Bear Paw Meanderings
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When I was a mere sapling, how I loved June.
School was finally out and I could spend my summer doing the things I loved to do the most, work at the Lou Lucke Company and spend all the rest of the time at a cabin out on Clear Creek.
At the Lou Lucke Company we were open from 8 until 6 six days a week and you might think that with a schedule like that it would be impossible to get much cabin time in at all.
But we got a lot of
cabin time in.
My friends and I would head for Clear Creek on Friday after work. We would cook up a meal usually consisting of macaroni and cheese from the box or even better, Spaghetti from a box that had this neat tin of parmesan cheese with it. That was good Friday night fare for us. If we were especially flush, we might stop at Ray Barsotti’s Meat Market and pick up a couple of steaks and cook them outside.
Friday was poker night. We had lots of room in whatever cabin we were in for many friends. At the school house cabin on Henderson Creek, I remember that it must have happened after World War II but we had eight US Government bunk beds in one end of that cabin. Not only that but we had a couple of big stainless steel pots that said on the lids, US Army. I still have those pots and use them to cook spaghetti to this day.
Anyway early Saturday morning I would drive to work and work the day. My Dad would leave the store about 2 on Saturday afternoon and my uncles Al and Scott would leave around 4. They knew that they had me to lock up and I stayed until the end, hauling the books up to the large safe on a balcony before locking the doors and heading back out to the cabin myself. When there maybe one of our fathers would have shown up to fish and would cook us some supper and more often than not on Sunday after church my mother and her mother would bring a picnic lunch out for us all. That lunch was more a feast of fried chicken, potato salad, deviled eggs and always a pie and a cake too. We ate well.
When not eating or fishing or playing poker we would do a lot of talking. We talked about our lives, the state of most everything and there were always lots of stories of the history of Clear Creek.
Poker consisted of as much wild as possible. Always one eyed jacks were wild. Dime Store meant that fives and tens were wild and there was my personal favorite, fours, whores and one eyed jacks.
Always we stayed until Monday morning. Even though those early Monday mornings were hard on us, we had already learned one very valuable lesson. Fridays might be horrible weather and usually so was Saturday but about the time on Sunday that everyone was heading home, that was when it cleared off and the weather became glorious. We knew that and Sundays were always good evenings.
I had a friend, Francis Black who said that fifteen years after he retired from working at Black’s Jewelry Store in Havre, he still jumped up very quickly every Monday morning thinking he had to go to work.
Those were the days, we thought they would never end and in a way I guess they never did for even though my life changed drastically, I still write about that time like it was just yesterday.
