“The Traveling Sataspians – a story of 1920’s & Norman Macleod’s Intramural Missoula Basketball”
“The Traveling Sataspians”
Excerpts from Norman Wicklund Macleod’s autobiography “I Never Lost Anything in Istanbul,” Pembroke Magazine # 5 – 1973.
“My next recollection is of riding in an open observation car – something like the top deck of a Fifth Avenue bus – of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul going to Montana out past waving wheat fields in autumn, over shining waterways toward the triple divide (near Alberta) of a continent, across the broad plains and rippling prairies, past the loping foothills to the stone backbone of the Northwest, the western Montana Rocky Mountains. I did not know it then, but when the train left North Dakota and passed into the brilliant, recently rain-washed air of Montana, I experienced a kind of rebirth which would result in my permanent love of and dedication to the American West.
“My mother had obtained an appointment as an English and speech instructor at Montana State University in Missoula. For a while we lived in the western half of a duplex close to the college campus. . .
“One Sunday after (sic) I was leaning out the window of my mother’s office when Barbara [Sterling] approached on her bicycle, braked to a stop, and (bracing herself with her right foot on the sidewalk) called to me to come down. I think it was the only time she ever spoke to me. I was tongue-tied, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak, but I dreamed about her for the rest of the time I was in Missoula, and I invited her by letter to the only party my mother ever gave for me. I was about to be graduated from grade school, I think. The boys and girls bobbed for McIntosh apples, danced and played games while I, in the recess of the bay window in the living room opposite the red brick fireplace, miserably looked on, embarrassed and alone. This was after my mother married Dr. William Park Mills, a pioneer physician and surgeon in western Montana, and we had moved from the duplex on Connell Avenue to a large, three-story rococo house on Stephens Avenue. . .
“My first job was selling newspapers for the Daily Missoulian . . .
“The afternoon I first came out of the newspaper plant with my bundle of papers, Wild Bill Kelly, Eddie O’Rourke, and the other news-kids gave me the hotfoot. They pounded the soles of my shoes with a stout board until the bones in my shoes rattled like dice on a crap-game Saturday night. The youngsters were tough in Missoula, or so it seemed to me. Most of them were ruggedly individualistic, had a kind of pioneering vigor, I believe, that was not characteristic of kids in the Middle West. The gaunt mountains had something to do with it and the fact that Montana in those years was still culturally expressive of the wild violence of the frontier. The loud lustiness of lumberjacks and the anger of miners in the copper mines of Butte, the mythology of the Plummer gang and other road agents of the past, the visible agony of the rigid mountain peaks, and the free-for-all economic warfare that had resulted in the making of so many Montana millionaires in one generation were all a living reality to the boys I knew in Missoula. Perhaps that accounted for what later became their high morbidity and mortality rates as well as for the reckless spirit and violence of their play.
“In the summer of 1941, when I had returned to the scenes of my Montana boyhood in order to write the novel named The Bitter Roots – the publisher Harrison Smith had given me an advance – I took an inventory of what had happened to the youth I had known in Missoula. The older brother of Barbara Sterling, I heard, was far gone in booze and living like a hermit in a primitive log cabin beside Flathead Lake in the shadow of the Mission Mountains. Another athlete I had known, a high school football tackle who had weighed 190 pounds, had revisited Missoula the year before. He looked like a ghost of his former self. He was hooked on heroin, it was said. But Eddie O’Rourke* had become a prize fighter of some renown and later a successful gambler who owned a saloon across the street not far from the new plant of the The Daily Missoulian. One of the boys I had feared and admired, Paul Maclean, a son of the Presbyterian minister in Missoula, after graduating from an Ivy League college, became a press agent for the University of Chicago Press and was discovered in a dark alley of the Windy City in 1938 with a bullet hole in his head – I had already learned this before my return to Missoula through having read a news item in the New York Times. I don’t think a gun was ever found. Another boy had been drowned before he was out of grade school. He had been tossed into the Clark Fork of the Columbia River where the current was swift and he couldn’t swim. And Wild Bill Kelley, who was our hero, the only Montana athlete who was later to make an eighty-six yard run through the University of California team at Berkeley, and who subsequently became a gangster in Brooklyn, Eddie O’Rourke said, died during the depression. . .
