Alice E. Campbell

 

MISSOULA – Alice Campbell, 80, passed away on Saturday, March 15, 2003, at Heritage House of natural causes.

 

She was born July 24, 1922, in Missoula, the second of four children born to Edmund and Myra Caplis.

 

Alice grew up in a very warm and loving family where laughter ruled supreme. Her father always wanted to know what was over the next hill. Her mother made a safe haven of any place they lived, no matter how humble. During the Depression, when her father was employed by a ski resort in California, they lived in a tent and Alice and her two sisters were home-schooled by their mother when the snow was too deep to attend classes.

 

Throughout her childhood, Alice displayed a keen sense of adventure and was always planning the next great escapade – outings in which her sister Pat was always a willing participant.

 

She attended elementary schools in Bremerton, Wash.; Hawthorne, Calif.; and Clinton. She attended Missoula County High School and Sacred Heart Academy, graduating from Sacred Heart in 1941.

 

Alice married Douglas Campbell on Nov. 18, 1941, in Missoula, where they have resided ever since. Eight children were born of this marriage.

 

During the years when her children were growing up, Alice was an active member of the St. Francis Altar Society and other church-related organizations.

 

After raising her children, Alice became very active in politics and community projects. In 1970 she was one of the founding members of the Missoula chapter of Mothers for Peace. In 1996 she received that organization’s Peace Award, which consisted of a quilted wall hanging depicting the time that Alice met Jeannette Rankin. Jeannette was campaigning for re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1940 when she stopped by Alice’s family’s home on Sherwood Street.

 

In 1972 she was a member of the local group that helped revise the Montana Constitution.

 

In 1985 she attended the dedication ceremony of the Jeannette Rankin statue at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. At that event, she met Ralph Nader, who referred to her as “a special lady.”

 

She also was a volunteer at the Missoula Food Bank, a member of the committee that founded the Mountain Line bus system, vice chairman of the Committee for Nursing Home Reform, a board member of Council Grove, and a member of the Democratic Central Committee.

 

She and her husband Doug were members of the Westside Neighborhood Association and were instrumental in upgrading lighting and improving streets in that area.

 

Alice was preceded in death by her parents, sister Mary Anne Gibford, and eldest son Patrick.

 

She is survived by her husband Doug; daughter-in-law Linda Campbell (widow of Patrick) of Columbia Falls; son David and wife Gail of Great Falls; daughter Peggy and husband Ed Leonard of Colorado Springs, Colo.; son Mark and wife Margie of Columbia Falls; daughter Mary and husband Rob Pounding of Neskowin, Ore.; son Matthew and wife Judy of Missoula; son Gus and wife Becky of Bemidji, Minn.; son Edmund and wife Nancy of Milwaukie, Ore.; sister Patricia Thaggard of Missoula; brother Michael Caplis of Helena; 21 grandchildren; 15 great-grandchildren; and numerous nieces and nephews.

 

To those who knew and loved her, Alice’s life is best summed up by the Ninth Beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God,” and the Sixth Beatitude, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after justice for they will be satisfied.”

 

We love you, Alice. We will miss you, but know that you have found the peace and justice for which you strove so zealously.

 

Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Wednesday, March 19, at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church followed by a reception at Reidy Hall.

 

 

 

 

 

The Article below appeared in The Missoulian 5/31/2009.

 

 

 

Doug Campbell worked hard for his family, causes

by Michael Jamison of The Missoulian

 

 

Doug Campbell was an old-school meat cutter, whose large and powerful hands tended delicate dahlias and award-winning roses.

 

He also was father of eight, champion of underdogs, calm, quiet, a rouser of rabble, a lunch-bucket Democrat who truly believed that none of us was more equal than another.

 

Campbell had little formal education, but tremendous intellect – an unschooled scholar who, while others his age slipped silent into retirement, fought hard for peace and social justice.

 

“He was really quite a remarkable man,” said longtime friend Michael Kennedy. “In every way, a very remarkable man.”

 

Campbell had the ear of councilors and congressmen.

 

“Doug was a good friend, and a great person,” said U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. While he never hesitated to let me know when he didn’t agree with me, I always respected, and appreciated, his honesty, his dedication and his passion.”

 

Campbell lobbied in Helena and in Washington, D.C., and he danced a mean polka.

 

“He was,” said son Dave, “the hardest working man I ever knew, and the most honest man, too.”

 

But more than anything, Doug Campbell remained, as he began, a humble man, still giving more than he was taking, right to the day he died, at age 93, on May 19, 2009.

 

Campbell’s humble beginnings were shaped by Circle, where he was born at the family homestead in eastern Montana on Jan. 7, 1916. His dad, Charles, was a hardscrabble farmer with a few lean cows, a political progressive who sometimes served as county recorder and also, on the side, wrote poetry. His mother, Almeda, was likewise a Depression-era progressive, a New Dealer whose later letters show she was not pleased at all by the unequal treatment of Native Americans.

 

Doug Campbell left those roots in his early teens to live with a family in town while attending high school. He arrived in Missoula in 1937, with 50 cents in his pocket and a plan to enroll in college.

 

“But he had to get a job, first,” said daughter Mary Pounding. “He got on at a grocery store, the old Bitterroot Market.”

 

The owner gave Campbell $1.50 advance on his pay, a room to rent, and then taught him to cut meat. Campbell’s big hands, like his mind, were quick, and he learned fast.

 

He saved for school, but never saved quite enough, and was still saving at age 27, when he met Alice Caplis, a 19-year-old Catholic beauty who worked at the local hospital.

 

The couple raised their first five children at their home on South Third, then swapped houses with Alice’s parents and raised three more on Sherwood Street.

 

“With eight kids to feed, he never did get to college,” Mary said.

 

Instead, “he worked really hard to raise a family on meager wages.”

 

By the time the third child was born, he gave up fly-fishing on the big Bitterroot. By the time a couple more arrived, he gave up hunting sapphires. By the time the last little Campbell hit the nursery, Doug had given up most of the rest of life’s private pleasures, and was working two eight-hour jobs, seven days a week, butcher and janitor and moonlighting game cutter.

 

But somehow, Dave said, he always had time to cook the family breakfast every Sunday. Dave laughs when he remembers his dad – hair slicked back beneath the stocking cap he wore to bed – flipping pancakes and eggs while dancing to polka around the kitchen.

 

“He was a great father,” Mary said. A loving guy, and a no-nonsense disciplinarian, too. Supportive, and happy, and upbeat.

 

Work and family and then more of both. No time for much else.

 

“He was old-school,” Dave said. “When the kids mess up, you kick ’em in the pants. When they do good, you pat ’em on the head.”

