Vet club struggling, but holding on
By Paul F. Vang
Montana Tavern Times
“There aren't many World War II vets left, though one of them is sitting over there, playing cards,” Karlyle Van Setten, Commander of VFW Post 4109 of Fairfield commented, as he pointed to the pinochle game in the other room.
The VFW post owns the Servicemen's Club in Fairfield, the center of Montana's malting barley farming area, “The Malting Barley Capitol of the World” according to the signs along the highway.
The VFW Post was chartered May 11, 1945, as area veterans of that war, the people Tom Brokaw described as “The Greatest Generation,” began to return to their homes and farms on the Rocky Mountain Front to rebuild their lives.
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| Karlyle Van Setten (right), Commander of VFW Post 4109, and Bob Kasper, the Post's Quartermaster.
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This past November, 64 years after the end of that global war, Fairfield again paid tribute to area veterans, though the veterans organizations that have been the community's cornerstones find themselves struggling to maintain numbers.
Van Setten, a Vietnam war veteran, is the Commander of Post 4109 and has been active with veterans activities since the 1970s, and has been Post Commander off and on much of the time.
He's also a barley farmer, and of area agriculture points out, “It's all barley around here.”
Bob Kasper is the Post's Quartermaster. He's an accountant with a practice across the street from the Servicemen's Club and oversees the Club's business affairs.
Post 4109 has around 70 members, though when it comes to business meetings, it's usually the same four or five people who show up to conduct the post's business. Van Setten recognizes there has been a change of culture: younger people aren't joiners like they used to be, and returning veterans are no different. He relates that a Great Falls veterans organization offered a free trial membership to 300 Air Force personnel who had been deployed to the Middle East. “How many new members did they get? None.”
While there are struggles, and Van Setten points out there is also an American Legion post in Fairfield, “and they're struggling, too,” they continue to provide vital community services, and earnings from the Servicemen's Club makes it all possible.
The Servicemen's Club goes back to those post-WWII years when returning veterans founded the VFW post. The club started as a joint project between the VFW and the American Legion, with the club securing its liquor license in 1947, and which explains the generic nature of the club's name. The Legion later elected to split off from the joint venture.
The Club built a new building in 1993.
“The old building was falling down around our ears. We had to do something,” Van Setten recalled. Building that new home for the Servicemen's Club was a good move – a fact reinforced in December 2008 when the veterans burned the mortgage on the new building.
The VFW post performs an array of community services.
“We do a lot of stuff for the schools, such as scholarships and patriotism essay contests. On Memorial Day we put flags on all veterans' gravesites in community cemeteries,” Van Setten said, though he added with a laugh, “We have a great school system here. One year, half the senior class graduated with straight A's and qualified for scholarships. That about broke us! We had to make some changes in our eligibility rules for those scholarships.”
The VFW and American Legion posts collaborate on a service they hold sacred: providing military rites at funerals for veterans.
Van Setten says, “My brother, Tom, is bugler for those funerals. He's not a veteran, himself, but he's faithful in providing that final service for veterans' funerals, playing Taps. We have a CD for emergencies, but it's not the same.”
He notes that on Veterans Day, itself, on November 11, the local schools put on a program with area veterans as their honored guests.
In any event, Van Setten notes that the various services of the VFW Post are mostly financed by revenues from the bar and gaming machines at the Servicemen's Club. The club depends on the public for generating those revenues. “We're wide open to the public,” Van Setten says, adding, “We get more business from the public – not the vets. The main thing that produces revenue is the gaming.”
That's echoed by the Club's manager, Bob Ward. Ward put in a long career as a steelworker, erecting buildings over much of the Midwest, before ending his career in his company's home office in Chicago. Though he sometimes regrets leaving Chicago, where he enjoyed the wide array of major league sports available in the Windy City, when he retired he and his wife came to Fairfield, his wife's home town. Ward says, “There are too many bars in town, four bars in a town of 800 people. If it wasn't for the gambling machines we couldn't survive.”
While the VFW Post's membership is aging and diminishing in numbers, Van Setten speaks positively of the new statewide smoking ban as something that's helping them maintain business.
“It's for the good,” he says. “It's going to help. We have eight-foot ceilings in here and sometimes the smoke would really be thick, and it would keep people away. I was in here a few nights ago and there was a good bunch of younger people in here.” (Reporter's note: a couple weeks into the smoking ban, there is no hint of tobacco smoke in the Servicemen's Club. There's a mild scent of disinfectant, indicating a thorough cleaning of the premises to get rid of any lingering second-hand smoke odor.)
The Club is part of a five-bar pool league. Ward notes, “It brings in business. They play here on Friday nights and it brings in a lot of people.”
November 11, 2009, marked 91 years since the original Armistice Day, the day that marked the end of World War I, “The War to End All Wars.” The day later became Veterans Day, to honor the veterans of all of our nation's wars.
All across Montana, communities such as Fairfield hold ceremonies commemorating the day. It's always a good time to honor our nation's veterans – and if you're one of them, this might also be a good time to join your local veteran's organization. They could use your support.