Tag Archives: Montana nostalgia

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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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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Once upon a time somewhere on a Montana highway, eastbound

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Photo shows empty highway

On the road, you never know what’s over the next hill. Photo by Kevin S. Giles

By Kevin S. Giles

Only room left in town.

Door won’t latch, casing splintered, footprint on the door.

Ashtray overflowing beneath no smoking sign.

Motel promises local channel. Nothing but gray fuzz.

I go outside. Kitchen chair by the door is the old metal kind with chrome legs and padded seat. Suspiciously resembles furniture at the diner down the road. Had a burger there, two pickles and an onion slice. Ketchup if you ask. Not bad, considering.

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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.

Buy! Mystery of the Purple Roses

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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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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Two books, one small western Montana hometown, 800 pages of storytelling

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Photo shows Deer Lodge, Montana

Main Street in Deer Lodge, Montana, as it looked in 2013. This photo, by Pat Hansen, was published in the Montana Standard.

Since I wrote this post I’ve published a third book of interest to Montanans: my biography, One Woman Against War: The Jeannette Rankin Story.

By Kevin S. Giles

A wise uncle told me once that when I found a good place to live, don’t blab about it. There’s no faster way to ruin paradise, he counseled me, than putting it on the map.

Sorry about that, uncle. The secret’s out.

I’ve written about Deer Lodge, Montana, in my two latest books, which I imagine is just about the most anybody has written about a hometown anywhere in Montana. I doubt either book will start a stampede to Deer Lodge. Word’s getting around, though. It’s a town that’s climbing in the search engine rankings, and in today’s digital world, that’s something.

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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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An author’s love letter to his native Montana, the ‘state of mind’

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Photo shows Deerlodge National Forest

Snow and clouds obscure the Deerlodge National Forest in southwestern Montana. Western Montana is a canvas of unspoiled mountains, ripe for a writer’s (and photographer’s) imagination. Photo permitted by Paula Krugerud

By Kevin S. Giles

Dear Montana,

You stole my heart. You own my soul.

Can you help me understand why I left your embrace, crossing over your borders to places far from the rhythm of your waters and the beckoning from your tallest peaks? To live apart from you for all these years?

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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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