 

Campbell mellowed with age, relaxing and finding time again for those dahlias and roses and gladiolas. His flowers stunned judges at the fair, and his raspberries delighted his kids. (Later, when Alice slowed and needed care, he gave up his flowers just as he had once given up his fly rod. “That was his message,” Mary said. “Work hard, do what you have to do, don’t look back and don’t be afraid to move on.”

 

But retirement was slim for a lifelong meat cutter with a big family, and so in 1975 he won a landslide election to become Missoula County tax assessor. It was easy, Dave said. He’d worked at just about every grocery in town, and everyone knew him, the people-person who people loved to see.

 

Doug Campbell spent a decade in the taxman’s post, much to the dismay of the county’s big corporations, whom he forced to ante up their fair share of taxes.

 

“Dad was very serious about his fellow man,” Dave said. “He always taught us, ‘You’re never any better than the guy standing next to you.’ A gentleman, always. He was very adamant that everyone was equal.”

 

And that went for corporations and governments, too. Doug and Alice protested the social injustices of Vietnam, advocated for peace and equality, championed fairness, did not believe that the “golden rule” meant that those with the gold got to make the rules. He hated greed, and the dehumanization of corporate culture, and the dollar as the ultimate bottom line.

 

And slowly, surely, as others became more conservative with age, Doug Campbell became increasingly entrenched in progressive politics.

 

Pete Talbot, a friend and fellow progressive, wrote in a eulogy that “well into his 80s, Doug Campbell spoke truth to power.”

 

Often, he spoke it to conservatives, but sometimes he spoke it to Democrats, too, when he felt they were caving to political expediency.

 

“He just blossomed in his later years,” Mary said. “He became the epitome of how to mature gracefully. He had quiet wisdom.”

 

Campbell fought for laborers, and for a single-payer health care system, and for senior citizens, and affordable housing, and for the New Party, and both he and Alice became what Talbot called “progressive political icons in Missoula.”

 

“He was never an ideologue,” Kennedy said, “but he understood the difference between justice and injustice. He was firm in his beliefs, but never strident. He was never disrespectful.”

 

Instead, Doug Campbell was prepared, renowned for his research, quiet in the knowledge that he knew the facts and figures better than just about anyone else. He read widely and voraciously.

 

“He was a very quiet man, but he was powerful,” said Betty Beverly, with whom Campbell worked at the Montana Senior Citizens Association. For years, he was president there, “and everyone respected him,” Beverly said, “because he was so smart and he knew what he was talking about. He did great things for senior citizens here in Montana.”

 

Campbell never made it to college, but he turned out to be a first-rate student.

 

It’s interesting, then, to consider the number of people who saw him as a teacher. Kennedy used the word “mentor,” and so did Talbot, and several others, too.

 

“When I would get discouraged pursuing progressive politics,” Talbot wrote in the eulogy, “all I had to do was look to Doug Campbell for inspiration. He fought more battles on behalf of the people than I could even consider. And at nearly 40 years my senior, he was still fighting them: labor, peace, social justice, health care … the list goes on and on. He continued to speak out for those who had no voice; the underdog ignored by the powers that be.”

 

Campbell worked hard to make his wage, worked hard to make a difference, “worked harder than you can imagine,” Dave said.

 

He worked for seniors, and for Democrats, and the New Party, and the Legacy Legislature, and the Missoula Demonstration Project, and the Missoula Aging Services Project. In 1995, the meat cutter was invited to the White House to attend a conference on aging there.

 

And yet, Dave said, when asked in those last days what he believed his lasting legacy would be, Doug Campbell summed his life’s greatest work in just two words: “My family.”

 

Eight kids, 21 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren.

 

“Before anything else, he was a family man,” said friend Jim Parker. “Everything else was shaped by that. He was a man of great integrity.”

 

Parker sat with Campbell the day before his death, and his old friend greeted him with a smile, and asked “Are you still kicking heinie?”

 

“It was his way of telling me goodbye, and reminding me not to forget the stuff that really matters,” Parker said. “He was thinking about others, still, and not himself.”

 

And at his last, Doug Campbell wanted Parker to let the people of Missoula know how very much he enjoyed the time he had spent with them, discussing and debating and cutting to the meat of matters.

 

“He was a wonderful human being and a great friend,” Parker said.

 

Talbot agreed. “If we had more Doug Campbells in the world,” he wrote, “it would certainly be a better place.”

 

 

 

MONTANA MASONIC NEWS – AUGUST 2011

 

Hands Of The Workmen Hiram Knowles, Grand Master 1879

 

 

Our 14th Grand Master was Hiram Knowles. Hiram Knowles was born in Hamden, Maine, in 1834, the son of Freeman Knowles, a ship’s captain and medical doctor. When he was four years old the family moved to Illinois and two years later to Keokuk, Lee County, Iowa. In 1850, young Knowles accompanied his father west to California to search for gold, staying there a year. He was educated at Denmark Academy, Antioch College, and Harvard Law School.

 

In 1862, Knowles returned west, this time to Nevada, where he practiced law for four years, serving also as district attorney and probate judge for Humboldt County. In 1865, he moved to Idaho, and a year later to Montana. He came to Deer Lodge to practice law in 1866. Three presidents, starting with Andrew Johnson in 1868, appointed him to terms as associate justice of the territorial Supreme Court. During his first years in Montana, Knowles combined a law practice with prospecting and mining. He was re-appointed to this position, successively, in 1872 and 1876. He found the court records in a chaotic condition and during the course of his three terms organized them. In 1879, Knowles resigned from the bench to return to the private practice of law. He was again in private practice in Butte, Montana from 1879 to 1890. He was married to Mary C. Curtis in 1871 in Athens, Clark County, Missouri. In 1884, in his one excursion into politics, Knowles ran unsuccessfully for territorial delegate to Congress, he was defeated by Hon. J.K. Toole. Judge Knowles also served as a member of the Montana Constitutional Convention in 1889. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Knowles federal district judge for the Montana district. He served in that position until his retirement in 1904 and was in private practice, in Missoula until his death. Judge Hiram Knowles died April 6, 1916.

 

Judge Knowles died on the train while returning home to Missoula, Montana from a trip to Los Angeles. Judge Hiram Knowles, taken suddenly ill on a train ride home to Missoula, died in his berth on the Oregon Short Line. The end came shortly after noon near Spencer, Idaho, as the train approached Monida Pass and the Montana that Knowles adopted as his home in its early territorial days. At his side were his wife Mary and his daughter, Eloise. The train carrying Knowles’ body was greeted by a large contingent at Butte that evening. The 77-year-old Knowles, who served as federal judge in Montana from 1890 to 1904, was a longtime diabetic. He and Mary were returning from a three-month stay in Southern California, where they’d gone for his declining health. He was severely stricken two nights earlier in the train’s dining car, and was all but paralyzed when Eloise joined her parents at Idaho Falls, Idaho. Judge Hiram Knowles was honored as an outstanding pioneer of Montana, a man of high integrity, who had come to his new home state when it was an undeveloped Territory, inhabited by savage tribes and buffaloes. He conducted his own law practice; was identified with the Masons in which he served as Grand Master. Though Knowles spent much of his time in Helena, often sleeping in his chambers, his family home was in Missoula. In 1889, he platted the Knowles Addition, in the historic McCormick neighborhood south of the Clark Fork River. Knowles was buried at Hillcrest Cemetery in Deer Lodge alongside three of his children.

