Homecoming week ends Friday with the parade down Main Street at 2:30 and the Wranglers' game against Sage Hill at 7 p.m. School lets out at 2.

Floats line up behind the elevator at 1:45. The senior class has won the float contest three years running and, according to people who would know, has been working in a barn north of town since Sunday with the doors shut.

The Wranglers (3-1) are coming off last week's 28-14 win on the road and are favored by everybody who doesn't have to play the game. Sage Hill is 2-2. The homecoming court will be crowned at halftime, and the band will play, and the band director promises it will be in tune.

The Class of 1949 holds its 50th reunion this weekend, and eleven of the class's twenty-three graduates plan to be here. The Class of 1974 holds its 25th. Both classes will ride in the parade.

The Booster Club's chili feed starts at 5 in the old gym: $4 for adults, $2 for kids. The homecoming dance is Saturday, 8 to 11 p.m., in the high school gym, for high school students.

The school board voted 5-0 Monday night to buy a new 72-passenger bus for the north route. It replaces a 1979 bus that the district's mechanic described, for the record, as “tired.” The new bus will cost $61,400 and should arrive in January.

The board also heard a report on the district's readiness for the year 2000. The office computers, the grading program and the heating controls in all three buildings have been checked and updated, and the district expects no trouble on January 1.

“If the lights go out, we'll be on Christmas vacation anyway,” said board chairman Eileen Mackay. “But they won't.”

Fall enrollment is 618, down 7 from last year. This year's kindergarten has 41 children, the most since 1993.

The board meets next on Monday, Oct. 18, at 7:30 p.m. in the high school library.

Helen Edington will be ninety on Sunday. She would like you to come by, and she would like you not to bring anything.

An open house will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 26, in the fellowship hall at Trinity Lutheran Church. There will be cake and coffee.

Mrs. Edington was born Sept. 26, 1909, in a homestead shack eleven miles north of town, the year her family came out from Minnesota. She went to the country school on the bench, finished high school in town, and taught at three country schools in the county from 1928 until she married in 1934. She and her husband ranched north of town until his death in 1971, and she moved into town in 1980.

She still lives in her house on Third Avenue, still drives herself to church, and still takes the Ledger, as she has since 1934, through four editors. She says the current one is “coming along.”

Asked for the secret of a long life, she said there isn't one, and that we would do better to write about the water tower.

First freeze. It got down to 27 at the elevator Sunday morning, the first hard freeze of the fall. Anyone who still had tomatoes on the vine has our sympathy.

Library hours. The library goes to winter hours Oct. 1 and will be open until 8 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.

Flu shots. The county nurse will give flu shots at the senior center Tuesday, Oct. 12, from 9 a.m. to noon. Bring your Medicare card if you have one.

Hunters' breakfast. The volunteer fire department will serve its hunters' breakfast at the fire hall from 4 a.m. on opening day of the general season, as it has since 1958. Pancakes, eggs, sausage, and coffee you could stand a spoon in.