Old Missoula

By Ginny Merriam for the Missoulian

Crya McFadden grew up in the back seat of a midnight-blue Packard and honed her early reading skills on Burma-Shave signs posted on Western highways. The lure of the road is still with her.

“I’m clearly still a rodeo brat,” she said in a recent interview. “I pay the insanely high mortgage on my San Francisco house, but I won’t get back there until August. I’m lately more than ever subject to the wanderlust.”

A writer and columnist for the San Francisco Examiner who has returned to her hometown to teach at the University of Montana, McFadden had logged 150,000 highway miles by age 3. She traveled with her parents on the rodeo circuit, where her father Cy Taillon was known as the “World’s Greatest Rodeo Announcer” from the late 1940s until his death in 1980.

“I had one of the world’s greatest childhoods,” McFadden said. “A sociologist wouldn’t think so, but it was wonderful growing up as a rodeo brat.”

McFadden wrote about those years and her family in her book “Rain or Shine,” which was a finalist for the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. Her mobile childhood was partly responsible for her becoming a writer, she said.

“Reading was something I did to fill the time, and soon I was addicted to books,” she said.

She also credits teacher Pearl Felker of Paxson School, which McFadden attended after her parents were divorced and she lived in Missoula with her mother and stepfather. McFadden calls her fifth-grade teacher “legendary.”

Her class read “Ulysses,” poetry and Shakespeare, and Felker taught a whole generation to write good prose.

“If I think about it, I think she made me into a writer – and encouraged me to act, another of my passions at the time – and opened up that whole world of imagination,” she said.

McFadden got her first exposure to journalism in a class at Missoula County High School, during which time she worked as a “copyboy” at the Missoulian. She later earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in English literature at San Francisco State University, where she taught in the English department from 1972 to 1977.

Her first book, “The Serial,” a satire about Marin County, California, was a best seller in the United States and England; it was turned into a movie in 1979.

Although she’s a teacher this quarter, her role as a writer looms before her at least once a week, when her Examiner column is due. On Tuesday, she was facing a deadline on her column, for which she had yet to find a topic.

“I do know that I’ll fill the space somehow,” she said. “I used to joke about how someday I’ll have to print tuna casserole recipes.”

McFadden began he twice weekly column three and a half years ago. After agreeing to a 90-day trial, she took three days to write her first 750-word piece – and had a new deadline instantly.

“I’m very slow as a writer. I’m a rock breaker,” she said. “Twice a week really chews me up.”

But, she said, after seven years of free-lancing, that first Examiner paycheck made a difference.

“The muse descends on your shoulder when it’s your bread and butter,” she said.

McFadden’s is a first-person-voice opinion column in which she writes about whatever she wants to; recently, she has addressed former California Gov. Jerry Brown, lousy drivers and the information overload.

The above article appeared in the Missoulian on April 7, 1989

https://www.newspapers.com/image/351734536/

An interesting review of McFadden’s autobiographical book “Rain or Shine,” by Missoula writer Caroline Patterson Haefele, appeared in the Missoulian on April 4, 1986. The review is quoted below:

“Rain or Shine – A Family Memoir,” by Cyra McFadden, 1986, Knopf. 178 pp; $16.95 hardcover

Meet Cy Taillon, king of rodeo announcers from the 1940s through the 1970s, a self-styled gentleman cowboy, one of those men “of iron will, stout heart and sensitive manner . . . men who spoke their minds and minded what they spoke.”

Meet Pat Montgomery, his first wife, a young “chanteuse” who left Paragould, Ark., because “she got tired of grits” and danced her way from The Fox in St. Louis to the Missouri Theater Rocketts to the Ernie Young’s Revue “Rain or Shine” and into the arms of Cy Taillon.

And meet the child of these two flashy, fast-living parents, Cyra Taillon, who spent her early childhood amid the heat, beer and animal smells of countless rodeos with parents who matched each other “drink for drink, seduction for seduction, irrational impulse for irrational impulse.”

