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Independently owned since 1905
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The Sanders County Fair is a fun time for most people, but for the 102 4-H kids from across the county it can also be a time of work. It's like a final exam time, getting their year-long work judged and graded, according Juli Thurston with Montana State University Extension, which runs the 4-H program. The kids started their projects in October and at fair time they not only showed their work, but were questioned by a group of judges about their projects. All seven 4-H clubs - Heron-Noxon...
This year's Sanders County Fair is going "to be the greatest show on earth," according to Randy Woods, chairman of the fair commission and his first fair as a member of the board. Melissa Cady, hired as the fair manager in May, also believes the 2019 fair will be one to remember. "It's going to be an amazing fair," said the Thompson Falls resident, who added that there's going to be a wide variety of food and commercial vendors and some new rides from the fair's second-year carnival, Paradise Am...
A retired professional baseball player took time out while visiting Plains friends to sign autographs at the Amundson Sports Complex Saturday morning. Dick Green, who played 12 years for the Kansas City Athletics and the Oakland Athletics, signed autographs and told baseball stories to nearly 20 people for just over an hour at Field 3. Green was visiting with his friend, Denny Miller of the Miller-Burgess Ranch, and was asked to make himself available for autographs. The 78-year-old Green said...
Winners of the 2019 Sanders County Fair Demolition Derby will be taking home a bit more money this year. The Plains Lions Club and the chairman of the Sanders County Fair Commission ironed out a few details for this year’s derby, including dividing up the $10,000 prize money for the winners. The champion driver will get $4,000, which is $1,000 more than last year, said Randy Woods, chairman of the fair board, during a meeting at the fairgrounds last Wednesday with Lions representatives Ron Robinson and Chuck Wassinger and Melissa Cady, the f...
Nearly 200 people went to the Sanders County Fairgrounds to witness infidelity, jealousy, revenge, attempted murder and humorous conniving. People from Heron to Missoula gathered on the fairgrounds lawn last Thursday evening to watch "The Merry Wives of Windsor" put on by the cast of Shakespeare in the Parks. The two-hour play was free admission, thanks to Plains Woman's Club, which paid $2,000 to get the Montana State University troupe to Plains, but they had help from sponsors McGowan's...
One Plains church showed that God isn't just for the Sunday pulpit. Members of the First Lutheran Church of Plains took part in the church's "God's Work, Our Hands" program to repaint the Plains Golf Course clubhouse. Ten volunteers spent Thursday and Friday morning repainting the 2,000-square-foot building at no cost to the golf course, which is owned by the Town of Plains, but operated by a nonprofit organization. Plains Mayor Dan Rowan said the town doesn't have funds in the budget, nor does...
It wasn't the rivals of the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, but the competition was still fierce and even included a team of superheroes. Ten teams - four of them from Plains - competed for two days in the 5th Annual Wildhorse Showdown Softball Tournament at Amundson Sports Complex in Plains. When the diamond dust settled, the Silver Spur team of Troy claimed victory with a 14-12 win over the Super Heroes in Town of Missoula. The two top teams, however, had Sanders County ties. Plains resid...
A group of Plains people showed their artistic talents in Paradise last week with the Artists in Paradise 2019, an annual event put on by the Sanders County Arts Council. An estimated 350 people showed up for the art show Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Paradise Center, where eight artists displayed a variety of mediums - paintings, drawings, photograph, wood carvings, glassware and pottery. "Because of unforeseen circumstances in some of our vendors' lives, we had fewer artists this year,...
Baroque music is centuries old, but the following for the yearly Montana Baroque Festival at Quinn's Hot Springs Resort is nothing new either, as more than 460 people flocked in from Montana and across the country to hear the musicians play last week at the 16th Annual Montana Baroque Music Festival at Quinn's Hot Springs Resort. Adam LaMotte, the festival's artistic director, said he recognizes about half of the people at the festivals each year and calls them "baroque groupies." Organizers...
A longstanding member of Paradise was honored last Wednesday as a tribute to his selfless devotion to the community by dedicating the Agriculture Building at the Sanders County Fairgrounds to the late Clyde Terrell. Nearly 40 people showed up for the Plains Lions Club dedication, which included a large brass plaque attached to the building. Those in attendance included a dozen Lions members and five people from the Terrell family. Terrell's daughter Kim Burgess and Terrell's great-granddaughter...
The Paradise Elementary School Preservation Committee finished one more major project in its renovation plans to get the Paradise Center renovated for a working art facility and community center and at the same time preserve the old school's historical presence. Thompson Falls resident Rudy Boukal spent more than two weeks tearing out the old rotted floor, windows and window frames of the center's bell tower and put in new materials throughout, including six custom made window frames that had...
Members of the Plains Lions Club gathered at the Glenn Hadley Wading Pool last Thursday and Friday to erect a shed to store its lawn mower and other supplies on site. All of the materials for the 4-foot by 8-foot wooden shed were donated, said Marv Tanner, the club's vice president and chief builder of the shed. Longtime Lions member Alvin Amundson, formerly of Plains and now a Missoula resident, donated $500 and Plains resident Doug Bratz donated $250 to the project, said Duane Highcrane, the...
