Love the ol' "Galloping Goose."
The "Goose" was the local train (there were several of them) which years ago hauled mail and milk and passengers from town to town.
The train probably had a more dignified name. But everyone called it the Galloping Goose.
It was a Neighbors column about Mose, N.D., in a story about North Dakota ghost towns, which brought the Goose chugging into the memory of Harriet Wangberg, Moorhead.
"When I was a child living in Binford (N.D.)," Harriet writes, "four of us pals packed lunches and rode the Galloping Goose to Mose, about 5 miles to the west, over the noon hour.
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"The train continued on to McHenry where it turned around and returned on its route to Valley City via Binford.
"One of my pals was Dorothy Greenland, and I remember she had some relatives in Mose, so I would guess Morris Greenland was her uncle."
The column had mentioned that Mose got its name from a lumberyard worker named Morris Greenland, whose nickname was Mose.
Harriet says Dorothy's father, Oscar Greenland, was a banker in Binford.
"The above expedition was in about 1925," Harriet says, "and I'm the only one still living."
For the record, those other pals of Harriet who rode the Goose were Lucille Larson and Dolores Laughlin.
Sanish and Hillstead
The column which led Harriet to write told of the Web site established by Terry Hinnenkamp and Troy Dayton to record the history of North Dakota towns vanishing from the map.
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Terry wrote that the column generated considerable interest in the Web site. "We got a large response of e-mails from individuals all over," he writes.
He adds he and Troy recently were on a ghost town-hunting "expedition" in western North Dakota.
"We were quite surprised to find the old town site of Sanish, which had disappeared under the lake (Sakakawea) in the 1950s," he says. (Recent Forum stories have told of the Sanish site reappearing as the drought lowers Lake Sakakawea.)
Terry also has information for the woman who wrote Neighbors to inquire about a town named Hillstead. Or maybe it was a school, she said.
Give Terry a lead on an old town and he starts jumping at the leash, raring to go to find information about it.
"I was doing some research on the column looking for Hillstead," he writes. "Unfortunately, it looks like Hillstead was not a town site or even a proposed one. I suspect it was in fact the name of a school." But he said he'd keep digging.
Meanwhile, you can check their Web site at www.ghostsofnorthdakota.com .
Songs by Sunny
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If you're in the Seattle area soon, you might drop in at a supper club called Crepe de Paris.
The entertainment from now through Sept. 3 is called "Sunny Sings Sinatra."
You may have heard of Sinatra. And if you went to Concordia College, you may have heard of Sunny.
When she was there, however, she was a student from Hutchinson, Minn., named Sonia Ann Peterson who sang in the Concordia Choir. After she graduated, she went on to star in acts at Branson, Mo., Las Vegas, Reno, in Europe and in South America, and now she's a featured performer in Seattle under her stage name of Sunny.
According to a press release from the Crepe de Paris, Sunny, accompanied by a pianist, sings "all of your Sinatra favorites along with an evening of entertaining stories of her adventures singing, playing in and winning the Frank Sinatra Celebrity Golf Tournament in Palm Springs."
Along with Sunny's songs and stories, you also get Italian food.
So there's your summer treat, all of you heading for Seattle: an international evening of Italian food in a Parisian-type café with Sinatra songs sung by a Scandinavian gal from Minnesota.
How can you go wrong?
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If you have an item of interest for this column, mail it to Neighbors, The Forum, Box 2020, Fargo, N.D. 58107; fax it to 241-5487; or e-mail blind@forumcomm.com
