Old Missoula

Robert B Fraser

In 1952, Robert Fraser, of Billings, was one of five U of M students who were selected as candidates for a Rhodes Scholarship. A photo of him appeared in The Missoulian, along with Missoulian Wayne Mytty, who was an MCHS graduate. It wouldn’t have been all that unusual, except that Fraser was decidedly different from the other candidates. In addition to being a senior in economics and an outstanding student, Fraser was a state Golden Gloves boxing champion and an acolyte of noted professional Missoula boxer, James “Spider” McCallum. He was also a top competitor in International horse shows, along with his three older sisters. One of his sisters became a Miss Montana while riding a show horse.

Fraser’s record attests that he was no ordinary local boxer. He was a three-time U of M campus boxing champion, and was the outstanding U of M club boxer in 1951.

A description of one of Fraser’s bouts appeared in the U of M Kaimin newspaper on January 23^rd, 1951:

“Two champions retained their titles, eight new champs were crowned, and two former winners were dethroned in the close, scrappy, hard-fought, 11-bout M club boxing tournament Saturday night before a capacity crowd in the Men’s gym.

“In top shape for the feature event, Bob Fraser, Billings, 145 pounds, fighting for Sigma Chi, not only retained his crown for the second year, but was awarded the trophy for being adjudged the outstanding boxer of the evening. Fraser proved too much for opponent Jerry Wilcomb, Missoula, 155 pounder for the National Guard, and the fight was stopped after the first round. . . “

“Referees were Bill D. MacFarland, veteran M club official and one-time crown holder, and Burt Sommers, Fay Clark and Dean Jones judged the bouts while Tom Kingsford, former Grizzly quarterback, kept time. Master of ceremonies was MSU’s national discus champion, Dick Doyle.”

One of the participants that evening was a Missoulian, Bill Merritt. He would lose his life in Korea the following year. The M-Club tournament in 1953 was dedicated to Merritt.[1]

Fraser won the Montana AAU welterweight title in March of 1951, and in April competed in Boston, Massachusetts for a National AAU title, losing in the first bout. He was accompanied to Boston by “Spider” McCallum, who at the time acted as his trainer and mentor.

The legendary McCallum had worked with groups of young Missoula boxers for years. They formed an unofficial club while he trained them and escorted them to cities throughout Montana and Idaho. He also worked with U of M Club fighters for several years.

McCallum’s remarkable reputation in Missoula is recalled even today. He was a veteran of more than 100 fights who was banned from professional boxing in Montana by State Boxing Commission in 1955 because of his age, 38. He had just won 4 bouts the previous year. Nevertheless, he continued to fight in various places throughout the Northwest, including 2 bouts in the same night in Yakima Wa., in 1957 – winning the first, but losing badly in the second.

Sometimes called the “mayor of Woody Street,” McCallum had been boxing since the age of 12. He was born in Dodson, Montana, in 1912, came to Missoula in 1935, and was later the owner of the Maverick Bar on notorious Woody Street. Evelyn King, a Missoulian columnist, referred to that part of Missoula as the “hot bed of honky tonks.” She once visited McCallum’s establishment and recalled that he was respectable host, wearing a white shirt and tie. McCallum was murdered with an ax at his home in downtown Missoula in 1969. The story of his murder trial would require more pages than are available here.

In 1950, Missoulian Sports columnist Ray Rocene wrote about “Spider” McCallum’s endorsement of Bobby Fraser:[2]

“Spider McCallum is enthusiastic about the Missoula squad entering the Whitefish divisional meet. Spider is “’high’” on Bob Fraser, clever University puncher, who is making admirable progress, showing that he has everything in the ring. Spider says that Fraser recently gave a professional boxer a sound trouncing in a workout in the practice ring, convincing him that the Billings boy will go far.”

 In 1951 Rocene gave the following description of Fraser’s progress with “Spider” in his Missoulian column:

“Bob Fraser, Montana university student, who won the state welterweight title at Billings recently, will fight at Boston Monday in the national amateur tournament.

“’Spider’” McCallum has been giving him doses of all angles, boxing, slugging, moving in, drilling from the inside, and he says the boy is improving. “‘He is not a kayo socker yet, but we’ll teach him that’” says Spider, who has 20 years on Montana fisticuffs. “’Fraser is most conscientious about training, zealous about keeping in top-notch physical condition.’”[3]

In a later column (1952) Rocene noted: “Spider McCallum left Friday to be in Bobby Fraser’s corner at the AAU fights at Billings, called there at the insistence of Bobby’s father.”[4]

Fraser won another Montana Golden Glove championship in the spring of 1952, and then competed in Chicago at the National Golden Gloves tournament, winning the first bout, but losing his next by a split decision. He had flown to Chicago with “Spider” McCallum.

