The bank stayed open until six on Friday evenings, and Frank Matson always felt that it was his duty to stick around in case something happened, especially since his father was never there in the summer.

This was an extraordinarily slow afternoon for Frank, however. While someone occasionally walked by the office and waved at him, or stuck their head in the door to say “Hi,” nothing in particular was happening, giving Frank time to sit and think.

Frank looked at his watch; it was 5:15 now. At one point, he’d had in mind to sneak out of work early and go play a round of golf, but he knew that was out, since the municipal course would have tee times filled from now to dark. He probably could get on the course at the West Turtle Lake Club, of course, appealing as it was a better course than the one here in town, and nowhere near as busy. But that would mean going out to the club, and enduring at least four nasty phone calls from his mother.

He looked at the pile of work that had accumulated on his desk. There were several items that he really needed to talk to his father about, the railroad abandonment being one of them; but there were a couple of questionable mortgages and a bond sale that he also wanted his father’s opinion on. The bond sale bid, especially, had been lying there for days, and they were going to have to burp up a number at the first of the week or forget about the deal.

There was no putting it off; he’d have to go visit his father, and this weekend, too, no matter what his mother would think.

For perhaps the millionth time, Frank shook his head at the quandary. Here he was, thirty-five years old, and he couldn’t have a simple business discussion with his father without it becoming a screaming issue with his mother.

It wasn’t as if Frank was a fanatic about the things that his father enjoyed. He’d been exposed to nudism all through his boyhood days, but had never become real comfortable with the club, since it had always been an issue with his mother, one that wound up in court more than once. Frank had a membership in the club, now of fifteen years standing, but always paid by his father, to twist his mother’s tail, he supposed. If that was what his father had in mind, then he had succeeded, but it left Frank in the middle, where he’d been for thirty years.

Diane, Frank’s wife of more than ten years, had no qualms over it. In fact she liked to quietly go out to the club on warm spring days and work on her tan in the altogether and perhaps play a round of golf, hoping word wouldn’t get back to Donna. Diane didn’t like her mother-in-law’s screaming fits any more than her husband did.

Frank decided it couldn’t hurt to ask. He picked up the phone and called Diane. “What do you want for supper?” she asked.

“What would you say if we went out to Turtle Lake, ate at Commons, played a round of golf, and while we’re there, I could have a conference with dad?”

The bank president could hear his wife shake her head over the phone. “If I didn’t think your mother would hear about it, I’d love to,” she said.

“You know,” Frank said, “The thought has crossed my mind that we’re both over thirty and we ought to be able to do things like we want to by now. I’m to the point where I think we should just go out there for the weekend, and to hell with what she says. She won’t throw any more of a fit than she would if I went out there for ten minutes, and we could get in two or three rounds.”

“What would we do with the children?”

“Take them,” Frank said. “Turn them loose in the nursery.”

“Then think of the lecture they’d get from their grandmother when they got back,” she said. “They’re too young for that kind of thing.”

“You know, someday we’re going to have to lay the law down to mother about this. She doesn’t need to be our moral protector.”

“She hasn’t changed in thirty years,” Diane said. “She won’t now. If you’ve got to go and see your dad, then you’ve got to, but I’m not in the mood for a major fight with her right now.”

Frank hung up the phone. “Maybe I should have taken the job with Unibank, down in Camden,” he thought. It would be a way out of the middle that he kept finding himself in. He looked at the clock again; still a while before closing, but if he got moving right now, maybe he could catch his father at dinner in Commons. Nuts to the golf clubs, too; maybe if he went right out and came right back, the aftermath wouldn’t be quite so bad. And there was maybe one chance in three that his mother wouldn’t find out, anyway.

Thank God the summer was almost over with! At least this particular issue died down in the winter.

He made a mental note to figure out some way to leave the kids with a sitter sometime and take Diane and get away for the weekend somewhere. Maybe next weekend. No, he had to judge at the damn chili festival that weekend. The weekend after? Well, maybe. Where to go? Well, not the club, for sure. No point in it; it would just make things worse, not better.

There was no point in sticking around the bank this afternoon, either; there wasn’t enough time to do anything if something came up, anyway. He gathered up the stack of papers for his father that had collected on his desk and threw them into his briefcase.

Frank’s car was hot from sitting in the sun all day, even with the windows cracked open a bit. He started it up to let the air conditioner take hold, then got out, took off his coat and tie, and threw them in the back seat, then bit his lip, knowing that it would still be hot, and got in again.

He drove out of town, bumped across the railroad tracks on County Road 919, and followed the glorified logging trail through the cool, green forests as the air conditioner chilled the car down past the comfort level. The road was bad enough that he didn’t want to drive fast, and it gave him more time to wrestle with the protocol he would have to face when he got out to the West Turtle Lake Club: to strip, or not to strip?