 

Brother Knowles was already a Mason when he came to the Montana Territory; he served as WM of Deer Lodge No. 14 in 1876. In 1879 as Grand Master of Montana Masons Hiram Knowles, had just retired after eleven years as a territorial justice and was an ardent enemy of vigilantism because of his strong association with the courts he found any suggestion of a link between the vigilantes and the Masons as an embarrassment and it was a topic that angered him. During the Annual Communication in 1880, Grand Master Knowles sought legislation to permit what is now known as the conferring of a courtesy degree. “There ought to be some regulation by which an Entered Apprentice from another jurisdiction can be advanced in the jurisdiction where he made his home…without having to undergo an additional apprenticeship,” The recommendation did not pass at that time.

 

An interesting example of one of his rulings as a Judge was in May of 1903 “Helena, Montana, May 18 – Judge Hiram Knowles, in the United States Court here today held in effect that the President had no right to set apart lands as forest reserves which are subject to entry under the homestead laws. The Government sought to recover $28, the value of the twenty logs cut by Matt Blendauer on 160 acres of land he had entered under homestead laws, which had been included as part of Lake Como forest reserve in a Presidential proclamation. The Government also sought damages in the sum of $100. Judge Knowles also overruled the demurrer of the District Attorney to the answer of the defendant in the action. Fifteen townships are involved in the decision and were withdrawn from settlement for the purpose of including them in the forest reserve. It was contended that they were not public lands, because they were held in reserve from 1855 to 1871. The Government bought the lands from the Indians in 1859, paying therefor $100,000. Judge Knowles holds that the act of 1874 did not restore them to the general mass of the public domain, and therefore the President had no right to set them apart as a forest reserve.”

 

Reid Gardiner, Grand Secretary

 

 

 

Richard G. Forbis

 

The biography below appears in ARCHIVESCANADA.CA

 

Dr. Richard (Dick) George Forbis was born July 30, 1924 in Missoula, Montana to Clarence Jenks and Josephine Hunt Forbis. He completed his secondary schooling in Missoula. During the Second World War, Dr. Forbis was seriously injured in the Battle of the Bulge, however by the fall of 1945 he had recovered and resumed his studies at the University of Montana. He earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1950, both in Sociology, from that institution. Dr. Forbis obtained his PhD in Anthropology at Columbia University in 1955. His dissertation fieldwork was initiated at the MacHaffie site in Montana. While at Columbia, Dr. Forbis also spent a year as a research associate, participating in the Signal Butte site excavations in Nebraska.

 

Richard Forbis joined the Glenbow Museum in 1957 as an archaeological anthroplogist after being selected by Eric Harvie, the founder of the Glenbow Foundation in Calgary, to develop an archaeological research program for the institution. In 1960, he married a Glenbow employee, Marjorie Chown, with whom he raised 3 children, Michael, David and Amanda. The same year as his marriage, Dr. Forbis accepted a part time position at the University of Calgary as a sessional instructor, before joining the faculty as a full time associate professor in 1965. Subsequently, he and his colleague Richard S. “Scotty” MacNeish created a new department, detaching archaeology (the study of historic or prehistoric people) from anthropology (the sudy of mankind). This was Canada’s first university department devoted solely to instruction in archaeology. During his years at the university, Dr. Forbis taught hundreds of students in such classes as Archaeology of the Great Plains, General Anthropology, and Physical Anthropology. He also served on theses and dissertation committees for 25 graduate students and acted as intermittent head of the Department of Archaeology many times; he was head of the Department in 1968-1969. Throughout his teaching career Dr. Forbis continued to act as a consultant for the Glenbow Foundation.

 

A pioneering archaeologist and prehistorian, whose principal research interests included early man, archaeology of North America, the northern Great Plains, communal hunting, human adaptations to grasslands and protohistory, Dr. Forbis was responsible for the first systematic programme of archaeological investigation in Alberta. He was directly responsible for many projects in the province including: Old Woman’s Buffalo Jump, the Fletcher site, the Upper and Lower Kills, the Cluny Earthlodge Village site, the British Block Cairn, the Taber Hominid site and the Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. In addition, his interest in communal hunting and human adaptations to grasslands led him, in collaboration with Robert W. Neuman, to field research in Argentina, Mexico, Peru and China.
Dr. Forbis’ career spanned nearly 40 years of undergraduate and graduate student education, research, publication and service to both archaeological and anthropological societies and associations, as well as the public. In 1970 he was the visiting senior scientist at the National Museum of Man in Ottawa, and as Chairman of the Public Hearings into the Conservation of Historical and Archaeological Resources in Alberta (1972) he played a critical role in the development of the Alberta Historical Resources Act. Dr. Forbis was also a scholar on the Environment Conservation Authority of Alberta and a member of the Province of Alberta Historic Sites Board. In addition, he was the Killam Memorial Scholar in 1977, and the recipient of many awards, including the Alberta Achievement Award, the Canadian Archaeological Association’s Smith-Wintenberg Award, the Society for American Archaeology’s 50th Anniversary Achievement Award, and the 1999 Plains Anthropological Society Distinguished Service Award. In 1999 the Richard G. Forbis Paleoindian Research Fund was established by the Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University-Bozeman, to further investigations Dr. Forbis had initiated at the MacHaffie Paleoindian site in 1949.

 

Called the “Father of Alberta Archaeology” for his pioneering contributions to Northern Plains archaeological science, Dr. Forbis died on October 2, 1999 at the age of 75.

 

 

 

MRS. REINCKE BOOMS MISSOULA

 

RESIDENT SPENDING SUMMER IN EAST ADVISES PRETTY GIRLS TO GO WEST.

 

Special to The Daily Missoulian.

 

Boston, June 20. – If Missoula is not inundated with marriageable young women from Massachusetts, it will not be because Mrs. Charles H. Reincke of that city has failed to properly praise and explain the merits of the town and the young bachelors of Missoula.

 

“Go west, young lady; go to Missoula,” is the advice she gave at Worcester, Mass., today. “All the young men in Missoula,” said Mrs. Reincke, “are well-to-do and many of them have snug fortunes. We have all the New York and Paris fashions almost as soon as you have them here. The people there are not gossipy, as they are in the east. There a girl may do as she pleases, without being criticized by the whole community. The women in Missoula are better dressed than the average. We certainly enjoy life there. I wonder more girls from the east don’t go to Missoula. There is a care-free atmosphere about the town that is a delight, after life in a bustling New England city and I am sure any Worcester girl would find happiness if she would come out to Missoula. She would succeed in finding a husband who would appreciate her New England training.”

