Inside the Portage County line By GENE KEMMETER of The Gazette The 11th annual Community Christmas Parade in downtown Stevens Point drew a crowd on a relatively warm November night, Friday, Nov. 19. The parade had a record 75 entries and lasted about an hour and a half. The parade had all the ambience of small-town America. There were some well-done floats, but nothing like the extravagant ones that populate Thanksgiving and New Year's Day parades shown on television. Mostly, the units consisted of grade school students, Brownies, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, mostly walking along. There were groups with their pets, a decorated cement mixer, a polka band and the Grenadiers, the senior citizen band. As one downtown merchant noted, "Half the town showed up to watch the other half walk by." * * * U.S. Rep. David Obey, D-Wausau, stopped at Jefferson School in Stevens Point Tuesday morning to announce a $500,000 learning grant for Jefferson and Madison School. Students gathered in the school gym for the announcement, and Pam Bork, principal at Jefferson, compared the children writing a letter to Santa to the school district writing the grant proposal. Only, she explained, "this letter was really long, 57 pages." Obey related the fruits of that letter, saying each page was worth about $10,000 and calling it "a high quality application." He said when he was young, one parent was waiting at almost every home when a student finished school for the day, but society has changed. Now children are going home to mostly empty homes because both parents work. The grants will provide after-school learning centers, with staff and equipment, he said. The nation has learned a lot in the last 15 years, he said, finding out that students learn a lot better if classroom sizes are smaller. Students also learn better in small high schools, he said. The students then showed their spirit, singing the "Jefferson Eagles" school song. * * * The state is buzzing with talk about the 30-point buck that Mike Peirick of Ashippun in Dodge County shot on Saturday, the opening day of the gun deer hunting season. He shot it near the tail and in the front hoof and tracked it, finally catching up to the animal about 1:30 p.m. The rack isn't the largest ever in the state. That mark belongs to a buck shot in Rusk County in 1911 that had 47 points. Two other deer in the state are listed with Boone and Crockett Club in Montana as having more than 30 points. However, Peirick's deer caught statewide attention because "Da Turdy Point Buck" is the title of a song that gets airplay around the country and especially Wisconsin during the deer season. It can also be found on a number of jukeboxes in watering holes around the state. The song was recorded in the 1980s by Bananas at Large, an area musical group headquartered in Portage County. Shane Totten, one of the principals in the group who taught at Pacelli High School, now lives in Florida.