Old Missoula

Wild Bill Kelly- 2 Books and 2 Normans

Norman Macleod-author of “The Bitter Roots”- 1941 – (1906 – 1985)

Norman Maclean-author of “A River Runs Through It” -1976 – (1902 – 1990)

 

I was recently notified that the University of Montana press has plans to reprint the 84-year-old novel, “The Bitter Roots,” by Norman Macleod. Apparently, the project is in conjunction with Mr. Brad Bigelow who operates a publishing business called Boiler House Press. Mr. Bigelow promotes the unusual project of finding and republishing forgotten books. He recently notified me that he discovered the Missoula based novel, “The Bitter Roots,” the same way that I did about 30 years ago; basically, by accident while examining other books at the University of Montana library. Mr. Bigelow apparently convinced people at the U of M press that republishing the book was a worthy project. I’ve described my discovery of that book previously on my website and also gave a synopsis of the novel.

Reprinting “The Bitter Roots” will likely create some controversy in Missoula’s readership, since it examines a topic that is a great deal more viral today than when the novel was published in 1941. It featured a fictional version of the same character whom Brad Pitt later played in the 1992 movie “A River Runs Through It,” the Presbyterian pastor’s son, Paul Maclean. Augie Storm is that character’s name in “The Bitter Roots.” Since Macleod’s novel is fiction it frequently tells a story largely born of the author’s imagination, though his cast of characters often harkened closely to the lives of real Missoula people -whose stories he occasionally grossly manipulated. A good example is when he kills off a fictional version of the author Norman Maclean during combat in WW1. This type of manipulation is the bread and butter of autobiographical fiction, even when the authors purport that their work is largely based on a true story. The publication of Norman Maclean’s novel, “A River Runs Through It,” some 35 years later in 1976 also did some of this when he obliquely described another Missoula character that also appeared in “The Bitter Roots.” – Bill Kelly. More on that in a bit.

Norman Macleod, author of “The Bitter Roots,” attended Missoula’s public schools along with several notable Missoulians, including William Carl “Wild Bill” Kelly, Paul Maclean, John Hutchens (One Man’s Montana), Fritz Sterling, and Bill Dugal McFarland. Although “The Bitter Roots” describes interactions with each of these characters using fictionalized names, many Missoula readers with a refined sense of community history won’t take long in recognizing several local people of that era. In an afterword to his novel Macleod acknowledged that he relied on a few Missoulians who still lived in Missoula in 1941, thanking them for help in writing his novel. Two of these were Bill Dugal McFarland and Deane Jones, both well acquainted with Missoula in that era. McFarland eventually became the proprietor of the iconic Missoula bar, The Oxford, while Deane Jones, a U of M journalism graduate, was a long time Missoulian newspaper editor. Both of these gentlemen were friends and for a time deeply involved in Missoula’s amateur boxing world.

While “The Bitter Roots,” is packed with local incidents involving Missoula characters, it likely won’t excite a wide general readership, mainly because it fails to follow some basic formulas for a successful modern novel. It’s not a love story or a simple read without any digressions, nor does it avoid topics of historical controversy. It mainly relies on a humorless tale that dwells on a boy’s mournful adolescent thoughts and actions that are not likely of great interest to non-Missoulians. Nevertheless, Macleod wrote an interesting description of a small Missoula town during the period of 1917-1920 which gives us an unusual view that’s not available in many other places. Macleod eventually became better known as a poet and an editor of small magazines.

Macleod’s novel depicts one particularly dominant character, “Stiff” Sullivan, who is clearly drawn from their schoolmate, William “Wild Bill” Kelly. Kelly was an athletic marvel whose exploits are still a Missoula sports topic even today, 100 years later. After a stellar career playing football at MCHS and the University of Montana Grizzlies, he went on to play professionally. He was also a very good baseball player who captained the University team and also played varsity Grizzly basketball. In 1923, as a high school senior who knew the rudiments of boxing, he sparred for four rounds in Missoula with the venerable Tommy Gibbons who then boxed Jack Dempsey in the Heavyweight Championship fight in Shelby, Mt. As the 17-year-old sparring partner for Tommy Gibbons, he could hardly be expected to emulate the great Jack Dempsey, a task that he was clearly unprepared for. Still, some biased spectators felt that Kelly gave Gibbons all he wanted.

