BASEBALL, BRICKS AND BRIC-A-BRAC

We don’t usually drive 150 km for a pizza, but in Ogema’s case, we made an exception. There's been a lot of buzz about the Neapolitan-style pizza served up in this south Saskatchewan town -- aficionados have been driving up from North Dakota for a pie. To our delight, we discovered that pizza isn’t the only thing worth checking out in this little town.  The first thing you notice as you turn off Highway 13 is a trio of well-tended baseball diamonds and a large billboard dedicated to one of the town’s home-grown stars.

Arleene Johnson-Noga grew up playing baseball in and around Ogema.  In 1945 baseball scout Hub Bishop saw her play in Regina and invited her to join the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.  She wasn’t much of a hitter, but was known as the Iron Lady for her work at shortstop and third base.  She was a technical advisor on the Tom Hanks movie, A League Of Their Own, showing Rosie O’Donnell how to play the hot corner and Madonna how to slide into base.   A more in-depth history of the AAGBL is found in a 2002 documentary called All For One – The Story of Canada’s All-American Baseball Girls, and Arleene was the also the subject of a 2016 one-woman play called Diamond Girls.

She retired from pro ball after three or four seasons, but played and coached the game all her life.  It’s not surprising that she is a member of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and of course the Saskatchewan Baseball Hall of Fame. She was also a pretty fair bowler, and skipped and played on several top-notch curling rinks.  Ogema named their grandstand in her honour in 2004.  She died in 2017 at the age of 93.

Main Street in Ogema is probably wide enough for a game of scrub, or to turn around a four-horse team and wagon.  And it’s flanked with history.  On the east side is the Fire Hall containing not only a water cistern but also a jail cell.  The structure was built in 1915 after fire destroyed the entire east side of the downtown area.  Across the street is a brick wall 70 feet long, 30 feet high and 16 inches thick designed to stop the spread of future fires downtown.

Further north along Main Street is the BA (British American) gas station built in 1925 and restored in 1997.

This town of about 400 people was originally called Omega, for the end of the road.  But there was already a place registered with Land Titles as Omega, so the town decided to scramble the letters and call itself Ogema.  The word also happens to mean “chief” in the Ojibwe language.

Scrambled letters also make up the name of the Lil Amego Cafe, one of the town’s main restaurants.  They make a pretty decent BLT, and local ranchers come here to talk about farm machinery and livestock auctions.  But we’ve come to Ogema for the pizza at Solo Italia, which is a little further down Main Street.

Solo Italia keeps a staff of six busy making and selling la cucina Italiana – northern Italian cuisine – including ready-made calzone, ravioli, lasagne and sauces.  The place is run by Chef Marco de Michele, who's from northern Italy, and his wife Tracey Johnson, from Ogema.  The thin-crust pizzas are loaded with toppings and baked in a brick oven partly built with traditional Italian materials. The pizzas come frozen, for baking at home, so we buy three.

But you don’t have to make the drive to Ogema to pick up a pizza.  The products are available in more than half a dozen towns around Saskatchewan. The Saskmade website will tell you where you can buy local:  https://www.saskmade.ca/  

Back up Main Street is a tidy and surprisingly large thrift store called Second Time Around.  It sells everything from vintage dolls to Spode china, and the nice ladies are keen to make a sale.

We still haven’t checked out the Deep South Pioneer Museum, or taken a ride on the historic Southern Prairie Railway, which tootles along the tracks to nearby Pangman and Horizon.  So we’ll have to come back to Ogema another time, because the pizzas are starting to thaw, and should be ready to pop into the oven by the time we get home.   Ciao!