 

Mrs. Reincke is to spend a couple of months in Worcester, and is accompanied by Mrs. George Hepworth, also of Missoula.

 

 

The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian, June 21, 1909.

 

 

 

Werner Held, teacher and thinker, was ‘fully engaged in life’

 

The article below appeared in The Missoulian on November 26, 2004.

November 26, 2004 12:00 am  • MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

 

Never mind that he wasn’t a boat builder.

 

Never mind that he wasn’t exactly a seasoned sailor.

 

Never mind that his wife didn’t much like the water.

 

“OK, Dad’s going to build a boat and sail around the world, but who’s going to go with him?” Held’s daughter remembered. “We called it the Ark. The rest of us just wanted it out of the garage. We wanted to put cars back in the garage.”

 

But once Werner Held was in the grip of an idea, the project would not wait.

 

“It’d be late, dark,” remembered son Arthur, “and his shoulders would be covered in sawdust. His hair would start to get kind of wild and stand on end, almost like Einstein. Then came this crazy, maddened grin, and he’d say, ‘can’t stop now.’ He’d turn up the lights and just be fully engaged in life. If the neighbors came by, it could kind of startle them.”

 

Werner Held went about building his boat much the way he went about living his life – with an intensity and focus fueled by brilliance and a driving curiosity. A teacher by trade, a mathematician by vocation, he was a thinker who would rather do than watch, would rather debate than chat, would rather engage than idle.

 

It’s hard to imagine a fire that burned so intensely could last a lifetime, but somehow Held’s curious flame blazed for the better part of a century. Perhaps he just couldn’t stand the idea of not learning anything new tomorrow, of not experiencing what wonders waited in the world.

 

He died, wheels still turning, on Nov. 17, 2004. He was 88.

 

“I think he influenced a lot of lives along the way,” said daughter Pauline Utter. “Warner wasn’t the sort of person you could ignore. He had very commanding eyes; you knew it when he was looking at you.”

 

Those eyes first opened to a view of Boston on March 26, 1916. A short two years later, his father died, and his mother took over the task of preparing young Werner for the world.

 

Perhaps someone should have been preparing the world for young Werner.

 

“He had some very strong ideas about right and wrong,” Art said, “and about the ways the world worked.”

 

Or, more precisely, about the way the world should work.

 

Those strong ideas were formed during a childhood Werner Held didn’t much care for.

 

His widowed mother, a language professor at Mount Holyoke College, had immigrated from the Old Country, and was convinced her son should see the world through eyes that, though American, were informed by older cultures as well.

 

And so his early years were spent traveling between the Eastern Seaboard and Europe. His seventh year was spent with his paternal grandparents in Germany; the next, with a family in Lyon, France. He was treated poorly there, sleeping on the floor in the maid’s room, the family all but ignoring him as he struggled to communicate.

 

“That really stuck,” Art said. “He really remembered his mother, without notice, dropping him off with strangers who didn’t speak his language.”

 

The sink-or-swim trials left him somewhat ambivalent toward his mother, and if he appreciated the education “you’d never have known it,” Utter said. But by his early teens he had three languages under his belt, as well as a fourth – mathematics – in which he would prove most fluent.

 

Held returned from Europe just in time to be sent away again, this time to a prestigious preparatory school for boys. It was a religious school, a tough spot for a lifelong agnostic, and for the first time in his life he learned to repeat what the teacher thought, rather than what he thought.

 

He thought enough, however, to gain admittance to MIT, then the Worchester Polytechnic Institute, graduating with a degree in electrical engineering.

 

“But it was the Depression,” Utter said. “There weren’t a lot of engineering jobs out there.”

 

And so the cultured graduate washed dishes, swept the floor of a garment factory, delivered newspapers. That last job would worry him later, during the McCarthy era, as the newspaper was the communist Daily Worker.

 

Held was no communist, just a young man in need of a paycheck, Utter said, but he always felt himself an outsider in American culture. The Committee on Un-American Activities, she said, seemed a particular threat to a young man who did not believe he had full ownership in American culture.

 

That feeling of being an outsider, coupled with the constant need for a salary, might explain how Held came to apply his brilliance in science and math for the U.S. Navy, designing anti-detection devices for submarines.

 

While in Washington, D.C., he met and married Doris Sorensen, only to leave her for active duty when the country entered WW II. Held put his German language skills to use for an intelligence unit, Utter said, then served in Europe as part of the invasion and occupation forces before applying his science to build radio systems for the Army Signal Corps.

 

Then came the GI Bill, the master’s degree in math from Wisconsin, the job interview in Kremlin, Mont., of all places, and finally the teaching post in Eureka. (Eureka, of course, being so much warmer and more cultured than Kremlin.)

 

“I’ll never forget the day he arrived,” said former Lincoln County High student Bill McClure. “We lived across the street from the principal, and one day this old, green torpedo-shaped Plymouth pulls up – the new teacher in a country town.”

 

McClure, like most former students, remembers Werner Held as “a tough teacher who had very little patience with students who were not interested in learning.”

 

Those he didn’t reach were never so happy as the day they left his classroom once and for all. Those he did reach, however, had a mentor for life.

 

If you were interested in learning, as McClure was, Held made sure you received an education, both in school and in life.

 

“They subscribed to the New York Times,” McClure remembered. “They had lived in Boston and D.C. They were kind of a window on the world for me in old Eureka.”

 

The teacher McClure recalls as “intense, energetic, imaginative, enthusiastic” hired him to do odd jobs, providing “teaching that was beyond the classroom.”

 

McClure ultimately would receive a Ph.D. from MIT, spending a career as a research scientist, just as Held would have had it.

 

But math wasn’t all Held taught.

 

“I had him for math, algebra, geometry, French, German, chemistry, physics,” Utter said. “He did it all.”

 

The trick, she said, was to get him talking about the war; if you could really get him on a roll, he would often ramble so far afield that you could get a test postponed or slip out with a homework assignment unnoticed. It became a game for his students in Eureka and later at Missoula’s Hellgate High, but it was a game you can bet he understood and had calculated from the beginning.

 

He loved the games, loved his students, loved life in all its weirdness, but not as much as he loved a good equation. Upon his death his granddaughter Lisa uncovered whole notebooks filled with his mathematic work, saying “I never knew he was so intellectual.”

 

But Werner Held also loved things well beyond the reach of science – good nonfiction writing, for instance. Their house in Eureka had no television, but it had Harpers and the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Review of Literature.

 

He liked to learn, no matter the source, and used to say “everybody serves a purpose, if only as a bad example.”

