Category Archives: Blog

Postcards from a Montana town named Deer Lodge, where history lives on

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Photo shows historic Montana theater

The Rialto Theater in Deer Lodge, Montana, was built in 1921 with 720 seats. The Beaux Arts theater featured extensive painted murals, artistic plaster designs, and a painted stage background. Fire destroyed much of it in 2006. The community rallied, restoring and reopening the Rialto in 2012. Here’s an early view.

By Kevin S. Giles

Everyone has a hometown, or should, because it figures strongly in matters of the heart.

Mine is Deer Lodge, a dab of humanity in a seam between two rambling mountain ranges. Deer Lodge is a dwindling place, even smaller than my long-ago days there, but it stands proud before a mighty promontory known as Mount Powell in western Montana. It’s here, in a town with a real Main Street, where memories sleep and the fictional Summer of the Black Chevy takes place.

My favorite postcards show the downtown district through the years. It’s less robust now, but the buildings remain much the same, like history stood still.

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Tales of Froggy, Turkey Pete and ghosts of other old Montana prison convicts

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By Kevin S. Giles

We squinted at the wind-chapped brick, trying to decipher some of the nicknames carved into it.

“Right there!” said the old guard, jabbing impatiently with his finger, and I knew he was waiting to tell me a story. “That one!”

He pushed me closer to the wall, pointing again to a crude carving. I saw it, sure enough. “Froggy,” it read, but I didn’t know the name and when I shrugged, he seemed grateful for my ignorance.

The old guard tore into a checkered tale, staining the air with his blue language. The story he told described a convict who had spent a half-century at the Old Montana Prison in Deer Lodge, Montana. He had been an accomplice in a sensational 1959 riot. It was a blood-letting; three people died.

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

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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.

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(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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Montana native remembers his first cars (and motorcycles, and ranch summers)

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Photo shows blue pickup

Young men from Deer Lodge, from left: David Lintz, car sentimentalist Earl Cook, Eric Coughlin, Kevin Giles. This was 10 years after our high school graduation. We were classmates.

By Earl Cook

I am car poor. There are three vehicles in my garage and my wife has her own (x license and insurance). Cars can have addictive properties for guys of my vintage. I particularly like the cars from the 50’s and 60’s, though many new model cars turn my head. Around, and around. “They don’t make ‘em like they used to.” No. They make “em” better. And right in-the-face of powerful, practical, cultural change, there is still the desire for additional horsepower and roaring pipes.

Photo shows pickup

Here is the famous 1956 Chevy pickup we all remember.

When I was 11 years old my Uncle Frank and Aunt Joan invited me to the Helmville (Montana) Valley during the summer months to “work for wages.” I couldn’t do much. Pick weeds, feed the bum lambs, bring in the milk cow, follow behind Frank and pay attention. He put me in the seat, behind the wheel of a 1942 Willy’s Army surplus jeep. It had a homemade plywood top with removable doors. I was instructed to put the jeep in compound gear, let the clutch out slowly, and steer between the bales of hay, up and down the meadow. He half-walked, half-skipped alongside and bucked bales onto a skid of lodge pole pine. Boy did I think I was somethin’!

When I returned to school in the fall, I was quick to boast to my friends that “I could drive!” My Dad got tired of my requests to back his car out of the garage and ended it with, “not until you have your license.” From that day forward, all I thought about was the day that I would get my driver’s license.

The following summer I was introduced to a Ford tractor and side-delivery rake. Frank mowed hay with a tractor and side-bar sickle. Aunt Joan would cut out “a piece” of ground by making the first pass in the field, pulling the mowed grass from the irrigation ditch, and return in the opposite direction, forming the first windrow, and then hand over the equipment to me.

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Lyle Gillette: Retired Montana teacher stood for kids, now needs help himself

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Photo shows Montana prison tour

Lyle Gillette, in the purple cap at left, briefs people inside Old Montana Prison before beginning a tour in 2009. He led tours inside the prison, now a museum, for years. Many of the people attending this particular tour were participants (or their relatives) in the 1959 prison riot. The Montana National Guard ended it after three days. (Photo by Kevin S. Giles)

(Sad update: Lyle Gillette died Aug. 21, 2015 after, his son reported, five days of terrible pain.)

By Kevin S. Giles

The first time I met Lyle Gillette we were a rowdy bunch, some of us more than others, as he took charge of our eighth-grade gym class.

