Carrie Evachevski wrapped up the stick of copy, ran some leader, and went over to the processor. She didn’t like to let a take get too long; about one time out of ten, something would hang up or stick in the processor, and the whole take would be ruined. When that happened, not so much was lost if the takes were kept short. Fortunately, the phototypesetter paper ran through the machine smoothly for once.

Though the next issue was several days away, Carrie liked to stay ahead of the routine typesetting by doing what she could with what came in; it kept the job from being so much of a hassle when deadlines were drawing near.

Mike McMahon was still struggling with the chili cook-off story. After all, he had said about all there was to say about the subject the week before, and two weeks before, and at that, much of what he’d written was stolen from last year’s coverage. At least he was making more progress on the story as Kirsten had left to make some ad calls, and he was free of that distraction.

But, even though Kirsten had left, he still had Carrie to distract him. Though she was a different sort of distraction, it was still about as welcome.

Carrie was almost as pretty as Kirsten, though ten years older, but she wasn’t the sort to flaunt it. She was tall, five-foot-ten or so, and golden tan, with an aura of naturalness about her. Today, she was wearing a lightweight summer dress that showed off her figure – still nice after five kids – without emphasizing it. She was easy to talk to, and in the six weeks or so that Mike had been in Spearfish Lake, he had learned much about the community from her.

As Carrie set the stick of type to drying, Mike struggled with trying to figure out some way to open the subject of the squabble with her. Though Webb had made it clear that Carrie’s viewpoint was not necessarily objective, it at least would give Mike some idea of what questions to ask, if he could get her to talk.

“Who do I talk to about the parade?” Mike asked, deciding to put off his probing for another time.

Carrie took the strip of copy from the dryer and put it in a stack for future proofreading, then went over and sat down at her desk. “Kate Ellsberg, probably,” she said. “Probably won’t be much of a parade, but the fire department will be there. That’s more than we had last year.”

That got Mike curious. “Why’d the fire department miss the parade last year?”

Carrie shrugged. “Fighting a fire. It happens. Oh, we’ve got the rock band, too. That might be kind of interesting.”

“I hadn’t heard about the band. Local group?”

“Yeah, a bar band. They’re not very good, but they’re loud enough to knock your fillings out. I think they call themselves the Lazy River Band, or something. You probably ought to check with Kate Ellsberg on that to be sure.”

“What’s the deal with this Ellsberg woman, anyway?” Mike wondered, “And where did she come up with the idea for this chili cook-off, anyway?”

“I remember Kate from when we were in school,” Carrie told him. “She was a year ahead of me. She’s just a naturally bossy person. She was always the organizer, the person who had to make things go her way.”

“I know the type,” Mike admitted. “My mother is kind of like that.”

“I don’t know where she came up with this chili cook-off idea,” Carrie went on. “But she and my stepmother are big in the Woman’s Club, and they got the big idea that we needed to do something different for a summer festival, rather than the Paul Bunyan Days that every other town around here seems to have.”

“You’re not real crazy about her, I take it.”

Carrie shrugged. “She doesn’t like me, so I don’t have any particular reason to like her. It’s a family thing.”

Trying not to show that he was perking his ears up, Mike began to probe a little gently. Perhaps now he could find out a little of the story about Garth Matson and Donna Clark. “Is Kate some kind of relative of yours?” he asked.

“No, but she’s big friends with my stepmother,” Carrie explained, “so, therefore, I’m one of the unacceptable.”

“So this is actually a fight between your mother and your stepmother?”

“You could say that,” Carrie went on. “Except that it’s not a fight, really. Donna, my stepmother, hates both my father and my mother with a passion. My dad will fight with her if it interests him, and occasionally, it does. My mother does what she wants to and doesn’t even take notice of Donna. That makes Donna furious. Since Donna’s big in clubs and stuff, all her friends have to hate my mother, too, or else be in trouble with my stepmother.”

“Did it start with divorce, custody, like that?

“You could say that. Do you know any country music?” Mike nodded, and she went on, “It’s always been a question of who done who wrong. And who done who wrong first. My mother has always had some different ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong in some things, and she’s always worked on what she wanted to do, and I’d have to say that it’s made things worse.”

“Frank Matson is your half-brother, right? You get along with him.”

“Oh, yeah, we kids get along all right. Always have, even though there’s only Frank and me left in town anymore. We more or less grew up together, except that Frank and Barb had to spend their weekends and summers with their mom.” Carrie decided that it was nothing of the nosy little twerp’s business to know that custody had been a continual legal fight until Frank had turned twenty-one, and was still a moral fight today.

Mike shook his head. “Isn’t it a little hard to live here like that?”

Carrie smiled. “No, it isn’t, really isn’t. I’m my mother’s daughter, after all. Let the little minds play their little games, and to hell with them, I’ve got other things to do. And since I married Gil, nobody gets mouthy.”

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, August 13, 1975

LAZY RIVER BAND TO ROCK HARD AT CHILI FESTIVAL

by Mike McMahon
Record-Herald Staff

A well-known Spearfish Lake rock group, the Lazy River Band, will be rocking hard enough to strike sparks off of them at the community dance following next weekend’s Second Annual Spearfish Lake Chili Festival.

Kate Ellsberg, President of the Spearfish Lake Woman’s Club, which is sponsoring the festival, said the band will be playing at the bandstand in Webster Park behind the site of the Chili Festival, from noon until 6:00 PM.

The band, which is well known in the local area, is perhaps best known for their spirited renditions of such rock oldies as “Proud Mary,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” and “I Get Around.”

Gilbert Evachevski’s father Daniel was a “D” battery veteran and had attended the Colonel’s wedding to Helga, which made him part of what was to be a rather exclusive club in years to come. After the war, he went back to raising his kids, and very soon after the war was over he could spend the falls enjoying Gil’s career as a Marlin halfback, perhaps the best the school ever had.

