Tag Archives: Montana authors

Dilemma: Why use a few original words when a great many clichés will do?

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Excuse me for being existential. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

By Kevin S. Giles

Ever notice how we beat some words to death in the news? In social media? In everyday conversation?

For example, why is it important to continually state that all storm damage “looks like a bomb went off?” Or, that the aftermath looks like “a war zone?” Or why we redundantly describe every storm in winter (and sometimes in fall and spring) as “a winter storm?” What else would they be, in winter? A “summer storm” that occurred in winter would be far more newsworthy. And when did a thunderstorm become “a rain event?”

We also have “past history.” In the past? No kidding.

Beware false drama

Why do we engage in false drama, such as “a brutal murder,” heard habitually over the years? If you know of a “kind murder,” let me know. The same idea pertains to “grisly” murders and “tragic” deaths.

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And, the false drama category includes “rushed to the hospital,” one of the most overused and misleading descriptions in journalism. In these days of modern ambulances equipped with the latest medical technology, and EMTs trained in on-scene trauma care, rushing is rare. A newer false drama cliché (used everywhere all of a sudden to describe shootings) is “multiple victims,” lazy news reporting that obscures critical facts. How many people were shot? Two? Seventeen? Forty?

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Rules of the rails: A 20-point guide to Amtrak travel, St. Paul to Whitefish, Montana

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By Kevin S. Giles

•  You’ll see some of the best creative graffiti in America in the switching yards of Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana.

•  You’ll see some of the best forgotten (rusted) classic cars anywhere huddled in rows on farm property alongside the tracks.

•  Riding “coach” on Amtrak’s Empire Builder improves your tolerance for snoring, nose-blowing and occasional disruptive cell phone chatter (especially at night).

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Memories of pre-wildfire Paradise and California psychic Harold Cameron

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Photo of Author Harold Cameron

I met Harold Cameron in Montana when I interviewed him for a news story about his new book, “Night Stalks the Mansion.” We subsequently wrote a book together, although it remains unpublished.

By Kevin S. Giles

Grim fire news of “Paradise lost” in California brought back memories of visits to the city when I was writing about a man’s psychic experiences.

Paradise was home to Harold Cameron, author of a curious ghostly memoir, Night Stalks the Mansion. The nonfiction book was a gripping tale of his family’s experience in a haunted house in Pennsylvania and his subsequent discovery of evidence of murder and suicide. As commonly reported in similar cases, earthbound spirits in Harold’s house perpetually re-enacted tragic decisions, their footsteps echoing night after night.

“It can happen to anyone,” Harold told me. “We are approaching a time when all mankind will have an awareness of an extra-terrestrial experience.”

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How a young Montanan found his way into an Aussie newsroom, on hardly a dry note

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By Kevin S. Giles

We shared a desk maybe four feet wide, sitting side by side. He responded to my questions with grunts and wave-of-the-hand dismissals. He was older and knew the drill. I felt intimidated.

We worked the evening shift at the Courier-Mail, the large morning daily newspaper in Brisbane, Australia. We were “sub-editors,” meaning we edited stories and wrote headlines before the presses started late at night. Our combined desk sat at the end of a long room full of other desks, all empty by that time. We sat alone in this room, known as Trade and Finance, staffed in daylight hours with reporters and editors who wrote the business section of the paper. Frosted glass separated us from several other night editors who cussed and coughed beneath a cloud of blue cigarette smoke.

Geoff was an Aussie. I was a Yank, seemingly a fatal distinction to him.

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Echoes and ghosts: Montana prison women left teardrops on the cell house floor

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Photo of female Montana prison inmate

One of the youngest women ever held at Montana State Prison was Evelyn Donges, then 16. She was convicted for luring a man into a robbery on September 11, 1951. He was beaten and later died.

(This story first appeared in the Sunday features section of the Helena, Mont., Independent Record. I wrote it after women held captive at Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge were moved elsewhere. In those days, the women’s unit held only few female offenders. Today, Montana has about 200 inmates in the women’s unit, now in Billings.)

By Kevin S. Giles

DEER LODGE, Mont. — It was a long time ago, it seems, when the women were here.

The row of empty cells – four of them – are dark and damp.

One is empty. Its mattress is rolled and stacked at one end of the bunk, which is cyclone fencing stretched across a metal frame.

In another, books of salvation are scattered across the bed. The gleam of a faraway window bounces off one cover, illuminating its title: Prison to Praise.