We wore red gym trunks that we stored with our tennis shoes and jock straps in wire baskets in the basement below the basketball floor. Every so often, when the air in the locker room ripened, Lyle would get after us for neglecting the washing machine.

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Montana memory: Confessions of a little girl drug store shoplifter who tried to make amends

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Photo shows old building

This early photo shows the Masonic Temple building in Deer Lodge, Montana. In later years it housed a drug store on the ground floor behind the corner pillar.

By Suzanne Lintz Ives

As a child, I’d definitely have been on Santa’s “naughty” list. I stole candy when I was little, and then went on to a larger crime that haunted me for 50 years.

First Steps

Photo shows Suzanne Lintz Ives

The author, Suzanne Lintz Ives

If your moral compass is spinning, I ask: Did you ever commit a minor childhood infraction, maybe telling a little fib or swiping a cookie? Crime is crime!

It began in Deer Lodge, Montana. We were scared at first.

Three of us bored seven-year-olds would innocently enter the store. Two of us would distract the clerk by dropping cans on the floor — and one of us would pocket bubble gum, penny suckers, and jawbreakers.

In three tries, we weren’t caught.

Believing we had refined our craft, we were ready for Main Street and Ben Franklin. We even named our gang, “The Egdol Reeds” (Deer Lodge spelled backward).

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Keep a tight line: Memories of fishing for browns on Montana’s Little Blackfoot River

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Photo shows Bill Haviland

Bill Haviland describes his favorite fishing hole north of his hometown of Deer Lodge, Montana.

My childhood friend William Kelsey Haviland, no longer walking among us, wrote his thoughts on fishing a few years back. It’s worth sharing, if no other reason than to hear Bill’s voice one last time, much as we heard Norman Mclean speak of the ghostly water as he ended “A River Runs Through It.” Bill describes his favorite fishing hole north of our hometown of Deer Lodge, Montana. He died in the summer of 2014 when complications from diabetes stole his eyesight, stilled his legs, silenced his heart. In his essay, he speaks of Bob, another childhood friend who died of leukemia at age 30. And so the river runs over rocks from the basement of time.

By Bill Haviland

I fished the Blackfoot downstream of the bridge that crosses the river coming off Beck Hill. The river closed to fishing after noon because of low water and high temperatures. The Little Blackfoot seems to stay cool because of the many springs feeding it along its banks.

I crawled under two barbed wire fences, one between the road and railroad tracks, and one between the railroad and river. Old fences are loose enough to get under. I walked downriver through the tall cottonwoods.

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Ed “Bus” Ellsworth: A National Guard colonel recalls a deadly Montana prison riot

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Guards at prison

Victor Baldwin, shown fourth from right in this 1970s photo, survived being taken hostage in 1959. Many of these guards shown here were involved in the riot or began work at the prison soon afterwards. Photo permitted by Don DeYott of Montana State Prison

By Kevin S. Giles

In the 30 years since his last days as warden, Ed “Bus” Ellsworth had never gone inside the old prison in Deer Lodge. I coaxed him back on a raw March afternoon, anxious to hear what he could remember about the 1959 riot and its aftermath.

I was researching a book I planned to write someday. I didn’t have a title for it because, like writers do, I was trying to find the central story. Newspaper reports of the day described the riot as “a failed escape attempt by a desperate madman.” That seemed much too predictable an explanation, and I thought Ellsworth could give me some perspective.

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Wife of a prison hostage recalls details from Montana’s deadly 1959 riot

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Photo shows former prison hostage

Everett “Guff” Felix and his wife Amy Lee shown in the Bitterroot Valley in Western Montana where they lived after the 1959 riot. Guff was a captain and taken hostage. He never went back to Montana State Prison. (Photo by Kevin Giles)

By Kevin S. Giles

Recently I discovered that Amy Lee Felix had died. In reading her obituary I remembered, in some detail, visiting her home in the mid-1990s in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana. I was there to interview Amy’s husband, Everett “Guff” Felix, who had a remarkable story to tell about being held hostage during the 1959 prison riot in Deer Lodge.

Guff would be remembered as the highest-ranking officer taken hostage when the riot began on April 16. He was a captain then, just a few years after he closed his restaurant and began looking for work, hardly prepared by his own admittance to deal with rioting prisoners.

I took the following from a letter Amy wrote me in 1996. It shows what Guff faced as the prison’s new captain: Continue reading →