Upon returning to Billings, Fraser was quoted in the Billings Gazette: “Perhaps the main thing introduction of Golden Gloves to Montana and Wyoming has done is the improvement of boxing in the eyes of the public. It’s difficult to explain the general change in attitude of people as they begin to think of boxing the same as basketball, football or any other sport.” Fraser had attended the Chicago tournament, all expenses paid; subsequent to winning a Midland Empire Golden Gloves championship in Billings.

In 1948 Fraser, then a Freshman, and his sister, Carol, a Junior, were both attending the University of Montana. From a Montana ranch background, they were already accomplished horse people and had the trophies to prove it. They rode their own horses in the Chicago International Horse Show where they brought home a total of 18 ribbons, including four first place finishes for Carol and one for Robert.

A Kaimin article on Nov. 14, 1950[5] reported that Fraser was a topflight horseman as well as a boxer. The article is quoted below:

Bob Fraser Wins Honors As Horseman

“Bobbie Fraser, junior in economics from Billings, won national recognition recently when he appeared with the United States Olympic jumping team in the national horse show at Madison Square Garden in New York. The United States riders took first place honors over teams from England, Canada, Chile, Ireland, and Mexico.

“Fraser won his position on the team after taking first and third in elimination trials held in Philadelphia. The trials preceded the team’s participation in the Pennsylvania national and brought together the top riders in the country. The team will travel next to Toronto, Canada, for the Royal Winter fair.

“Although he had participated in a number of riding tournaments in past years, Fraser is probably better known in Montana for his fistic talents. He boxed with the Billings PAL team during his high school years and continued to swing leather after coming to the University. Last year, he participated in the M club tournament and other amateur matches in this part of the state.”

In 1951, Fraser qualified as a finalist for the U. S. equestrian team for the Olympic summer games at Helsinki, Finland. He spent part of a summer at Fort Riley, Kansas, training for the event. He did not participate in further Olympic trials, rather opting to stay in school.

Fraser was involved in many U of M activities and organizations, including Sigma Chi and Silent Sentinel. He was also an ROTC student who would serve in the military after graduation. He was the student chairman at a discussion of the Montana Forum group at the University in 1953. The discussion centered on a proposal to lease state lands for oil development. Fraser’s father, Robert Fraser Sr., owned American Motors dealerships in Billings and Butte, and had been in the car business for over 40 years. He also owned ranches at Pryor, Winnett and Sweet Grass.

Fraser’s family included three high-achieving sisters. They all had connections with Missoula.

Anne ‘Toni’ Fraser Rosell graduated from U of M in 1948. She received her master’s degree from Columbia University Teacher’s College in N. Y. in 1952. She was a guidance counselor at MCHS in 1950 – 51, director of student activities at Eastern Montana College 1954-56, and a counselor for Youth Guidance Council in Billings. Beginning in 1956 she served 3 terms in the Montana House of Representatives from Yellowstone County; the first woman representative elected from that county. She then served four terms as a State Senator, at one point sitting as the minority whip; the first woman to ever hold a leadership position in either house. She ran for the U. S. Senate in 1964, and later lost in a race for Montana Lieutenant Governor, running with Robert Woodahl in 1976. She was also an athlete, winning the Montana State Singles and Doubles championship tennis titles.

Carol Fraser[6] won the Miss Montana contest in 1949, as a 20-year-old student at the University of Montana. While competing she gave a talk on horses, equestrian competitions, and showed pictures of her life as a horsewoman. The previous year she won a world championship in five-gaited competition, which added to her huge trophy collection, amassed over eight years while winning more than 100 first places. She then competed in the Miss America contest riding a 9-year-old mare, hoping to demonstrate fine horsemanship at the convention center in Atlantic City. Sadly, the horse, Victory Belle, slipped on rubber matting on stage and nearly fell into the orchestra pit. Contest rules required her to scratch her first horse choice, Victory Call, since contestants were not allowed to associate with any males. It was the first time an animal was part of this beauty contest. She shared honors for Miss Congeniality and won a $500 scholarship. She was honored with a local parade and the MCHS band performed when she arrived back in Missoula. Nancy Fields (O’Connor) of Missoula was a runner up in the 1949 state competition.

