Remember When?

40 YEARS AGO

NOVEMBER 10, 1983

NONHUNTER BUSIEST IN HUNTING SEASON

He favors tending his garden and yard over hunting and fishing, but he sure knows what to do with the game bagged by those who do hunt for meat for the table.

Longtime Thompson Falls resident Norm Knudson is an especially busy man right now in the fall of the year. He has already processed 8,000 lbs. this season and averages over 20,000 pounds of wild meat a season!

A recently retired meat cutter with Stobie’s IGA, Norm affirms he has not retired completely from meat cutting. “It’s good to have work to do when you retire,” he says. And by the looks of his full meat coolers and his hustling and that of his three part-time assistants, it’s obvious Norm takes his advice seriously.

With 30 years under his belt at cutting wild meat, Norm has seen hunters from “probably every state except maybe Tennessee, Alabama and possibly one other.” And in approximately three to four days he can promise a customer steaks, roasts, burger, and sausage all wrapped to order.

“Most of the carcasses come in clean,” he says, “but occasionally a hunter will lose part of the meat with the neck and shoulder section souring because the front wasn’t opened adequately and cooled down enough in the first four to six hours. It should be propped up off the ground or hung up for proper cooling. Some carcasses come in to him a mess, he says, covered with dirt, pine needles and hair. But he realizes that some hunting situations are especially difficult.

Norm says that most days during this busy season he takes time for lunch and so do his assistants - “Fat” Brauer, Willie Spridgeon, and Candy Shima - but not always. Long-time friend since the 30s, Brauer interjects, “Norm’s wife, Emily, has to come out to the meat room during the day to see her ‘retired’ husband. Conveniently, the shop is right beside their house.”

Emily says she has trained many a new meat wrapper over the years, weighed animals and recorded licenses, but now the operation is pretty much Norm’s.

“The first week is the busiest time with the out of state hunters before the cow elk season is over,” Norm says. After that it tapers down a little but is still very busy all through the season..

It is a challenge trying to talk to Norm these days with electric saw blades buzzing and the meat grinder whirring. And just when the saw is turned off, he’s off into the cooler again lifting deer, elk, sheep and bear carcasses, answering the telephone, or talking to a customer who just walked in the door.

Norm started cutting meat, he says, after WWII when he got out of the service. He received in-store training from Safeway in Cut Bank. From 1952 to 1959 he worked in Thompson Falls for Macho’s grocery and then for Stobie’s IGA for 22 years until his retirement a year ago.

The year 1936 brought Norm to Trout Creek, a beautiful place but not without its hard times earning a living. Norm saw service with the Civilian Conservation Corps and the U.S. Forest Service for four seasons.

Norm and Emily have raised three children in Thompson Falls - Ken, a biologist in Helena, Sharon Spridgeon who ranches with her husband Ron in Thompson Falls and daughter, Lillian Omsberg of Cutbank.

“I used to cut wild game in the grocery stores until the 60s when it became illegal. That was when I started my own shop up here next to the house.”

Although Norm has cut his share of meat over the past almost 40 years, he couldn't possibly cut all the wild meat that is taken in this area during hunting season. Several other area “fellow” (including one woman) meat cutters run an extra busy place this time of the year, too: Earl Van Campen and Jerry Cline of Plains; and Pete Kagen and Sis Williams of Heron. These meat cutters learned their trade in a variety of ways: as former butchers, correspondence schooling, from a parent who owned a butcher shop, GI bill schooling, and in-store training at stores out of the area, and with Stobie’s IGA and McGowan’s locally.

When the wild meat season is past, they keep at their trade with beef, hogs, lambs and sausage.

Does veteran meat cutter Knudson eat only wild meat? No. For a Montana-raised boy who grew to his tall, lean stature on venison, wild meat has been a staple. So dinner table fare of chicken, turkey, fowl and fish have an appeal, too, at the Knudson’s

And when Norm isn’t cutting meat, playing cribbage or tending the garden, a passerby might catch the smell of salmon, trout and turkeys being smoked in his smokehouse.

If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Norm seems to have found plenty to do in his “retirement.”