BBQ marks end of summer

Camp Sherman's Labor Day celebration kicked off with The Anvil Blasters' foot stompin' music on the Ponderosa Stage, accompanied by Camp Sherman Store owner Roger White's great burgers, brats and beans barbecue. Locals like the party.

Visitors like the hometown feel they experience every time they visit Camp Sherman.

While there were a lot of brews being bandied about, just as many people thought wining and dining was the way to go.

Allen and Jill Methven of Methven Family Vinyards returned with an array of their wine selections, whose aromas competed with the scents from wood-burning stoves. Their vineyards grace the Willamette Valley near the Eola Hills east of McMinnville, where they are currently bottling custom wines for their wine club. The special events they offer their wine club members include a "consensus" day where members get to blend their own wine.

Tom Zimmerman, of Wildwoodworks of Redmond, brought a hand-scribed picnic table made of fir salvaged from the B & B fire. Those tables come with a story.

"I had a customer who lives in Sisters who was driving over the Santiam pass just as the fire crowned over the road. He managed to talk his way through the roadblock and said he was the last person allowed through the pass," Zimmerman said. "When he saw these giant 1,000-pound picnic tables made from trees from the fire, he had to have one so he could embellish his story every time he told it."

Labor Day brought a family of celebrants to Camp Sherman to honor the wedding anniversary of Cathy and Ed Saunders, married 17 years ago to the day in Klamath Falls. Accompanied by their 12-year-old son Michael and 14-year-old son Mitchell, a niece who was their flower girl, and various friends and family members, stories flowed about the day that got it all started.

"We were at a beer garden with mutual friends drinking beer and eating sandwiches when Ed asked my friend Leah who I was," Cathy said, whispering the end of the story in this correspondent's ear, "Now go ask Ed and see if he tells you the same story."

Their stories started the same.

"We met at a beer garden, and I asked our friend Leah who she was. Leah turned to me and said, 'do you want to meet her?' Meet her, I said, heck I want to marry her," Ed said. He matched his wife's story to a "T."