Garth Matson
| Garth Matson | ||||||||||||||||
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| Sex | M | |||||||||||||||
| Spouse | Donna Parmeneter | |||||||||||||||
| Spouse2 | Helga Ingstad | |||||||||||||||
Children
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Garth Matson makes only a brief appearance in Spearfish Lake Tales, but his descendants are encountered frequently. Garth was the grandson of Caleb Matson. In 1928 he started working at the Spearfish County Bank, and joined the local National Guard. He served through World War II and retired in 1948, close to being a general in the state guard.AF24
Garth first married Donna Parmeneter and had two children, Barbara and Frank Matson. Garth was Vice President of the Spearfish Lake State Savings Bank in Spearfish Lake and was the battery commander of the local National Guard artillery unit when World War II started. "The train taking (the unit) down to Camp Knox wasn't even out of sight yet when Donna and Wayne were getting it on out in his hunting camp."DW17 They were divorced not long after.
As told by Garth to his family, Helga Ingstad was nude when they met her. "Sort of goes with the territory when you’re a nudist. Apparently a convoy made a wrong turn or something" As Ryan Clark heard the tale, they met and "Let’s just say that lightning struck Garth and Helga. They were married before the battalion shipped out to Italy, and Danny's mother was born before they made it back."HC8
Garth and Helga had three kids, Carrie, Rodney and Phil (a fourth, April, mentioned twice,FK3 FK19 is otherwise unknown). As their grandson Danny described it, Helga "decided that even though she’d exiled herself to the back of beyond to be with Garth, she was still going to be a nudist, no matter what the local textiles wanted" and thus founded the West Turtle Lake Club. Garth managed to guilt-trip Wayne Clark "out of a section of stumps out around West Turtle Lake for even less than the pennies an acre that Wayne had bought it for in the first place."HC8 Helga was a strict vegetarian and was probably the reason Commons was usually vegetarian, too. The founding of the Club is told in The West Turtle Lake Club.
In August 1955 Garth was driving to work from West Turtle Lake Club when he was flagged down by some scouts. One of their party was unwell and they asked him to take Bob Rathburn and the scoutmaster, Jim Blanchard, to the hospital.FK5 When Bob was diagnosed with polio Garth decided to stay in town to avoid the risk of passing it on to his children.FK7 He helped the fight against polio when local kids were also diagnosed. He is a major character in the book Forgotten Killer.