 

Recently, a Missoulian sports columnist wrote that Bill Kelly sat at the top of his list of Missoula’s greatest athletes; a list that includes some Olympic athletes as well as NCAA champions. Kelly, however, was not known for his academic achievements. Macleod wrote, “He got his grades in high school by being the best quarterback they ever had.” One thing rarely mentioned was that he was the sports editor for the school newspaper his final high school year. He was also known locally as a budding chronic alcoholic who was expelled from the University of Montana while a freshman by the President, C. H. Clapp, for drunkenness. Subsequent interviews later attested that Kelly relished providing his college mates with large quantities of illegal liquor he brought from Butte, Mt.; a place where he liked to “party.” When viewed by those who knew his story intimately his erratic behavior was not totally surprising. One who knew him well, the legendary Missoulian sportswriter, Ray Rocene, wrote that Kelly became interested in sports while a fatherless newsboy on the streets who was “practically on his own through his school days.” Rocene also wrote, “He had played cornerlot football before coming to high school, being more or less a waif of the streets.” Many in the community did not argue that the cognomen “Wild Bill” was well deserved.

Stiff Sullivan’s protagonist in “The Bitter Roots” was his frequent foil, Augie Storm, the pastor’s youngest son, a fictional Paul Maclean. Their hostile interaction subsisted in several episodes of the novel’s dramatic storyline, usually with Kelly in the lead. Interestingly, both Bill Kelly and Paul Maclean died tragic deaths prior to publication of Macleod’s novel in 1941. Kelly died in New York at age 26, Maclean died in Chicago at age 32. Their untimely deaths served as one of the underlying dark themes of Macleod’s novel.

In “The Bitter Roots” Stiff Sullivan (The Mick) and Augie Storm were each involved in episodes of bullying others with little or no recourse available to their victims. In one event this behavior turned deadly when Augie Storm helped throw another smaller kid in the Missoula River as a prank and the boy drowned when no one could rescue him. (Macleod based this story on an account of the real Missoula drowning of Maurice Llafet that occurred in 1917.) Sullivan frequently served as a brutal enforcer for his neighborhood friends when disputes arose, and smaller kids quickly learned to avoid him when necessary, at the risk of a thrashing.

In a time of a disastrous European war, Sullivan’s strident Irish patriotism clashed with the local war effort in one crucial incident. Sullivan and Storm nearly came to blows when it was revealed that Storm and a friend mugged a defenseless German immigrant (Hun). Boasting about it to a small group of kids, Storm proudly displayed the money they had bilked from the man. In an angry response Sullivan then cornered Storm and forced him to release the money which Sullivan promptly destroyed, protesting, “I wouldn’t want the pastor’s son carrin’ this kind of cash!”  Augie Storm later revealed his hatred of Sullivan while pondering the return of his older brother from the war. “It would be good having an older brother around the house again. Augie could talk to him about Stiff Sullivan and ask advice about what to do with a seditious guy like that.”

One of Stiff Sullivan’s smaller neighborhood mates “lived in Poverty Row across the railroad tracks,” as did Sullivan (and Kelly@ 738 N. 3^rd. St.). In Missoula it was locally called “The Northside.” Sullivan’s friend was one step away from homelessness, spending cold nights bagging loose coal in the N.P. railyard while seeking to provide heat in a home where his unemployed father was stricken with alcoholism. Feeling helpless the boy had complained to others that Stiff Sullivan was no longer attentive to their neighborhood business: “… Stiff was getting so’s he read the papers too much. Following the progress of the Revolution, Sullivan explained.” Sullivan’s political leanings had gained momentum as the war progressed.

While the boy gathered coal in his gunnysack, a railroad “yard bull” surprised him from behind and beat him badly. Sullivan soon organized a gang of tough kids who took revenge on the “big Bulgarian bastard.” Sullivan recruited help all the way from Butte in that clash when they waylaid the railroad cop and put him in the hospital.

An earlier episode involved Stiff Sullivan and Augie Storm as they hopped a freight train to Butte, Mt., not long after Butte miners went on strike. They intended visiting Sullivan’s uncle and the radical newspaper editor Bill Dunne, who had a reputation as a Montana leader of the socialist movement. Dunne was not just a fictional character. The real Bill Dunne had a long history in the organized labor movement and edited “The Butte Bulletin,” an anti-Anaconda Company newspaper fraught with a socialist agenda. Dunne’s activities got him arrested and convicted under Montana’s infamous sedition law in 1918-19, although he was later acquitted by Montana’s Supreme Court.

