Sherry Devlin

My grandma was fascinated by a new invention in the 1920s called radio. It is she who I can thank for my interest, and later career, in radio and television. I recently came across a small booklet of hers which accompanied the 1929 radio receiver my grandparents purchased from the Nott-Atwater Company of Spokane, Wash., in which she kept track of radio stations she could pick up from her home in Libby.

The Missoula courthouse clock tolled 10 o’clock. It was Memorial Day, one hundred years ago, May 30, 1924. Parade Marshal Will Cave, the city’s unofficial historian in those early days, positioned himself across the river on the city’s south side to lead the parade over the Higgins Avenue Bridge, northward toward the courthouse.

Tales of Montana Christmases past show years of sadness and struggle, joy and celebration.

Missoula is one of the wickedest, most raucous, meanest towns in America! As I noted in my book, “The Sneakin’est Man That Ever Was/Headline Stories of Montana’s Early Days, Vol. 1,” one local resident shared that view of the Garden City with a newspaper reporter in 1883.

In 1923, the Treasure State News reported on a Worden-area farmer who claimed his tobacco crop was “equal, if not superior, in quality to that grown anywhere else.”

“Lack of Houses Greatest Problem Facing the Nation,” declared the headline. No, it isn’t today’s headline, though it could be; it’s from 1920!

One hundred years ago, it looked like the Missoula City Band was done. Kaput. All washed up. Finished. Out of business. Down the drain. Wiped out. Or as announced in the local paper, “The Garden City Band has disbanded and presented its instruments to the University Band.”

By Jim Harmon/Missoula Current A Missoula Current reader recently asked, “Has there ever been a story about the Blue Mountain Trailhead south of Missoula? We hike there a lot and know that it was part of a ranch and then the Army? Used it for a range?” ...

Oregon’s Environmental Quality Commission voted unanimously to require auto manufacturers to begin producing and delivering a growing number of zero-emission vehicles to Oregon beginning in 2026, so that they make up 100% of new vehicles sold in the state by 2035.