'Golf with a shotgun' Saturday in Elburn

If you enjoy shooting clay pigeons - and a lot of people do at the St. Charles Sportsmen's Club on Keslinger Road in Elburn - you'd be interested in an event being promoted as a "fun-filled day of blasting clays."

There's more to it than just firing away this time. The event at 11:30 a.m. Saturday at the club is the first Northern Illinois Sporting Clays Shoot hosted by the Union Sportsmen's Alliance.

Union members, leaders and contractors and their families will gather for this event as the alliance pushes to improve hunting and fishing habitats for everyone in the future.

Those who intend to blast away will register at 9:30 a.m., with shooter instructions taking place at 10:30 a.m. before the start of the competition.

The alliance is a hunting and fishing organization solely for union members that addresses various conservation issues. And they have an interesting way of describing the clay-shooting competition - "golf with a shotgun."

Information is available at the unionsportsmen.org/events website.

Not quiet park: You can usually count on Pottawatomie Park to be much quieter once the pool closes for the summer. Not this year. With construction work taking place for a new pool, it hasn't been this noisy around Pottawatomie Park and the golf course, probably since 1939 when it was built as part of a Work Projects Administration project during the Great Depression.

Another Batavia move: It's not like there's been a major exodus of Batavia businesses taking up shop in Geneva, but it has happened to Kiss the Sky, Sofa Solutions and Party City.

It comes to mind because Kim Pippin, who cuts my hair, works out of the Spice Curls shop in Batavia and she'll be moving with that shop to a new location in Geneva at 11 N. First St. early next month.

Spice Curls is part of the retail center on Island Avenue in Batavia that the city and park district have earmarked for clearing out to make way for a future recreation center.

Hey, I can get my haircut in any city, but more importantly downtown Batavia could benefit greatly from a recreation center in that spot.

And, yes, I get my haircut at a place called Spice Curls. Before that, Kim worked at Sara's in Geneva. So, like many other people would, I stick with the person who's been doing a good job of clipping my hair.

Straighter gravestones: Mike Hoge did a big favor for his brother, Terry Evanswood, last week when he helped raise the boulder over famous magician Edward Maro's gravesite at North Cemetery.

Evanswood, who went on to his own fame as a magician after graduating from St. Charles High School in 1988, had become obsessed with raising the 100-year-old gravesite boulder to reveal the gravestone plaque in memory of "The Great Maro."

But afterward, Hoge, a masonry contractor, said he also was going to straighten out the Civil War gravestones at North Cemetery, as so many are lopsided.

"I'm quite a history buff, so it just seems like the right thing to do," Hoge said of his project.

dheun@sbcglobal.net