Missoula history

The year was 1908. A “lunacy commission” (a carry-over from old British law) was formed, made up of the Yellowstone County commissioners and two Billings physicians. The panel was told that A.J. Thompson had been claiming that “he came to Billings from Forsyth to get a man who was wanted by the sheriff of Rosebud County, and in the next breath told them that he was the inventor of an air brake and would soon be worth $5,000,000.

Jim Harmon writes, "As locals know, there are only two seasons in Montana: Winter and Road Construction."

“The weather was perfect for an outdoor meeting,” wrote an Anaconda Standard newspaper reporter. “The platform next to the court house was elaborately decorated with flags, and electric lights were hung among the trees, making the scene an attractive one. The demonstration tonight was a splendid one and was one of the grandest in Missoula's political history.”

Columnist Byron Williams once wrote, “Interesting, breezy gossip has its charm. Men like it as well as women.” In fact he claimed men were worse than women, when it came to gossiping.

Perhaps the most influential news report of the day, which thoroughly solidified my feelings that the 1870s were not for me, was the following reminder of the obvious: There were no women to be found in 1874: “Draw poker and whiskey straight are again the favorite recreations of the natives.”

Growing up in Libby, the Riddle kids were older than I was, by a decade or more, so I never really knew them. But the world would soon come to know Dick Riddle through record albums by his folk group Three Young Men, later renamed, Three Young Men From Montana. In the early 1960s, the group recorded albums for “Columbia Records, appeared on the Johnny Carson Show nine times and became a regular act on the musical variety television show Hootenanny,” according to press releases at the time.

In the summer of 1924, Missoula experienced a rash of petty robberies and burglaries, so many that police were “of the opinion that there was a gang working here, different robberies not being the work of one man.

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.

Jim Harmon writes, "I suspect you may not be familiar with the name Morris Reece Chew Smith. I certainly wasn’t."

It’s important to note that Mother’s Day is singular, not plural. It was created to honor your own mother, not all mothers. In that context, I honor my late mother, Vesta Jane (nee Knoke) Harmon, who wrote her own story of growing up on the Huntley Project in Montana in 1908.