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Saturday was the Dodgeville Home Talent Baseball Team's annual 9-Pin Tap Bowling Tournament fundraiser. It was a pretty good day for the "Mudville Nine" and Dodger Bowl owner Nick Portzen was the usual good host that he is! There were a lot of prizes, mainly donated by area businesses and some pretty good silent auction items.
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A big surprise came to Pat and me when Pat's old college roommate, Larry Priban, showed up at the event. We had about 43 years to catch up on and we spent from noon on Saturday until noon on Sunday doing just that! Larry's retired and lives in Winfield, Illinois which is near Chicago - where he grew up. Larry began his college career with a basketball scholarship to Bradley - he's 6'8" tall. He transferred to Platteville because he wasn't cutting the grades at Bradley and he fell in love with Wisconsin! In fact he liked it so much he started school there in 1964 and graduated in 1971! He spent a few summer breaks with us in Hialeah, Florida - where cousin Jeanette (Reilly) Marty lived with our uncle and aunt. Larry, Pat and I went through Saturday and Sunday discussing a lot of good times and some not so good times. Although, Larry's retired, he still has a model train development company.
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I was at Bob's Electric on Thursday and Shauna, one of the employees there, was reading our 150th page and really finding some interesting things. She recalled the Indian abduction of a woman and her two daughters who eventually got let go by a "good" Indian who had traded another Indian a horse for them and then let them go. She, along with several other people mentioned how articles were written back then. We've written about the years 1862-1878 at this time. Another interesting fact stemmed from the Spotlight story about Christian Kessler, a relative of Pat's and mine through our uncle that we never met (died before 1945 when Pat was born). Christian was Dodgeville City Clerk back when the Chronicle started! You can read about thefts (in fact, the Chronicle was broken into), murders, foreclosures and pretty much everything that is in the news now - what goes around, comes around!
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Great job by our area wrestlers at the state individual tournament. Mineral Point's Deven Walrack and Iowa-Grant's Blake Welu both came away with championships in Division 3 - unfortunately Welu had to beat out Mineral Point's Robby Chubb or Mineral Point may haveve had two champs to win his! There were also area championships won by Lancaster's Ethan Soderstrom in Division 3, along Cuba City/Southwestern's Jarod Donar and Belmont-Platteville's Dusty Jentz in Division 2.
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Good luck to the Iowa-Grant wrestling team as they are in the Division 3 team championships this Saturday at the UW-Fieldhouse.They have a very formidable opponent in the first round in Coleman, a team that isn't a stranger to those mats.
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With wrestling winding down for the season, that means that basketball tournaments are beginning!  The boys started Tuesday with the girls tourney underway this coming Tuesday. Good luck to the area teams! Hopefully this won't be the final year I can say: "Good luck on getting to Madison!
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It was a busy ambulance page day on Sunday over the scanner, but I heard a very strange fire page. The Barneveld Fire Department was sent out on a fire call when a lady threw grease out of a frying pan outside that started the grass on fire!