Lasting Love Without Any Strings

In 1945 Norma Speelmon moved to town in an old pickup purchased by her husband, Mel. The windshield wiper motor broke in the middle of a downpour.

Using ingenuity and cooperation that was a keystone of their 49-year marriage, they found a solution: string. Norma and Mel tied two strings to the wiper blade.

First one and then the other pulled the blade back and forth in much the same way early loggers pulled a crosscut saw. Mel drove on through the storm.

Melvin Speelmon grew up in Clark Fork and logged the northwest woods.

Norma lived in Eugene, Ore., where she planned to open her own beauty salon.

“I had two girlfriends in beauty school, and they asked me to go with them to a dance,” she said. A tall fellow who “looked pretty nice” asked Norma: “Would you like to dance?”

Norma did. Six days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they were married in Clark Fork. Mel was drafted, and Norma spent war years near various air bases in the Western United States.

Once Mel wrote: “If you want to know where I am, get this issue of Life magazine.” That was how Norma discovered that her husband was stationed in Brazil. When the war ended, Mel was a master mechanic working on B-29s in San Francisco. As soon as he received his discharge papers, Mel, Norma and eldest son Douglas headed to Clark Fork to make a home.

“My mother-in-law had an old two-room schoolhouse on her property,” Norma recalled. “She had painted the walls for us and called it a doll house. I called it a shack.”

The house sat closer to Lightning Creek than any other house in the area. “I could always hear the creek roaring by,” Norma said. They had an outside privy, cold water piped in from an artesian spring, and a big wood stove.

“Frank Vogel lived near us,” Norma said. “He always gave me eggs and milk and all winter long brought me vegetables from his root cellar.” In the summer she had her own garden while Mel hunted and fished. “Mel used to go up the creek and come back with creels full of fish,” Norma said. “He put wet leaves between the fish to keep them moist.”

Norma cooked up some great meals on that big old woodstove. She became so proficient that Mel took her and the three children into the woods with him every summer to run the cook-house.

“It was a small building on wheels that was towed by Cat to the logging sites,” she said. “I was healthy and strong and loved being out in the woods.”

Norma spoke fondly of those days despite long hours in front of a stove in the heat of summer with three children to care for as well.

Norma cooked bacon, eggs, hotcakes, “you name it” for breakfast, made sandwiches for lunch, and prepared roasts, turkey and fish they caught in the local creeks for dinner. “I did not bake bread,” Norma said, “but I made pies all the time.”

Norma’s pie specialty in those days was mincemeat, made with venison they bagged themselves. She became famous for her pies, and later worked at the Lighthouse Restaurant in Hope, making all of their desserts.

She still rolls flaky, mouth-watering dough for banana cream and lemon meringue pies for the fund-raisers in the Methodist Church, where she has been a member since her first days in Clark Fork.

In her younger years, Norma and Mel formed a little dinner group with friends and met once a month. The hostess prepared the meat and vegetables, and others brought bread, salad and desert. After dinner they played canasta.

For the past 20 years, Norma has played bridge twice a week and pinochle once a week. She never misses a sporting event at Clark Fork High School, and still goes to Homemakers once a month.

In summer she tends her flower garden in front of the cozy home in town she and Mel eventually bought. Mel died eight years ago.

Norma keeps in shape with home exercises and daily walks through town with longtime friend Lustella Shields.

At one time Norma was the only person in Clark Fork who had no relatives in the area. “Mel used to say if he had married a Clark Fork woman, the whole town would have been related.”

Norma admits that she felt lonely for the first five years and thought she’d landed at the end of the world. But now she feels differently.

“I have wonderful friends here and I’m lucky,” she said. “And all my family is here, while most of my friends have family all over the country. I don’t want to live anywhere else.”