 

Tenacious, emphatic, ornery, generous, sensitive, baffled by America’s Americanisms, Held “tried constantly to do his best,” Art said, “but he didn’t always know how to do it.”

 

He liked to travel, but slept in tents, not hotels, and preferred the everyday slice-of-life of the cultures he visited rather than the mainstream tourist package. He liked to laugh, to toy with wordplay, to put on clever accents.

 

“He liked Scrabble better than cards,” Utter said, “because with Scrabble you were learning something.”

 

He was a skier, a builder, a loner, a sometimes flyer of questionable airplanes.

 

He was a taskmaster, a father with a houseful of rules. But at the same time, he’d buy his son a six-pack on occasion, believing it was inevitable and certainly beat drinking and driving. After moving to Missoula in the early 1960s, he signed absentee slips so Art could attend Vietnam War protests, even though doing so threatened his job as a teacher at Hellgate.

 

“He was loving,” Art said, “but in his own way. It’s more like he was committed.”

 

At one point or another, all of Utter’s own children lived with her dad, testament to his own children’s trust and belief.

 

“It was just such a welcome thing to go visit them,” Utter’s daughter Lisa said of her grandparents. “It was warm, restful, relaxing. It was home.”

 

“But,” she is quick to add, “he was a tough old bird and I think he had mellowed quite a bit by then.”

 

Held was a progressive, a free thinker, a pragmatist with vast reserves of empathy; he was a debater, a pounder of tables, a waggler of fingers and a maker of points. He was an afternoon napper and a tremendous snorer, a binge exerciser and a caring father.

 

“You know,” Art said, “he knew he was dying. And he spent our last conversation trying to make me comfortable.”

 

Werner Held liked American musicals and big American V-8 engines, liked building and tinkering and soldering together tomorrow’s technology today.

 

“There really wasn’t anything he wasn’t interested in,” Utter said, “and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t tackle.”

 

“Basically,” McClure agreed, “I think he was interested in the whole world and the way it worked.”

 

Which, of course, brings us back to that 26-foot wooden-hulled boat sitting in the garage.

 

“It never saw the water,” Utter said.

 

“I think he just ran out of steam.”

 

More likely, said son Art, Dad ran out of interest. Held’s focus, Art said, was always to learn how to build a thing, to learn how it worked, to apply his math to the world and see what would happen. That’s why he liked ham radio equipment better than ham radio chatting.

 

The creative scientific process, Art said, held far more appeal to Werner Held than did the realities of actually sailing around the world. Once the boat was built, the fun was done, and it was time to move on to the next project.

 

“He finally sold it,” Utter said. “This beautiful handmade sailboat that he built from scratch. He just sold it. God, that was just like him, you know?”

 

 

 

Arthur C. Millspaugh – History Teacher, History Maker and Persian Oil

 

What MCHS history teacher went to work for the Shah of Persia?

 

Arthur Millspaugh did – twice – from 1922 – 1927, and again 1942 – 1945. He went on to write several books; two of them about Persia and its people.

 

Persia was officially renamed Iran in 1935.

 

Millspaugh’s Missoula connection came in 1912 when he taught history at MCHS for two years. Like a lot of other very talented people, Dr. Arthur Millspaugh didn’t stay long in Missoula. He was on a fast track indeed.

 

Born in Kalamazoo County, Michigan, in 1883, he attended public schools and graduated from Albion College in Albion, Michigan, in 1908. He quickly earned his Master of Arts degree in 1909 at the University of Illinois.

 

He then came to Montana, teaching in Kalispell for two years and then Missoula for two years. After his short stint in Missoula he entered Johns Hopkins University where he received his Ph.D. in 1916, specializing in political science and history. His Vita also mentions “political economy” – a discipline that Dr. Millspaugh pursued on a grand scale.

 

Dr. Millspaugh taught political science at Johns Hopkins for two years and then began working for the U. S. State Department in Washington D. C. as an economic advisor in the Office of Foreign Trade.

 

Keep in mind that W.W. 1 was raging during this period, lasting until November of 1918. This devastating war changed the face of the world. One thing it did not change however, was the world’s growing appetite for oil and like some other Middle Eastern countries, Persia had plenty of it.

 

Foreign political meddling was not new to post W.W. 1 Middle East countries. With respect to Persian oil, the show started in 1908 when a British Company struck the first Persian gusher, and by the next year formed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. This company eventually spawned into B. P. and at one point the British Government held the majority of shares.

 

In Persia, outside influences intensified with this discovery of oil, but British and Russian interests were active in Persia long before that. Colonial imperialism had already split Persia in 1907 when Russia and Great Britain signed their Anglo-Russian Convention dividing Persia into three zones. Russia controlled the north; a neutral zone acted as a buffer in the middle; and the British controlled the Southeast.

 

That same agreement provided that Afghanistan would join the amazingly long list of British Protectorates.

 

Persia also endured the shock of a constitutional revolution (1905 – 1909) during this period. The new constitutional government included a parliament which set about ending corruption, limiting the power of the Royal Family, and preventing foreign dominance.

 

At that time the United States was viewed differently than Russia and Britain in that it did not enter Persia with a long history of regional interference. With the Persian economy in trouble an American policy advisor, Morgan Shuster, was hired in 1911 to install needed economic reform. This was known as the first of three American Financial Missions in Persia.

 

Millspaugh would lead the next two.

 

Shuster had earlier attracted the attention of President Taft with reforms he enacted while serving as collector of customs in the Philippines beginning in 1901.

 

Upon Taft’s recommendation Shuster arrived in Persia in 1911 with a small team of Americans and soon began modernizing government structure and introducing tax reforms. However, as the treasurer-general, he met resistance from both the neighboring Russian and British interests who resented his tactics and they soon persuaded the Persian government to curb his authority.

 

Shuster was dismissed after a few months. He later documented his experiences in his book, The Strangling of Persia (1912). He roundly criticized outside influences:

 

“It was obvious that the people of Persia deserve much better than what they are getting, that they want us to succeed, but it was the British and the Russians who were determined not to let us succeed.”[1]

 

Three years later, W.W. 1 made life very difficult in many important Middle Eastern countries. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire disrupted governments throughout the entire region. Key among these was Persia which the British invaded and occupied in 1918. After installing the puppet government of Reza Shah the British would stay for more than two decades.

 

In neutral Persia thousands of people had died of starvation and disease during and shortly after W.W. 1. While the British and Russians were busy defeating the Central powers, they vied for control in Persia and the Persian people suffered greatly in the process.

 

One study asserts that the British essentially committed genocide trying to control their interests there. Underlying all of this was the British controlled Anglo-Persian Oil Company which garnered exclusive rights to drill oil in much of the Persian Empire.

