Ted and LaVona's 2400 Mile Journey Diary [page 3]


Ted and LaVona's 2400 Mile Journey Diary   [Page 3]

        

"Dickinson Baseball Field"


Thursday, August 29, 2002
DICKINSON, ND (16,010)-We've been on the road for 10 days 
and finally reached the main event, the Dickinson High School Class of 52 
golden anniversary reunion.  We are staying with two members of that class, 
T.F. (Tom) and Karen Murtha.  Their home is in the shadow of the northside
Water Tank perched atop Rocky Butte.  In a rock outcropping next to the 
water tank about 52 years ago, I received my first French kiss.  The girl 
who delivered it will not be at the reunion.

Tonight we joined TF for broiled walleye at what as a teen I thought was as 
elegant as you could get out here on the prairie, the Queen City Club.  It's 
across old Highway 10 from Western Livestock, so it's a favorite place for 
cattle ranchers and other assorted cowboys.  Karen was unable to join us 
because she had to play organ at a wedding rehearsal.   Earlier today TF had 
a tow truck haul away his old Lincoln Continental.  It had been inoperable, 
parked in the garage for a year or so.

TF recommends Message on the Wind: A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern 
Plains by Clay Straus Jenkinson. Chatted with the Murtha's neighbor Bev 
Kohling who won't be at the reunion because she graduated a year later.  Tom 
Thomas took her to the 1952 prom, but she married contractor Gene Kohling 
after she graduated and Tom married Buzzy Fenstermacher.  Bev has a big 
smile but it's apparent that she's having difficulty adjusting to life 
without Gene who died three years ago..


Friday, August 30, 2002
Today began in Bowman.
BOWMAN-Lively breakfast crowd (great blueberry pancakes) at Jumping J's 
Café, mostly business people, mostly men.  Three retired ranchers at the 
counter played "snap poker" for 20 minutes to determine who would buy 
coffee.  They agreed to let LaVona take their picture, but only after saying 
"we'll break your camera."  Each of them said it, one after another, and 
each laughed after saying it.





Jumping J's may be the cafe described in this passage from Zen and the Art 
of Motorcycle Maintenance by Richard Pirsig, one of the hot college reads of 
the 70ies:

On the street and sidewalks of Bowman we see almost no one, even though 
plenty of parked cars show they're here. All inside. We swing the machines 
into an angled parking place with a tight turn that points them outward, for 
when we're ready to go. A lone, elderly person wearing a broad-brimmed hat 
watches us put the cycles on their stands and remove helmets and goggles.
``Hot enough for you?'' he asks. His expression is blank.
John shakes his head and says, ``Gawd!''
The expression, shaded by the hat, becomes almost a smile.
``What is the temperature?'' John asks.
``Hundred and two,'' he says, ``last I saw. Should go to hundred and four.''
He asks us how far we have come and we tell him and he nods with a kind of 
approval. ``That's a long way,'' he says. Then he asks about the machines.
The beer and air conditioning are calling, but we don't break away. We just 
stand there in the hundred-and-two sun talking to this person. He is a 
stockman, retired, says this is pretty much ranch country around here and he 
used to own a cycle years ago. It pleases me that he should want to talk 
about his Henderson in this hundred-and-two sun. We talk about it for a 
while, with growing impatience from John and Sylvia and Chris, and when we 
finally say good-bye he says he is glad to have met us and his expression is 
still blank but we sense that he really meant it. He walks away with a kind 
of slow dignity in the hundred-and-two sun.

In the restaurant I try to comment on this but no one is interested. John 
and Sylvia look really out of it. They just sit and soak up the 
air-conditioned air without a move. The waitress comes for the order and 
that snaps them out of it a little, but they are not ready and so she goes 
away again.

``I don't think I want to leave here,'' Sylvia says.
An image of the elderly man outside in the wide- brimmed hat comes back to 
me. ``Think what it was like around here before air conditioning,'' I say.

AMIDON, ND (260)—LaVona shuddered.  She felt dark premonitions as we walked 
down the main street (US 85) of the self-described smallest county seat in 
the United States.  About 50 miles west of here near the Montana border is 
Marmouth, the only other town in Slope County.  The county’s population is 
754, down 15 percent from last year.   But it isn’t the absence of people 
that bothers LaVona, it’s something else.

