Old Missoula

O. C. Garlington and George B. Wilcox – 2 Early Missoula Mercantile Employes Retire – 1950

Two Mercantile Employes Retiring – Wilcox and Garlington

Two old-timers at the Missoula Mercantile company were honor guests at a dinner given by the firm Monday night at Hotel Florence. George B. Wilcox, a hardware buyer, retired April 10 after a half-century of continuous service and O. C. Garlington, traffic manager, is retiring Saturday after 42 years of continuous service.

Some 100 persons were present at the affair. They were composed of close associates, MM employes with at least 25 years of consecutive service, department managers, officers and directors.

Each man was given a wrist watch by the company. President Walter H. McLeod was toastmaster. Other speakers were L. E. Bunge, vice president and treasurer; Amelia Loffnes, who has had 53 years of continuous service, and the honor guests.

Vocal solos were given by I. E. Peterson and Mrs. McLeod and a vocal duet by Ruth Lechner and Mr. Peterson. Heinie Eisen played dinner music.

Mr. Garlington’s place will be taken by Fred O. Deckert, his assistant, whom he has been training for several years to become his successor. Mr. Wilcox’s place has not been filled yet. As one of several hardware buyers, he has been handling tools, builders’ hardware and stoves and ranges principally.

The traffic manager maintains a suburban home in the Orchard Homes district and intends to remain in Missoula. He expects to spend more of his time on his hobbies of hunting, fishing and growing Holland tulips. He and Mrs. Garlington may take a trip toward winter.

Mr. Wilcox, whose wife died last October 12, will continue to make his home in Missoula. However, he plans to be away during the cold months. Next winter he and a daughter, Georgia H., expect to take an extended trip to California, through the southern states to Florida. At the end of this week they are going on a trip to the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, through central California and to Seattle which will take a month.

Mr. Garlington went to work for the MM on April 27, 1908, as traffic manager. He had been a Missoulian since September 4, 1899, when he went to work in the Northern Pacific railroad’s freight office under Harry P. Clark who then was local agent. After several years of office work with the railway he spent four years as rate and revising clerk which was the beginning of his transportation career.

The first decade of the twentieth century impressed both Mr. Garlington and Mr. Wilcox as an important period in the development of Missoula. At the beginning of his work for the MM, Winston Bros & Co. of St. Paul had the contract for double tracking the NP from Garrison to Missoula which really was a big undertaking since it involved several tunnels, said Mr. Garlington. The western extension of the Milwaukee to the Pacific coast was under construction then, construction being linked August 15, 1909. As the MM was furnishing much of the material and supplies used by the contractors on those projects, the store’s freight traffic was very heavy, he recalled.

Within 30 days after he started to work for the store, the big 1908 flood came. It destroyed considerable of the Northern Pacific’s old roadbed and much of the new work on both NP and Milwaukee lines in Hell Gate canyon east of Missoula. Missoula had no through passenger or freight trains for about a month.

Mr. Garlington has participated in many of the state’s railroad transportation problems pertaining to rates and practices, before both the state railroad commission and the interstate commerce commission. He had a part in an extended battle that led to passage of legislation by congress ending a long period of discriminatory rates imposed on shippers in the mountain Pacific territory. For many years he was Montana vice president of the Interstate Rate association.

The transportation expert was born at Walla Walla, Wash., March 10, 1875. When he was five, his family moved to a ranch in eastern Oregon near the town of Wasco. In 10 years the family moved to a ranch in western Oregon between Hillsboro and Forest Grove.

After finishing Oregon grade schools, Mr. Garlington entered what then was known as Tualatin academy and Pacific university at Forest Grove, Ore. He was graduated from the academy and then entered the university which he attended for three years. At the end of his junior year he came to Missoula on July 7, 1899, to vacation with friends. Being pleased with Missoula, he decided to make the Treasure state his home so went to work for the NP.

He was married to Jessie O. Slaughter, a Missoula girl, at Bellingham, Wash., where she was then living with her folks, on January 20, 1904. They have one son, Jamesbert C., a local attorney.

