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Happy Father’s Day Sheriff’s Deputy Charged With Drug Possession
Prince Fans Visit Henderson
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ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIXTH YEAR
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BELLE PLAINE, MINNESOTA, june 14, 2017
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NUMBER 24
German Day and Downtown Cookout Friday
Belle Plaine will be celebrating a bit of its German heritage Friday during German Day. Festivities will include the crowning of this year’s German Day queen and princess. Pictured above (from left) are last year’s German Days’ Queen Rebecca Schmitz, German Day queen candidates Gabrielle Malecha and Rebecca Schmitz, and German Days’ First Princess Heather Burmeister.
Activities galore will take place on Belle Plaine’s downtown streets this Friday evening as the community holds its 35th annual German Day festivities. First will be the Downtown Community Cookout starting at 5 p.m. Free food samples will be provided by a number of merchants. There will also be Food Vendors, Pony Rides and Face Painting for the kids, and more.
There will be a Kids’ Pedal Pull at 5 p.m. with registration beginning at 4:30 p.m. A Super Hero Fun Run begins at 6:45 p.m. At 6 p.m., the Queen Coronation will take place. This year’s candidates are – Gabrielle Malecha, daughter of Renee and Norman Malecha. – Rebecca Schmitz, daughter of Sheila and Chuck Schmitz. The reigning Miss German
Days royalty are Queen Caitlyn Schoon, First Princess Hannah Burmeister, and other Princesses Teresa Wentworth and Allison Hennes. Introduction of Bar-B-Q Days Royalty will also take place. A Sauerkraut Eating Contest open to all who want to enter will also be part of the evening’s festivities. The Johnny Holm Band will start performing on the street at 8 p.m.
German Day’s Queen Candidates Want to Share Their Heritage
Retiring Royal Court Said Year Representing Belle Plaine Has Been Great
The two young women seeking the honor of being Belle Plaine German Day’s queen both believe their heritage is worth sharing when they visit other communities. Friday (June 16), Gabrielle Malecha or Rebecca Schmitz will be crowned German Day’s queen. Knowing they both will be crowned either queen or first princess, the two young women are looking forward to the next year representing Belle Plaine at community festivals around the region. “I really like my German heritage. We celebrate it a lot,” Malecha said. “It has always interested me.” Schmitz said the experience of presenting Belle Plaine as a member of the German Day’s Royal Court will provide the opportunity to get to know Belle Plaine and other communities in the region better. The German Day’s court attends community festivals and parades in cities throughout the area during the summer and into the fall. “I’m very proud of my heritage,” Schmitz said. “I look forward to being able to share it.” Malecha is the daughter of Renee and Norman Malecha. She will be a senior at Belle Plaine High School and works at The Lutheran Home as a dietary aid. Malecha plans on attending
Luther College after graduating from high school. She is interested in choral and instrumental music and may pursue a career teaching music in school. Schmitz is the daughter of Sheila and Chuck Schmitz. She will also be a senior at Belle Plaine High School. Schmitz works as a waitress at Kingsway Retirement Living. She is interested in attending college in Duluth, Minn. and is considering St. Scholastica and the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Schmitz is interested in teaching history. Malecha and Schmitz enjoy the way German Day brings out Belle Plaine’s German heritage. They enjoy people getting together and enjoying the festival and its events. Malecha’s German relatives are on her mother’s side. Both her mother’s grandparents came here from Germany, she said. Schmitz’s great grandparents on both sides of the family came to the United States from Germany. The four women judging the two applicants for Miss German Day were impressed with both Malecha and Schmitz. The judges were Chris Weiers, LeAnn Brezina, Sarah Schilz, and Darla Nieson. They said the pair did a good job presenting themselves and their interests to the panel of judges. The judges asked the candidates about representing Belle Plaine and their participation in social activities. They also wanted to get a sense of the candidates’ leadership qualities, and their personality and sense of integrity.
