Dozen of children (and some adults) enjoyed making bluebird houses April 3 at St. Stephen City Hall.
It was the annual St. Stephen Sportsmen’s Club’s birdhouse-building day to which anybody and everybody was invited to build, for free, birdhouses and then take them home to put up anywhere they like.
The event proved to be so popular at one point there was a long line of parents with children waiting in line in the city-hall lobby, eager to get into the council chambers room where the construction of the houses was taking place.
All of the pre-cut wood pieces were donated. Mike Legatt, member of the Sportsmen’s Club, worked in high-speed motion stacking the various sizes of wood pieces in tall stacks on a table, ready for children and parents to take the wood pieces to their work stations on the long tables and even at the council members’ long dais.
Many other Sportsmen’s Club members helped the children, along with parents, assemble the wood pieces into birdhouses, using electric screwdrivers that were also provided by the club.
Donation jars, set up at the construction areas, gradually filled with green bills.
Jodi Ireland-Dingman of Rice and her children, all proudly carrying birdhouses, emerged from the city hall on their way home.
“We’re going to put them up at our cabin on Red Lake,” she said.
Dalman was born and raised in South St. Cloud, graduated from St. Cloud Tech High School, then graduated from St. Cloud State University with a degree in English (emphasis on American and British literature) and mass communications (emphasis on print journalism). He studied in London, England for a year (1980-81) where he concentrated on British literature, political science, the history of Great Britain and wrote a book-length study of the British writer V.S. Naipaul. Dalman has been a reporter and weekly columnist for more than 30 years and worked for 16 of those years for the Alexandria Echo Press.