Gil Evachevski’s wisecrack over breakfast the day before about the weather turning rainy and cold was directly related to Frank’s dilemma. If the weather was not really conducive to nudism, no one would think it odd if he remained clothed, especially on a short visit. However, today’s weather was anything but. Frank knew that it would have felt good to strip and take a quick dip in the lake on a hot day. However, he was only a quasi-member of the club, and not really a supporter; with all of his mother’s harping on the subject over the years, he never felt totally comfortable naked at the club but he never felt quite comfortable clothed among the nudists, either.

However, under the circumstances, his father would expect him to be nude.

Damn, he thought again. I really should have taken that job with Unibank.

There was nothing that Frank Matson had to discuss with his father that wouldn’t have taken five minutes on the phone, if the elder Matson had ever allowed phones to be installed at the West Turtle Lake Club.

The Colonel advised against one of the mortgages “That family has screwed me once too often, and he’s no better than the rest of them. Let FHA get screwed this time.” The other, he was in favor of: “I know she hasn’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of since her husband left her, but she’ll work her ass off.”

The bond was a little more complicated. It was for Amboy Township bridge work, and Amboy Township officials had never been happy about the fact that since the club was a non-profit organization, it kept the most valuable piece of land in the township off of the property tax rolls. Seeking peace and cooperation the Colonel had long had an unwritten, unspoken agreement to make it up to the township in other ways, so long as the word “tax” never came up. The tax-free private ownership of cabins on leased lands was downright questionable, and everyone knew it. The Colonel wanted to keep that question from ever coming up.

“Is 7.18 percent the best we can offer?” he asked.

“If interest rates don’t go any higher, we break even,” Frank admitted. “Northwoods Savings just wrote a similar sized and shaped deal for Kerentoff Township, down in Blair County, and that went for 7.775 percent. Sweetheart deal, but not quite as sweet as this.”

“Well, if that’s as low as we can go, that’s as low as we can go,” the Colonel conceded, then asked, “Anything else?

Frank explained about the railroad’s plan to abandon the tracks through Spearfish Lake. “I don’t know that we can do anything about it,” he said. “But we have to try. Clark Plywood will hurt, Jerusalem Paper up in Warsaw will hurt bad, a couple of other places will hurt. I’ve had calls from all of them, and everybody figures you’ve got the best contacts down in the state legislature of anybody in the county.”

The Colonel shrugged, and made a big concession. “I’ll come into town Monday and make some calls. We can stall them off for a while, probably, tie them up in lawyers, but the end result is we’re going to lose the tracks unless we think of something else for the long term. Got any ideas?”

“I looked into it a bit,” Frank told his father. “Bud Ellsberg reads some kind of train fan magazine, and he told me that there are some cases here and there where local outfits have been able to get the state to purchase a railroad line, and then lease it to the locals to run. Some make out. Others don’t. I don’t know if a setup like that would fly here or not, and I don’t know that we could get it through the legislature, anyway.”

“Take a closer look,” the Colonel advised. “If we can hold the railroad off for a while, we can maybe get a better idea about whether someone could make a go of it. Maybe you can get Ellsberg to ask the up-front questions. I’d rather the railroad didn’t know we’re giving them political hassles at the same time we’re studying a buyout.”

“Good idea,” Frank said, admiring once again how his father could operate at several levels at once and keep everyone from figuring out exactly what he was trying to accomplish. It was a talent Frank wished he had. “Well, that’s about it. Might as well think about heading on back.”

“Oh, take it easy, stick around,” Garth said. “You need to relax after sitting behind the desk all week. Get some exercise, it’ll do you some good. Let’s go get in nine holes before dark.”

“I don’t have my clubs with me,” Frank responded.,”and I really do have to be getting back.”

The Colonel shook his head. “That’s bullshit, and you know it,” he said. “You’ve already blown up your evening by coming out here. We’ll stop off, get Gil’s clubs. Carrie told me last night they wouldn’t be coming out here tonight.”

“Gil’s clubs? God, big as he is, they’d be six inches too long for me.”

“Then use Carrie’s clubs,” the Colonel said, “She’s not a hell of a lot smaller than you are.”

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

AMBOY TOWNSHIP SELLS BRIDGE REPAIR BONDS

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

At the monthly Amboy Township Board meeting Monday evening, the Township agreed to sell $275,000 in bonds for bridge repair and replacement to the low bidder.

The low bidder on the bonds was the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank, whose bid of 7.18 percent was by far the lowest rate offered for the bridge repair.

Township supervisor Heikki Toivo said, “This is just another example of the wonderful support we have received from the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank over the years.”