The Marlins in those days were a football power in the league, a status they were to lose in the early fifties and never regain on a long-term basis. Gil Evachevski was one of the reasons for a four-year unbeaten string; even as a freshman, he was a big kid, and fast, a big-man-on-campus who had it all. Even off the football field, he was envied; he steady-dated the beautiful cheerleader Barbara Matson all through high school, and everyone had them figured to be a permanent item.

All through Barbara’s high school career, she frequently had to babysit for the young Carrie Matson, her half-sister. Carrie was a cutie from the word go, and Barb and Gil and Carrie were often a threesome. Even when Barb was busy with something, Gil almost always found time to play with Carrie, and people looked at the storybook pair and noted how well he got on with Carrie. They said that Gil would make Barb a wonderful husband and perfect father for her children.

It was not to be. One of the few things that Barbara’s father and mother agreed on was that Barbara was going to college, and a good college at that. Even if money hadn’t been an issue – and this was before the days of liberal full-ride scholarships – college wasn’t a part of Gil’s plans. He asked her to marry him, anyway. She refused.

With the Korean War on, Gil knew he was going to be facing the draft if he didn’t go to college, so he enlisted in the army, hoping to wind up in an artillery unit like his father and be a little safer. The army screwed up that plan, and Gil returned from Korea in the summer 1953 as a young sergeant, a highly skilled, experienced, and decorated infantryman.

Barbara was home from college that summer, following her brief, disastrous first marriage, and living with her mother. Gil, hoping against hope, asked Barbara again to marry him. By then, Barb’s taste in men had gone beyond sons of workers in plywood mills; she had her sights set on a potentially rich lawyer. She refused him again, and Carrie soon heard about it.

The nine-year-old Carrie took the bull by the horns, got on her bicycle, and rode over to the Evachevski house, where Gil was sitting around and wondering if there was any percentage in hanging around Spearfish Lake any longer. All of a sudden the Army looked pretty good as a career.

“I haven’t seen you in a long time,” Gil told Carrie. “You’ve grown up a lot.”

Matson family members had a reputation for never being much on beating around the bush, and Carrie was no exception. “I heard Barb turned you down,” Carrie said. “She’s crazy.”

“I’m sorry she did,” Gil replied.

“I’m not,” Carrie said. “Don’t let her bother you. If you’ll wait for me to get out of high school, I’ll marry you.”

Gil laughed and thanked her for the offer. Then, they went outside, tossed a basketball around, and Gil took her out for some ice cream. At least they were still friends.

The next day, Gil packed his bags and re-enlisted.

Gil didn’t come back to Spearfish Lake until 1961. In the meantime, there had been a tour in Germany, and one in California, and, after he joined the Green Berets in 1958, one in Okinawa. They were busy years, but they were lonely ones, too. He was nearing the end of his tour in Okinawa when he heard in a letter from an old friend that Barb had gotten a divorce from her young lawyer, who turned out to like boys better than girls. She was back home again, living with her mother for a while.

He hadn’t been home in years. Maybe it was worth one last try.

Barb was nice to Gil, but even at their first meeting, both of them could see that the spark was long gone. He kind of offered to marry her once again, and she kind of refused.

That evening, he was sitting in the Spearfish Lake Bar and Grill, nursing a beer and conceding that it had been a forlorn hope anyway, when a beautiful young brunette he didn’t recognize sat down across from him. “Damn it, don’t you listen to anything anybody tells you?” the vision of loveliness said.

He frowned, blinked his eyes, and all of a sudden, bridged an awesome gap. “Carrie?”

“I told you not to let her bother you,” the glowing young Carrie said. “I told you to wait until I got out of high school, and I’d marry you.”

“You were only nine,” he said. “I didn’t believe you.”

“I meant it,” Carrie replied, and added, “I graduated last month.”

“You going to college?” Gil asked.

“The hell with college,” Carrie told him. “It didn’t help Barb.”

He looked her up and down. She had come out even prettier than Barb, much more like her mother, Helga, who had often pointed out Carrie as an example of what her brand of a healthy upbringing could do. She had a lovely golden tan, and Gil had no doubt that it was an all-over tan, too. An important factor in combat was the ability to make critical decisions quickly, and he had the decorations to prove he could do just that. He never gave it a second thought: “All right.”

“The only thing,” Carrie said, “Is that I want to have a wedding like my father and mother had.”

Gil was still a Spearfish Lake boy, and he knew what that meant. He had heard the stories, and his father had even been at that wedding. “Fine with me,” he agreed.

They were married six days later at the West Turtle Lake Club.

Spearfish Lake Record-Herald, July 17, 1961

EVACHEVSKI, MATSON GIVE VOWS

Sergeant First Class Gilbert Evachevski and Carolyn Elizabeth Matson, both of Spearfish Lake, were married Sunday in a private outdoor ceremony at the West Turtle Lake Club, with the Rev. F. W. Ashtenfelter of Camden, an old family friend, officiating.

In the ceremony, which wedding guests described as “natural and appropriate,” the beautiful young bride carried a wildflower bouquet.

The bride is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Garth Matson of Spearfish Lake; the groom is the son of Daniel and the late Sarah Evachevski, also of Spearfish Lake. The bride is a 1961 graduate of Spearfish Lake High School; the groom graduated from Spearfish Lake in 1951.

Among guests at the ceremony were the bride’s parents, brothers, and all but one of her sisters, maternal grandparents, and the groom’s father. Also present were several members of the West Turtle Lake Club.

The young couple will make their home in Germany, where Sergeant Evachevski will be stationed.

(Marginal note on file clipping: “No photo submitted.”)

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