The impetus for Sullivan’s Butte trip involved one of his uncles who had worked as Dunne’s stenographer. As Sullivan and Storm approached the Butte church where Dunne was barricaded, they observed “the snarled snout of a machine gun.” When they entered the church Dunne greeted them with a warning that Butte was currently a dangerous place where Martial Law had been in effect since a bombing incident in 1914. U. S. troops were brought in to restore order, but dynamite was still going off in various places in the city. Dunne escorted the two Missoulian boys into one of Butte’s famous bars and convinced them that he was being followed by two Anaconda Company operatives who were bent on killing him. He then revealed a gun tucked in his belt and laid it on the bar stating boldly, “Either way, I get one son of a bitch.” The bartender warned him to quiet down saying, “Take it easy! Guy was killed here only last night.”

In another episode Sullivan read a newspaper at [Ownie] Kelley’s downtown Missoula billiard hall while practicing his pool game. The lead article read, “Frank Little, I.W.W. leader in Butte, hanged!” He read further as he went back and forth from the table, “Only men ashamed of what they are about, work with masked faces at three in the morning. This was the job of hired gunmen of the A.C.M., Bill Dunne is quoted as having said.”

As Sullivan went outside, he noted the weather was unusually hot and dry and would likely lead to a severe fire season. “They’d probably blame this on the Wobblies, too. He wondered what in hell all the fighting was about. So far as he could learn, from what Dunne said and his uncle spilled in his cups, the workers wanted a decent wage, safe conditions in the mines and lumber camps. His old man had been a fireman and a union man, too. No Wobblies in those days, though; the old man had been dead for some time.”

Reflecting the different standards of acceptable behavior from that era, in another episode Sullivan had already introduced Augie Storm to alcohol and now to a local brothel. “When Sullivan suggested going to see Penny, Augie was scared half out of his pants. They’d gone down to the rooms of Madam Nellie’s Hotel. They’d walked up the stairs to the second-floor lobby. The Madam with skirts flowing like Thais floated up the hall. . . ‘What comes now?’ Says Augie. ‘Keep your pants on!’ Sullivan sneers. ‘All in good time.”

Larger than life, echoes of Stiff Sullivan dominate “The Bitter Roots,” almost to the point of suffocating the other characters. If Macleod’s tale accurately reflected the real “Wild Bill” Kelly, what became of the darker side of this athletic marvel who died at age 26? In an interview with me a few years ago, one of Wild Bill Kelly’s prominent Grizzly teammates, Sam Kain, who later became an MCHS coach, described to me an incident of being bullied by Kelly on the football field. He still had no liking for Kelly. He also curiously described Kelly as both an enigma, and a thug. Kain also had gotten to know the Maclean brothers and liked them.

In his fiction, probably the most famous Missoula fiction writer of all, Norman Maclean, author of “A River Runs Through It,” also had a penchant for writing about some of Missoula’s real characters; and in some instances, he used their real names. While concentrating on fishing and working for the Forest Service, Maclean also focused on some of the things that you might expect from a tough kid from that era: “The world of the woods and the working stiff was pretty much made of three things–working, fighting, and dames-and the complete lumberjack had to be handy at all of them;”- this a quote from his story-“Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim.”

A good athlete himself, Norman Maclean played varsity football as a senior for Missoula High School in 1919, starting as a running back who weighed, according to a Missoulian article, 143 pounds. That same year one of his teammates was a freshman who actually quarterbacked a varsity game, Billy Kelly who weighed only 130 pounds. Norman Maclean was familiar with the 14-year-old “Wild Bill” Kelly even in his high school days, since at least 1919.

In May of this year (2024) I contacted John Maclean regarding several different things related to this: His father, Norman Maclean, “Wild Bill” Kelly, his father’s story, “Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim,” and the book, “The Bitter Roots.” In the past I had repeatedly browbeaten some of my friends and relatives about Norman Maclean’s Logging story, to the point of exhausting their evaporating patience. “Give John Maclean a call and see what he says,” was a constant refrain, which I avoided for a long time. With the coming reprint of “The Bitter Roots,” it seemed like a good time to talk to him.

