Category Archives: Blog

How it all began: A suffragist, an inspiration and a biography about Jeannette Rankin

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Photo shows Montana suffragist

Suffragist Belle Fligelman Winestine was the inspiration for Flight of the Dove, the Jeannette Rankin biography written by Kevin S. Giles. He published a new and expanded edition in October 2016, entitled One Woman Against War. This photo was taken at a book signing ceremony at the Montana Historical Society. Photo by Gene Fischer

(Today we’re going back to tell about my original biography of Jeannette Rankin, Flight of the Dove. This story, which appeared in the Missoulian many years ago, explains how I got started researching Rankin’s life and writing the first book. The roots of my new and expanded edition, One Woman Against War, can be traced to when I met Belle Fligelman Winestine, an early Montana suffragist. – Kevin S. Giles)

By Deirdre McNamer.

Life is sometimes like that. Two events come together in an uncanny way and you suddenly find yourself on a whole new tack.

For Helena newsman Kevin Giles, the coincidence took place one day in October 1976. Giles, who was editor of the Independent Record’s lifestyle section, had just interviewed Belle Fligelman Winestine, a tiny, fiery octogenarian who had been a leader in the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s.

Winestine had also served as administrative secretary to Montana Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin in 1917, and she convinced Giles that the really INTERESTING story would be an account of Rankin’s life and work.

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Vietnam-era Jeannette Rankin peace parade: Thousands of voices, speaking as one

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Photo shows first page of Jeannette Rankin book

The updated Jeannette Rankin biography, by Kevin S. Giles, starts with her participation in a peace protest at the US Capitol in 1968. She’s was one of America’s best-known pacifists.

(This is selected from the first chapter of One Woman Against War: The Jeannette Rankin Story. A second selection will appear next week. © Kevin S. Giles)

By Kevin S. Giles

It wasn’t a convenient morning. Snow had fallen overnight, filling the streets surrounding the United States Capitol with slush and mud. Several thousand women wearing boots and overcoats gathered around an old woman in the gray light outside Union Station. She stood shivering, hardly resembling a historical figure, at first appearing long past her prime. Eyeglasses loomed over her wrinkled face. The old woman watched the milling crowd while organizers called activists into place, state by state, and handed them protest banners. They would march on the Capitol to protest the war in Vietnam. They would decry the slaughter of young men, profiteering by corporations with fat defense contracts, congressional neglect of social and economic needs at home. They would take to the streets to beseech their government to listen to their grievances. They wanted change. They wanted peace. It all seemed hauntingly familiar to this diminutive octogenarian named Jeannette Rankin.

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A saved Rialto: A championship team trophy for the folks of Deer Lodge, Montana

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Photo shows Rialto Theater in Deer Lodge, Montana

Steve Owens, president of Rialto Community Theater, shown in the reconstructed hallway leading to the balcony. Photos by Kevin Giles

By Kevin S. Giles

The fire was so horrific that it lit the night sky for miles. It consumed the priceless 1921 theater with frightening urgency. In the end, most of the ornate movie palace was gone.

Three days later, after dozens of volunteer firefighters poured three million gallons of water on the inferno’s sad work, the people of Deer Lodge, Montana, took stock of their Rialto Theater.

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The terra cotta Beaux-Arts façade stood, a near-miracle. Most of the stage remained, as did five original painted canvas backdrops. A fire curtain fell when the heat rose, saving the back portion of the Rialto.

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Extra! Gangs of newsboys once ruled street corners in uptown Butte, Montana

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Photo shows newsboys smoking

Newsboys ruled uptown Butte, Montana, and similar cities where news was a hot commodity and newspapers competed for readers. (Public domain photo)

By Kevin S. Giles, author of Mystery of the Purple Roses

Newsboys once commanded the streets of uptown Butte, Montana, fighting each other for turf but uniting against newspaper publishers.

Hundreds of newsboys competed for prime selling spots: bars, the miners’ pay office, sections of the red light district, card rooms and mine gates, streetcar stops, ballparks, churches and theaters, and anywhere else where large crowds might gather.

They bought newspapers at a wholesale price, sometimes two copies for a nickel, and then sold them for a nickel apiece to make a 100 percent profit.

Buy! Mystery of the Purple Roses

In Butte’s early years, newspaper offices dotted the extensive business district. Cries of, “Paper, mister!” could be heard on every street corner. They sold the Standard, the Butte Miner, the Inter-Mountain, the Daily Bulletin, the Butte Daily Post, the Appeal to Reason, the Montana Socialist and others.