Inez Sue Fraser attended the University of Montana, the University of Southern California and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1946. She married Sydney Kurth of Fort Benton in 1947. Kurth was a WW2 Marine Corps veteran and University of Montana Law School graduate with a lifelong practice in Billings, Montana. Describing herself as the “least talented of the bunch,” Sue took over the Fraser family’s ranch operation in 1968. Living in Billings, Montana since the 1950’s, they celebrated their 60^th anniversary in 2007.

An example of Robert Fraser, the student, came in a letter to the editor he wrote to the student newspaper, Kaimin, in November 25, 1952.[7] It prefaced a later life that would be dedicated to intellect instead of fisticuffs:

Fraser Uppercuts University Apathy

I would like to call attention to a recent (Nov. 20, 21, 22) Farmer-Labor institute that was held on this campus. The Kaimin evidently knew of its existence for they announced its program. I do not know what limitations of personnel exist on this paper. I do know there were no reporters at the institute’s sessions. It is significant, too, that only a few faculty members and fewer students attended.

There seems to be a serious need for a careful self-examination when we find ourselves in this situation. On one hand we have juvenile efforts to revive school spirit which completely overlook the real basis of pride in school. We have teachers who instruct in facts and fail to instill a desire for truth in students or possess such a desire themselves. (Or are we already so enlightened?)

We get excited over national politics where we have a minimum of voice. And we neglect an opportunity to find out what one segment (they call themselves liberal) of the state’s population finds of vital concern. There’s the Kaimin, too, which fills up entire back pages with advertising – often advertising the Kaimin – for want of material and fails to attempt even a first-hand account of democracy in action.

The people at that institute wanted to learn. While we, surrounded by opportunity, shut our minds and ears to anything outside our specialty. Whether that specialty is Murrillism, Religion, Sports, or “Journalistic methods of appealing to the masses.” Should we perhaps re-analyze our actions in the light of our professed purpose here?

Leaves Montana and Returns

Fraser graduated from U of M in 1953 with honors, majoring in economics, psychology & philosophy. He then served a tour as an officer in the 82^nd Airborne Division, stationed in Germany after basic training at Fort Bragg, N. C. He supplemented his European tour with boxing demonstrations while a soldier.

After his Army tour he attended Columbia University in NYC, graduating with a master’s degree and pursued a Ph.D. there. While still attending Columbia University in 1956 he married Carmen Magrina, a fellow student from Puerto Rico, and a graduate of Wellesley College. He attended Columbia University until 1958.

By 1960 he was back in Montana where he began raising a family and was appointed a director in the Fraser Land & Livestock Company.

In Billings he became involved in fellowship activities through Rocky Mountain College. In 1964 he spoke at a meeting of the Billings Art Association, lecturing on “Creativity and Intelligence.” In 1965 he and his wife led a discussion titled, “On Truth and Falsity” by St. Thomas Aquinas, at the Junior Service League Library. The Billings Gazette noted that in 1966 he chaired a meeting at Rocky Mountain College Great Books Club, on Spinoza’s “Ethics – Part One.” By 1966 Fraser was a leader of the Billings Unitarian Fellowship.

Moves to San Mateo

In 1969 Fraser was chosen as a minister of the Unitarian Fellowship of San Mateo, California. He was a graduate of the Starr King School for the Unitarian Ministry at Berkeley, California.[8]

Fraser quickly embraced the controversy of that era. The Viet Nam War and its repercussions at home were a topic that he met head on as a minister in California. His first year in San Mateo also landed him square in the middle of Berkeley and its social activism. It would seem to preface much of his ministry when he witnessed a different kind of violence first hand, outside of a boxing ring, while he lived there.

Thirty thousand angry demonstrators gathered on the streets near Berkeley’s Peoples Park in May of 1969. Several days of demonstrations had earlier arisen from efforts to stop the administration’s plans to develop this small park. On May 15 Governor Reagan ordered a violent crackdown on these demonstrations; the day now known as Bloody Thursday. Police and Sheriff’s use of firearms and batons, and the presence of 2,700 National Guard troops who used tear gas, sprayed from National Guard helicopters, resulted in many injuries and at least one casualty.

Fraser was the subject of a 1969 article in The Billings Gazette regarding that disturbance in Berkeley, California, quoted below:

Berkeley Clash Was Forced

By Dave Williams

Gazette Staff Writer

“It was a lot of strong reaction by some pretty conservative towns people.”