When I asked John in a phone call if he was familiar with “Wild Bill” Kelly, he explained that he’d never heard of him. “There you go,” I could hear the refrain from my friends. My own whacko Bill Kelly conspiracy theory fell on its butt, while my fickle friends laughed. John Maclean wasn’t laughing, however.

He was very interested in the coming reprint of “The Bitter Roots,” which he had also never heard of. Nor was he familiar with its author, Norman Macleod. When I first contacted John, I mentioned that I was a retired 40-year Missoula Postal worker who had worked with Norman “Bunny” Means, another native Missoulian, whose father was a prominent Missoula fisherman, highly regarded fly tier and friend of Norman’s father. I do have a fair knowledge of Missoula’s community’s history, though I admit I am frequently reminded there’s plenty I don’t know. I’ve also been warned about speculating about this stuff.

In our discussion, John Maclean was affable and easy to talk to. I recounted several similarities I found between “Wild Bill” Kelly and Jim Grierson, the logger/protagonist in his father’s story, “Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim.” I didn’t dwell on the fact that his father’s story never mentioned football once.

In the beginning of that story Jim Grierson crudely challenges everybody in his bunkhouse with a brash statement about their “incompetence,” and the Anaconda Company. It caused Norman to observe that he already knew Jim Grierson and knew that he was a socialist, “who thought that Eugene Debs was soft.” By then Debs was known worldwide for his socialist history. Yet, the story strangely never explained how Maclean had come to know Jim Grierson prior to the bunkhouse incident, or that he was a socialist.

Norman also describes Grierson as a tough customer who probably hated the Anaconda Company more than anybody in the camp. In estimating that he would probably not stand a chance in a fight with Grierson, Norman later described him as weighing 185 to 190 pounds, who “worked with a kind of speed that was part ferocity.” In several instances in his story Maclean referred to Grierson as similar to Jack Dempsey. . . “with this Jack Dempsey at the other end of the saw I knew I’d never have a chance if he took a punch at me.” Keep in mind that Billy Kelly’s job was to simulate a Jack Dempsey while sparring with Tommy Gibbons in Missoula in 1923.

Maclean’s story described his Blackfoot logging camp life as occurring in 1927, when he was first entering graduate school. A full-page article and a map from ‘The Helena Independent’ newspaper on January 16, 1927, described the lives of Blackfoot lumberjacks and life in the camps in the Blackfoot during that time. Logging in that area had been largely dormant until 1927 when ACM operations moved back there from the Nine-mile area, west of Missoula. Logging in the Blackfoot at that point involved several hundred men spread over six different camps, with headquarters located not far from Greenough. Camp 6, with about 100 men appeared to be the farthest camp downriver. Groups of 16 men lived in a series of bunkhouses in each of the camps and the article thoroughly explained that they ate well courtesy of the company. The article also stated that some men had saved as much as $6,000 while working there.

At the end of 1927 “Wild Bill” Kelly had just wound up his collegiate football career in Missoula playing for the University of Montana, and had just signed his first professional contract to begin playing in N.Y. Some reports stated that he weighed 180 pounds. He still did not have enough credits to graduate but had plans to return and finish his degree. A frequently mentioned West Point opportunity had recently fallen through. It’s believed that Kelly made as much as $9,000 that first year in professional ball.

In the Logging story Maclean wrote, “It is true, too, that up to a point I liked being around him – he was three years older than I was, which is at times a lot, and he had seen parts of life with which I, as the son of a Presbyterian minister, wasn’t exactly intimate.”

“Wild Bill” Kelly, born in 1905, was three years younger than Norman Maclean. He was the same age as his classmate, Paul Maclean, Norman’s brother.

In the story Norman learned that Grierson “had been brought up in the Dakotas and that his father (and I quote) was a ‘scotch son of a bitch’ who threw him out of the house when he was fourteen and he had been making his own living ever since.”

Bill Kelly’s mother, Anna (or Annie) Kelly, married Otis J. Price, a railroad brakeman, in Butte, Mt., in 1909. Her first husband, James Kelly from Aberdeen S. D., had moved the family to Denver where he died in 1907. By 1909 Anna and her family were living in Missoula. Anna stated in a research interview with researcher Howard Schwartz in 1969 that Bill was actually born in Denver, even though the 1920 census stated he was born in South Dakota.