Normally, American Legion Post 52 in Thompson Falls works on the white crosses along the roads and highways once a year, and that was in mid May. However, the man in charge of the American Legion Highway Fatality Marker Program said that a handful of the markers along Highway 200 were the wrong size and needed to be switched out. Last week, Post Commander Bill Beck of Plains spent nearly two hours on the road for a 10-minute job of replacing one of the crosses and plans to get the other four...
It didn't have the most cars, but it had the most variety since it began, said Bryan Spellman, who volunteered to register the 2019 Local Yokels' Car and Truck Show Saturday at Ripples Ice Cream Parlor and NAPA Auto Parts in Plains. Twenty-three cars and trucks and one motorcycle registered for the show, which was free to enter and free admission. Tom Peterson, owner of Ripples, started the event four years ago for local people to show their vehicles. For the first show, Peterson was said to hav...
The grand marshals for the 40th Huckleberry Festival are Kathy and Jim Hill. Kathy has been the vendor chair for the festival for the past 22 years, she retired from these duties last year. Both she and Jim were very surprised and honored to be named the grand marshals for the 40th Annual Huckleberry Festival parade. Kathy was born in Festus, Missouri and grew up in the Detroit area. She moved around extensively with her first husband (Michigan, Las Vegas, Houston, New Mexico). Kathy's first...
The residents of Paradise celebrated the nation's birthday with food, drink, games and fellowship on Independence Day at the local park, where the community and American Legion Post 129 sponsored the get together. More than 200 people attended the town's Fourth of July Picnic in the Park, which ran from 5 p.m. to just after dark with a 10-minute fireworks finale. The post, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary, paid for 145 hamburgers and 120 hot dogs for the event and supplied the...
Fred Young Park was a busy place for about three hours on Independence Day as members of VFW Post 3596 served a free burger and hot dog picnic meal to people to honor the birth of the United States. Veterans decorated the grounds with several American flags, some of the vets donned patriotic colors, including a Stars and Stripes top hat on Jered Littlefield, and member Dave Tupper handed out red poppies, a symbol of peace that became popular after World War I after someone discovered it was said...
The greenway along Railroad Street in Plains took on a more patriotic look Tuesday morning when the VFW Post 3596 Auxiliary fashioned a blanket of red, white and blue with its "Field of Flags" to honor of Independence Day. It took just over a dozen volunteers from the Auxiliary and VFW to put up the 13 precisely measured rows of 313 American flags, including a single flag to signify the missing man, now referred to as the "missing member." "It looks awesome. How could it not, it's our flag,"...
People tend to smile when they get something free, especially when they get a brighter smile because their dental visit was at no cost. Seventy-six people from in and out of Sanders County took advantage of the MT West Dentist "Dentistry From The Heart" event in Plains on Friday. The event was a big success, said Kayla Lilja, the front office administrator at the Plains dentist office. The office is in the former Wildhorse Elementary School, which closed its doors five years ago. This the fifth...
The Sanders County Arts Council (SCAC) gave youth the opportunity to tap into their artistic side with the 2nd Annual Kaleidoscope Summer Camp held at the Paradise Center last week. Eighteen kids from first-graders to sophomores from Thompson Falls and Plains took part in the four-day art camp, showing the fruits of their labor on Saturday in the center's auditorium. "This year has been a big success. We have had a number of new students attend and they really enjoyed it," said Cinda Gazaway,...
Nearly a dozen boys and girls from Plains traveled to Columbia Falls to compete in the annual swim meet last weekend and seven qualified in the meet's final championship round Sunday. "They're getting better with their strokes and that helps them with their times and they're gliding through the water faster," said Shayna Swanson, the team's coach this year. Swanson also coaches the Polson Lake Monsters. Two hundred and fifty-three kids from around Montana took part in the meet, which lasted...
You've heard of it raining cats and dogs, but ping-pong balls are something new. That's what happened at the Plains airport last weekend when Dan Normandeau and Jimmy Miller tossed 200 colored ping-pong balls from an airplane some 100 feet in the air. It was one of several contests at the 3rd Annual Wings and Wheels Fly-In at Penn Stohr Field in Plains Saturday morning. Normandeau flew the plane, a home built Pietenpol open cockpit airplane, while Miller let the bag of balls fly. The balls...
As the long days of summer get into full swing, Montanans and visitors alike have begun to reconnect with our state parks, our one-of-a-kind outdoor recreation experiences, and the cultural treasures that define our state. Last week, I visited a crew of middle school students who spent one of the first weeks of their summer break instilling a lifelong dedication to our outdoors. As part of Montana Conservation Corps’ youth program, these students were introduced to conservation early, in a hands-on, dirt-in-the-fingernails way, by digging t...
The Plains Woman's Club is participating in a nationwide program to help put shoes on the less fortunate. The General Federation of Women's Clubs adopted the project last year, according to Plains Woman's Club member Debbie Heckman. The national nonprofit organization is called Soles4Souls and is based in Tennessee. According to the Soles4Souls website, the group has distributed over 30 million pairs of shoes around the world since its creation 13 years ago. "If they go overseas, they go to...
The red, white and blue stars and stripes were quickly engulfed in flames to the point it was unrecognizable as the symbol of America. A group of men placed Old Glory in a barrel of fire - not as a demonstration, but out of respect. It was Friday – Flag Day – and American Legion Post 52 was holding its annual flag retirement ceremony at the Clark Fork Valley Elks Lodge 2757 to properly dispose of 240 unserviceable U.S. flags. There is no law that requires that an American flag be disposed of...