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About that pacifist, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin from Montana …

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Photo shows Jeanmarie Bishop

Jeanmarie Bishop has performed dozens of roles in regional theatre and stock in the US and Canada and began directing while still in her teens. Jeanmarie is founding artistic director of the Nevada Shakespeare Company, from which she retired in 2008. She lives in Arizona, where she continues to act and write.

(I wrote this as the foreword for Jeanmarie Bishop’s new published play about Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress. “Tens of thousands have seen the play in theatres, meeting halls and living rooms throughout the world,” Bishop writes.)

By Kevin S. Giles

It’s been said that to truly understand Jeannette Rankin requires practicing what drove her through a lifelong pursuit of pacifism. Otherwise we stare at her through a looking glass from afar, seeing eventful mileposts but never breathing the rarefied air of her innermost thoughts. Yes, Rankin was the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. She was the only American to vote against two world wars. She was widely vilified for doing that, but why?

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‘Down Under’ … yes, even years later, our living in Australia remains unforgettable

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Photo shows wallabies in Australia

Becky and Kevin S. Giles found a few wallaby friends in Queensland, Australia.

(I wrote this for Australian newspapers after our visit in 2002 to renew friendships made when we lived in Brisbane. It’s worth repeating for anyone interested in a journey Down Under.)

By Kevin S. Giles

The conversations go something like this:

“I heard you went somewhere exotic on your vacation?”

I grin, because I can hardly stop myself from sharing one of those dreaded “you know what I did?” travelogues.

“Yes, I went to Australia.”

“That’s so cool!” comes the reply. “I’ve always wanted to go there. I hear it’s a really great place.” And then comes the puzzled question: “Where exactly did you go?”

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In Helena, Montana, it was Louise Rankin Galt helping out a young author

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By Kevin S. Giles

When I began researching the life of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, I went to the law offices of Louise Rankin Galt. She was a block off Last Chance Gulch in Helena, Montana, continuing the practice she once shared with her late husband, Wellington Rankin.

In the years after Wellington’s death, Louise had married rancher Jack Galt, but she very much remained a link to the famous Rankin family.

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Author Kevin S. Giles: If you want readers, publishing is only part of a long story

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Photo shows Kevin S. Giles

The author, Kevin S. Giles, pondering his next cavalcade of words. Sunglasses optional.

By Kevin S. Giles

I learned a few things. One of these discoveries was a reminder that promoting a book takes a lot of work, even more than it did in the early Internet era. Infinite online opportunities await hopeful authors. So does the challenge of cutting through the “noise” of tens of millions of people trying to get noticed all at once, many of them promoting a political bias or sharing false information. Yes, the Internet has opened a new frontier to authors. No, finding an audience doesn’t come easy, because distractions abound.

When I published Summer of the Black Chevy, the spam started rolling in like a winter storm. Internet marketers promise they can deliver a rich market of readers — for an undisclosed price, of course — and they aren’t entirely wrong about that. Navigating the Internet, and rising above the noise, does require a strategy that largely involves social media to target customers.

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Memories of summer jobs, and that oh-so-regrettable mosquito truck incident

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Photo shows two Montana boys

Cousins Hugh Wales and Earl Cook (right) outside hop kiln, Yakima Valley, in the summer of 1967.

By Earl Cook

Kevin S. Giles’ novel, Summer of the Black Chevy, took me to a time and place where our community had a spirit of vitality and promise. Young Paul Morrison was typical of many young people then who started early on with some work after school, or on weekends, and then a summer job. Opportunities to work were plentiful.

I once delivered the news. Grade school. It was The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Sunday edition, delivered Monday after dinner. Twenty cents a copy. It was a tough sell and I had but seven to 11 regular customers, for a very short run. It was hell going door to door in sub-zero temperatures. I believe my customers subscribed out of empathy. I got to keep a dime for each paper sold. And though I wasn’t going to get rich, it was worth its weight in “funny papers.”

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Houses in Montana when we were kids, and the meaning of being at ‘home’

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Photo shows childhood house

Here’s my final home in Deer Lodge, Montana. It was the last of six houses where various stages of my youth took place. I returned here many times, but as an adult. It was a homey place, a refuge.

By Kevin S. Giles

I lived in six houses in the 12 years I spent in public schools, all of them in Deer Lodge, Montana. Each time we moved I left a piece of me behind, less perceptible than the pencil marks on the walls where my mother measured my escalating height. Scattered behind me, like pages ripped from a diary, were memories formed by physical proximity.

They linger in the shape of walls and size of rooms, and the number of rooms, and stairwells and pantries, and dim lights that made it tough to read a textbook at the kitchen table after dinner. Physical spaces frame events and interactions that make us who we are. It’s destiny to find our more mature selves in unfamiliar rooms of the next house.

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