In his Logging story Maclean makes this strange observation about Jim Grierson’s history: “Coming out the back door of the Dakotas in the twenties he had to be a dispossessed socialist of some sort . . .” Maclean never made clear the significance of the “back door” remark. Over the years in Missoula “Wild Bill” Kelly’s origins had always been obscure and were not made clear until the 1960’s, when the above researcher, Howard Schwartz, tracked it down while writing his research paper about Kelly.

Since the age of 4 Kelly had lived with his mother, Anna, sister, Mary, and stepfather, Otis Price in the Northside area of Missoula. In 1916 they lived at 738 N 4^th Street. This area of Missoula was known to be heavily populated by railroad employees. His parents were divorced in 1920 when Kelly was likely age 15. It’s unlikely that he lived with his stepfather, Otis J Price, after that. His mother remarried and moved out of the state not long after. Where high school age Billy lived at this time is not known. It is known that he had a Missoulian paper route for several years and that he graduated from Whittier grade school. Mary, his sister, was 2 years older and is also listed in the 1920 census as residing at the same location.

Kelly had built a well-known football reputation by the time he graduated high school in 1923 and appeared to be headed to college out of state. Local rumors were that Notre Dame had contacted him, possibly through a friend, Frank Campbell who had graduated there. At this point several Missoula businessmen made a pitch to keep him in Missoula, and to keep playing for the Grizzlies. H. O. Bell, the dynamic Ford car dealer in Missoula, revealed in a later interview that he paid Kelly $75 a month to remain in Missoula and to work for him at the Ford dealership. It was also known that Kelly lived at Bell’s home for a time. Another Missoula business, Independent Oil, owned by the Campbell family, also hired Kelly around this time. It appears he had more jobs than he had time for.

Kelly joined the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity his freshman year. One of his fraternity brothers recalled that he “preferred going out on the town at nights.” Another classmate stated he liked to drink, “like all the rest of us. It was prohibition times, so it seemed fashionable to imbibe.” Not long after Kelly signed his first contract in 1927, he was also featured in a national cigarette advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Pictures of him smoking appeared in ads in The Missoulian.

In the Logging story Maclean wrote this about Jim, “He explained to me that he made his living only partly by working. He worked just in the summer, and then the cultural side of him, as it were, took over. He holed up for the winter in some town that had a good Carnegie Public Library and the first thing he did was he took out a library card. Then he went looking for a good whore, and so he spent the winter reading and pimping . . .He said that on the whole he preferred southern whores; southern whores, he said, were generally ‘more poetical, . . .’”

The location of Jim Grierson’s local pimping business became clearer as the story progressed.

“Pimping is a little more complicated than the innocent bystander might think. Besides selecting a whore (big as well as southern, i.e., “poetical”) and keeping her happy (taking her to the Bijou Theater in the afternoons) and hustling (rounding up all the Swedes and Finns and French Canadians you had known in the woods) you also had to be your own bootlegger (it still being prohibition) and your own police fixer (it being then as always) and your own bouncer (which introduced a kind of sporting element into the game). But after a few days of resting every hour we had pretty well covered the subject, and still nobody seemed interested in bringing up the subject of socialism.”

Any friendship they had seemed totally strained at that point. Jim worked so hard on the two-man saw that Norman was almost collapsing. And they were not talking anymore. “I suppose that an early stage in coming to hate someone is just running out of things to talk about. . .Slowly we became silent, and silence itself is an enemy to friendship. . . within a week we weren’t speaking to each other.”

Norman spent a good portion of the story now detailing how he managed to survive what appeared to be Jim’s plan to literally work him to death. Maintaining his dignity was important, but at a cost. “When he broke the silence to ask me if I would like to change from a six- to a seven-foot saw, I knew I was sawing for survival.”

Using everything he could think of to survive, Norman described slowing down the pace of sawing, while avoiding upsetting his partner in doing it. Another tactic involved unnecessarily clearing brush away to stop the sawing altogether.

