The Blackfoot Valley's News Source Since 1980
The Blackfoot Valley's News Source Since 1980
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 82
Until the late 1950s and early 60s, milk cows were an essential part of the operation of most ranches. The large numbers of children in the families of those days demanded a lot of milk, as well as cream, butter, cottage cheese, buttermilk, and other dairy staples. The milking process was detested by everyone. It was a chore that had to be done twice a day, 365 days a year, in forty below zero or a hundred above temperature, and it was so tedious that many ranchers didn't...
Some friends stopped by the house last Sunday. They had been in Hawaii for a couple weeks and shared their impressions with me. I was in Hawaii once, but my experience was far different from theirs. The military sent us to Okinawa for war games. I was a radio operator on one of the teams. There were sixty of us, I think. We left Okinawa after the exercise and made a stop on Wake Island for a day so the pilots could rest. We took off that evening and flew all night in an old...
He would never exchange his solitude for anything. Never again be forced to move to the rhythms of others. Tillie Olsen Tell Me a Riddle (1960) Searching my childhood memories for material to put in this column, I have too few recollections of spending days of play with my siblings (four of the six of us were born in four-and-a-half years). Visiting with my sister, she said that she doesn't remember that I was around very much. We got along as well as any large family can, and...
During the post-WWII years and into the late 1950s almost every town in Montana had a sandlot baseball team. Baseball was in its heyday with Mantle, Ford, Ted Williams and others all playing, in those days. Even the smallest towns fielded teams, and the larger cities had a number of them. As small as the town is, Helmville had its own baseball nine. All over the nation, young men who had won the war returned with an exuberance and sense of community they didn't have before...
I've been back in the US for over a year, now, and it's time to correct a wrong I left unattended for most of that time. It's embarrassing. I've had the life-long propensity to get myself into desperate situations, then scream to others, begging for help. But with a willing family and good friends who always pulled me out of the mire, life continued so I could do it again. The experience I suffered in Brazil left me emotionally and intellectually catatonic. I gave up on...
Emotional weariness and physical weakness are the only things that keep me from foolishness any more. Like I've written, I have the propensity to invent unrealistic and immature acts, then cry to friends and family for help when things fall apart – like the Brazil trip that almost killed me. The BBC said the other day that Brazil and the U.S. have reached an agreement to eliminate the need for a visa from American tourists. This means that passports don't have to be sent to th...
The summer before my eighth grade (1960), my mother, who still had hopes for me, got the idea that I would do well to attend my last year of grade school in Deer Lodge, where I would be going to high school. I was all for it. Living with our grandmother and entering into the Deer Lodge elementary school society was exciting - and a year earlier than expected. Maybe I had a future, after all. The school population was accepting, of course, and I was quickly absorbed into its ra...
As kids, we were always anxious to help our fathers (it was always the fathers those days) in their work. We were participating in the adult life, plus we learned new and fun things. The work was enjoyable until we were old enough to be paid; that's when it became misery. One task that became an annual project for us as children was helping to roll the old barbed wire left by the homesteaders' when they abandoned their claims during the drought years of the late 1920s. Old...
In the early 1980's I attended a lecture by Dr. Timothy Leary, the professor and LSD advocate. He said that the world has gone through a number of "ages:" the Iron Age, to the Industrial, and then to the Atomic Age. Leary said that we were already in the "Information Storage and Transfer Age." And some years ago I was visiting with a friend, when we came to the conclusion that the transistor will make the deepest and most radical changes in world culture than have ever been...
Throughout my life, the only recurring nightmare I ever had was that of me, huddled in a corner, surrounded by an angry crowd screaming accusations. I still remember it - all too well. It eventually happened, but without the crowd. The accuser owned a convenience store on the highway at Big Sky, and work was slow that month, so one morning we were visiting and he asked me if I wanted to work a few hours a week. I accepted his offer on a whim and went to work the next evening....
When I entered the Peace Corps they gave me five months of Portuguese lessons in the state of São Paulo before they sent me to Mato Grosso, a state on the borders of Bolivia and Paraguay. I was to work with the Brazilian extension service, giving technical orientation and assistance to ranchers and farmers. Part of the job involved formulating loan proposals, then providing oversight as to how the borrowed money was invested in the property. Another one of my...
When I was in Barra do Bugres this last time, I put a lot of effort into finding old friends from my Peace Corps years. Many had passed on, of course, and two, who were extremely wealthy in the 1970s, had died in poverty due to poor life and business choices. During this last visit, almost every morning I passed a gas station a half-block from where I was living. I always saw an older gentleman sitting just outside the little convenience store. One morning he called my name...
