Bossy gets cut from my Sarah story

Yesterday, Billie Jean, the Sandpoint Magazine editor, called and told me my story about Gov. Sarah Palin had to be cut by 200 words. She also had a few questions, which I answered.

Then, she told me the word count amounted to 1,400-plus words, to which I countered that it had been just over 1,300 when I filed it a couple of weeks ago.

To which she told me that she had added a few facts. Thanks a lot, Billie. You add the words; then tell me to cut 'em. What kind of a deal is that, anywhoooo?

Well, I groaned for a while while wasting regular gas (now $3.38) to go to the Samuels Store to get some premium gas for my rototiller which won't start. Tony, my trusted fix-it man, told me that rototillers are notorious for not starting when they sit for two months with this cheap expensive gas we're putting in their tanks.

"Use premium," he said. "The regular loses its octane when it just sits." So, after painting the new board fence on the south lawn, I headed to the Samuels Store to fill a gas can with premium fuel.

After seeing my friend Lois Blasko selling corn and onions, plucked from her nearby garden, I rolled up to the pump, read all the signs that said "Pay first," reached in my pocket and then remembered I had changed my jeans for painting.

The pocket was empty. So, I took the gas can into the store, asked for Arlana, the owner, and learned she wasn't around. The clerk empathized with me, though, wrote up an invoice for me to sign, put seven dollars in the till and turned on the pump.

I filled my gas can, visited with Lois for a moment and then headed home, mad at myself for forgetting the money and determined to get right back there to satisfy my debt.

That gave me more time to think about Billie's request to get rid of approximately 15 percent of my story. I got to thinking, though, that all was not lost.

I could take the cow out of the story, and put the cow on my blog. So, that's what I'm doing this morning, having re-filed a 1,204-word story for the magazine, which comes out next month shortly after the election.

I really liked the bossy part of my story. Here's the dirt.

Sarah Heath Palin was born Feb. 11, 1964. That same week there was a lot happening in the Sandpoint area: Mrs. Randy Curless of Copeland had called on her mother, Mrs. Bob Sherwood of Wrencoe, and Captain Sinbad and Tale of Arabian Nite (yes, I spelled it right) was playing at the Panida Theater.

The Blue River Boys were playing Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Hi-Dee-Ho Bar on Route 10-A at Kootenai, with jam session on Sunday.

Some boys started a fire at the Pack River Tenex plant at Dover (wonder if any of them were my classmates), and birdsfoot trefoil had become an important matter in bloat control.

Cows bloat, ya see, and they get kinda miserable. Part of their belly puffs up really big on one side making them look pretty lopsided. And, as you can imagine, they sure would like to cut the cheese, but they can't. So, to prevent cows from bloating, the experts were figuring a little birdsfoot trefoil would suffice for Tums.

Now, the above intriguing information was NOT included in my story, but since we're talking about cows, I must tell you that the local paper gave billing to cows a lot more in Sarah's birth year than they do now, except for this morning's Daily Bee photo of the cow paddy golf team at the Klondyke in Laclede.

To attain my 200-word whack from my story that Billie Jean had added to, I had to let Midwood Dolly 9th and her owner Ivan Smith go. Here's the blurb, which, of course, I had already condensed for my limited assigned space:

Headline: National publicity for Ivan Smith's cow

from Milking Shorthorn Magazine:

The new J3 class leader in both milk and butterfat is Midwood Dolly 9th, owned by Ivan E. Smith, Sandpoint, Idaho. Starting at 3 y 2m (three years two months), she produced 14,799 pounds of milk and 569 pounds of butterfat in 305 days.

It pained me to have to cut that tidbit from the story because I've always loved cows and because Ivan Smith taught me a skill years ago that I used just the other day while nailing up boards.

Ivan lived out east of town, near Oden Bay, where he owned a dairy. He also worked at the old fairgrounds in Sandpoint. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Idaho, I worked at the fairgrounds also---for a brief time alongside Ivan.

One day we were nailing up some boards on the outside of one of the series of white barns at the fairgrounds. Ivan could get his nails into the wood a whole lot faster than I could.

Noticing my frustration, he stopped for a moment, walked over to me and showed me how much more effective holding the hammer at the low end instead of up near the metal head could be in providing the proper punch to those nails. I never forgot that lesson, and every time I'm using a hammer, I remember Ivan.

I later taught Ivan's grandsons, and his great-grandson, Steve. So, I thought it was kinda nice to stick Ivan and his cow in my story. Since they had to be extracted from the feature to allow more space for graphics, I wanted to tell you Ivan and Dolly's story today, as a reminder of days gone by and how much times have changed in the past 44 years.

Folks will read the story about Sarah in the upcoming Sandpoint Magazine and will still be treated to plenty of human interest in those 1,204 words, but even before it appears, you, my faithful blog readers, will have read the rest of the story.

I never did learn if Ivan fed his dear Dolly any Birdsfoot Trefoil, but it's obvious she probably didn't have much time for bloating or cutting the cheese if she was producing that much milk and butterfat.