As we walked into Amidon’s general store we saw the owner, a middle-aged 
woman with affect and physiognomy of a zombie.  She affirmed L.’s 
premonition.  Let’s get out of here, she whispered.  We slowly sidled toward 
the screen door to the outside, casually touching candy bars and souvenirs 
to avoid the appearance of dread.  On the grass in front of the store was a 
two-tone low-slung sedan of 50’s vintage with a red emergency globe on the 
roof and a sultry female mannequin in a Slope County sheriff’s uniform 
behind the wheel.  It is a joke about law enforcement in Amidon, of course,  
but it probably slows down travelers.

In an oddly upscale gift shop across the street, we met a 40-something 
woman with a handsome braid to her waist.  She moved here this year from 
Medora, one of the few true tourist meccas in North Dakota.  She had lots of 
customers there, but the rent was too high for her to make a profit.  In 
Amidon, rent is practically free, but “there are no customers.”   She also 
complained about the difficulty of finding plumbers and electricians. 
She and her “partner” moved to Medora from Atlanta, GA.  It was to be an adventure.

NEW ENGLAND, ND (555)—One of the few southwestern ND towns I visited during 
my high school years.  In the late 40’s, my step father bought a third share 
of the Fad, a thriving men’s clothing store in Dickinson with a small 
satellite store in New England, and we moved from Detroit Lakes 400 miles 
across the prairie.  I used to help him bring Levis and other ranch wear 
staples to stock the New England store.  We also hunted pheasants around 
here.  The New England Fad was eventually sold to its long time clerk and 
shortly thereafter it went under.

Today I strained to remember details of the town, but most of my images 
have evaporated.  We found the baseball field that serves also as a softball 
field—a few feet from every base is a companion base for softball games, a 
common cost saver in these small towns.  The baseball field benefits from 
its overlapping with the football field because the school district has the 
money to keep it watered and well manicured.  One of the best outfields we 
have seen.  But the infield is weedy and uneven.

We lunched at the bowling alley, photographed the wondrous grain elevators.

REGENT, ND (211)—About 20 miles from New England, famous for the 
monster-sized metal sculptures of grasshoppers, geese, horses, etc., that 
loom over the 30-mile road between here and Interstate 94.  The locals call 
it “Enchanted Highway,” hoping to snag a few tourists from those trying to 
get through North Dakota as quickly as safety will allow.

LEFOR, ND (114)—Depressed, squalid, the baseball field now taken over by 
weeds and junk cars.  You can’t even get a drink there anymore, a Dickinson 
lawyer told me.  At one time Lefor’s American Legion baseball team was made 
up of hard-hitting farm kids, most of who had the last name of Lefor.  The 
box scores read W. Lefor, M. Lefor, T. Lefor, D. Lefor, etc.  Now the only 
visual elegance left is St. Elizabeth Church, perched on top of a hill that 
the town is built on.

GLADSTONE, ND (248)—On the Northern Pacific line and on a cliff overlooking 
the picturesque Green River valley.  Depression is apparent here too, but 
there seems to be more of an effort to fight off the decay that threatens 
all small North Dakota towns.  People from Dickinson still call this town 
“happy rock.”


Friday, August 30, 2002
DICKINSON, ND--Class of ’52 reunion registration and reception at the Elks Club.
I navigated through clusters of people clutching drinks, nervously glancing 
side to side.  They too were trying to remember these faces, some of whom 
they may have necked with 50 years ago. You congregate with faces so 
engrained in your memory that you can wade through the sagging flesh and 
creases to connect with that adolescent image and thus, the name.   Those 
who stayed in North Dakota have the advantage of watching each other age, 
but most of us left the state to find work and love.

It was a fluid scene, but the stock topics were repeated in each cluster:  
Where you living now?  Retired from what?  Kids live nearby?  That many 
grand kids, wow!

Before the reception, T. F. and I went to the first half of an afternoon 
football game between Dickinson, our alma mater, and Fargo North.  Mild 
temperatures, cloudless sky, and the familiar black and orange colors of old 
DHS, but there was no band to play the school song (sung to the tune of the 
Notre Dame fight song):

	Cheer, cheer for Dickinson High
	Raise up your voices, raise them on high, etc…

Dickinson has refused to change its questionable team name, the Midgets.  
Apparently there has been some pressure to come up with a new name, but 
school board members successfully campaign on the platform of no change.  T. 
F. said Midgets was chosen in the 1920’s as a play on the New York Giants.  
I bought a Dickinson Midgets t-shirt with a caricature of a grimacing small 
guy just to show disbelievers.  Dickinson eventually lost today.

