From time to time, life’s incidental, inconsequential, non-related moments, commas in the long journey, come together like atoms colliding, and fit perfectly.

For example, last week, two of Deadwood’s most infamous ladies of the night have been on my mind.

There’s Poker Alice, whom I learned had gotten into trouble during prohibition years for dealing in illegal booze and operating a house of you-know-what in Sturgis, my home town for a time as a youngster.

The Poker Alice dilemma, one of those little commas, will be about a half-page in my book on South Dakota’s experience with prohibition from 1917 to 1935. Alice was sentenced to six months in the Sioux Falls pen for her indiscretions, but friends presented a petition asking Governor William Bulow to pardon her.

Five days before Christmas in 1928, Gov. Bulow did just that. The 75- year- old bootlegger died two years later in the same old broad-veranda- encircled Rapid City hospital on Rushmore Road where my granddad Charlie later passed away; another commas, albeit a sad one.

Then last week along came Calamity Jane, another of Deadwood’s soiled doves.

I read of a Calamity Jane musical production coming to Deadwood under the auspices of the Deadwood-Lead Arts Council, and of a special auction at which a recently autographed picture of movie star Doris Day, who played a Hollywoodized Calamity Jane in a 1950s movie set in Deadwood, will be auctioned off.

Holy moly, Doris Day is still around, and signing autographs?

I haven’t heard of this comma in my life for nearly six decades.

But I’ve remembered her all these years for her 1953 movie, Calamity Jane. I watched that picture in a Japanese theater in a Tokyo suburb in late 1953. I was one among several hundred Japanese who sat cheek-by-jowl on long wooden benches rather than in cushioned seats.

That long-ago comma seems so incongruous now. Here’s a kid from Rapid City, the lone American in a crowded, off-the-beaten-path Japanese theater, watching a Hollywood movie with Japanese subheads about a character from his home state and the Black Hills.

I’d been in the Far East for 18 long months, with six more to go, when that movie came to the Land of the Rising Sun. I yearned for anything from South Dakota, and so I boarded one of those marvelously choreographed and on-time electric Japanese trains at the Atsugi Naval Air Station near Yokahama to whiz off to Tokyo to see it.

I don’t remember much of the movie’s plot because I was watching for familiar scenes of Deadwood and the hills I knew so well.

Now, reading the Rapid City Journal last week about Deadwood’s Doris Day event, this 57-year-old comma suddenly came back to me. Doris is alive and well at 88, signing an autographed picture from her home in California.

The Japanese audience that day in Tokyo enjoyed Doris Day, attracted by her pretty, freckled face, golden hair and chirpy disposition.

But perhaps the sound of her name also had something to do with it.

We sailors learned a few Japanese words and assumed we pronounced them in perfect Japanese. One of the words was “why,” but I have no idea why why was a word we knew.

We knew it just the same, and in Japanese, we pronounced it “dorsday” which was easy for all of us Calamity Jane fans to say.

Hearing now that Doris Day is signing autographed pictures, I think I’ll write and ask if she would send me one.

And if she won’t, comma, I’ll ask, “Dorsday?”

Throughout history, getting from here to there was mostly by shank’s mare.

That’s another term for walking.

Some perambulation examples recently came to mind as I read of the plight of Sioux Falls meter maids who couldn’t take the walking.

So Sioux Falls bought T3 Motion Electronic Stand Up Vehicles at $10,000 a pop.

Walking caused many of the maids pain and suffering, and then they took time off for medical treatment. So rather than hire new employees who could walk, the city decided it could save money in lost wages and workmen’s compensation costs by removing the walking requirement from the job description.

It was a big change. Since the city installed parking meters about sixty years ago, meter attendants have walked about ten miles a day tending their flock, which many in other vocations are also required to do.

Up until 2010, Sioux Falls meter maids had no problem getting around. Today’s food on demand society has apparently changed all that.

For a perspective to this torturous practice of requiring Sioux Falls attendants to actually walk and use the twenty foot muscles they were issued at birth, consider that most of mankind has pretty much walked through history.

In 1805, Capt. William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, on cold winter’s day walked 30 miles on a hunting trip. South Dakota pioneers later in that century tramped hundreds of miles in ill-fitting boots to get to their promised land. Stories abound about Brookings County homesteaders who walked to Sioux Falls to register their claims.