“Rain or Shine” by Cyra McFaddden, formerly of Missoula, is in many ways a book about myth. The myth of western man, the small-town woman dreaming of stardom, the little girl who longs for the warm loving family pictured on the cover of Saturday Evening Post. Yet “Rain or Shine” is a welcome addition to western literature because McFadden steers clear of the myth-making so prevalent in western lore, and instead presents a livid and sharp-edged picture of people and places of the West.

In this family memoir, McFadden describes the Taillons’ early life on the rodeo circuit. Cy, Pat and Cyra traveled from rodeo to rodeo, permanent address “Mint Cafe, Great Falls”; “The bars were my parents’ living room. We spent our nights in them, our mornings in the Packard or a motor court – with Cy and Pat sleeping off their headaches and begging me to stop that goddamn humming – and our afternoons at the Black Hills Roundup or the Snake River Stampede, rodeos that blur into one.”

Cy reigned from the crow’s nest with his “silver-tongued palaver,” the consummate showman “who could play a crowd the way he played stringed instruments, by instinct and with perfect pitch . . .” He charmed crowds and cowboys alike with his sophisticated vocabulary and keen memory, dignifying the sport “with his ten-dollar words, his impeccably tailored, expensive suits and his insistence that cowboys were professional athletes.” Not to be outdone, Pat would perform as a trick rider.

Watching from the background was Roy Qualley, nicknamed Old Honest Face, who paid Cy’s bar bills, extricated him from fights, and “rode the tail of the comet, Cy grateful for the ballast.” When Cy left Pat in Billings, it was Roy who hitched the family trailer to his car and hauled Cyra and Pat to Missoula. Thus began Pat and Cyra’s introduction to “normal living”: the stuffy little bungalow on Missoula’s North Avenue, the set of china that was never used, the sprouted wheat growing in the bathtub.

Cyra’s growing up was a gradual process of estrangement from a father whose new family and increasing popularity as a rodeo announcer “moved him to center stage,” in arenas ranging from the Cow Palace in San Francisco to the Calgary Stampede to Madison Square Garden, while Cyra “drifted into the wings.”

“Rain or Shine” is McFadden’s attempt to make sense of and make peace with her past. In clear and eloquent prose, she uncovers the legend who was the “World’s Greatest Rodeo Announcer” and the man who left his rakehell past and rakish daughter to become respected and respectful. It is about the stepfather Roy, who tried – tried to support a wife who would never fit into Missoula’s social norms, tried to raise a step-daughter whose vocabulary alarmed him, tried to erase the ever-present shadow of Cy Taillon who was once his best friend. Finally, it is about Cyra growing up between two very divergent worlds and not fitting comfortably into either one.

While McFadden paints wonderfully vivid pictures of Montana in the 1940s and 1950s, periods all too rarely written about, often enough she omits dates which are crucial to the reader’s understanding and ordering of events. When Cy enlists in the Army Corps because his career is on the skids, one is genuinely surprised to find out she is referring to World War II. Or when Cyra describes her first marriage as “my leap into the idea of normalcy at the time,” the reader wonders at what time?

Nonetheless, “Rain or Shine” is a fresh portrait of a Montana where bars are “cool and dark, a cave hollowed out of the heat,” of “the straight highways that shimmer in the heat . . . the small-town fairground where the rodeo was usually part of a country fair or paired up with a carnival . . .” and of that “group of people joined together as that mysterious and complicated thing, a family.” And it is a portrait of Cy Taillon, the man with the golden voice, high-heeled boots, tall hat and diamond horseshoe stickpin, whose elegant announcing style “made us forget the cold, by stamping our feet and cheering the rider on,” who forgot “his own discomfort, and all else, as long as he had a microphone in his hand.” “Ladies and gentlemen,” he used to say, “this cowboy’s only pay this afternoon is your applause.”

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Cyra McFadden participated in a long interview with Debra Schwartz, for the Mill Valley Oral History Program in 2016. A link to the interview is below.

http://ppolinks.com/mvpl39241/2016.099.001_McFaddenCyra_OralHistoryTranscript.pdf