I talked on the phone to Pat Grantier, the wife of Jay who is the younger 
brother of Erna (most beautiful, see above).  Jay is a pretty good writer.  
I was trying to track down a copy of his out of print collection of 
newspaper columns There’s This to Say About That.  Pat recommended Twice 
Told Tales, a local used bookstore that supports the city library.  They had 
three copies, so I bought them all.  At the reception, Erna gave me an autographed copy.
I climbed over the centerfield 8-foot cyclone fence of the locked Dickinson 
baseball park to take some pictures.  It’s a treat to know that at my age I 
can still sneak into a baseball park.  This park is a gem, perhaps the 
finest of any small park I have ever seen.  [see photo at the top of this page]


Saturday, August 31, 2002
DICKINSON, ND--The reunion finale, the banquet in the 
Sodbuster Room of the Elks Club, Tommy Thomas, presiding.  Willie Wandler 
gave a week’s stay at his resort in Nevis, MN as a drawing card for the 
reunion.  Gene Sahr’s fetching wife won it.  They live in Conneticut.

LaVona coaxed Donnie Fischer into singing in a borrowed tape recorder a 
marching song that he and fellow southsiders sang.  As a northsider I was 
nervous about southsiders.  The southside was considered the wrong side of 
the tracks unless you were a northsider.  TF pointed out that the southside 
was continually screwed over when we were in high school.  The northside got 
city hall, the public and Catholic high schools, the community center, the 
railroad and bus depots, Knights of Columbus,the college, most of downtown 
businesses, etc.  The southside got the baseball park and the 
German-Hungarian Club.  Poor people lived on the southside.  To me they had 
strange central European accents and greeted each other in an exotic mix of 
English, Czech, Russian, and German.  We northsiders were advised never to 
go to the southside after dark except to a baseball game, and then never 
alone.  Tonight for the first time I had heard the song which Donnie and 
other southsiders have been singing for 50 years:

		We are the gang of the South Side
		You’ve heard so much about,
		The people always stare at us
		Whenever we go out.

		We’re noted for our cleverness
		In many things we do,
		And also for the snappy way
		We carry our duties through.

         CHORUS     As we go marching,
		And the band begins to P-L-A-Y (shout).
		You can hear them shouting,
		The South Side Gang is marching by.
			HOW!  HOW!  (shout)

Gene Kralicek is a ’51 graduate, but he regularly comes to our reunions 
because he likes us.  He has been drawn to LaVona because she is “bright and 
energetic, a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it.”   At every 
reunion function, Gene demands that LaVona sit next to him.  I think if she 
were single, he would crank up his attention a notch or two more.  He is a recent
widower and retired radiologist with homes in Bismarck and Detroit Lakes.  LaVona
clearly enjoys Gene’s wit and worldliness and his interest in her. Besides that, he is
an artist. As part of the program, I read from my 1998 diary a memory of a 1952 
new years eve party at Buzzy’s house.  I was very nervous and trembled more 
than usual, but my fellow alums laughed a lot.  Changing the names in my 
diary didn’t help, I guess.  Everyone knew whom I was referring too.



"Gene Kralicek"


The banquet dissolved into an early morning drinking session, so LaVona and 
I slipped out.  We want to get an early start home tomorrow.


Sunday, September 1, 2002
ST. CLOUD, MN-- Although we were told it would be bad karma, 
we slipped out of Dickinson two hours before the Class of ’52 reunion brunch 
at the Murtha’s.   The biggest event of the trip was a stop 70 miles east of 
Dickinson at the 30-foot high concrete Holstein that stands on a butte 
overlooking New Salem to the south and Interstate 94 which appears straight 
as an arrow from horizon to horizon.  She’s known in around here as Salem 
Sue.   The site offers the best panoramic view of western North Dakota landscape
I know of.


"LaVona and Sue"
New Salem, North Dakota (just off of Hwy 94)

Except for that stop and lunch and tea breaks, we drove relentless for 10 
hours.   No more pictures of main streets or baseball fields.

When we got home, we found three bats in the kitchen tonight.   One flew in 
circles while the others dozed side by side on the window curtain.  I herded 
the flyer out the back door, then trapped the sleepers in a dust mop and 
launched them into the night sky.


"Artist's rendition of LaVona's bat"