Deer Lodge once was a two-stoplight town. It’s a quieter, less-populated place now. The town lost 1,000 residents after the railroad pulled out. This view looks south toward the old prison, towers visible in the distance.

By Kevin S. Giles

I have memories of my father building a contraption that sprinkled used motor oil on the gravel road beside our house. He hitched it to his 1953 Chevy pickup, driving it back and forth to keep the dust down. Neighbors who wanted to help with this endeavor, which included everyone living in the four houses at the intersection of College Avenue and Claggett Street, stood on the

This photo from 1965 shows a conveyer belt hauling earth out of our expanding basement at the corner of College Avenue and Claggett Street in Deer Lodge.

contraption as it bounced along, turning faucet handles that released the oil. It seems gravity created the flow. Possibly it was something more ingenious than that, such as a pump, but time has blurred the details. Dad was blue collar to the core. His first love, I think, was tinkering with machinery. When he wasn’t working inside the walls of Montana State Prison, he was running machines in the detached garage behind our house. He rebuilt motors. He also owned at least a dozen machines for sharpening saws and blades. Often, he kept several running at once, a cacophony of grinding and screeching. Even today, I hear those ear-wrenching sounds.

Dad didn’t sit still for long. I came home from school one day to find the kitchen linoleum rolled and stacked in the corner while he nailed down squeaking floorboards. Sometime in that era he began shoveling outside the kitchen window after dinner. I asked what he was doing. “Digging a basement, after I find the bottom of the foundation.” And he did. I helped, through a cold icy winter, rolling wheelbarrows full of earth from the ever-widening space beneath our house to a rumbling conveyer belt hundreds of times.

I have an unlimited cache of dad stories when I think back to my hometown of Deer Lodge, Montana. Nostalgia and hometowns go together. I have a million stories about my hometown, as do you.

Let me take you back, then.

Can you hear the siren at City Hall sounding curfew at 10 p.m.? Hourly chimes from the bell tower at the Catholic Church? Boxcars slamming in the train yards back in the day when the railroad ruled the town? Meadowlarks on a summer morning? The thumping of a car breaking deep snow after most of Deer Lodge had gone to bed? Movies playing at the Rialto on Main Street?

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Can you see inmates in their lighted cells visible over the old prison wall? Know the blur of a Ferris wheel on an August night when the little carnival came to the Tri-County Fair? See the dawn rising over the eastern mountains and the sun setting behind Mount Powell? Witness the cattle drives through town?

Hometowns are all about diving into our deep well of memories. We remember people who helped us and those who hurt us. Time wipes away most of our painful moments. Hometowns bind people. We meet people who share that hallowed ground and talk for hours. Most other folks, less so. Memories vary between generations as a town’s complexion changes. Still, the foundation is there. People of all ages wear their hometowns like a badge of honor.

Several of my classmates are gone. I’ll mention a few of them: Denis, a fellow Boy Scout, died in a car accident a year after high school graduation. Bob Finch, a microbiologist, died of cancer at 30 years old. Bruce, a blossoming trial attorney, was shot to death in a commuter train robbery in Chicago. Cancer ended Bob’s life a few months after I joined him for breakfast at a restaurant and noticed his yellow pallor. Bill, a National Park Service ranger, died after his lifelong war with diabetes overwhelmed him. Rick, one of my closest friends in high school, fell dead of a heart attack after he quit smoking and lost 50 pounds.

Kevin S. Giles wrote ‘Summer of the Black Chevy,’ a novel, which tells the story of teenagers finding their way in life.

I met Rick at the start of my sophomore year. He was one of the toughest kids I knew and one of the kindest. He got a job at the IGA grocery store where his dad worked, earning money to buy cars. The first was a German Ford that belonged to his grandparents. Something went kaput with the transmission on Main Street as were taking two girls for a ride, attempting to impress them. The second was a 1958 Pontiac that caught fire under the hood. I found him dousing it with a garden hose in front of his house. The third car was the best. It was a 1956 Ford, two-tone blue, in fine condition. Rick persuaded me to drive to Butte one Sunday afternoon in February or March. We were halfway there when the engine seized up on the windswept highway. Whether the oil drained out or the coolant was low, the result was the same. I waited in the car, shivering, while he hitchhiked for help. Later, I spent two hours in the bathtub at home thawing out.

One evening at a Wardens football game at the fairgrounds, known as the “cow palace,” Rick joined the cheerleaders in front of the crowd. He was waving a pompon when a kid from Anaconda made fun of him. Insults were exchanged. In instant, Rick threw a flurry of punches, knocking the bigger boy backwards onto the ground. It wasn’t long after that when a couple of boxers from Butte jumped Rick and our friend Don outside the high school gym during a basketball game, beating them to a pulp. Rick came wandering into the gym during the game, dazed and bleeding, crossing the floor to the police chief on the other side.

Rick joined the Marines after high school. We hadn’t seen each other for most of our adult lives. We finally reconnected through Facebook. We made plans to see each other that summer. Then he died.

I remember clearly those hometown moments with Rick. The past cements them together. Hometowns, I think, are best remembered through childhood eyes. It’s possible that people who stay and grow old in their hometowns don’t have the abrupt memories of someone who lived there and left. Adult life has a way of wearing off the sharp edges. Nostalgia isn’t necessarily romantic, or should be romanticized, but it does appeal to our primal need for security and belonging.

I’ve returned to Deer Lodge less frequently over the years. Dad died young and my mother moved away. My hometown looks different and yet very much the same. The population has dwindled. High school enrollment has fallen to less than half of what it was when the town hit its peak in the 1960s. Residents, on average, are older. One of the two Main Street stoplights disappeared long ago.

The town struggles for an infusion of customers for its downtown businesses and, in a broader sense, its identity. It’s a slower town than when I lived there. Some of the most prominent historical buildings, like St. Mary’s Academy, are gone. Dilapidated houses and empty storefronts scream abandonment.

All that noted, Deer Lodge is a place of hope. Other houses and businesses are beautifully kept. The town has a world-class Rialto theater, rebuilt after a devastating fire, and a rare railroad hotel that many residents want to save. It’s got Old Montana Prison Museum, and the Grant-Kohrs National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park Service. The territorial-era buildings on Main Street are worthy of a movie set.

For someone long gone like me, walking the streets of Deer Lodge is like consorting with ghosts. I picture people working in their yards in the years before they died. I hear the yap-yap of sprinklers on summer mornings. I hear the ticking clock in the town library on the mornings I checked the boiler before school. I hear the cadence of the band and the oompahing of my sousaphone as we marched down Milwaukee Avenue on Memorial Day. I see long-ago faces in

This is the gravel intersection where my father and our neighbors oiled the gravel road. The dust was terrible in summer. Note the date.

the stores, in the second-story meeting room in the Moose Lodge, in my classrooms at O.D. Speer school and at the Ben Franklin store. I recall the paper and ink smell of the magazine rack at Corner Drug. I see men emptying battered aluminum garbage cans in the alleys, guards standing on the towers at the old prison, our mail carrier pushing a three-wheeled cart full of letters from house to house. I see my dad, Murry, shifting the gears of his pickup as we rode to Downing Chevrolet to load barrels of used motor oil he poured on the road to knock down that cloud of dust around our house.

Hometown memories, we have a million of them. They stay stacked in a closet in the mind until we discover them all over again.

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Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.