 

In his book Great Britain and Reza Shah, author Mohammad Gholi Majd examined the role of British forces in Persia shortly after the W. W. 1:

 

“With the revolution in Russia and the collapse of the Ottoman armies in Persia and Mesopotamia, the British had become the unchallenged military power . . . they quickly set about transforming their military supremacy into political domination and economic control.”[2]

 

A coup d’etat in February of 1921 resulted in the seizure of military power by an obscure Cossack soldier, Colonel Reza Khan, who had previous connections to the Anglo – Persian Military Mission. Though now the new Minister of War, he was an acknowledged British agent and a ruthless leader. Reza Khan would become the new Shah of Persia in 1925 and he would last until W. W. 2. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, succeeded him and remained in power until the Iranian Revolution deposed him in 1979. He is known as the last ‘Shah’ of Iran.

 

In May of 1921 the new Prime Minister, Qavam-es-Saltaneh, took office and again sought the assistance of American advisors. Later known as ‘old fox’, Qavam would serve as the Prime Minister a total of five times and at one point negotiated personally with Stalin.

 

Qavam’s goal in 1921 was to involve Americans financially and politically, while diminishing the influence of the British and the Russians. He instructed the minister in Washington to “pursue the matter of an American financial team and possible loans to Persia . . .”[3]

 

This effort would later be described as “a futile attempt by Qavam and the Majlis [parliament] to save Iran from the looming abyss of Reza Khan’s dictatorship, which was being rapidly cemented with British help . . . With British financial assistance and support of the British occupation forces, and having been given control of the domestic and military police forces by the British, Reza Khan quickly became the de facto dictator of Persia.”[4]

 

In August of 1922 Dr. Millspaugh was officially hired as Administrator General of Finances in Persia. With his small team of advisors he arrived in November and found that internal strife and the complex issues of British interference would be enormously difficult to overcome. He was no longer teaching high school political theory back in rural Montana.

 

One of the goals of improving the Persian economy was enticing foreign loans and investments, especially in the oil fields. The United States was the acknowledged leader in the production of oil. Big American investors had been reluctant to put their money at risk in Persia. Major oil companies had already been offered, and declined, involvement in some areas not secured by previous agreements. Both Standard Oil of New Jersey and Sinclair Oil Company evaluated the Persian prospects and found that the drawbacks of British and Russian interference, along with the instability of the government, meant too much trouble.

 

In his study on U.S. and Iranian relations, Mansour Bonakdarian noted that Millspaugh arrived under difficult circumstances[5]:

 

“Tehran also expressed its desire to engage another team of American financial advisers. The State Department’s endorsement was obtained before the end of 1917, but it was not until 1922 that a second team of American financial advisers arrived in Iran, led by a person less willing than Shuster to take sides in the factional politics of Iran but equally, if not more, determined to have his own way. The new team of American advisers arrived in Iran at a time of momentous political transformations in that country. In February 1921 a military coup was staged by Reza Khan, an ardently patriotic military officer, and Sayyid Zia Tabataba’i, a pro-British journalist and political dilettante, who would eventually be cast aside by his co-conspirator. The coup, enjoying covert British support, was in reaction to the impotence of the central authorities, the rapid regional fragmentation of Iran, and the establishment of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Gilan with the assistance of the Bolshevik forces in the Caspian province. After the coup’s success, Reza Khan would also attempt to end British military presence in Iran and curb London’s imperial influence, the former task proving easier than the latter. Reza Khan’s swift consolidation of political and military power over the next few years resulted in the overthrow of the ruling Qajar dynasty (1796-1925) and inauguration of Reza Khan’s own Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979). It was in the midst of these political upheavals that the second American financial mission to Iran, led by Arthur C. Millspaugh, a former adviser at the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Foreign Trade, proceeded with its assignment. This mission, which was ostensibly engaged in “a purely private capacity” and acted independently of the State Department, lasted until 1927, when the new Shah (Reza) terminated it on grounds of Millspaugh’s increasingly domineering conduct and his repeated noncompliance with the Shah’s requests for increased military expenditure. Millspaugh managed to implement a number of reforms, including a new taxation law that hit the poor hard but financed Reza Shah’s Trans-Iranian Railway project, which got underway in 1927. The mission’s accomplishments were repeatedly hampered by internal political rivalries in Iran, wide-spread system of patronage and graft among many leading Iranian politicians, and Millspaugh’s abrasive conduct.”

 

An article by Deepak Tripathi in the Foreign Policy Journal, 6/1/13, presents a different view of Millspaugh’s role in modernizing the economy of Persia:

 

“At this stage, Reza Shah appointed an American, Arthur Millspaugh, to the post of treasurer-general.  Educated at the University of Illinois and Johns Hopkins, where he also lectured, Millspaugh had worked at the drafting office at the State Department and then as a trade adviser. Reza Shah’s decision to hand over the responsibility of reorganizing the economy to an American technocrat looked like a master stroke. It reduced British and Soviet interference in Iran’s affairs. Moreover, Millspaugh and Reza Shah worked well together for some time, and the economy improved dramatically.

 

“Using the shah’s personal authority and the coercive power of Iran’s expanding military, Millspaugh started collecting taxes from those who had been avoiding paying. He made the Majlis raise the tax rates every time more revenues were needed for expansion of the military or bureaucracy. He appointed full-time civil servants to run departments. All this strengthened the authority of the central government under Reza Shah—a remarkable turnaround in a country squeezed between two major imperial powers of the day. Millspaugh stayed in Iran for five years, until 1927. Many Iranians saw him as the man who could liberate them from British and Russian domination and the United States as a friend of their country.”

 

From today’s viewpoint the role that Millspaugh played in Persia during this time is the subject of differing interpretations. The fact that he spent five years as Persia’s fiscal manager leads one to believe that he was an effective manager. It is also significant that he was again hired by the Iranians in 1942.

 

World War II also spelled dramatic changes for Iran. The Allies invaded Iran in August of 1941. British, Australian and Indian forces attacked from the Persian Gulf as well as from Iraq, while the Soviets attacked from the north. Securing the seaports and the Trans-Iranian railroad were primary objectives, along with protecting oil wells and refineries. The Iranians offered little resistance before surrendering within weeks. Reza Shah quickly abdicated and the Allies installed his son, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlave as the new Shah of Iran. In January of 1942 the new Shah signed a Treaty of Alliance with the British and the Soviets which basically split Iran again. American troops arrived in 1943. Huge amounts of supplies for the Soviet Union were now being funneled through Iran and the occupying forces numbered in the tens of thousands.

 

The famous Tehran conference was held at the end of November, 1943. Attended by Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt this conference cemented plans to attack the Germans from a second front in France. Strategies for dividing post war countries were another important topic.