Funds from the bonds will be used to completely rebuild the Little Spearfish River bridge on County Road 919, and repairs will be made to other bridges in the township with the funds.

Especially among golfers who had heard of but never visited the West Turtle Lake Club it was rumored that, “They’re supposed to have one hell of a golf course out at that nudist camp.”

People who had actually played the course knew that the rumors were even more correct than most people knew.

The course was actually quite scenic, if not downright beautiful. However, it was also a little on the challenging side. Well, more than a little challenging; it was a number nine, double-spring steel bear trap of a course.

It had twelve greens, but a complex system of fairways that could be played for eighteen holes. While it was on the short side for either the front or the back nine, the fairways were both crooked and narrow; sand and water traps abounded, and the rough was just slightly easier than a minefield. Much of the rough had been open when the course was first built, but now was a large stand of aspen, so a ball hit into the rough could easily be considered as “gone forever.” West Turtle Lake Club golfers tended to not be big on the long drives, but were happier with short, straight ones. The greens, while neatly trimmed, were at best undulating and uneven, and since maintenance of the course was largely done by volunteers, it could vary greatly on the same hole from one day to the next.

The course par, while liberal, got broken on the average of once every two years. Golf at the West Turtle Lake Club could be more than something of an adventure. It was actually a fairly notable course, but only to those who knew it.

Much of the difficulty of the course goes back to the early days of the club, in fact, right back to that meeting between the Matsons and Brent Clark in 1946.

“We want the golf course to be interesting and challenging,” Matson projected that evening, with the glow of the wine on him. When he had first thought about a golf course, Brent Clark had pretty much figured on doing something rather like the Spearfish Lake municipal course, where he had most of his very limited golfing experience. In other words, bulldoze out all the stumps, plant it to grass, mix some clay with the sand to make skin greens, and consider it good enough, and that was pretty much the way things stayed, while Brent had it on the drawing board.

Then Ursula Mandenberg entered the picture that busy summer of 1946. While Clark Construction Company was busy with the work on the West Turtle Lake Club, Brent Clark had other things on his mind, and the golf course was far down his priority list.

Nudists are supposed to take bodily charms in stride, neutrally, but Brent was then still acquiring that attitude. When Ursula stuck her beautiful bare chest in front of his eyes and blinked her big, blue eyes, he wasn’t thinking too clearly when she popped the suggestion: “Let me design the golf course.”

Brent gave it the most minimal protest; after all, he didn’t want the chore. “What do you want to do something like that for?” he asked the girl that he was rapidly getting enamored with.

“It’ll be good on my résumé,” the statuesque young blonde said.

“You want to do it,” Clark conceded, “It’s fine with me.”

Ursula knew even less about golf than Brent did, but like any good architectural student, she hit the books when she wanted to learn a new style. She was smitten with the thought that the course wanted to be beautiful, and perhaps challenging, so she modeled it on some of the more challenging and beautiful holes she looked up. Holes like, say, the fourteenth at Augusta National.

Unfortunately, she sort of missed the point, selecting holes that were challenging for the pros of the day. For the average hacker, it was about like trying to play golf in the middle of the receiving end of a barrage from “D” Battery.

If you could keep your cool, it was an interesting course to play, and you got your exercise, as well: powered golf carts and caddies were permanently banned.

The golf course was slow coming together, since in the early years, its development had never been a priority. At first, it really was more what Brent had envisioned, but Ursula kept planting trees and having traps dug, and it was probably about 1958 before it was truly complete. However, it had started to get some of its reputation well before then.

Even at the beginning, it was clear that the course would not be a money-maker, except as a draw for the club, and if the golfers wanted the course, it was clear that they would have to be a part of its maintenance. There were no greens fees; in the early years, helping out with the construction in lieu of greens fees was an accepted practice, and now the members who played the course were expected to put in some time on maintenance chores.

Clark had only slowly come to realize that his by-then wife had created a ball-eating monster. One day in perhaps 1954, he came in off the course after losing seven balls in nine holes, to find Ursula sitting at the drawing board, redesigning the landscaping for the number four hole. “What has your twisted mind come up with now?” he asked her.

“This hole will be very pretty,” Ursula smiled. She was pregnant and glowing and very much showing it that summer.

“You know,” Brent said, “If you actually played golf, life around here would be a whole lot simpler.”

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, July 19, 1957

TOURING PRO COMMENTS ON LOCAL GOLF COURSE

PGA tour favorite Tony Wilson visited Spearfish Lake County last weekend, and played the golf course at the West Turtle Lake Club.

“That’s quite a course,” he said. “It rewards you for good shots, and makes you pay for bad ones. It’s beautifully landscaped, but it’s easy to get distracted by sights around the course.”

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