How to make the most of a Century: the story of Verna Fine Walsh

by Liv Stecker

100 years is a lot of time. Over the course of the last century, Verna Fine Walsh has made the most of her time. As a mother, a wife, a postmaster, volunteer librarian, gas station attendant, camp cook, food bank volunteer, Charter Member and Past Master of the Kettle River Grange, actress, convenience store clerk, avid dancer, pinochle player and quilter, Verna has quite literally done it all.  Only July 26th, Verna turns 100, friends and family from all around will gather to celebrate with her at one of the places that she was instrumental in building, the Kettle River Grange. 

Verna Jean was born to Bill and Betty Plews in 1915 at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane. Growing up in Ione, Washington, where her father worked at the sawmill, Verna remembers the catastrophic fire of 1924 that destroyed much of the town. "They had the train backed into evacuate people because they didn't have any other way to get out." She tells the story. Her family was one of the few with a car at the time: "Mother had the car packed up, and in the evening, just before we left, the wind shifted and the fire went the other way." In 1929, the Plews moved to Boyds, where her father ran the local tavern for many years. 

Verna went to school in Boyds and Marcus before the town was relocated, and was transferred for her senior year to Orient, due to reallocated school district. Her junior year, she was tapped for a role in the senior play at the Marcus School. The next year she starred in both the senior play and the all school production at Orient. She graduated in 1934 and the following year she met Lester Fine through mutual friends at a dance at the Sherman Creek Grange Hall. She and Lester were married that year and had their first son, Gary Dean Fine, in the spring of 1938. 

Grange and schoolhouse dances were the best and often only place for young adults to socialize during the mid 1930s, and Verna recounts traveling all over to go to dances, from Laurier to Deadman Creek and Kettle Falls at it's original location above the falls. To get to dances at the Marcus Dance Hall, Verna says that she and her friends had to walk across the railroad bridge, since the only one who owned a vehicle apparently didn't have a driver's license yet. She says crossing the bridge in the dark seemed like a long trip, and looking back she's not sure it was worth it. "There was a fella that had built the dance hall out of slabs, and when you danced around, they would move." She laughs at the memory. Always at the dances,  there was a fiddle player, and usually an organ or piano to accompany. Later on, the Kettle Falls High School orchestra formed a dance band that played for dances at the Orient School - one of the favorite dance locations. 

The winter of 1938-39, Verna and Lester lived at old Kettle Falls. The relocation process had already begun, but Verna recalls how cold that winter was, and how poorly insulated their house had been. They had no running water and Verna remembers that the water bucket sitting right next to the stove would freeze solid overnight. Baby Dean was only a few months old at the time. "Good thing he slept through the night!" Verna chuckles at the recollection. 

In the Spring of 1939, the relocation of Kettle Falls was completed. Verna remembers going with a young Dean to see the Grand Coulee Dam as construction was completed. Lester got a job with the mill on Sherman Creek as night watchman. The Fines lived in a company house and Verna worked in the cookhouse. "My son would come into the cookhouse and sit on the men's laps and they kept giving him food and taught him all kinds of bad words. He was just learning to talk, and luckily he forgot most of them after we left." Verna recalls. 

The following year, Verna's second son, Monty Keith Fine was born. The Fines moved around for seasonal jobs, working for the Forest Service at Growden Camp on Sherman Pass, operating a service station where Verna became proficient at pumping gas, and finally ending up back in Boyds where Verna helped move the Post Office into the front of their convenience store. 

In 1946, Verna helped to organize the Kettle River Grange, where she became a charter member. Shortly after its founding, she and several other community members spearheaded fundraising efforts to construct the grange building. "We started working hard at turkey shoots, dinners and plays - the plays were a big money maker." she says. The community built a basement with a peaked roof that could be removed when they  had the funds to build the first story. 

The first play at the grange took place in the basement. Verna remembers running around the outside of the building in costume to make entrances by sliding into the basement. That production was a minstrel show, all in grease paint black face, before the era of political correctness in theater. Verna played "Mammy" who had 16 children, including her own boys, all done up in black grease. She says that night was a greasy hot mess. The dinner they cooked before the show was put together in the cloak room of the schoolhouse, since the grange didn't have a kitchen yet. Someone had donated a cookstove that ran on propane, but Verna and her friends didn't have experience cooking with gas. There was a mini explosion when they lit the stove that melted holes in her girlfriend's nylons, and after that, the ladies gave up and resorted to the old reliable cook stove they knew so well. One of the gals had to run home and cook up a batch of potatoes on her own stove to save time. 