Mr. Garlington belongs to Missoula lodge No. 13, AF&AM; Western Sun chapter No. 11, Royal Arch Masons; Electa chapter No. 7, Order of Eastern Star, and Covenant lodge No. 6, IOOF; the local Chamber of Commerce and the Orchard Homes Country Life club.

During the half-century, Mr. Wilcox has been employed by the MM, he has seen the number of hardware department employes increase from nine to more than 60 and the store’s departments increase from nine to 23.

Arriving in the Garden city on a Saturday night, he went to work the next Monday, April 9, 1900, as an MM hardware clerk, having come west when promised a job. He followed a brother, A. Warren Wilcox, to Missoula. His brother had come to Helena on hearing about a job from their uncle who was a traveling salesman. Subsequently Warren Wilcox went to work for the MM here.

George Wilcox was born at LeMars, Iowa, February 21, 1878. He was one of a family of four boys. He attended the schools there and was brought up in his father’s hardware store.

It was a few years before he came to Missoula in 1900 that A. B. Hammond left the store in the hands of the late C. H. McLeod when he entered the lumber business at Astoria, Ore.

The main office was located where the college shop now is. C. H. McLeod was general manager; Fred Sterling, brother of A. M. Sterling of Ronan, was assistant manager; Harry Van Wart was cashier and John Inch was secretary and credit manager. Nat Little was hardware department manager and George Beckwith, now a St. Ignatius merchant, was the department’s floor chief.

Two employes of the store when he came to Missoula are with it today. They are Miss Loffnes, who did secretarial work for C. H. McLeod, and Sid William, now in the hardware department but then in the crockery department, who, however, hasn’t worked continuously for the store.

The store was kept open from 7 a. m. to 8 p. m. Monday to Friday, and from 7 a. m. to 11 p. m. Saturday. Inasmuch as the NP had the only pay roll of any consequence here in those days, it used to be a common thing in those days for the head of the house, when paid off on Saturday night, to take his whole family to the Isis or Empress theaters until about 9 p. m. and then go to the store to do the family shopping, he recalled.

The Hotel Florence used to meet trains with a horse-drawn bus, Mr. Wilcox said. Streets were deep with mud and planks were used at intersections for pedestrians. Mr. Wilcox told how bus passengers used to bump their derbies on the bus top when the planks were crossed.

About 1908 a period of great development got under way in this part of western Montana and it continued even after World war 1, the veteran employe said. He spoke of the Northern Pacific and Milwaukee railroad construction projects and the 1908 flood, which Mr. Garlington also mentioned. He told of a dam being built at Lake Como and of irrigation water being provided for the east side of the Bitter Root valley. This led to setting up of five and 10-acre plots, which were planted to McIntosh Red apples, boomed across the country and sold to professional people to live on when they retired. He recalled that the Flathead Indian reservation was opened to settlement. He spoke of the disastrous 1910 forest fires.

When the Higgins avenue bridge was washed out, a half-dozen clerks were forced to sleep for a night on cots set up in the store, Mr. Wilcox related. They got home the next day, he said, via a temporary suspension bridge strung between remaining portions of the old bridge.

About 1910 the store got its first motor-driven delivery truck, he remembered. It was a high-wheeled, chain-driven vehicle. In those days deliveries were provided as far out as Orchard Homes, he said.

The year 1910 was noteworthy for Mr. Wilcox, too, because he was married June 1 to Helene Kennett at the First Presbyterian church here. Their children are Mrs. Carl G. Forssen of Seattle, Mrs. Charles E. Hubbard of Deer Lodge, Mrs. D. B. Harris of Anchorage, Alaska, and Georgia, a nurse, who has been home since her mother died, coming from Whitefish.

On coming to Missoula, Mr. Wilcox transferred his church membership to the First Presbyterian church here. He was named a trustee in 1901 and has served continuously in that capacity for 47 ¾ years.

 

The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian on April 25, 1950.

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