Frank Matson was not a serious golfer; he played perhaps a dozen rounds a season. Frank had once – just once, in many years – carded a 49 for nine holes at the West Turtle Lake Club. His best-ever score for 18 there was 127, and that included the unofficial “back route” to the eighteenth green. By comparison, he usually shot around 100 to 110 on the somewhat longer but much easier Spearfish Lake municipal course.

The day was winding down and the shadows were growing long when Helga joined Garth and Frank on the first tee, producing a spray-can of some new miracle, industrial-strength insect repellent and hosing each of their bare bodies down liberally with it. As they waited for her to finish, Frank reflected again that, although he knew his step-mother to be fifty-five, she had the body and complexion of a woman of forty; his dad, now sixty-five, could have almost passed for his older brother.

Maybe there is something to this naturist business, he thought, but kept the thought to himself.

As he teed up his ball, Frank did comment on a related subject, though: “I think I’m about to turn vegetarian for a while.”

“Are you finally getting interested in healthy food, Frank?” Helga asked, then kept quiet as her stepson took a couple of false swings, then an easy swing at the ball.

The ball took off soaring, then eased to the right. “Come on …” he pleaded, but the slice worsened, vanishing in the woods. “The hell with it, I’ll take the two strokes,” he said, teeing up another ball and making a mental note to pick up a dozen balls for Carrie when he got back to Spearfish Lake. This time, the ball went more or less down the fairway, but short of the dogleg; it would cost him an extra stroke to get around the corner.

“No, Helga,” he said as his father stepped up to drive. “Well, maybe a little. I got shanghaied into judging at the chili festival again, and I need to think of some way out of it. I think maybe I’ll turn vegetarian just so I don’t get rooked into it again next year.”

He kept quiet as the Colonel made his drive, right down the left of the course, in perfect position at the dogleg.

“Can it be that bad?” Helga said, teeing up at the men’s line. “I mean, yes, it’s eating meat, and that’s not good for you, but if you eat that, you ought to be able to eat anything.” Her drive rolled a little right of the center line, but came to a stop in a good position for a chip to the green.

“Helga, one of the things that you’ve missed as a lifelong vegetarian,” Frank said as they picked up their clubs and started down the course, “is the sensation of eating lutefisk chili. I mean, you take spoiled fish, soak it in caustic soda, wash the soda off, then mask the taste with pinto beans and Thai hot peppers. To call it edible makes starvation look good. You’re a vegetarian, so you know how to fart, but I have never had gas like that. God, I could have filled the Goodyear blimp. And stink! God, I had to stay upwind of myself for days. I couldn’t work, or I’d have had the EPA and OSHA and the health department fighting over who would get to cite us.”

“Who talked you into it?” the Colonel asked. “Your mother?”

“I suppose so, but it was Kate Ellsberg who did the arm twisting. I’ll get her for it sometime, somehow.”

Frank managed to get on the green in five, something of a miracle after his bad start, but four-putted the green. He was off to his usual great West Turtle Lake Club round. Maybe the mosquitoes would come and carry him off, and the misery would be over with.

The second hole didn’t start any better. A long par-four with a dogleg to the right, it was a relatively easy one for the West Turtle Lake Club course. Helga’s drive went right down the center line, and his father’s was well placed, as well, but when Frank stepped up to drive, he caught a hook; the ball went whistling off into the woods somewhere. “If the Cubs had three pitchers with curves like that, they’d win the series,” the Colonel commented.

“Naw, they’d still choke up in the stretch,” Frank said, teeing up again. This game was lost by the second hole; there was no point in trying to beat anybody, so he might as well try to have fun, and maybe get in a little practice. After all, it was only going to cost him a dozen cheap balls or so, for nine holes.

Quite amazingly, Frank managed to get onto the third green in two, one ahead of his father, but then he six-putted the miserable green in the bad light. His father wound up about six inches from the pin shooting out of a sand trap, and actually parred the hole. It could be done.