Verna went on to play countless lead roles in the Kettle River Grange plays, which became major social events in the area. She recalls playing a "hideous hag" that no man wanted, and a schoolmarm that was overcome by shock and fainted in nearly every scene. One of the stand out productions involved all of the local men, burly loggers, miners and mill workers, dressed up as Can Can girls in a Showboat play. The community would bring potluck dishes to share for every play, and Verna jokes that everybody that wasn’t in the play got to eat all of the food while the actors were busy performing. 

In 1956 she was appointed Postmaster of Boyds. Lester worked for the Napoleon Mine across the hill from Boyds driving an ore truck until it closed, then he went on to drive school buses for area schools until his retirement. Verna kept the little community of Boyds ticking through the grange and the Post Office until her retirement in 1976. Lester passed away in 1975, and following her retirement, Verna took many bus tours with her sister down to the redwoods in California and other scenic locations. 

An avid pinochle player, Verna traveled to card games around the area in the "widow wagon" with three other widows that were chauffeured by Swede Hills every Saturday night. Card parties in those days would pack out the grange, with up to ten tables of card players. Kids would roller skate in the basement of the grange, as her son Monty recalls. 

In 1977, Verna moved into Kettle Falls. She immediately began fundraising for the new senior center, an abandoned church building in need of remodeling. "I sewed quilt blocks day in and day out - I don't know how many I made!" she laughs. The church was originally relocated from the old town of Kettle Falls and served many purposes before the senior center purchased it and revitalized it. Verna says that they held dances in the center until they discovered that the foundation couldn't handle the traffic. 

In addition to her efforts for the Senior Center, she also volunteered at the library, and the Kettle Falls food bank for many years, where she served on the board. Verna was a tireless advocate for the community for many years. Recently, the loss of most of her vision forced her to quit working, but she stays active in the community at the Senior Center and other local events, even riding in parades as Grandma Kettle! 

On Sunday, July 26th, Verna’s son (Monty) Keith Fine and friends invite the community to join in celebrating Verna’s 100th birthday. The old fashioned potluck party will take place at the Kettle River Grange that was such a big part of Verna’s life in the community. Keith is providing meat, and asks guest to bring a side dish or dessert to share. The party will start at 1:00 PM; no gifts please.  

Truly a matriarch of the community and an example of how to make the most of a long life, when asked what her secret is, Verna laughs. "Working! Just keep going I guess. Even when it's bad, just pretend it's not and move on!" With a memory like a steel trap, a keen sense of humor and a twinkle in her eyes, Verna is what all of us should hope to be at 100. Happy Birthday Verna! 

The Proof is In The Bottle

by Liv Stecker

When Henry Anderson headed to Kentucky last year for the Annual Conference of the American Distilling Institution, winning an award was the last thing on his mind. Somewhat reluctantly, he submitted a sample of his Apple 151, a distilled spirits specialty "moonshine", made with 5 different varieties of apples from Sherman Creek Orchard, local beets and molasses. "I wasn't going to send it in," says Anderson, "because it was the second batch out the still," but seeing the conference and the judging process as a chance for some feedback and exposure for his fledgling distilling project, he changed his mind. Henry says he wasn't even paying attention to the competition results until he started getting pats on the back from the people standing around him. Apple 151 had taken a gold medal for best in category and a silver medal overall. Long time craft distillers watched grudgingly as Dominion Distillery emerged to the immediate accolades of some of the world's most qualified master distillers, professional nose and taste experts and more importantly, everybody who tasted it. 

Henry decided to tackle the intricate world of distilling after several years of successful home beer brewing. Not wanting to launch yet another micro brewery and compete with good friends locally, he wanted to try something new. Dry Fly distilling in Spokane was just taking off as a model of a successful craft distillery, and Henry was intrigued. A pile of distilling textbooks later and Henry was in the thick of it. Simultaneous to creating award winning recipes, Henry designed a still to optimize air cooling distillation using vertical copper tubing that forces distilled spirits upward without compromising the flavor of the finished product, which happens often in traditional stills. While waiting for approval for his spirit recipes, Henry submitted patents for the "Gatling Still" as he calls it, a nod to it's gangster-era machine gun resemblance. 

