Category Archives: Blog

That memorable time renting in Alberton, Montana, autumn 1973

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By Kevin S. Giles

That dog looked obedient enough, staring at us with shining eyes and nary a whimper until the retired teacher told us Tippy was dead and stuffed and nailed to a board. A black poodle she couldn’t bear to part with when the parting time came. Dead dog on a board decorating the living room in the dead old house.

The house sat on a hillside beneath an umbrella of trees, pretty enough at a glance. Just out the back door, half a dozen steps north, the mountain began its steep climb to somewhere a thousand feet above us. Watch for bears when you hang your clothes outside to dry, she warned us. They come around, right down that mountain, wandering into the yard just as they please. They like it best after dusk.

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Hitting the open road in California in 1971. Rolling down Highway 1 on a hippie bus.

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By Kevin S. Giles

Oranges rolling down the aisle. That’s what I remember about that bus. Bright oranges as big as softballs tumbling from a yawning-open drawer in a rattling dresser.

Roy and I gripped an array of battered furniture as the old school bus shook and swerved. The hippie chick stayed with her man up front as he drove toward Los Angeles. They were nice enough folks, completely trusting, as they welcomed two hitchhikers aboard. “Hey man,” the driver greeted us. We were young. He looked hardly older. As the man grinded the bus into gear, the girl guided us through a doorway of dangling beads into their apparent living quarters. Tapestries ballooned from the ceiling and music posters blocked light from the windows.

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How a young Montanan found his way into an Aussie newsroom, on hardly a dry note

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By Kevin S. Giles

We shared a desk maybe four feet wide, sitting side by side. He responded to my questions with grunts and wave-of-the-hand dismissals. He was older and knew the drill. I felt intimidated.

We worked the evening shift at the Courier-Mail, the large morning daily newspaper in Brisbane, Australia. We were “sub-editors,” meaning we edited stories and wrote headlines before the presses started late at night. Our combined desk sat at the end of a long room full of other desks, all empty by that time. We sat alone in this room, known as Trade and Finance, staffed in daylight hours with reporters and editors who wrote the business section of the paper. Frosted glass separated us from several other night editors who cussed and coughed beneath a cloud of blue cigarette smoke.

Geoff was an Aussie. I was a Yank, seemingly a fatal distinction to him.

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Echoes and ghosts: Montana prison women left teardrops on the cell house floor

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Photo of female Montana prison inmate

One of the youngest women ever held at Montana State Prison was Evelyn Donges, then 16. She was convicted for luring a man into a robbery on September 11, 1951. He was beaten and later died.

(This story first appeared in the Sunday features section of the Helena, Mont., Independent Record. I wrote it after women held captive at Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge were moved elsewhere. In those days, the women’s unit held only few female offenders. Today, Montana has about 200 inmates in the women’s unit, now in Billings.)

By Kevin S. Giles

DEER LODGE, Mont. — It was a long time ago, it seems, when the women were here.

The row of empty cells – four of them – are dark and damp.

One is empty. Its mattress is rolled and stacked at one end of the bunk, which is cyclone fencing stretched across a metal frame.

In another, books of salvation are scattered across the bed. The gleam of a faraway window bounces off one cover, illuminating its title: Prison to Praise.

A third is the home of a ghost. The bedding has been thrown aside, as if the cell’s occupant was startled by the cold metallic clank of a cell door, and stood for a smoke, or awakened by a nightmare of the past.

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Tale of mysterious 1966 hit and run death in Montana draws strong interest

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By Kevin S. Giles

My recent post about the lingering mysterious hit and run death of 63-year-old widow Montana Martinz attracted a record number of readers to my website.

Within two days, the number of “hits” topped 1,000. My story also generated dozens of emails and instant messages from readers who ventured theories about who drove the car that killed Mrs. Martinz in Deer Lodge, Mont., on Oct. 15, 1966.

Most commonly stated was that the driver was “the son of a prominent businessman,” coupled with another persistent theory that the driver disappeared after police began investigating. Some people remain convinced that a young teenager drove the car that killed her. Others think the driver was a young adult, in one case a father who moved his family out of town soon afterwards. Many readers used the word “coverup” to explain their interpretation of the mystery.

If you’re just now joining us, here’s some brief background: A coroner’s jury empaneled soon afterwards concluded that two and possibly three drivers were racing when Mrs. Martinz was struck. Paint chips taken from her body indicated the car that hit her was a new, blue, 1966 model Chevrolet or Buick. The jury ruled that she died “by an automobile driven in a careless and reckless and criminally negligent manner by a person unknown.”

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50 years later, rumors linger in Montana over hit-and-run death of 63-year-old woman

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(The following story was compiled in 2015 from public court records, newspaper coverage and interviews with public officials and residents. Thanks to Gary Newlon for his research assistance.)