 

In 1943 Dr. Millspaugh became part of a three pronged program to establish an American presence in Iran. America’s heavy military involvement comprised 30,000 troops whose task was to provide support for the transport of supplies to the Soviets over the ‘Persian Corridor’. American forces also sought to strengthen the Iranian military and police security. A second mission involved diplomatic efforts to stabilize the Iranian government. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) personnel were at work analyzing and gathering intelligence. Thirdly, Millspaugh’s mission focused on the Iranian economy and finances.

 

These missions, as noted by John Miglietta in his book, American Alliance Policy in the Middle East . . ., proved to have a longer shelf life than originally intended.[6]

 

“While initially these contacts were established in the general context of meeting immediate American needs in fighting World War II, they quickly began to take on an intrinsic importance of their own. The United States began to broaden its aims in the country and the region as a whole. These centered around acquiring control of Iranian oil, as well as maintaining Iran as a strategic bulwark against the Soviet Union during the cold war. Oil was one of the primary reasons why Iran became important to America and this resource had become more significant during the war.”

 

 

A detailed look at Dr. Millspaugh’s W. W. II experience is found in The Middle East Theater: The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia by T. H. Vail Motter from the Center of Military History – United State Army – 2000:

 

 

“The second category of Iranian requests, those for assistance in the economic field, came later in the year. Dizzy with the problems arising out of the Allied occupation, the new Iranian Government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, having returned to constitutionalism, asked the Department of State to recommend Americans for administrative and advisory posts. As a result, Dr. Millspaugh, invited by Iran, returned there as Administrator General of Finances on 29 January 1943. He accepted the invitation only after the Majlis on 12 November 1942 approved a contract embodying his conditions. By a further law of 4 May 1943 the Majlis empowered Millspaugh to establish or work toward rigid governmental regulation of grain collection, prices, transport, and distribution; and to recommend enactment of a high, graduated income tax to spread the tax burden more fairly and to combat inflation and other war-born evils. The Majlis also authorized employment of up to sixty American specialists and gave Millspaugh power to direct the government’s entire financial program, to draw up the budget, to supervise the operations of the Finance Ministry, to control the inspection department, and to supervise the Americans and Iranians who represented the Ministry of Finance in the provincial capitals.

 

“The ramifications of Millspaugh’s second economic mission to Iran extended to collection of the harvests and supplying bread for urban centers; control of the public domains and administration of the estates of the former Shah ceded to the government on his abdication; stabilization of prices; and regulation of the purchase, distribution, and control of goods. In this area, the Road Transport Department controlled movement of all kinds of goods over Iranian highways and was at one time aided by some fifty British and American Army officers lent by their governments. Another office, the Transport Priorities Office, determined priorities for all civilian goods moved by road, rail, or water. All of these controls were necessarily subordinate to the over-all controls over movements and priorities exercised under the Tri-Partite Treaty by the occupying powers.

 

“Besides the members of the Millspaugh mission, who never exceeded thirty-five, other Americans served in various administrative and advisory capacities. One reorganized the police of Tehran and other cities. Another became in 1944 adviser to the Ministry of Public Health and attacked the increasing spread of typhus in the country. Still other experts supervised the importation of pharmaceutical supplies, and advised on soil erosion and irrigation, petroleum problems, and agricultural education. The account of their work lies beyond the limits of this volume. It is understandable that Millspaugh’s mission, in view of its extensive powers and responsibilities, should eventually have run into trouble and, as in the earlier attempts by Shuster and Millspaugh himself, should have come prematurely to the end of its labors. Millspaugh resigned in February 1945, and, with the exception of a few who remained until 1948 under direct personal contract to the Iranian Government, most of his staff were gone by autumn 1945. Their departure was unmourned by many Iranians. It would be difficult to say who learned the least by the experience, the Iranians or the Americans.”

 

In 1946 Dr. Millspaugh published his second book on Iran – Americans In Persia – Washington D. C.: The Brookings Institution.

 

In 1949 Dr. Millspaugh returned to Kalamazoo, Michigan where he became the Chief editorial writer of the Kalamazoo Gazette. He died in Kalamazoo of heart failure in 1955.

 

 

Closer to Missoula, Dr. Millspaugh wrote an interesting article that appeared in The History Teachers Magazine in Feb. 1915, titled Points of Emphasis in Teaching Government in the West. An excerpt appears below:

 

“From my room in a Montana high school building, it was possible for me to see, in the sweep of an everyday glance, an Indian teepee, a homesteader’s cabin, a fence marking the boundary of a Northern Pacific land grant, two trans-continental railroads, a dry farm, an irrigation system, a National forest, a modern city, and a State University. The whole panorama, with its background of snow-clad mountains, was a suggestive living picture, not at all exceptional either, of Western Civilization.”

 

 

http://books.google.com/books?id=yNrFAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=arthur+millspaugh+missoula&source=bl&ots=gs8eI4Ao-S&sig=FtXnVHLBuNH3FssjwO1Mv1cpceU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ABEqU5uPCovtoATc3YDQAQ&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=arthur%20millspaugh%20missoula&f=false

 

 

 

 

The Article below is an excerpt from – A History of the School of Music – Montana State University 1895 – 1952, by John R. Cowan Jr.

 

 

Blanche Whitaker (1856-1941)

 

Mrs. Whitaker is remembered as a small, energetic, and very musical woman with a brilliant mind and a forceful personality. She and her husband and family came to Missoula in the 1890’s and took up a homestead on Miller Creek, near Missoula. Mr. Whitaker, an artist and designer of fine furniture, died soon thereafter, and Mrs. Whitaker and her twelve children moved to a home on Pine Street in 1894. Many other prominent pioneers of Missoula also lived on this street. The Whitakers had previously made their home in England, and were probably influenced to come to Montana by publicity aimed at settling the West. Such publicity was circulated by the railroads at that time. Soon after arriving in Missoula, Mrs. Whitaker began making house to house calls with her horse and buggy to give piano lessons.

 

Mrs. Whitaker was a well-trained musician. She was reared in England by her grandfather, educated in private schools there, and held the degree of Associate in Arts from Oxford University. She studied music with Dr. Cedric Bucknall and Edward Roeckel, and had many years of successful teaching experience In England and in the United States. Her forebears, to mention a few, were statesmen, ministers, church musicians, and composers. Mrs. Whitaker is said to have been an exceptionally fine interpreter of Chopin. She gave all of her children musical training.[1]

 

From 1896 to 1910, Mrs. Whitaker was very prominent in the musical activities of the University and the Missoula community. She was instrumental in bringing such artists as Leopold Godowsky, pianist, Edward Baxter Perry, the blind pianist, and Max Benedix, violinist, to Missoula for concerts. It was mainly through her efforts that the University obtained its first reed organ for use in the auditorium of University Hall. Besides many other activities, she gave lectures on the History and Philosophy of Music, as well as formed a Music Club interested in music history and composers. She also wrote articles and papers, some of which were presented before the Cosmos Club, a literary club of men and women from Missoula and the University faculty. Mrs. Whitaker was a very fine and inspirational teacher. Among her pupils were Marjorie Maxwell, later of the Metropolitan Opera Company, and Mrs. Bernice Hamskill, Associate Professor of Music on the present School of Music faculty. One of the many picturesque details of Mrs. Whitaker’s public appearances was the regularity with which her dog, “Watch,” sat beside her on the stage when she played the piano for University convocations and programs.