The finished product of  Dominion's distilling innovation speaks for itself. So much so that Henry is also building a custom Gatling Still for a new distillery in Buffalo New York. It's not like Henry doesn't already have enough to keep him busy. The 100 gallon still at Dominion Distillery cranks out about one batch of spirits a week. This process involves five "stripping runs" that take about 8-10 hours apiece, and heat the distillery to a whopping 130 degrees - and that's just outside the still. After that, Henry performs a "spirit run" which can take even longer. All said and done, the process of making a batch of Apple 151 starts off with 500 gallons of apple mash and results in 30-50 gallons of 151. "It's a reductive process," Henry explains, "the still could be running all the time," but the problem that Dominion runs into at present is fermenting space. Henry and his business partner, Tommy Webster are working on solutions for this, as well developing a larger still. 

Recently, Dominion Distillery was approved to begin distributing through the Rosauers chain of grocery stores, which includes Super 1, Harvest Foods and many more. To keep up with this kind of demand, the need for more distilling space is urgent. All of these logistical issues are nothing compared to the challenge of keeping the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms happy. Each recipe has to be submitted for approval and classification before the distilling process can begin. This process involves copious amounts of paperwork and time. "It took nine months for them to tell us how to classify the 151. They had us put on the label 'Distilled Spirits Specialty' and 'moonshine'." Henry went on to say that the federal agency has since changed their definition of moonshine and that will mean yet another label change for them down the road. There are a lot of hoops to jump through, and occasionally Henry recruits the help of Saundra Richarts, who is also one of their tasting expert and resident spirits connoisseur.

When Henry isn't distilling or building state-of-the-art stills, he spends his time with his wife Quinell and their three little girls. Quinell makes wine at home, and Henry jokes that any marital discord in the home usually springs from who gets to use the glass carboys next and where the hydrometer went to, issues only a brewing family would understand. 

Growing up in Stevens County, Henry was homeschooled for most of his K-12 career, and it's perhaps his acquired skill of self-motivated investigation that is responsible for his success as a distiller. From college distilling text books to historical documents, Henry says he has found almost all of his knowledge about distilled spirits within the pages of the vast distilling library he has accumulated. "Craft Distilling is all about tradition," Henry says, and most of his recipes hearken to the oldest styles of spirits. 

July 1st, the tasting room at Dominion Distillery will begin to serve mixed cocktail drinks, including the Dominion Orange, Apple Pie, and other original recipes created by a master chef in Spokane. Plans for expanding the tasting room as well as the distilling operation and underway, as Henry and his partners look forward to meeting the ever growing demand for their award winning product. 

The Dominion Distillery tasting room is open Wednesday - Saturday, 3:00 PM until 8:00 PM, where you can sample Apple 151 and the Single Malt Vodka, and take home a bottle or two and see Henry and the Gatling Still in action. A new batch of Whiskey is in the final stages of distilling and then into the racks for barrel aging; it will be released in stages over the next few months. Stop by the tasting room at 116 North Main Street in Colville; check them out on Facebook, visit the website http://dominiondistillery.com or call 509-675-2179 for more information. 

Local Author Busts it Like a Mule

by Liv Stecker

They say that the best writers draw from personal experience, and while Caleb Mannan certainly isn't an Okie from the early 20th century, the characters from his recently self-published novel, Bust It Like A Mule, spring from the pages as if they were old familiar friends of the Colville native. 

Bust It tells the story of Cotton Kingfisher, the son of a "lousy cuss drunk" in Oklahoma who set out as a boy to make his way into the west, where he rides the rails and works across the Dakotas and the Pacific Northwest, leaving a trail of legend behind him as he goes along, defining the difference between a bum and a hobo who "chooses the life of a gypsy and earns his way through it..." Eventually, Cotton's travels take him to the Land Where The World Began and into the hometown of  a "beer bottle pretty girl" named Jael, who forever alters the course of his wandering. 

Told in the rambling voice of a drifter poet, Bust It Like a Mule is songlike in its spoken-word dialect and colloquial disinterest in grammatical propriety. Much like the hero of the story, Mannan's writing trudges along, winding through the emotions of the reader like so many mountain roads in Glacier National Park, which serves as the central setting for the unfolding of Cotton's fate. As the story develops, bits and pieces of northwest history are intertwined as Cotton moves through the Second World War and makes his way working seasonally for the Forest Service in Oregon and then Montana as a firefighter. Set against the backdrop of mountains, train cars and raging wildfires, Cotton Kingfisher battles local stigmas as well as his own baggage in the ultimate human quest to belong.

