

Things were still unsettled, especially the first year, but Helga set forth in developing a proper, healthy atmosphere for the club, one that was to continue for many years.

Over Helga’s protest, Garth Matson did not make an issue about his older children spending time at the club; it was up to them. Frank, then six, spent a fair time out there the first couple of years, and then, after that, was allowed to make a perfunctory visit occasionally. Matson’s eldest daughter, Barbara, then twelve, never warmed up to the atmosphere at all, and only came out to the club a couple of times.

Young Carrie, though, like her mother, was raised in the appropriate atmosphere, and even from a young age was comfortable with it. She, at two, was a nudist at heart, and didn’t like to wear clothes, anyway; at home in Spearfish Lake, she had to be reminded, and sometimes fought with, to get dressed before going outside to play.

More young Matsons were on the way, too. Helga was heavily pregnant that summer with Rod, and not ashamed to let everybody be fully aware of it. Even for the Colonel, that took a little getting used to, but once he accepted the sight of his heavily pregnant wife cooking, playing volleyball or going swimming in the nude, he grew to enjoy it.

Helga was not the only thing blooming at the West Turtle Lake Club that first summer, for there was a hot romance under way, too.

Brent had been resistant, so far, to Helga’s matchmaking, but at West Turtle Lake that summer, the sight of Ursula Mandenberg, tall, slender, blonde and nude helped to wash away much of that resistance. She was a college student majoring in architecture and spent much of the summer at the club; Brent Clark finally hired her to help out with the planning of the place. The community center was mostly her design; its soaring roof and bare beams of local pine eventually won awards.

In later years, construction work would always be done in the spring or fall, but that first summer, nudism was strongly discouraged during weekday working hours to help the construction crews concentrate on the job. During the weekdays, Ursula always stayed demurely dressed in the field office, in the front room of what was to become Brent’s cottage. But, in the evenings and on the weekends, Brent and Ursula could be found somewhere in the far corners of the West Turtle Lake property, taking in the sun in the buff while they worked on the design of the golf course with a transit, rod, and chain, and if they had other pursuits, they never talked about them.

They would work together for two more summers before they finally got married; by that time, Ursula had already been able to develop some architectural work in the Spearfish Lake area, and in working with the growing Clark Construction Company was eventually responsible for many buildings in and around Spearfish Lake. Brent Clark never had reason to complain about the quality of Helga’s matchmaking.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, May 4, 1950

STEAM SEES LAST DAYS ON SPEARFISH LAKE LINE

The Decatur and Overland Railroad announced early this week that starting sometime later this month, they will no longer operate steam engines along the railroad through Spearfish Lake.

The D&O announced that the purchase of a new group of lightweight Baldwin diesel engines will allow the removal of the remaining steam engines along the line. Several of them will be scrapped.

A spokesman for the railroad said that steam service facilities, such as watering points, will remain in place for a while longer, in case some emergency requires a steam engine to be used on the run from Camden to Summit Pit, east of Walsenberg.

The spokesman said that the lower operating costs and lower service needs for the diesel engines made changing over from steam to diesel very appealing. “A lot of the engines we’ve been using up there are pretty old,” he explained, “and they’ve been getting harder and harder to keep up.”

Local trainmen will be sorry to see the days of steam pass. “It’ll be more like working in a factory,” one said. “I don’t know how to explain it, but steam is more fun, even if it is dirtier and harder. You can see so much more from the open cab of a steam engine.”

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