Golfers with experience who had played it say “playable” isn’t quite the word to be used to describe the fourth hole. It was known as “Mandenberg’s Monster” and was easily the most despicably deceptive hole on the course. It was very short, only 127 yards, but the fairway was very narrow, and the green was about twice the size of a living room in a single-wide mobile home, with a huge water hazard right in front of it. The fairway sloped sharply down from the tee to the hazard, so if a ball landed anywhere on the fairway in front of the hazard, it was a goner. Behind the green, with its traps, was a grove of aspen.

In other words, you either got on the green in one, or your goose was cooked.

The fourth fairway extracted revenge on the Colonel for parring the third hole; he lost three balls into the water hazard, bing, bing, bing. “I do that at least once a week,” the Colonel said, not upset with himself, “but we could build a new clubhouse for all the golf balls that have gone into that trap over the years.”

Frank knew it well; even as a kid, when he’d been dragged out to the club over his mother’s ranting and raving, he’d stayed away from the main crowds at the club by donning a diving mask and fishing balls out of the trap, then reselling them to the golfers.

Helga stepped up to the tee and tried a seven-iron; the high, arching shot put her right on the forward lip of the green, but the ball bounced high into the air, and landed with a puff in one of the backside traps.

Revising his mental note, to make it two dozen balls to get for Carrie, Frank stepped up to the tee. He chose – well, chose isn’t the word – he grabbed the first club that came to hand: a three-wood. A three-wood was about as bad a choice as any; he’d try to drive it easy. He stood there for a moment, thinking, “This is fun?” and then, without any false swings, just swung back and shanked the ball.

“Shit,” he said as the ball, a real worm-burner, veered to the left in his most magnificent hook of the day. All of a sudden, he heard a “ka-whack” from the aspen grove, and somehow, the ball arced high over the pond, high over the green, heading for the rough beyond the hole.

A mallard happened to be flying overhead just then, doing whatever it is that ducks do as they fly around, when all of a sudden, the duck found itself trying to occupy the same airspace as a soaring white golf ball, that, being near the peak of its flight, wasn’t moving very fast. “Wak!” the duck squawked at the intrusion, veering off and heading for the lake, unhurt but resolving to stay away from that particular pond.

The ball, robbed of most of its forward velocity by the midair with the mallard, dropped like a proverbial rock onto the edge of the green, bounced high in the air, bounced again, not so high, bounced a third time, and went into the cup like it had eyes.

“Shit,” Frank said again, with a totally different inflection, one that carried a tone of awe.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

MATSON SINKS HOLE IN ONE

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

Frank Matson, of Spearfish Lake, scored a hole in one last Friday evening on the infamous fourth hole of the West Turtle Lake Club course. He used a borrowed three-wood for his accurate drive.

Witnessing the ace were Garth and Helga Matson.

It was Matson’s first hole in one, and reportedly the first ace scored on the West Turtle Lake Club course since 1971.

Matson finished the round with a score of 87.

Many more people in the Spearfish Lake area got their introduction to mixed nudism in saunas than ever had first experienced it at the West Turtle Lake Club.

Kirsten Langenderfer had her first experience with the subject in 1965, while she was in eighth grade. Kirsten had been friends with Betsy Toivo since early in grade school, and had known her brother, Henry, for at least as long.

It wasn’t exactly a party that the girls were having out at the Amboy township home of the Toivos that February Friday evening; some girls had just gotten together to play records, and talk some girl talk, and giggle a lot, like any eighth grader. The winter’s day had been short; Henry and a couple of friends had been out rabbit hunting, and wound up at the house with the girls along about dark, rather stiff from the cold, and rabbitless, to boot.

“You need a sauna to warm you up,” Betsy and Henry’s father, Heikki said. “Why don’t you go cut a hole and light it off while you’re still dressed?”

Henry agreed, and soon the girls could hear the sound of a chain saw, down by the lake. After a while, the boys came back into the house, and peeled off their coats. While the result still couldn’t be called a party, it was a gathering of friends, and soon all were having a good time.