By Kevin S. Giles

Half an hour past twilight, with only a sliver of a moon rising, Montana Martinz began her fateful walk home.

Cradling a sack of groceries, the 63-year-old woman left the IGA supermarket on the main street of Deer Lodge, Montana. It was October 15, 1966. The wind off the mountains felt cold. She stepped briskly through pools of light under the streetlamps.

Four blocks later, she entered the intersection of Fifth Street and Texas Avenue. She was three minutes from her house at 524 Conley Avenue. Mrs. Martinz lived alone. A year earlier, her husband Peter had died at St. Joseph Hospital of coronary thrombosis. Their only child, a son, was grown and gone.

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My brush with a five-star World War II general came in Montana, underground.

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By Kevin S. Giles

I was a young newspaper reporter in Helena, Montana, when a friend’s father tipped me off that the nation’s last living five-star general was seeking relief for his arthritic knees in a nearby radon mine.

I knew enough about World War II history to understand that Omar Bradley was a big deal. He was the “soldiers’ general,” a leader known for his compassion toward his troops. In 1945 he led four armies into the heart of Germany, destroyed the remnants of Hitler’s war machine, and declared: ”This time we shall leave the German people with no illusions about who won the war and no legends about who lost the war. They will know that the brutal Nazi creed they adopted has led them ingloriously to total defeat.”

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We can’t go home again to Montana? Look again at those majestic mountains

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Photo shows Glacier National Park

Unspoken beauty: This is how St. Mary’s Lake, in Glacier National Park, looks from the air. Pilot David R. Hunt, a Deer Lodge native, took this photo.

By Kevin S. Giles

From my aisle seat aboard the sardine can of an airplane, I manage a glimpse through the window before the sleepy woman in front of me, blinded in a purple sleep mask, fumbles the shade down to block any evidence of the outside world. Imagine flying over some of the best mountains on earth and she doesn’t want to look.

Mountains look small from several miles up. We see them blotched over the landscape like paint globs on a canvas, snow gracing their highest peaks. We see their beginnings and endings and the context of their existence in the wide and wild place we know as Montana.

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It’s always a bit unsettling returning to my native state. The mountains point the way to a long-ago place, a yearning deep in the spirit. Random glimpses through tiny plane windows show me little of what I already know is down there. Those mountains are intensely familiar to me but a sudden turnabout from the crowds and traffic noise that surround me in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, now approaching 4 million residents. It takes time to hear Montana’s wind-born silence. Montanans know what I mean.

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Interview with Montana native Kevin S. Giles who writes books about his home state

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Photo shows Kevin S. Giles

Kevin S. Giles is a native Montanan and longtime newspaper journalist.

You’ve published a biography of Jeannette Rankin. Who was she?

¶ History knows her as the first woman elected to Congress. She went to the US House of Representatives in 1916. She was a fierce suffragist, led Montana to approving suffrage in 1914, and rode that momentum to Congress. At that time only 10 states had given women the right to vote. Once Montanans elected Rankin, national suffragists saw her as the voice in Congress who would achieve a federal suffrage amendment.

Did that work out?

¶ Unfortunately for the suffragists, no. World War I got in the way. But even as Congress preoccupied itself with war legislation, Rankin led a push for the federal amendment. The House approved it but the Senate didn’t, by a narrow margin, and it wasn’t until the next Congress that the amendment got enough votes and went to the states for ratification. Some people fault Rankin for failing to secure suffrage by federal amendment in those two years she served in the House. I think the opposite.There’s substantial proof that Rankin’s success at being elected astonished many Americans, the first woman ever, and she achieved more in that term than anybody expected. During that war, Congress didn’t spend much time considering the needs of women and children. That was Rankin’s principal platform, so you can see her challenges beyond the obvious one of being the only woman in the entire male Congress.

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From Kevin S. Giles: What I said about my original Jeannette Rankin biography

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Photo shows author Kevin S. Giles

This is how I looked at the time I published the first edition of my Jeannette Rankin, entitled “Flight of the Dove.” The second edition is renamed “One Woman Against War: the Jeannette Rankin Story.”

These are my actual quotes that I pulled from newspaper and broadcast interviews after I published the original Flight of the Dove. I would say much the same thing today about my new edition, which I retitled, One Woman Against War, but add this: “Pacifists like Jeannette Rankin perpetually live in the shadow of war, devoting their entire lives to shining sunlight on the prospect of peace.”

¶ “Why was she so terribly lonely?”

¶ “My parents have been great, too, always being interested in the book and telling everybody about it. They thought maybe I was a little too radical in college, but never once have they criticized me for writing about a woman who was considered radical in her time.”

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