The bearded man speaking was Robert Fraser, son of Mrs. R. B. Fraser, 106 Clark, and brother of State Senator Mrs. Antoinette Rosell.

Fraser, a recently ordained Unitarian minister and resident of Berkeley, was generalizing about the recent disorder in Berkeley over the closing of the People’s Park.

The People’s Park was a park set up by street people, students and radical activists on property owned by the University of California at Berkeley.

The property was not being used by the university, Fraser noted, and would have made an excellent study center for the university as well as a park.

The university built a fence around the park to keep the users out, and had police in riot gear present to prevent trouble.

Fraser said that the university by putting up the fence had violated a responsibility delegated to it, to develop ways to help people in general and people in the Berkeley area in particular.

“A wide variety of people participated in that park,” Fraser said. “The park was ideal research thing.”

“The decision to put up the fence was one to elicit a confrontation,” he added.

The ensuing clash between students, activists and the police left one person dead and 67 others injured, Fraser said.

“The police provoked them by their presence. It was a mutual thing. The students were mad about the fence, and other things, too,” Fraser said.

The police made liberal, “irresponsible” use of tear gas, deploying it from helicopters for the first time in history, Fraser said.

“No matter what part you had to play, you were aware of the helicopters,” he added while making circles in the air with his finger.

Fraser said he had a lot of friends who had been gassed, one school was gassed, and the university clinic was forced to put some patients in iron lungs because tear gas seeped into the hospital.

The use of gas and seeing the National Guard where children wanted to play influenced him to participate in marches and demonstrations against the park closing, Fraser indicated.

He participated in the Parent’s March. Fraser vehemently stressed the legality of the march, saying it had a permit, went only three blocks and returned, and had monitors to keep the sidewalk clear.

But the police broke up the march as illegal.

“This was a violation of my constitutional rights. It’s strong evidence of how fearful the law enforcement agencies were,” Fraser observed.

In a previous march, Fraser said, about 490 people were arrested and taken to the Santa Rita prison, where they were mistreated and forced to stand for hours without being allowed to move.

The National Guard may have brought readied bayonets and barbed wire, Fraser said, but “the people were glad the National Guard was there, because they controlled the police and cut violence.”

Fraser also participated in the Memorial Day march. “There was a tremendous variety of People – kids, adults, street people, hippies, middle-aged . . .”

The march was impressive for Fraser, and peaceful for Berkeley. Looking up into the readied bayonets of the National Guard, Fraser and his co-marchers smiled and raised their fingers in the peace gesture, he said.

“It turned into a festive thing,” he wonderingly added.

Fraser cited the erection of the fence and overreaction by the police as reasons for the demonstrations. The desire to rid the city of the “occupied city” and “warlike” atmosphere pervaded when the Guard arrived.

Fraser called it “the biggest irony” that the university which is set up to help people and do research, should close the park, forego the chance to help and research, and inflict injury and damages at the same time.

Fraser didn’t back away from later controversies either. He gave an interview to a reporter for the San Mateo Times in 1971, stating his views on Lieutenant William Calley’s trial and the reckoning it was causing with the American public. He identified with the general view that Americans were uninvolved because the war was thousands of miles away.

“The people are identifying with Calley,” he said this week. “He stands for what the war really means. We can bomb and decimate an entire country and then we can stand back and look at it dispassionately. But, with Calley we’re really into it. . .

“This trial has touched the people where they had refused to be touched before. They hadn’t been involved before. We had all learned to accept it in terms of bombings, the balance of power and body counts. We didn’t have to talk about it in terms of the individual soldier. . .

“It’s never been a really military war in the old sense,” he added. “the old concepts don’t hold here. Now, with Calley, we’re finally being forced to think about what the war really is: A war on personal terms, of individuals being killed and killing.

“This is the first war I can remember which doesn’t fall under the banner of national self-righteousness.

“I was a product of the Second World War and that one was easy because you evaluated the objectives and not the effects. But Vietnam is far different. . .”

Reverend Fraser, a former Army paratrooper, said that the Calley case has aroused virtually every thinking American on all sides of the political spectrum.

Did the verdict bother him?

“I felt it when Calley stood there and cried,” he said.

So did the rest of the nation.

Conscious Objectors

In 1972 San Mateo hosted a parade for returning veterans, the Army’s Screaming Eagles in particular. As a member of San Mateo’s Human Rights Commission, Fraser gave voice to a dilemma that returning veterans faced, as well as a lesser-known group of young people, conscience objectors. He was interviewed by John Horgan of the San Mateo Times and elicited some thoughts regarding that subject that were not widely endorsed, nor well understood. The article is quoted below:[9]

The San Mateo parade honoring the men of the Army’s Screaming Eagles earlier this year meant different things to different people.

