Category Archives: Montana memories

Miles traveled: A writer’s journey began in the mountains of western Montana

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Photo shows Kevin S. Giles

This was during the time I wrote “Flight of the Dove.” I was at my paying job (or appearing so) in the Independent Record newsroom in Helena, Montana.

By Kevin S. Giles

Ideas for writing fiction tumbled around in my head for most of the bouncing long road through adulthood. I also deal in fact. I still can’t say with certainty which is harder to write.

I wrote Flight of the Dove: The Story of Jeannette Rankin on a typewriter when my second daughter, Harmony, was a baby. Looking back, writing nonfiction in the pre-Internet days seems somewhat of a miracle. I spent hours in the library at card files, and writing letters to distant places, and trying to revise my story by retyping pages time and again. The new edition of the Rankin book (One Woman Against War), which I launched in 2016, benefits from technology that puts information at our fingertips.

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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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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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