Arts & Events

It’s gardening time, at least hopefully, now that we’re past our last gasp of wintry weather! This time of year also brings back memories of the war gardens and victory gardens of the past. During World War I, with commercial farm produce needed for the military, American households were urged to create their own backyard gardens.

The town of Geraldine sits roughly in the middle of the state of Montana. In 1913, it literally sprang up out of nowhere as a “railroad town,” an expected stop for the expanding Milwaukee line.

It’s time for spring cleaning! Unlike the garden where springtime weeding and thinning lacks any hard decisions and is universally accepted as the right thing to do, my office is another matter.

Back in the 1800s, before anyone conjured cheap, throwaway shoes, Montana newspapers were filled with shoe sales and shoe repair ads.

Even before the official pronouncement by the nation’s surgeon general in the early 1960s, most all of us knew smoking and other forms of tobacco use were a poor choice. Despite that, many of us (including myself) continued the bad habit  for decades. I quit in the 1990s. My confession and modern-day facts aside, I do have to marvel at the creative advertising for tobacco (particularly plug tobacco) in the 19th century.

In recent years, “gobsmacked” has become one of my very favorite words. Unfortunately, I have used it in excess this past week concerning Missoula Mayor John Engen’s announcement that he has pancreatic cancer.

Recently, a reader of this column asked, “How about history from an indigenous perspective instead of a colonial perspective?” The answer is, at once, simple and complicated.

On the Montana State Prison intake form, the Warden described Inmate No. 6667 as a male, 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, shoe size 10, with blue eyes and a few missing front teeth. On a separate line was a curious note: “hole on top of right forehead.”

Jim Harmon writes, "There always seems to be something amusing, even in some of the serious journalistic accounts. As one paper put it, “Even the grave business of life may be helped on by a joke.”

Can you remember the first valentine you ever sent? The Butte Semi-Weekly Miner, in February 1889, suspected each of us likely could. After all, “it was when you were an apple-faced school boy and walked a mile every morning to the red school house under the hill.”