For the Rev. Robert Fraser, it was a warm, moving experience that had considerable worth. But it also stirred some thoughts about another group of young Americans who have been involved in the war in Southeast Asia in another way.

Fraser, the minister at San Mateo’s Unitarian Church, said this week that it might behoove the city’s Human Relations Commission to consider a probe of the community’s attitude towards the conscientious objector and the young men who have chosen to go to prison or Canada instead of Vietnam.

A veteran of the Korean war, Fraser accepts the fact that much of the city and the immediate Peninsula wholeheartedly endorsed the display of affection and sympathy for the men of the 101^st Airborne Division. However, it is his contention that this other segment of youth has also been affected by the pangs of war and that it has been virtually ignored by the community to date.

Fraser, who is also a member of the HRC, said it was unfair to compare a young man who has been killed in Vietnam with another who refuses to be drafted.

“It is a tortuous process to decide to leave one’s country,” he went on. “It’s not all roses in Canada. We have to learn to deal with this question of punishment. It doesn’t really finish the penalty when a young man is released from prison. Coming home can be a form of punishment too.”

Rather than ask the City Council to endorse some abstract pledge to aid the young men who, through conscience, felt they could not serve in Vietnam, Fraser has asked that interested people here write to the Human Relations Commission to relate their thoughts on the whole issue of the CO, the men in Canada and the question of amnesty.

At his church Fraser has also instituted a Committee for Community Involvement, a major part of which is a program for CO’s.

Gary Gustafson, 22, of San Carlos is one of ten CO’s currently assigned to work at the local church in this program.

It is his job to administer the CO program, Fraser noted. Much of the work of the young men involves tending severely disabled individuals, including some quadriplegics.

Fraser and Gustafson both remarked that the CO issue involves a moral point of view.

“I have the feeling that the CO idea isn’t accepted here,” Gustafson said. “That’s one reason why the parade for the Screaming Eagles was so successful. People here seem to be more conditioned to the concept of welcoming the men coming home from war. But they aren’t so sure about their feeling towards the CO.”

“You know, it’s one thing to talk about a moral issue and quite another to go out and do something about it,” Fraser added. “And this is what the CO has gone and done. It’s a question of conscience.

“I was moved by the response to the Screaming Eagles. A lot of the men had anticipated being put down by the people here. You can’t blame them. Most communities haven’t received the veterans very well when they return.”

The same could be said of the CO’s and the others, he said.

“Now, what about the guys in jail over this thing,” Fraser asked. “I married a couple the other day and the young man was going to have to go to jail for refusing to be drafted. He has accepted this responsibility. The prison experience can be an alienating one. Then, when he comes out in two years, what kind of reception will he get in the community? Will he be shunned? Will employers hold his prison record against him? Really, all of us are victims of this war.”

Fraser said the decision to go to jail may be a tougher one in the long run than actually going to Vietnam to fight.

“What we risk by not fighting is a double penalty,” Gustafson said.

Fraser added that there is a kind of analogy between the treatment meted out to CO’s and the other and to the recent state supreme court’s decision on the abolition of the death penalty.

The basis of that decision was that the administering of the penalty was cruel and unusual punishment and was therefore unfair and illegal.

Fraser and Gustafson said this is the case with the Selective Service system and the Americans who feel, in their consciences, that they cannot kill.

“Many of these men had only two choices: Either go to war or go to prison,” Gustafson said. “They had no other choice. I feel these men deserve some kind of decent treatment. They should not be shunned any longer.

“I like this country. I believe in it. I don’t want to leave it. I want to share this mistake. The tragedy of war is a mistake. But, I’m willing to stay here and partake of the system and its mistakes.

“And what about dignity? For me, the most dignified thing to do is to disassociate myself from the military. But people here feel the military man is the man fulfilling his duty. My duty is to my conscience.”

Anyone interested in responding to some of the remarks and thoughts of both Fraser and Gustafson are asked to write to either the city’s Human Relations Commission or to the Unitarian Fellowship Center, both in San Mateo.

Moves On 

Robert Fraser moved his ministry to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Rockville, Md in 1977, and then to the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, Hi in 1985. He still lives Honolulu, Hawaii.

He is married to an old school mate, Beverly (Anderson) Lahr, who was also a U of M graduate. Between them they have 9 children.