We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
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I grew up in a wonderful town at a wonderful time. Born in 1941, Havre was my stomping ground in the late 1940.s and early 1950’s. Things did not start to change until the 1960’s. Havre was a town unto itself. Its business district was glorious. There was our store, the Lou Lucke Company, a store that little boys dream about. There was Clacks Hardware, the F. A. Buttrey Department Store, many small stores, many restaurants, three Oriental restaurants, bars for all occasions, three downtown hotels, a flower shop, three jewelry stores and whe...
A couple of weeks ago Keith Hanson, Duke Pursley and I were having a conversation in “The Mountaineer” office in Big Sandy about fish. Duke had said that he hoped it warmed up soon because he wanted to catch some of the fish in his privately stocked pond. I asked him if the fish were rainbow. He scoffed at the idea and said it was only brookies for him. He loves them about ten inches long and all the bones come out when the back bone is removed. That led me to dream about our Clear Creek cabins of my youth. My Grandpa Lucke used a cabin cal...
Like much of the time I do not know the outcome of the Masters tournament at Augusta, Georgia. I love the Masters for several reasons. First, it is held when spring is in full bloom in Georgia. The course is beautiful with camellias and azaleas blooming all over and birds singing their hearts out in the trees about the course. The lawns are green with the first blush of spring and commentators like Jim Nance make it even better with their lavish descriptions of the settings and golfers. President Eisenhower had a summer home right next to the...
It is recipe time once again. Here are three ways to make steamed cabbage. All three turn the cabbage into a very different food than the others. One or more just may be hits around your house. First, my mother’s recipe. It is very simple. She was a simple but good cook. This recipe makes for a very traditional and might I say pure steamed cabbage. Core out a medium cabbage and cut it into very fine shreds. Take a medium onion and dice it using a medium to large dice. Put a quarter of a cup of butter or margarine in a heavy frying pan. S...
By Robert Lucke BCJ News It is called a Young Producer Conference but it should be a great conference for agriculture producers of all ages. Put on by the Montana Farmers Union, the conference will be held at the Best Western Plus, April 1st and 2nd in Havre. Big Sandy farmer Alan Merrill, president of the Montana Farmers Union said there will be something for everyone interested in agriculture at the conference. “The speakers we have will all speak very well to the general public,” continued Merrill. On Friday Kate Vogel will be talking abo...
How different it is at Easter in the Van Orsdel Methodist Church in Havre than it used to be. On Easter Sunday I will go in clean clothes, maybe even jeans, and a white shirt and a sport coat. I will go to a church that will not be half full of people. I will go to a church where I will hear a good Easter sermon but will be short on music this year. Can you imagine a Methodist church short on music? I will have cooked my Easter ham on Saturday as it is so much easier to do it that way so on Easter Sunday I will eat leftovers after church. Even...
This month this column is mainly recipes. Today a wonderful way to cook corn beef and cabbage using a secret sauce that took me years to find out how to make. It makes the dish. Be sure to serve the sauce warm at the table on March 17 or whenever you make your corn beef and cabbage. It is a perfect dunk for this meal. A friend served this sauce that she said was her secret sauce. After years of begging like a shameful dog, I finally found out that the sauce was simple, just equal parts of regular yellow mustard and brown sugar. So that is the...
March can be a very fickle month. Or maybe it is that I am expecting so much of spring out of March and frequently the month is much more about winter than spring. The National Weather Service told me a couple of weeks ago to look for March to be the end of El Nino which has been providing us with such an open winter. It has been probably the strangest winter I have ever spent on the banks of the mighty Milk River. Day after day it is sunshiny, cold at first, then warming up to the 40’s. Lots of wind and more of the same week after week a...
Once again kudos to area teams who won championships for basketball at the state level. For those who got so close but did not win what they thought they would, there is next year and just to get to play in a state tournament is a real honor for our far north teams. Good job girls and boys basketball players! I have been watching a little NBA basketball myself lately. And I have been listening to sports gurus who talk like they know what they are talking about. Most of them are really bragging up Golden State. As far as the NBA is concerned,...
As many of you know I have been cooking some of my recipes gotten from Laened Black in February. I had a recipe that was called Black’s Party Beans. Well, I made it the other day, gave it to a church potluck and it was gone before anything else at the potluck! The beans serve 25. It is hard to lessen the amount but they freeze well so make the whole amount and give some away, fill your own bean pot and enjoy these wonderful beans. Laened recommended cooking them in a roaster. I filled a small turkey roaster. These are wonderful. Lots to buy b...
It has been an abnormally warm two weeks in Big Sky Country. A couple of weeks ago the thermometer hit 73 one afternoon in Choteau and has been in the high 50’s and low 60’s every day for almost a fortnight in and around Havre. So far my flowers, lilacs and trees seem to be not paying attention to the warm weather. Not much happening in my gardens thank goodness. And, of course, there is little or no moisture of late and probably not going to be until we get into a moisture mode, then watch out, for it will probably flood! So, what shall we...
Kudos to the Havre and Chinook wrestlers for taking home State trophies. These two programs are as good as it gets for prep wrestling and it is a great testament to coaching, community support and drive of young wrestlers that they do so well year after year! Havre High Football is losing Mark Samson. The former Northern football coach led the Blue Ponies for one year to one of the best football seasons they have had for some time. He is going to be the head coach for the Great Falls Bison. We wish him well with the Bison and just wish he had...
