Phil Sheridan Days
Phil Sheridan Days
We’re trying to keep this column contemporary, but it seems three letters out of four start out, “Remember the time . . . “
F’rinstance, one from Robert C. Hendon, vice president of Railway Express Agency. He’s a 1931 and 1934 graduate of the University of Montana (yep, that’s right) and is a trustee of the UM Foundation.
Bob was a roommate of mine for four or five years while he attended the University. He writes from Larchmont, N. Y.;
“Remember that 1931 Fourth of July celebration Phil Sheridan staged up at Mill Creek, above Frenchtown?”
‘Deed I do, Bob. That year, as in many recent years, Missoula made no formal observation of Independence Day, but many other Western Montana communities did. Thousands of Missoulians remember Phil Sheridan’s Orchestra, which played for every conceivable type of gathering. In that depression year of 1931. Phil staged an all-out celebration at Mill Creek, where there was a dance pavilion.
Ambitious Program
There were to be a barbeque, foot races, various other contests of skill, a fight card, fireworks, and, of course, dancing, all day and all night, with a midnight feed thrown in. Phil gave us 50 bucks to stage the fight card, and that wasn’t hay in those days.
I lined up Joe Roe from the University and Buck Van Dorn from town, a couple of other bouts, and matched myself with a soldier from Ft. Missoula. Bob Hendon and I, with Tommy Moore, now a San Francisco bank vice president, hitchhiked out to Mill Creek, no small experience in itself.
When we got to the celebration site, everything was ready as planned, except people. Phil had made arrangements for a couple thousand or so, but the crowd, by stretching, may have been 200, not more.
Another Hitch Develops
The orchestra kept blaring away, waiting for more of a crowd, but finally Phil said: “You may as well go ahead with the boxing card.” Well, the soldier I was supposed to fight hadn’t arrived, but the others were ready. Sheridan had paid for four bouts, and that’s what we gave him. When the first two were finished, and my reluctant tiger still hadn’t shown, we repaired to a tent, and mapped some quick strategy. Tom Moore, a Grizzly sprinter and halfback, weighed about 165. I weighed 125. We matched ourselves for the main event.
I had a patch over my left eye, from a two-day-old cut. We enlisted Hendon as referee, with strict instructions to stop the fight when Tommy knocked the patch off and got the blood to flowing. It worked perfectly, with a little more maneuvering. The patch was still on at the end of the first round, so a quick pull in the corner removed it, and a little rubbing got the cut bleeding as we started the second round. Tommy went to work on it, smeared the blood around, Hendon stepped in to stop it and the crowd cheered.
We gave each of the other battlers five bucks and that left 20 for Hendon, Moore and me. Quite a celebration.
Bob gets out here every year or so for University Foundation meetings, and I thought he’d be content to forget that episode. But still he brings it up.
Phil Sheridan died in Spokane quite a few years ago, but as far as I know the other principals in that celebration are still going.
About those two graduation dates for Hendon. He got his degree from the J-School when he was 19 years old, and three years later got his law degree.
The above Keeping Up With Jones column appeared in The Missoulian on June 1, 1967.
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