 

Mrs. Whitaker will also be remembered for her fine sense of humor. She was extremely well-read, and able to speak intelligently on practically any subject. She retired from her University duties in 1910 because of illness in her family, and died in California, at the age of eighty-five.

 

 

Below is a link to the Ursula Jane Davis Masters Thesis from Montana State University – 1960.

A HISTORY OF MUSICAL GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE CITY OF MISSOULA I86O-I940

The purpose of this paper is to put in narrative form, for the first time, a history of the growth and development of music in the city of Missoula, from the time it was established in 1865 to the year 1940. Special emphasis is on music in the schools; civic music; music organizations; performing groups; and the professional entertainment brought into the city.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fscholarworks.umt.edu%2Fcgi%2Fviewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D3583%26context%3Detd&ei=OvklU8XwJsL0oATFmYDIBA&usg=AFQjCNGv_q2RzJ5Bdi_-6lyLzxnBObP2hg&bvm=bv.62922401,d.cGU

 

Eldon E. Diettert – Above average Missoula boy

 

The article below can be found at the National Smokejumper Association website – Killed in the Line of Duty.

 

 

Eldon E. Diettert (Missoula ’49) – Aug. 5, 1949 Eldon trained in Missoula in 1949 and died with 11 other Missoula jumpers in the Mann Gulch Fire.

 

An honor roll Forestry student at the University of Montana, he’d been called away from his 19th birthday luncheon to go to the fire.

 

The following is from Some of the Men of Mann Gulch, Starr Jenkins, 1993:

 

This account of Eldon’s life was written by his brother, Gerald A. Diettert, M.D.: Eldon was born Aug. 5, 1930, in Moscow, Idaho, the second son of Reuben and Charlotte Diettert. His father was an assistant professor in Botany at the University of Idaho, his mother, a housewife.

 

Eldon was the only one in the family who had naturally curly hair and mother allowed it to grow without cutting until it was shoulder length (about like Shirley Temple’s).

 

Frequently the mailman would tease Eldon about this, calling him a “little girl.” One day when Eldon was about three, following such taunting, he kicked the man in the shins and proclaimed, “I’m not a little girl.”

 

When he was four, I took him to the Saturday morning movie series, “Buster Brown and his Dog,” several times. Eldon always cried because he was afraid of “the dog” and had to be returned home, much to my disgust.

 

When Eldon was five, the family moved to Iowa City, Iowa, where his father returned to school to obtain his Ph.D. in Botany. During this time, the family lived in several apartments. While father was in school, mother did custodial work at the School of Dentistry. Father did his doctoral thesis on sagebrush and engaged his two sons in sanding and polishing sections of sagebrush for his project.

 

The family spent their summers on Grandfather Diettert’s farm near North Judson, Ind., where grandmother tried to fatten the brothers on cream and whole milk and gave them chickens to raise, then served them the birds at dinner before their departure for home at summer’s end. Some time was also spent on Grandfather Thompson’s farm near Lafayette, Ind.

 

Two years later, in 1937, the family moved to Missoula, Mont., where father became a member and subsequently chairman of the Botany Department at the University of Montana. Soon after this move, both brothers obtained magazine routes, selling such periodicals as Liberty, True Confessions and True Detective. Eldon continued his route (actually an area of town considered to be his “property” to solicit for customers) throughout grade school and was very conscientious and punctual with his customers. Some of the money earned went to supplement the family income, but part was saved “for college.”

 

At Paxson Elementary School, Eldon was an excellent student and received high marks. He was well liked by his teachers and fellow students. In contrast to his brother, who was three years older and very protective of him, he never got into any fights.

 

He was a member of Cub Scout Pack 1, Den 2 but did not continue in the Boy Scout program. He participated in a music program at the university, learning to play the clarinet. During summers, the family picked huckleberries to supplement their income.

 

Another adventure in the woods occurred when he was about nine. He and his brother climbed about 2,000 feet to a saddle in Mount Sentinel just east of the campus and cut down a Christmas tree that measured about 4 inches through at the butt. The top 15 feet was carried home where father shortened it again so it would fit into the house.

 

Eldon liked to build model airplanes powered by rubber bands, and after they had crashed and been repaired repeatedly, they were set on fire and launched from the second-story bedroom window to “go down in flames.” Luckily the house did not burn down from these aerial funeral pyres.

 

Eldon’s sister, Doris Jean, was born in 1939. Over the next 10 years, Eldon became her chief protector, looking after her every need and taking her to movies and other local events.

 

During the summers at age nine and ten, Eldon helped me mow and water neighborhood lawns. Sometimes the grass was so tall Eldon pulled on a rope tied to the mower while I pushed. Eldon took over the lawn jobs on his own when 11 and 12.

 

Following this, he worked intermittently after school and summers at the K&W Grocery Store, delivering groceries and stocking shelves. He was studious in high school and, though he was tall, 6-foot-3 and very strong, he did not participate in sports.

 

Our family took vacation trips to Glacier National Park and other camping spots. With his father’s encouragement, Eldon became an avid dry-fly trout fisherman in his teens.

 

In the summers of 1947 and 1948 he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the Blister Rust Control program at Camp Nowhere in northern Idaho. By the fall of 1948 he had decided that forestry would be his calling and he enrolled at the University of Montana, where he continued to be a scholar and was on the high honor roll each quarter.

 

Father bragged that Eldon was one of the best forestry students he had ever taught, but father was felt to be a bit prejudiced.

 

Eldon was very excited about and challenged by the smokejumper program and viewed it as a great opportunity in his chosen career. He was called away from his 19th birthday luncheon to go to the Mann Gulch fire. In the fall of 1949, Wag Dodge (MSO-41) took me, Eldon’s brother, up to Mann Gulch to view the fire scene and the site of Eldon’s death. I realize now what an emotional strain that must have been on Wag.

 

In Young Men and Fire, Maclean referred to a family that never spoke about their loss after the fire. I believe that was our family. In deference to my mother’s grief, the fire was never discussed and one treaded lightly in even recalling episodes in his life – a real shame, and unfair to him and his goodness, and unfair to all of us in remembering and talking about his short time with us with happiness.

 

Eldon Diettert did not live long enough to do any noteworthy accomplishments. His story is really that of an above-average American boy growing up in the Depression years, with his great promise unfulfilled. One sad mistake took away his life.