Tag Archives: Western Montana

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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About that pacifist, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin from Montana …

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Photo shows Jeanmarie Bishop

Jeanmarie Bishop has performed dozens of roles in regional theatre and stock in the US and Canada and began directing while still in her teens. Jeanmarie is founding artistic director of the Nevada Shakespeare Company, from which she retired in 2008. She lives in Arizona, where she continues to act and write.

(I wrote this as the foreword for Jeanmarie Bishop’s new published play about Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress. “Tens of thousands have seen the play in theatres, meeting halls and living rooms throughout the world,” Bishop writes.)

By Kevin S. Giles

It’s been said that to truly understand Jeannette Rankin requires practicing what drove her through a lifelong pursuit of pacifism. Otherwise we stare at her through a looking glass from afar, seeing eventful mileposts but never breathing the rarefied air of her innermost thoughts. Yes, Rankin was the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. She was the only American to vote against two world wars. She was widely vilified for doing that, but why?

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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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Makings of a writer (as an adventuresome boy) in western Montana

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Photo shows Author Kevin S. Giles as Boy Scout

In May 1964, I left at 6 a.m. to attend a Boy Scout campout at Dillon, Montana, according to my mother’s notes on the back of the photo. I was suitably prepared with my dad’s sleeping bag.

By Kevin S. Giles

I often wonder why I didn’t write more as a boy, or if I did, where it all went. My father, forever inclined to purge the attic of anything resembling sentimentality, might have pitched whatever I wrote. Or, maybe, I hardly wrote at all?

Writing seemed painful then. I realize now that was my first lesson about this craft of putting words to innermost thoughts.

In 1965 – the year that my novel Summer of the Black Chevy takes place – owning a personal computer seemed as far-fetched as landing on the moon. My mother had a black Royal typewriter with big round keys that clunked when pushed. Until I was a high school junior I didn’t know how to type anyway, and writing on tablets echoed homework, so I kept stories in my head and went to hang out with friends.

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Idyllic memories, for the most part, of being a boy in western Montana

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By Kevin S. Giles

Writing a novel set in my childhood brought a flood of memories, many of them good, reminding me that kids in the pre-driving, pre-job years see life with eyes of wonder.

As I drafted Summer of the Black Chevy those memories stirred the senses: Catching the scent of lilacs down the block while walking to school, my grandmother’s chocolate cake coming out of the oven, fresh earth when winter ice gave way to spring thaw. I heard the siren blowing curfew at City Hall two hours before midnight and the chimes ringing on the hour at the Catholic Church. I saw the lights of the big prison on Main Street at night, the spray of stars when the town went to bed, the red fire skies and the black thunderheads sweeping over the mountains.

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A Montana writer’s view of Butte, Montana (better yet, it’s Butte America)

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Photo shows Butte, Montana

Uptown Butte in its heyday was a happening place, full of stores, bars, movie theaters and, as this photo shows, a shop that sold furs. Mining kept the crowds coming, although this looks like a quiet day, possibly a Sunday.

By Kevin S. Giles

It’s a temptation to build novels around Butte. Anyone who asks “Butte where?” hasn’t been listening.

Butte, Montana. Butte, America. Butte, for crying out loud.

Mile High City. Mile High, Mile Deep. The Mining City. Richest Hill on Earth. You know.

Once home to Italians, Serbs, Cornish, Irish, Welsh, Finns and a dozen other nationalities who converged on the city, way back, when the mines ran dark and deep and coughed out copper by the ton. Right?

Today Butte is a lesser place, shorn of many of those characters that made it one of the strangest, naughtiest, more daring cities in America. Back then, of course, when men mined tunnels a mile underground and died of accidents, fires and explosions or, later, the lung disease from the poisonous dust they inhaled. Back then.

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