Near the end of WW II in the miserable winter of 1944-45, Brookings resident and Darby Ranger Lyle Davis, who was captured at Anzio in 1944, walked 250 miles from his POW confines through Germany just ahead of advancing Russian troops.

Now, it seems, we have a generation of folks who suffer walking badly and crumble physically on a measly ten miles a day.

I wonder what Leon Lester, a neighbor of ours in Rapid City who worked at the State Cement Plant, would think of all that. He was a cement bagger, a process probably accomplished automatically now. Leon worked sitting down, kinda’.

From a sitting position, he operated two bagging chutes. It was his job to put an empty cement bag under one of the two cement bin funnels and hit a lever that commanded 80 pounds of product to spill into the bag and then stitch it shut.

As this was taking place, Leon slid sideways on a polished, stainless steel bench over to a second funnel a few feet away where he inserted another paper bag and started the cement flowing there.

He then quickly slid back along his stainless steel bench to the first funnel and removed the filled bag, inserting another bag.

Back and forth, sliding and sliding went Leon, eight hours a day. We figured in his 48-hour week he slid on his hinder for hundreds of miles. In his long Cement Plant career he’d skimmed along on his skinny keester for thousands of stainless steel miles.

Now look where society has slid, collecting workmen’s compensation and getting a free ride on just ten miles a day.

They’ve literally gotten the lead out at Harold’s Printing as owners Pat and Eunice Leary prepared for a unique going-out-of-business auction sale Saturday.

So far, among other sale preparations, they’ve herded together about four tons of lead pigs, which comprise a printer’s passel. Perhaps you can buy a pig Saturday.

Pat and Eunice bought their business from Harold Schoepf in 1968 after Schoepf had started it in 1951. Probably some of the lead he used in his “letter press” plant then at 311 Third Street came from the Graphic weekly newspaper his father-in-law operated in Kimball.

Most of the lead the Learys’ grandsons Jake Larson of Volga and Sean Leary of Brookings are gathering up and melting down into 21-pound ingots, or what are called pigs, has been around a while, used over and over. If those pigs could talk, what stories they could tell.

Pat grew up operating those amazing linotype machines that turned the lead now being “gotten out” at Harold’s into neat letters, then arranged them into words, justified sentences, paragraphs and finally, stories and messages.

Most of Leary’s lead has been melted time and again and transformed into a pig for another circumnavigation of the linotype’s bowels. Other lead has been stored away in the shop as standing forms, advertisements, letterheads, or other printing that seldom changed and was used year after year.

As a printing management student at State in the 1950s, Pat worked evenings and weekends for the Brookings Register, setting the lead type that kept us all informed.

He could then (and still can) turn out lead type like sixty. He’s an ink-stained artist, and is to typesetting what an accomplished concert pianist is to the Broadway stage.

And although Pat has kept pace with the changes in the printing business, his old linotype heart has dictated he keep his faithful linotype clanging away even as he moved on to newer printing processes.

Grandsons Jake (his other granddad is local auctioneer and County Commissioner Don Larson, who will call the sale Saturday) and Sean, have by now melted down and “pigmatized” about four tons of lead. No longer in demand by printers, it is sought by junk dealers, hunters who make their own bullets, and other hobbyists.

The 21-pound lead pig isn’t all lead. About eleven percent is tin, and four percent is antimony. Antimony is in there because of its unique ability to expand as it cools, rather than shrink. It helps snug the lead close to the molds that form the letters.

As well as the lead once so necessary in the printing business, the Leary crew is recycling film used in the offset printing process for the silver in it. Pounds of used aluminum plates also have scrap value, as do wheelbarrows full of brass fonts and matrices.

But Saturday’s sale will still have hundreds of other interesting and unusual items employed in the printing business, especially the letterpress end of it.

Old print shops are fast melting away, nudged aside by copy machines and digital printing. This sale will be the last of its kind in Brookings County, and probably one of the last in the region.

So Saturday you’ll be seeing the final dispersion of the herd of Leary’s bulky pigs, and all the other printing gizmos passing on to history.