“According to Eddie, there were two stories as to how that had happened. One version averred that he had drunk a quart of bathtub gin during Prohibition, eaten twelve hamburgers one after another, and died of acute indigestion. The other account maintained that he had been taken for a ride by a rival mob, let out at a vacant lot in Brooklyn, and riddled with sub-machine gun bullets. . .
“Our new home on Stephens Avenue had been remodeled for the marriage. Some of the windows were made of stained glass. The grounds included a large lawn with rose and lilac bushes, and there was a patch of rhubarb near an enclosure containing peacocks that were owned by the French Canadian family next door. In the back of the house there was an orchard of apple and cherry trees, a henhouse full of white chickens, and a big barn. Dr. Mills had one of his Jersey cows brought down from his ranch near Lolo, and it was my job to do the milking every morning and evening for several years. After I entered Missoula High School, I converted the loft of the barn into a basketball court and organized a basketball team composed of high school and university athletes, most of whom had not been able to maintain grade averages high enough to qualify them to play in varsity games. I found a typewriter in the attic of our home and proceeded to peck out laboriously letters to many of the high schools in western Montana, and in that way I arranged a schedule of games for the Sataspians, the name I had chosen for the team. Sometimes I would not know until the very last moment what players would bum their way with me on the Northern Pacific or the electrified Milwaukee railroad. We never rode freights for fear of not getting to a game on time. We always caught passenger trains and rode either on the tender or between the blinds.
“The record of our dependable appearance for games on schedule was marred by only one pathetic failure. When spring arrived that year, none of the other Sataspians was in a mood to beat his way to Camas Hot Springs, Montana, a consolidated school way out in the back country of Flathead Valley where the humpbacked buffaloes still roamed under government protection and where the Flathead Indians were numerous. I pleaded and cajoled but to no avail. The parents of Camas Hot Springs High School boys and girls came from miles around to see the game, some by wagon, some by sputtering automobile, and others on horseback or on foot. But the Sataspians didn’t show. Several days later the principal of Missoula High School called me into his office. Understandably enough, the Camas Hot Springs principal had been greatly embarrassed. It took me some time to convince the Missoula principal that I had not used the name of his school in scheduling the game, but by the time I knew for sure that the Sataspians wouldn’t go, it was too late to do much good, and I was too ashamed to call. . .
“If much of my life has been mainly memory, some of it has been a language for blue spruce and pine tall as the standing rain above the he-grass brown and often whiskered beyond the sheltering underbrush, the grey grouse thundering out of the evergreen forest where the tracks of deer were too fastidious to go as high as the abstract tracery of ice above the snowline. Bill Williams [William Carlos Williams] once explained to an audience of girls at Briarcliff Junior College that he composed a poem as an artist paints a picture, placing a detail here and a brush stroke there in such a way as to expose the meaning. Harold Rugg, the only professor at Teachers College of Columbia University while I was a graduate student there that I truly enjoyed, went even further in commenting on the artistic process. He maintained that the elements in any art must be selected and arranged in such a way as to reveal the relationships of forces that lie beneath the surface and constitute the true and emerging reality. Since I feel what Professor Rugg has said to be true, I am not in the course of composing these memoirs adhering strictly to a chronological line of development. . . It is the function of the artist, I feel, to give meaning through composition to the chaos of experience – past, present and future. . .
“As a boy I was not a good basketball player. In games I had arranged for my basketball club (the Sataspians – I found the name in one of my mother’s encyclopedias, but I’ve forgotten what the word means) to play in competition with the high school teams of LoLo, Frenchtown, Thompson Falls and other towns smaller than Missoula in Montana. I usually played an erratic game at the position of forward but my performance against the Salish Indian quintet of Arlee on the Flathead reservation not far from the towering snow-covered Mission Range was a different story, one that I related in my second novel, The Bitter Roots, published in 1941. The other members of my Missoula squad, particularly the Presbyterian minister’s son Pauly Maclean, were astonished at my accuracy of aim from almost any part of the court, and after the game was over the Flathead Indians of Arlee were unhappy. I couldn’t seem to miss and partly because of that the Sataspians won. Later while we were playing pool in the local parlor downtown while waiting for the train on which we would bum our way back to Missoula, Pauly asked me what had happened.
