Slight Detour: A Snippet from Memory Lane

Participants and prize winners from one year of the Sandpoint News Bulletin subscription contest. I recognize three and maybe four winners as classmates. And, I recognize Tom Shields from Clark Fork, whom I knew from St. Joseph's Sister School.

Max Poulter was our guy!

Chris Pietsch resurrected the memory of Max.

Chris has been going through his family's collection of photos from the days of the old Sandpoint News Bulletin weekly newspaper, which the Pietsches founded back in 1924, according the link below.

Occasionally over the past couple of years, Chris has posted some samples from the extensive photo collection.

One of this morning's postings took me back to one of my most favorite places to visit: Memory Lane.

One look at that photo, and I was back riding my bike around the neighborhood or in town, knocking on doors and trying to sell subscriptions to the local newspaper.

Some years during the contest, fancy new bikes were the grand prize, while others, like the one above, a lucky kid won a pony. I'm not so sure his parents were nearly as thrilled as he.

After all, the upkeep usually comes out of Mom and Dad's pocket. But still, I think back in those days, winning a horse or a pony was a big thing. Maybe not so much now.

During this annual event involving generally grade school kids from the area, promoter Max Poulter came to town and acted as our manager of sorts. The paper advertised the subscription drive, and Max dealt with the details.

One of the main details involved meeting with us a few times during the subscription drive, taking in what subscriptions we had sold and finding prospects where we could go knock on a door and where the resident seemed already primed to purchase. I think Max made a lot of phone calls.

There was something about working with Max that gave us a sense of being grown up. After all, this was business, and we were part of the grand scheme, so Max treated us with both respect and professionalism and gave us encouragement.

The year I participated in the contest, I won $27 of hard cash. As noted in my book Pocket Girdles, in our family, winning $27 was like winning the lottery.

The most money I had ever previously carried around in my pocket was a dollar bill back in the first grade when Mother and Harold were getting married and we got to eat hot lunch in her absence.

I proudly took the dollar bill to Lincoln School and handed it over for my hot lunches.

When I won 27 dollar bills, I was extremely proud and feeling a bit rich. I put the money in my wallet which was then stuffed into one of my pockets.

One day I went to the Delamarter's aka the Pennington place near Sand Creek to ride their black mare named Blackie.

The wallet with all that cash and my then boyfriend Craig Thompson's picture inside (it was a one-sided romance, by the way) of course, came along with me in a pocket.

Blackie liked to rear straight up in the air, and I liked making Blackie rear by simply pulling up on the reins while riding her bareback.

On that particular day, sometime during the ride, the wallet fell out of my pocket.

I didn't notice until I went home, but when I did, I was sick to my stomach and very private about my loss.

That didn't last too long because the next day, Mother came to me, during what our family called Starvation Week. Could she borrow some of my dollars, she asked.

BTW: Starvation Week was the last week before Harold's monthly payday from the City of Sandpoint.

So embarrassed that I had lost the money and the wallet, I feigned looking for it in my dresser drawer. Finally, I had to give in and tell the truth---that I had apparently lost it while riding Blackie.

Let's just say Mother was not pleased for a couple of reasons, one of which involved her hopes of going to the grocery store.

After our less-than-pleasant Mother-daughter encounter, I walked down Boyer to Delamarters. This time, I did not ride Blackie but walked around, scouring the place, looking for the wallet with the picture of Craig and the dollar bills.

Unfortunately for me, a bulldozer had been clearing property on the place, and I discovered during my search that some areas where I had ridden Blackie had new piles of dirt.

Most likely, the wallet had moved with some of the dirt and buried, and I never found it. Consequently, my bonanza from selling New Bulletin subscriptions simply went back to the earth, never to be seen again.

It was an incident in my life filled with many lessons, not only learning how to do business transactions, to talk to strangers and to comprehend the importance of keeping track of money earned.

In addition, I had participated in a community event designed for kids of my age. I feel pretty certain that virtually everyone whoever took part in that contest has their own stories to tell.

It was a great time to be a child in our wonderful, close-knit hometown, and the Sandpoint News Bulletin played an integral role in making a positive difference in many kids' lives while Mom and Dad got to read the paper.

My association with the Sandpoint News Bulletin and monies earned actually improved over the years.

As a high school senior I won their $125 scholarship, which BTW did not go directly into my hands to be lost.

Instead, it went to University of Idaho in my name and helped pay for some of my university expenses.

Later, I worked for Loren Pietsch and his son Gary as a reporter/photographer for the paper and had some phenomenal life experiences, including finding a new boyfriend named Bill, who's been my husband for almost 50 years.

As a young photographer, Gary's son Chris Pietsch took our wedding photos.

Chris, thanks so much for posting that photo from Memory Lane. I was not in that group, but several of my classmates were.

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I ran across this link this morning and thought it would be fun for readers to skim through some Sandpoint history.

https://downtownsandpoint.com/sandpoint-history/

Happy Monday.