A third is the home of a ghost. The bedding has been thrown aside, as if the cell’s occupant was startled by the cold metallic clank of a cell door, and stood for a smoke, or awakened by a nightmare of the past.

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We can’t go home again to Montana? Look again at those majestic mountains

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Photo shows Glacier National Park

Unspoken beauty: This is how St. Mary’s Lake, in Glacier National Park, looks from the air. Pilot David R. Hunt, a Deer Lodge native, took this photo.

By Kevin S. Giles

From my aisle seat aboard the sardine can of an airplane, I manage a glimpse through the window before the sleepy woman in front of me, blinded in a purple sleep mask, fumbles the shade down to block any evidence of the outside world. Imagine flying over some of the best mountains on earth and she doesn’t want to look.

Mountains look small from several miles up. We see them blotched over the landscape like paint globs on a canvas, snow gracing their highest peaks. We see their beginnings and endings and the context of their existence in the wide and wild place we know as Montana.

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It’s always a bit unsettling returning to my native state. The mountains point the way to a long-ago place, a yearning deep in the spirit. Random glimpses through tiny plane windows show me little of what I already know is down there. Those mountains are intensely familiar to me but a sudden turnabout from the crowds and traffic noise that surround me in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, now approaching 4 million residents. It takes time to hear Montana’s wind-born silence. Montanans know what I mean.

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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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How it all began: A suffragist, an inspiration and a biography about Jeannette Rankin

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Photo shows Montana suffragist

Suffragist Belle Fligelman Winestine was the inspiration for Flight of the Dove, the Jeannette Rankin biography written by Kevin S. Giles. He published a new and expanded edition in October 2016, entitled One Woman Against War. This photo was taken at a book signing ceremony at the Montana Historical Society. Photo by Gene Fischer

(Today we’re going back to tell about my original biography of Jeannette Rankin, Flight of the Dove. This story, which appeared in the Missoulian many years ago, explains how I got started researching Rankin’s life and writing the first book. The roots of my new and expanded edition, One Woman Against War, can be traced to when I met Belle Fligelman Winestine, an early Montana suffragist. – Kevin S. Giles)

By Deirdre McNamer.

Life is sometimes like that. Two events come together in an uncanny way and you suddenly find yourself on a whole new tack.

For Helena newsman Kevin Giles, the coincidence took place one day in October 1976. Giles, who was editor of the Independent Record’s lifestyle section, had just interviewed Belle Fligelman Winestine, a tiny, fiery octogenarian who had been a leader in the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s.

Winestine had also served as administrative secretary to Montana Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin in 1917, and she convinced Giles that the really INTERESTING story would be an account of Rankin’s life and work.

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A saved Rialto: A championship team trophy for the folks of Deer Lodge, Montana

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Photo shows Rialto Theater in Deer Lodge, Montana

Steve Owens, president of Rialto Community Theater, shown in the reconstructed hallway leading to the balcony. Photos by Kevin Giles

By Kevin S. Giles

The fire was so horrific that it lit the night sky for miles. It consumed the priceless 1921 theater with frightening urgency. In the end, most of the ornate movie palace was gone.

Three days later, after dozens of volunteer firefighters poured three million gallons of water on the inferno’s sad work, the people of Deer Lodge, Montana, took stock of their Rialto Theater.

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The terra cotta Beaux-Arts façade stood, a near-miracle. Most of the stage remained, as did five original painted canvas backdrops. A fire curtain fell when the heat rose, saving the back portion of the Rialto.

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Extra! Gangs of newsboys once ruled street corners in uptown Butte, Montana

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Photo shows newsboys smoking

Newsboys ruled uptown Butte, Montana, and similar cities where news was a hot commodity and newspapers competed for readers. (Public domain photo)

By Kevin S. Giles, author of Mystery of the Purple Roses

Newsboys once commanded the streets of uptown Butte, Montana, fighting each other for turf but uniting against newspaper publishers.

Hundreds of newsboys competed for prime selling spots: bars, the miners’ pay office, sections of the red light district, card rooms and mine gates, streetcar stops, ballparks, churches and theaters, and anywhere else where large crowds might gather.

They bought newspapers at a wholesale price, sometimes two copies for a nickel, and then sold them for a nickel apiece to make a 100 percent profit.

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In Butte’s early years, newspaper offices dotted the extensive business district. Cries of, “Paper, mister!” could be heard on every street corner. They sold the Standard, the Butte Miner, the Inter-Mountain, the Daily Bulletin, the Butte Daily Post, the Appeal to Reason, the Montana Socialist and others.

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