After a while, Mr. Toivo stuck his head back into the room. “Sauna ought to be about hot enough,” he said.

The boys got back up and headed for the door, without bothering to put on their coats. “Want us to come and join you?” Betsy smirked.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” one of the other boys said.

After they’d left, Betsy commented. “You know, we ought to go out and sauna with them, just to see what they’d say.”

“Yeah, let’s do it,” another girl chimed in.

“Let’s give them a few minutes to get settled in,” Linda Caserowski, one of Kirsten’s friends smirked.

“I don’t know …” Kirsten said. She was, after all, a Spearfish Lake girl, and she knew about saunas, but knowing about it and doing it were two different things.

“Oh, come on,” Linda giggled. “It’ll be fun.”

Kirsten wasn’t sure she wanted to go along with her friends, but she didn’t want to be a spoilsport, either. Besides, what could happen?

It was a cold, clear night as the girls trooped through the snow to the Toivo family sauna out back of the house near the river. It was dark inside the changing room, with only enough light to see as the four giggling girls peeled their clothes off, then opened the door into the heated sauna proper.

For fifty years and more, the more “proper” types around Spearfish Lake had been having nightmares at the thought of the orgies that had to happen in a situation where seven teenagers, four girls and three boys, found themselves naked in a dimly-lighted eight-by-eight foot room. The actual reality, as Kirsten discovered that evening, was a little different, for the “proper” types neglected to consider what the 180-degree temperature and rolling sweat could do to teenage drives.

It actually wasn’t bad, Kirsten discovered, if she kept to the bottom seat, where the air wasn’t quite as hot, but the temperature certainly wasn’t conducive to fooling around. In the dim light of the single bulb, what she saw was actually rather interesting. For example, Linda’s big chest that she liked to show off with tight sweaters proved to be mostly cotton; she was flatter than Betsy was.

And Henry … well, if it hadn’t been so hot, maybe there could have been a case for fooling around after all.

But it was hot. After the initial embarrassment – not much, since it was nothing new for most of the participants – they fell to being just a bunch of friends, talking and gossiping and giggling just like they had been in the Toivo living room.

After a while, Henry wiped the sweat from his face once again and said, “I think I’m about ready for what comes next.”

“Me, too,” Betsy said. “I’ll race you,” she said, heading for the door. All of a sudden, there was a pileup of hot, naked bodies at the door; Kirsten found herself getting pushed outside about fourth in line, with Betsy and Linda leading, and Henry bringing up the rear.

Leading the pack, the two naked, steaming girls raced down through the snow through the darkened woods to the river, with Kirsten following along, already dreading what she knew was to come. Betsy cannonballed into the hole cut in the ice of the river, with Linda right behind her; ahead of Kirsten, one of the boys joined them, but Kirsten put on her brakes just short of the hole, not quite sure she could go through with it; two more people pressed past her, joining the crowd in the icy water.

“Come on,” Kirsten heard Henry say; then, she felt his arm around her naked waist … felt herself being lifted into the air … felt herself half falling, half being carried … and screamed at the top of her lungs at the s-h-o-c-k of the icy water.

She was only in the shallow water for a few seconds before she and Henry were climbing out, but the feeling was indescribable; all of a sudden, for just an instant, the world took on a different shape.

Others were climbing out of the water by now and heading back up through the woods. Taking her by the hand, Henry helped her out of the water, then led her quickly back up to the path to the sauna for another baking.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, June 18, 1969

ENGAGEMENT ANNOUNCED

Mr. and Mrs. Karl Langenderfer of Spearfish Lake are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Kirsten Ann, to Henry Duane Toivo, son of Mr. and Mrs. Heikki Toivo of Amboy Township.

The bride-elect will be a 1970 graduate of Spearfish Lake High School; her fiancé is a 1969 graduate, and will be entering the U.S. Army next month. The couple are planning a July, 1971 wedding.

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