As kids, it was rare for us to travel farther away from home than Deer Lodge. The roads and vehicles of the day weren't much, and we never saw any reason or need to go to a bigger town. But two or three times over the years our parents hauled us to Butte to see the Ice Follies. It was a big deal for us, and the show made the interminable trip worth the suffering. The show was at night, so we had to leave early in the afternoon order to compensate for our father's self-imposed...
It was rare to travel much distance from Helmville in the 1950's and 60's. The vehicles weren't that dependable, and the interstate system wasn't built yet, so the highways were only two lane. The roads to Drummond and Avon were gravel and often rough. Once every summer we kids were hauled to Deer Lodge, where we spent a week with our maternal grandmother. Our father had a propensity for preparation, and would begin his efforts at least two days before the trips were...
Our paternal grandfather's brother, our great uncle, died in 1959, so there aren't many of us left who knew him. We of the 4th generation only knew him as children, and I, the eldest of the group, was just 12 when Pat died while feeding cows one winter. Pat never married. I've been told that he drank for years, but one day simply quit alcohol. I heard him relate to a friend that one morning he woke up in the weeds behind the local bar. He got up and started inside for another...
I've mentioned a number of times the constancy a person experiences when raised on a rural property. The phenomenon crosses generations and allows people to realize the transience of their own existence. There are places on the ranch, I'm sure, where one can see the projects of four generations within a tiny area, all juxtaposed. Our father used to say that when a person dies, their absence makes no more difference than someone taking his or her finger out of a glass of...
The other day I was in a town about 100 miles from here. Townsend used to be a dynamic place, but there are a lot of empty storefronts there now. The phenomenon of dying rural towns is becoming more obvious all the time. Deer Lodge, for example, used to be well to do. The Anaconda smelter, the saw mills, the railroad, and the phosphate mine were all available as good employment. The firms paid their labor well and the employees were relatively comfortable in their lives. Optio...
Rural children grow up with fewer organized activities than do their urban counterparts, but they enjoy a variety of country opportunities not available in cities. One facet of a tellurian upbringing is exposure to animals, both domesticated and wild. With six children in the family, our mother suffered through myriad pets we kids dragged home. She wasn't much for animals, especially under her kitchen table and on the couch. But she survived - after a fashion. We were always...
This winter I spent some time in both retro and introspection. The results aren't very good, I'm afraid. I showed some promise as a child, but when puberty arrived, my concerns turned solely to girls, alcohol, and horses. I never developed any long term goals like my more mature friends did. I've always had the proclivity to act on impulse, with no thought of the results my actions might bring. I can think of very few untoward events in my life for which I wasn't solely respon...
I don't know how our paternal grandmother managed. She wasn't different than any of the women who raised families in the early and mid-20th century. They all had it hard. Many families were large in those days, and with no pizza shops, MacDonald's, or heat and eat foods, even lunches for the children entailed a lot of work. Our grandmother kept a house with seven sons, a husband, and a brother-in-law. She gave birth to a girl baby after all the boys, but the child died of meni...
With most of the news being about politics these days, I think often about our maternal grandmother who was a dedicated Republican in the Eisenhower vein. Her political views stemmed from her intense dislike of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. She was disgusted that FDR was on the dime, and when the 10 cent stamps with his bust on them were issued, she was vocal in her contempt. She disliked using the stamps, blaming FDR for the high price of postage and everything else...
This last siege of storms has made for long winter. The snow is welcome, but it may delay spring grass and the return of migratory birds. As kids, our first sign of spring was the melting snow, which was ideal for snowballs. During the better part of winter, the snow was too cold and dry to stick together. After the doldrums of the cold months, any change was welcome. We knew that the huge snowbanks formed in December would start to disappear soon. Being raised in the country...
This last blizzard got me thinking about how hard the old timers had to work just to keep the house warm from September to May, and to cook every day of the year. Both families and homes were often large in those days, many having a cook stove plus three or four heating stoves. I've been told that some of the houses used over 60 cords a year. Our paternal great uncle took care of the firewood at the ranch, and always maintained the woodshed completely full of split blocks – p...
When I was at my sickest in Brazil, and my legs didn't work to the point I sometimes couldn't get off the toilet by myself, I remembered a rancher whom I knew from my infancy to adulthood. Kenny and his brother had a ranch about six miles from ours. He suffered polio as a child, and didn't have the use of his legs. He used crutches his entire life, Even on crutches, Kenny mowed hay in the summer, a job that often involved him struggling on and off the tractor scores of times...
I've always kept myself on the outer edges of society, preferring to observe its actions and ideas with a soft contempt, always keeping my "ironic distance" from the point of my own contrived superiority. I think this trait began in the spring of 1965, when I was a senior in high school. In those days, Lawrence Welk and Art Linkletter ruled the TV world. The supposed moral decay of the later 1960's hadn't yet reached Montana. It was then that I saw through the arbitrary...
