Category Archives: Summer of the Black Chevy

I once enjoyed those winter days in Montana. In my memory, I still do.

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By Kevin S. Giles

I reflect often on the majesty of snow and ice as seen through the eyes of a Montana boy.

Winter, you lost friend.

Sliding and skating captivated me mostly in my preteen years. I’m much older now and inclined toward frequent bouts of sentimentality. Barreling down a hill on metal runners holds no charm for me nowadays. Not that I care to further experience what’s done. Ice gives me shivers since I slipped and broke my shoulder a few years ago. The wonder of ice still astounds me, but only ice on a rink. Caution comes with age.

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Nothing like a death ride behind the wheel, but foolishness loses its appeal with age

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By Kevin S. Giles

Navigating the insane traffic on a recent cross-country road trip reminded me how I once aspired to the simple pleasure of driving my parents’ car down Main Street.

The license I coveted would allow me freedom behind the wheel. The freedom I envisioned involved “cruising the drag” with friends in our small western Montana town.

A teenager doesn’t think ahead to crowded interstate highways where speeding multi-ton vehicles pass within inches of each other. That’s the stuff of adult life.

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Places in the heart: Memories zip us back to hometowns we knew and loved

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Photo shows Deer Lodge, Montana, in 1918.

An apparent Fourth of July celebration, possibly during World War I, shows Main Street in Deer Lodge, Montana. Today the buildings look much the same but the globed light posts disappeared years ago and the fountain was moved to the courthouse lawn. Photo from Model T Forum.

By Kevin S. Giles

Hometowns fascinate me.

It appears I’m not alone. I see a proliferation of “I Grew Up In (Name Your Hometown)” social groups on Facebook, the preferred social media for nostalgia-inclined adults. I have my hometown and I’m sure you have yours. Get involved. Let it all out. Make some true confessions. What’s the point of living if you can’t admit that you, and some fine senior classmates, toilet-papered your English teacher’s house on Halloween?

I’m speaking for a friend, of course.

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My small town vs. all those big cities: Here’s one native Montanan’s point of view.

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Photo shows Japanese friends

When I attended a banquet in Japan, two of these young women came to me with a camera, gesturing they wanted their photo taken. Three more jumped into the picture seconds before it was taken. I think they liked that I am tall.

By Kevin S. Giles

I told someone the other day about visiting Tokyo-Yokohama, an imagination-stretching megalopolis of 38 million people. Riding a bus into the heart of Tokyo from Narita International Airport took three hours. It was after dark. Even in the night, young business types toting briefcases streamed down the sidewalks. That scene continued for most of my journey to a downtown hotel where I could extend my arms to reach both walls in my room. In a megalopolis, space is precious.

Raised a small-town Montanan, I never felt inclined to intentionally seek out big cities. I’ve seen my share, such as Chicago and Honolulu and Sydney. I’m probably a better man for it. A good life is one of resonance, particularly for writers. Fabled large cities bring perspective to our occupation of this good earth.

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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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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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Rough and rumble on a hot August night in 1958 in Deer Lodge, Montana

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Photo shows Deer Lodge, Montana

In the 1950s, Main Street in Deer Lodge was a happening place with not one — but two — stop lights. Teenagers found the long wide street, also known as State Hwy. 10, great for cruisin’ (and sometimes looking for a bruisin’).

By Suzanne Lintz Ives

The gangs in my high school time were from Anaconda. Hairy girls tucked cigarettes packs into their rolled-up T-shirt sleeves. They were tougher and meaner than bear. They were really scary.

One Sunday afternoon, a couple of those wild females ones from Anaconish (as we sometimes called the neighboring town of ruffians), were quietly strolling Main Street in Deer Lodge. My gang and I (five of us) were cruising the drag in my Dad’s Pontiac (the one with the clutch), when my buddy, Dood, yelled out the window, “Hey, look at that! Street walkers!”

That’s when the brown, sticky stuff hit the centrifuge …

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Here’s what Author Kevin S. Giles said to graduates of Montana high school … in 1984!

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Photo shows Powell County High School

A postcard shows the “new” Powell County High School in Deer Lodge, Montana, which opened in 1903. An addition was added in the 1950s. The original building remains the heart of the school.

By Kevin S. Giles

(I was commencement speaker at Powell County High School in 1984, a special privilege because my sister Kerry graduated in that class. Here are selected comments from what I told those 100 or so graduates. You’ll see that the onset of the computer age played big. My initial comments referred to my own experiences in that high school in the 1960s.)

We always complained there was nothing to do in Deer Lodge, and then stayed out all night getting it done. And, of course, we were always ready to give adults the full benefit of our inexperience.

…

We expressed a burning desire to be different by dressing exactly alike.

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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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