Tag Archives: Deer Lodge Montana

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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Revival of closed Montana hotel back on track after a discouraging year

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Hotel Deer Lodge, Montana

Hotel Deer Lodge as it looked soon after it opened. The building, now shuttered, dominates the Deer Lodge, Montana, business district.

By Kevin S. Giles

The pandemic and a $400 city fine nearly killed the latest effort to restore Hotel Deer Lodge, an abandoned 33,000-square-foot brick structure at the heart of a western Montana town’s business district.

“When they shut us down it took the wind out of our sails,” said Kip Kimerly, who leads the nonprofit venture to revive the long-shuttered hotel that opened in 1912 to a burst of civic celebration.

Now, he’s promising a renewed effort to bring the historic building back to life.

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‘Walking the wall’ meant seeing Montana’s prison from a tower guard’s point of view

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Photo shows state troopers at Montana State Prison

My dad, Murry Giles, is shown kneeling and steadying the ladder outside Tower 7 the night of April 16, 1959. Armed state troopers climbed atop the wall to discourage inmates from attempting to break out. Tower 7, known also as “the main gate,” had fortified doors at street level that led into the prison. New prisoners walked through those doors to a life in the bars. Photo/Old Montana Prison

By Kevin S. Giles

Do high places bother you? Would you walk on a narrow wall 22 feet above the sidewalk? A wall lacking a railing?

When I read my father’s Montana State Prison hiring papers from 1958, after he applied for a guard job, handwriting near the bottom caught my eye. “Walked the wall OK,” someone wrote.

BUY! Jerry's Riot

I didn’t fully grasp the significance of that notation until I began researching for my book, Jerry’s Riot: The True Story of Montana’s 1959 Prison Disturbance, years later. The prison required applicants to “walk the wall” because tower guards rotated after an hour or two. Whether performing this feat was seen by administrators as a practical skill or a test of courage, I don’t know. The date on my dad’s application shows he walked the wall in winter. How did he avoid falling?

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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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Liquor company owner takes over shuttered Montana hotel, promises revival

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Photo of Hotel Deer Lodge.

Hotel Deer Lodge, standing at the center of the city’s business district, opened in 1912 as “one of the finest accommodations in Montana.” (Photos courtesy of Deer Lodge Preservation, Inc.)

By Kevin S. Giles

The chief executive officer of a Montana-based liquor company will lead a historic hotel revival with a plan to create a five-star destination.

Kip Kimerly, of Precious Vodka USA, Inc., took charge of Hotel Deer Lodge preservation in a deal struck Jan. 23, 2020.

The hotel remains owned by Deer Lodge Preservation, Inc., but the group will be represented by a new board of directors that Kimerly will lead as president, said Kayo Fraser, one of the former board members.

Kimerly envisions a nonprofit project to restore the empty building for hotel use on the upper floors, with retail space and a banquet room created on the ground floor.

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Reunions remind us of time and place, also restore valued face-to-face contact

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Photo shows class reunion

Kevin S. Giles with high school classmates (and longtime friends) Eric and Don at the July 2019 all-class reunion in Deer Lodge, Montana.

By Kevin S. Giles

Long before social media became a convenient tool for organizing reunions (or displacing them), people traveled great distances to enjoy face-to-face gatherings with friends and relatives.

Today reunions endure. We have reunions to celebrate music, religion, employment, ethnic heritage, history, neighborhoods, cities and military service.

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Inside story: when bold rioting convicts took control of Montana State Prison

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Prison mug shot of Jerry Myles

Jerry Myles was a stubby, intelligent career criminal who planned the April 16, 1959, takeover in defiance of new ‘reform’ Warden Floyd Powell. Photo by Kevin Giles

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By Kevin S. Giles

Sixty years ago, a deadly uprising at Montana State Prison began when two dangerous inmates doused a guard in Cell House 1 with gasoline and threatened to set him afire with a flaming mop. The inmates took the guard’s rifle and several rounds of ammunition and then, over the next few hours, gained control of the entire prison.

When inmates control the prison …

That riot began on Thursday, April 16, 1959. It ended 36 hours later.

Cover of 'Jerry's Riot'

This memoir by Kevin S. Giles details the 1959 disturbance at Montana State Prison and events leading to it.

Those troublesome inmates were Jerry Myles and Lee Smart, both psychopaths. Myles was the mastermind. He was a career burglar and an intelligent conniver. His ability to break rules and lead inmate mutinies resulted in his incarceration in three federal prisons, including Alcatraz. Smart was a runaway delinquent who, on impulse, became a teenage murderer. Guards who knew the men said they were lovers.

Smart shot and killed Deputy Warden Ted Rothe in his office inside the walls. Myles slashed a sergeant with a knife, seriously injuring him. They took 26 hostages, both guards and civilians, threatening to burn them alive or hang them from the cell house galleys. Minutes after the National Guard begin a barrage of rocket fire from the west wall of the prison yard, Myles shot Smart and then himself in the northwest corner of Cell House 1.

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Senior Lounge, historic experiment during psychedelic days in Montana high school

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Photo shows Powell County High School

The “new” Powell County High School in Deer Lodge is more than 100 years old. An addition to the west side of this building, at left, was completed in the late 1950s. Senior Lounge was at the back of the school at far right.

By Kevin S. Giles

It probably occurred to reasonable adults that grouping “Senior” and “Lounge” in a singular title was a spectacular admission of what would follow, but so it was.

I’m a veteran (survivor?) of the historic, but short-lived, experiment that began at my Powell County High School in the fall of 1969. We were the new seniors, the Class of 1970, emboldened with a plan that we should be trusted without supervision in a remote corner of the old school.

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Montana memory: when a man, resembling a boy, arrived in our little town

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(I originally published a shorter version of this post in my monthly e-newsletter. If you wish to join my free mailing list, add your email address here.)

By Kevin S. Giles

When I was young I knew a man named Mickey. Despite his graying temples he was more of a boy like me. Mickey arrived in our hometown of Deer Lodge, Montana, in the summer. He became a conspicuous presence around town as he rode his bicycle everywhere, a thirty-something man pedaling with an oversized wire basket attached to the handlebars. The basket, he told me, was for running errands for the nuns at the Catholic Church.

Mickey came from the state school for the developmentally disabled at Boulder. My parents explained that a new law sent people who lived in institutions to towns and cities across Montana to live among us. I didn’t know much about such things at my tender age. However, I did come to know Mickey. When he saw me he smiled and shouted my name, showing the big gap between his top front teeth. “Kevvvvin!” he would sing, sincere in his enthusiasm.

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Saving historic buildings, in western Montana and everywhere, makes good sense

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Photo of Montana grade school

Central School, which opened in 1884, had 13 classrooms and commanded a large city block. It was closed and razed in the late 1960s because of concern that its cavernous central hallways and wood floors would feed a disastrous fire. Photo supplied by Dale Case.

By Kevin S. Giles

I am reminded lately of how the disappearance of old buildings changes the character of cities and countrysides in often undesirable fashion. Not everyone agrees, of course, that history-altering demolitions inflict harm. Some people don’t hold sentimental attachments to old buildings, seeing them as impractical barriers to progress.

Recently I wrote about the value of hometowns, particularly mine. Deer Lodge, Montana, is often cited as the first incorporated city in the state. Despite the losses of several notable buildings over the past five decades, Deer Lodge remains a western town. It traces its roots to the early mining and Civil War eras, still wearing its history well, with enough of the very old infrastructure left to impress on us how the past can survive the future.

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