An avid storyteller and writer since elementary school, Caleb kept siblings and friends spellbound with his ridiculous tall tales and imaginative ramblings. Caleb married Jenny Anne Bulla, a local bluegrass musician, and the couple has four children. The themes of small town family, community spirit, down home music and dancing weave their way through Cotton's story, and manifest in a soundtrack for the book that has been developed by Caleb's friends and family, including his wife Jenny Anne, brother Jacob, and childhood best friend Kevin Morgan. The Mannans currently reside on the South Hill in Spokane Washington, where they held a "Hootenanny" release party on July 31st, at the Spokane Women's Club, complete with readings by the author, live music from the soundtrack, and a good old fashioned, small town hoedown. 

Growing up several miles south of Colville, Mannan is no stranger to the radical individualists, self-starting curmudgeons, dramatic beauty and hardship of the rustic northwest. Based loosely on an amalgam of characters throughout Caleb's life, Cotton Kingfisher is built on the core personality of J.E. Jones, Mannan's maternal grandfather, who was a singer/songwriter, migrant worker, and heroic legend to Caleb and his brothers throughout their childhood. The second born of four boys and one girl, Caleb Mannan lived on a little farm in Arden where they were homeschooled by their mother, Pat. As a young teenager, he worked a paper route for the Statesman Examiner in downtown Colville. He attributes his persistence in writing to a teacher that worked with him in highschool, Kay Bauer. Raised under somewhat strict, conservative standards, Mrs. Bauer encouraged Caleb to write passionately, allowing him to push boundaries. "As long as it made sense with the story, she supported it," he says, giving him the opportunity to venture into darker themes like war and conflict. Caleb says,  "She made writing as a boy fun." 

Getting Bust It published was about as much of a fight as Cotton Kingfisher puts up throughout the story. As Caleb's fourth complete novel (but the first to be published!) it was the first to garnish noteable feedback from publishers and literary agents. Granted, the feedback was resoundingly negative, but each response was personal and specific, in contrast to the form rejections Mannan was used to getting for his other stories. Repeated rejections had worn on Caleb, who also works full time in business for a subsidiary company of Expedia.

 When he wrote Bust It Like a Mule over a two week period in 2012, it was more of a recreational exploit than his darker and more serious writing endeavors had been for him. It happened after he and Jenny Anne visited Glacier National Park for their 10th wedding anniversary and Caleb was instantly captivated by the wild grandeur of the landscape and the Native American Lore that the area was rich with. 

Jenny Anne and Caleb made a pact to get his book published, come hell or highwater, but after so many edits, rewrites and turn downs, however personal they were, the project lost steam. Finally Jenny Anne took matters into her own hands and undertook to have the novel self published. She surprised Caleb with the first proof copies in June of this year. More editing, and preparing to self-market the book, Jenny Anne's kickstart was the momentum they needed to get going, and to "bust it like a mule" in true Cotton Kingfisher form. 

Mannan acknowledges his deviation from writing norms in the storytelling style of his book, he says, in an attempt to "connect with people on a visceral level." While some early readers of the story have said it takes a chapter or two to get in stride with the garrulous banter, Mannan says that it is the same narrator's voice that makes it so easy to read aloud and share. And like Caleb insists, he is a storyteller first and a writer second. The back cover of his novel is sprinkled with a tongue-in-cheek nod to literary rejectors, as if to thank them for giving the Mannans reason to wrestle the story into being just to spite them, much as the hero of the story would have. 

By the end of Bust It Like a Mule, the reader can't help but root for the crusty loner who has taken on his own demons as much as he has the closeminded Montana town where he lands. Cotton Kingfisher reminds us that a hero is defined by his actions more than his appearance, and that the bad guys aren't always the drifters fresh off the freight train.While Mannan might not have the war stories that Cotton Kingfisher can boast, he certainly captures the pulse of the very human struggle for commitment and belonging, and in that, his experience growing up in Stevens County is enough. 

Bust It Like a Mule is available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle formats, as well as at Auntie's bookstore in downtown Spokane. Visit the author's blog at CalebMannan.com for more background on the story, artwork by the author, and to listen to songs from the soundtrack by local artists.