“’Something came over me,’ I said. All during the game I was not fully conscious of the fact that I was playing basketball and playing well. Usually, I was too self-conscious to do anything properly, or so I thought. I couldn’t even win the Missoula High School declamatory contest, although my mother was a university speech instructor and had coached me as best she could. Pauly won the contest by reciting Vachel Lindsay’s ‘The Congo,’ which in retrospect is not surprising. In those days high school students were winning prizes all over the United States because of having chosen ‘The Congo’ to recite. Furthermore, the Presbyterian minister’s son usually got whatever he set out to get. From the billiard parlor in Arlee, I reported the game by long distance telephone to the daily newspaper The Missoulian, careful to give myself credit for having helped to win the game for the Sataspians, and later that night we boarded the frozen tender of the locomotive while the southbound train was gathering momentum after leaving the railroad station at Arlee and rode through the rugged Coriacan Defile back home to Missoula. The snow mantled acclivities on either side of us were tinged with honeysuckle rose whenever the fireman opened the furnace door to stoke the blazing fire with coal. The cone of the locomotive’s headlight, opening a swift running hole in the night, swerved at every curve and divided the distance that closed in darkness behind us. Twenty years later, after I had returned from Missoula (where I had spent the summer of 1941 writing the first draft of The Bitter Roots) to the apartment I shared with Vivian Koch in the east seventies of New York City, I wrote a poem in recollection of the only game in which I had played like a fairly decent adolescent athlete, some verse entitled ‘We Played the Flatheads at Arlee’. . . Not a good poem, but something the literary critic R. P. Blackmur perhaps in his capacity for kindness might have described as ‘poetry of statement.’
*The description here leaves little doubt that the Eddy O’Rourke he has described is his school mate Billy Dugal McFarland, eventual owner of Missoula’s famous bar – The Oxford. At the end of his novel, The Bitter Roots, Macleod also credits McFarland for stories “told out of season.”
Missoula Sataspians – A rogue independent basketball team – 1921/1922 (Dodson/McLeod/Keene/Dexter/Nash/MacLean)
See Norman Macleod’s poem below: “We Played the Flatheads at Arlee”
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352041997/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 1/12/1922 (Mills gym) – Florence-Carlton
https://www.newspapers.com/image/348703342/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 3/17/1921 – Epworth League
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352043004/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 2/3/1922 – Thompson Falls & Florence-Carlton
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352043289/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 2/10/1922 – Camas Hot Spgs
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352042726/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 1/27/1922 – Stevensville
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352043550/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 2/16/1922 – Msla Seconds
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352043691/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 2/19/1922 (McLean & Keene) – Frenchtown (Pinsonnault)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352043095/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 2/5/1922 – Florence-Carlton
https://www.newspapers.com/image/348700801/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 1/30/1921 – Victor
https://www.newspapers.com/image/348702778/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 3/6/1921 (McLeod/ Meehan/ Dodson/McClain/Nash) – Deer Lodge
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352042621/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 1/24/1922 (8 Game Schedule- 1922)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352042464/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 1/21/1922 (Keene/Maclean/Dodds/Giddings/Kendall) – Frenchtown
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352043283/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 2/10/1922 (Arlee Game announced)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352044895/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 3/5/1922 – Ronan
https://www.newspapers.com/image/348701478/?terms=%22sataspians%22 – Missoulian – 2/12/1921 – Msla Seconds
https://www.newspapers.com/image/348702778/?terms=%22Mcleod%22%2Bquint – Missoulian – 3/6/1921 – Deer Lodge
https://www.newspapers.com/image/348701947/?terms=%22Keene%22 – Missoulian 2/20/1921 – 2nd game of nite – Frenchtown
https://www.newspapers.com/image/348703298/?terms=%22Keene%22 – Missoulian 3/16/1921 (Dodson/McLeod/Keene/Dexter/Nash/MacLean) – Epworth League