Remembering a night in Missoula, Montana, with western novelist A.B. Guthrie

By Kevin S. Giles

Somewhere into that alcohol-fueled book signing that evening, Pulitzer Prize winner A.B. Guthrie warned us to “get the hell out of newspapering” if we had any hope of becoming serious fiction writers.

The famous novelist, a slender man who I remember favored unfiltered cigarettes and straight whiskey that night, sat between two authors of far less repute at a table stacked with books. I was to his left admiring my new book, Flight of the Dove: The Story of Jeannette Rankin. To his right was Steve Smith with his fine new book about Smokejumper pilots, Fly the Biggest Piece Back.

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One hot August night the Minneapolis bridge collapsed minutes before I arrived on the scene.

(I lay claim to being the first news reporter to arrive at the scene of the horrific Minneapolis bridge collapse. It was quite by accident. I had never witnessed such pandemonium and probably never will again. That scene on August 1, 2007, in downtown Minneapolis, was a far cry from my quiet country boyhood in Deer Lodge, Montana. Young boys grow up to become writers, and writers (especially news reporters) tell the big stories. I wrote this story early the morning after the bridge collapse. It was posted on our newspaper’s website with some prominence. Breaking news of the rescue efforts quickly drove it onto the back pages. I share it now because the memory of that humid chaotic night – stricken faces, screaming sirens and a twisted, fallen bridge — sticks to me like glue. Kevin S. Giles)

By Kevin S. Giles

I left the downtown Star Tribune newsroom minutes before 6 p.m. Wednesday to head home. Traffic seemed light, even with the Minnesota Twins playing in the Metrodome across the street. I crossed the Third Avenue bridge and remember looking eastward toward the Interstate 35W Bridge and thinking how blue the sky looked.

On the north side of the bridge I took a detour through St. Anthony Main to get to University Avenue. Then I saw a huge brown cloud in the sky. Maybe it’s coming from construction on the 35W Bridge, I thought. When I had driven across that bridge in the morning on the way to work, dozens of construction workers huddled in the shade of their vehicles, taking a morning break.

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