A Great Year
Caitlyn Schoon and Hannah Burmeister are the retiring Miss German Days and first princess. Teresa Wentworth is the outgoing second princess and Allison Hennes is the third princess. Schoon and Burmeister met with Malecha and Schmitz Monday evening. They provided the candidates with some insight into how to handle the year to come, since it will be a busy year filled with visits to area communities and projects. Schoon and Burmeister recalled how the quartet worked together as a team, never concerned about differences in status between the queen and third princess. The girls worked together to arrange photos of the royal court and to have buttons made. They made selecting dresses a team effort and jointly handled transportation to area communities. “We all had the same amount of say,” Burmeister said. “Everything was divided equally,” Schoon said. The year representing Belle Plaine provided the four girls with an education on their hometown and area communities. They attended community festival parades in Henderson, Montgomery, Chaska, Le Sueur, Lonsdale, Carver, and New Prague. “No matter how hot you got or how sunburned you were, it was always fun,” Schoon said. “There are so many nice little towns I’d never seen before. It was a lot of fun.”
Back to State
Belle Plaine’s Ollie Heitkamp teaches students the finer points of carving wood at a class at the Ney Center near Henderson.
B.P.’s Heitkamp Trains Next Generation of Wood Carvers
by Teresa Konechne About 18 months ago, the Carving Club was formed at the Ney Nature Center, with Ollie Heitkamp at the helm. Bringing with him 40 years of woodworking and about as many years as a senior high school teacher of biology, physics and chemistry, he is a gold mine of information. His initial instruction last month began: “Before carving, you need to know about wood.” He teaches about growth rings and how deciduous trees have seasonal growth, while coniferous trees grow all year at different rates. These rings give wood both its visual and carving character.
The Belle Plaine High School baseball team won a return trip section championship. Belle Plaine returns to the state tourto the state baseball tournament this week at Dick Putz Field nament as the second-seeded team. Details on page 7. in St. Cloud. The Tigers defeated St. Peter Thursday for the
The bit between the rings tends to be weaker and can cause divots in softer woods when sanding, Heitkamp said. He brought blocks of different woods to illustrate weight, grain and hardness. His samples included white pine, butternut, basswood, American black walnut, American black cherry, and red cedar. Heitkamp said his stock of butternut was gathered 20 to 30 years ago, and it’s very hard to find now. Butternut grew in semi-wooded grazing and pasture lands. As farming practices changed, the fields of butternut were cleared. Which wood is chosen is based on what carvers want it to look like when it’s done, and how hard they want to work. Although he has a small toolbox of various chisels, knives, gouges, and other somewhat maniacal-looking pointed and curved metal instruments, he said one could get by with just two -- a flat ¾-inch chisel and a (locking) pocket knife... and a sharpening stone. “It’s not a sharp tool that cuts you; it’s a dull one from having to press harder,” he said. Demonstrating how to sharpen a chisel, he insisted it must be a wet stone, and the “wet” is often spit. When the angle is just right, the “liquid” squeezes out just ahead of the chisel, and then you move it in circles. One of his sharpening stones came from his grandfather who was a blacksmith in Belle Plaine. Beginners start with a mallard or wood duck. Carving becomes not only a study of techniques but of the intricacies and beauty of the subject itself. He spoke of five surfaces on the duck bill and that each has a nail on the tip of its bill.
‘Side Pocket’
In one illuminating bit of information, Heitkamp showed the “side pocket” on a duck. These are muscles on the side of the duck that it tucks its wings into when landing on water to protect them from getting wet. A video on “slow motion duck beating wings” was used to show this. His teachings flowed in bits and pieces, having to condense decades of knowledge acquired through practice and mistakes, into a little over an hour. The two newest members, Henderson boys Isaac (11) and Noah (10) Castor, got to choose between butternut ducks and basswood bluebirds or cardinals. Other members of the club come from as far away as Minneapolis. Tammy Ness from Heidelberg joined because she wanted something that made her slow down. “I only do it here. I wanted something that would take me away from home,” she said. “I feel lucky to be a part of it. Learning from Ollie is like being with a famous painter.” Heitkamp first carved while in high school in Belle Plaine. He saw an ad about carving mallards in an outdoor life magazine. He tried it and gifted those first two mallards to a cousin visiting from Florida in about 1948. Thirty years later, he received a letter from that cousin’s daughter who was wanted to find out what to do because her puppy had chewed one of
Heitkamp
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