Norman describes two other unique incidents that helped him survive. Jim got into a battle with the camp’s head cook, demanding that he bake pies for breakfast. When the other men surprisingly  backed him up Jim won the battle, and the cook began serving pies for breakfast. Unbelievably, nobody from their camp would then touch the pies for breakfast, including Jim.

A second incident involved a local ranch wife who rode her horse into camp carrying a gallon pail with plans to go huckleberry picking. Jim somehow managed to escort her on her picking adventure. She later rode back through the camp with an empty pail. Other camp men ridiculed her as she rode by.

Encouraged that he had managed to survive the summer this far, Norman was now planning for his life at school. With that in mind his days became easier.

“The pie fight with the cook and the empty huckleberry pail were just what I needed psychologically to last until Labor Day weekend, when long ago, I had told both Jim and the foreman I was quitting in order to get ready for school. There was no great transformation in either Jim or me. Jim was still about the size of Jack Dempsey. Nothing had happened to reduce this combination of power and speed.”

“One day toward the end of August he spoke out of silence and said, ‘When are you going to quit?’ It sounded as if someone had broken the silence before it was broken by Genesis.”

Norman responded that he planned to quit before the Labor Day weekend.

Jim said, “I may see you in town before you leave for the east. I’m going to quit early this year myself.”

Whether by chance or by plan, Grierson and Norman did meet before Norman left Missoula.

“The week before I was going to leave for school I ran into him on the main street. He was looking great – a little thin, but just a little. He took me into a speakeasy and bought me a drink of Canadian Club.” After two more drinks, Jim said, “You know I have to take care of you.” Norman didn’t expect this type of exchange after a month of hating Grierson. “Even after three drinks in the afternoon, I was a little startled, and still am.”

“Outside, as we stood parting and squinting in the sunlight, he said, ‘I got a place already for this dame of mine, but we’ve not yet set up for business.’ Then he said very formally, ‘We would appreciate it very much if you would pay us a short visit before you leave town.‘ And he gave me the address and, when I told him it would have to be soon, we made a date for the next evening.

“The address he had given me was on the north side, which is just across the tracks, where most of the railroaders lived. When I was a kid, our town had what was called a red-light district on Front Street adjoining the city dump which was always burning with a fitting smell, but the law had more or less closed it up and scattered the girls around, a fair proportion of whom sprinkled themselves among the railroaders, When I finally found the exact address, I recognized the house next to it. It belonged to a brakeman who married a tramp and thought he was quite a fighter, although he never won many fights. He was more famous in town for the story that he came home one night unexpectedly and captured a guy coming out. He reached in his pocket and pulled out three dollars. ‘Here,’ he told the guy, ‘go and get yourself a good screw.”

Norman was quickly introduced to what he believed were two of Jim’s whores, one of whom spoke about like another Blackfoot logger. “God bless your ‘ol pee hole, come on in and park your ‘ol prat on the piano,” one said to Norman. She had earlier been described by Jim as a perfect whore; both “Southern” and “poetical.” Norman soon learned her name was “Annabelle.”

“The other woman looked older, but not so old as she was supposed to be, because when she finally was introduced she was introduced as Annabelle’s mother. Naturally, I wondered how she figured in Jim’s operation and a few days later I ran into some jacks in town who knew her and said she was still a pretty good whore, although a little sad and flabby. Later that evening I tried talking to her; I don’t think there was much left to her inside but it was clear she thought the world of Jim.”

Later Norman summarized his observations, “Earlier in the evening I realized that the two women were not mother and daughter or related in any way. Probably all three of them got strange pleasures from the notion they were a family. Both women, of course, dressed alike and had curls and did the southern bit, but fundamentally they were not alike in bone or body structure, except that they were both big women. So all three of them created a warm family circle of lies.”

While talking with John Maclean I briefly summarized several of the above points in making my case about “Wild Bill” Kelly, and his father’s Logging story. If you only used Norman Maclean’s story “Logging and Pimping and Your Pal, Jim,” without knowing Norman Macleod’s book “The Bitter Roots” to use as a secondary source, the oblique Kelly/Grierson references are truly only on the periphery. Norman may have said it best when he said, “He [Jim] was one of those people who turn out not to have some prominent characteristic that you thought was a prominent one when you first met them. Maybe you only thought they had it because what you first saw or heard was at an acute angle. . .”

John generously advised me to write it up.