I am still trying to comfort myself from the winter blues. Now, I know that as far as real Montana winters go, we have not really had a winter yet at all. And yet, not getting outside to garden and walk along a Bear Paw Creek has been putting me sort of in a funk to say the least. I decided one way I could cure the blues was to cook some old, old recipes that I had maybe never cooked before. For Super Bowl I cooked Francis and Laened Black’s Party Beans and they were wonderful. I got off funk while cooking and eating them both. That day I a...
Tomorrow is Sunday and there is no football. I volunteered at church to usher for awhile hoping that shock would chase away the shock of no football. But things are still going on. Let’s look at some standings. That is a good place to start. In the Frontier League it is on the women’s side of things Lewis and Clark in first followed by Carroll. Northern is fourth followed by Rocky in fifth place. On the men’s side, it is Lewis and Clark in first followed by Carroll. Rocky is in fourth and Northern is in fifth. Looking at the woman’s side in the...
This is a month of columns to send away the winter blues. One thing I do to feel better about winter is to eat Oriental take out once a week. That all started many years ago. When I was working part time at the Lou Lucke Company I would go to lunch once a week with Willie Garrahan at Tommy Woo’s Boston Café. There the Chop Souy was unbelievably good! I would ask Tommy what made it so good. He always said it was the gravy. I believed him. Many years later Laened Black made Chow Mein that tasted like the Chop Souy at the Boston. I asked her fo...
The Super Bowl is over and I am already into serious football withdrawal but there are other things happening that are neat to observe and write about. I don’t know at this writing who won the Super Bowl. More about that next week. For now I do know that some of the stories that attracted most of my attention were that Peyton Manning needed a hip replacement (can you imagine a starting quarterback in the NFL needing a hip replacement?) Probably that was not a true story although time will tell for sure. Then there was the strange fate of the P...
I had some good prime rib in the freezer since Christmas. I decided to cut it up and turn it into a Saturday night supper of beef Stroganoff. In the middle of my cutting the prime rib into strips, I got an inspiration. I remembered a meal that I had forgotten for years. It was my mother’s meal and one that we had in our family home at least once every two weeks for years and years. Mother called barbecued sirloin tops over rice. I call it barbecued prime rib tips over noodles. A word about the noodles. I prefer them to rice for this dish and f...
Let’s get one thing out in the open right away. There is no such thing as wind chill numbers unless you are going to school, work or the grocery store buck naked. For wind chill is the measurement of the wind on bare skin. If it was any good it would be used in summer as well. Can you imagine the weatherman telling you to dress warm today because even though it is eighty above, it is only sixty due to the wind chill! It is hogwash and not to be believed. I have been trying to debunk this craziness for over fifty years now and have to admit, I...
I turned 75 this January. That is a monument for me and for those who would say I am just a spring chicken yet, not true. I feel every one of those 75 years most of the time. How did I get this far? It was simple, brandy, martinis on Friday and Saturday nights and a huge white sheepskin rug to make me feel good every time I look at it! There was a time I was the holder of a huge collection of stuffed animals. Real stuffed animals. It was a collection that had belonged to the Lou Lucke Company and I added to it through the years. It got too big...
It is January of 1907 and the news this week is mostly all about the Little Rockies. Abraham Gill has disappeared and the Ruby Gulch is getting bigger and bigger as a gold mine. Mr. Gill was a partner of a man named Winter who had a ranch close to Landusky. The ranch had belonged to Johnny Curry and Curry eventually shot Winter to get the ranch back. There is a wonderful ghost story about Winter being seen yet in his night gear, brushing his teeth as that was what he was doing when he was shot. Anyhow, Abraham Gill came out looking for...
So, this weekend in the NFL it is the Chiefs at the Patriots. It is Green Bay at Arizona. It is Pittsburgh at the Broncos and it is Seattle at the Panthers. Last week every non home team won. Could it be that this week every home team will win? As usual I have not seen the games yet. More about that at the end of this column. There are local basketball standings to go over first of all this week. In standings on the boys side in A Havre is third right now. That is all the statewide standings regarding boys basketball teams. On the girls side of...
As long as the weather stays above zero and there is a tad of snow on the ground, it is a perfect time to get out to Beaver Creek Park and take advantage of winter conditions out there. Take sledding. There are several hills that are perfect for sledding. One is at the turn to go to Sucker Creek and another is at the Taylor Road turnoff. There are long slopes with not extreme steepness, good snow cover most of the time and it is just fun to go out with the family and enjoy sledding other than the College Hill in Havre or your own private hill...
Last weekend was the end of the regular season for the NFL. That means that all too soon football will be coming to a close. I admit, this year there was too much to do to watch many bowl games but if it ends up that it is Clemson vs. Alabama for the championship, you can guess that I will be watching that one and rooting for Clemson all the way! Meanwhile in the NFL, this last week has been plagued by bad decisions by coaches and one coach already has been fired even though at the time the season wasn’t over. I watched the game where the P...
It is the end of another year and, as usual, I am glad and sad both. I am glad that I made it through and it looks like I am going to see 2016. I am sad because it was a year that could have been so much better. Hindsight is always great and I learned a lot about having prostate cancer this year. More than I had learned in the twelve years I have had it. I went into the taking of chemo therapy as just another simple treatment. I soon learned that it is anything but simple. Five percent of people who take chemo for prostate cancer, get symptoms...
The year might be changing but 1907 has been sort of good for us so we are going to stay with it for a little time in 2016 Let’s get to it and see what this week brings us... The new lunchroom at the depot is open and being run by Mayor Newman. In addition to the counter, there is a very neat small dining room for ladies. The waitresses are dressed in black with white collars and cuffs. Mrs. O’Leary, the famous chef, has charge of the kitchen with a good corps of assistance, and the place promises to be well patronized. Editor’s note... When...
