Bozeman’s Charlie Soha had a great life

By Karen E. Davis - PRIME EDITOR

Editor’s note: Bozeman resident Charlie Soha died in April 2021, just after giving this interview. We believe his life story and memories of notable Montanans of the 20th century should not die with him, so we share them here.

In his 90 years, he racked up an impressive list of firsts, lasts, eccentric personal trivia and, well, just plain historic tidbits.

The historic trivia that usually gets the most interest goes back to what his mother Martha was doing circa 1916 in Great Falls.

Your first trivia clue comes when you walk into Soha’s Bozeman home north of Sypes Canyon: dozens and dozens of Charlie Russell prints cover every inch of the home, from “Bronc To Breakfast” to “Laugh Kills Lonesome.”

As a Great Falls high-schooler, his mom lived next door to an artist named Charles Marion Russell, and his wife Nancy. Yeah, THAT Charlie and Nancy Russell. That proximity segued into a job for Martha as the Russells’ housekeeper, typist, babysitter and secretary.

Charlie Russell Soha is named after the artist and neighbor, who was mightily beloved by his mom. He was born four years after Russell died in 1926. He has no first-hand memories of the famous pair but carries a plethora of his mother’s stories about the couple.

This chapter started in North Dakota with the death of his grandfather. His widowed grandmother, Mary Gabrielson, managed a railroad hotel in Kenmore, N.D., for $30 a month. Around 1910, she came to Great Falls with 15 cents in her pocket and his 7-year-old mother and her baby sister Elise.

“I think my grandmother thought that with the new smelter in Great Falls, there might be more opportunities for them,” Soha explained.

His German grandmother spoke no English and would clean hotel rooms for $2 a day. As fate would have it, she moved to a house on the 1300 block of 4th Avenue North in Great Falls, and that Fate made her neighbors of Charlie and Nancy Russell.

The current C.M. Russell Museum now sits on the site of the family’s former home.

In 1923, Martha and her sister Elise moved to Los Angeles to work for five years during the Depression. Earliershe met Charlie’s father while working in a bank in Belt, Mont. They married and moved to the Pacific Northwest, first to Tacoma where Charlie was born in 1930, and then to Seattle prior to WWII.

That placed him in line for his next gem of trivia: He went to high school with Bill Gates’ mother, Mary Maxwell.

“She was a senior, Class of 1946, Roosevelt High, and had the lead in the school musical,” he remembered. “My chorus partner in the musical was Donna Jean Modahl.” (More about her later).

Soha reminisced that he wasn’t much of a student and might not have graduated with the Class of 1948 but for a last minute, make-work “work study” gig as the school’s switchboard operator. “I set no academic records,’ he laughed. “I skimmed by on my smile and personality.” His first job? As a 9-year-old caddy at Seattle’s Montlake Golf Course. At the age of 12 he worked at the local A&P grocery and was a member of the clerks’ union by 13, during WWII. He also remembers hitchhiking to Montana when he was 16 and by 17 working as a dishwasher at the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone. Soha then attended Montana Western at Dillon for an undergraduate degree in education.

Everywhere he went he seemed to fall into little pieces of Montana history.

His first view of Dillon happened when a driver picked him up hitchhiking to school in Dillon and took him to the Andrus Hotel. It had opened in 1918 as “the finest hotel in Montana,” and Soha remarked that he felt he’d stepped back in time to a scene from a John Wayne movie.

“A hotel full of rich ranchers playing poker in the middle of the day, 10 gallon hats. I couldn’t even guess how much money was in that room.” he remembered.

Being in Dillon set the stage for his next piece of historical trivia:

Before his junior year at Montana Western in 1951, he taught at the oneroom school at Roy’s Junction, just a dot on a map near Winifred and literally the junction of the railroad tracks. That put him 25 miles from Lewistown and pretty close to the middle of nowhere. Six kids from two ranch families and five grades. Due to the harsh central Montana weather, the Roy Junction school year ran just from Easter to Thanksgiving. All that for $250 a month, and an extra $30 to dig two latrine holes.

His place in history? Soha believes that at 90, he is the oldest surviving teacher of a Montana one-room schoolhouse – one that also had no electricity or running water. (He returned to Western to earn his undergrad degree in two more years, and in 1959 earned a graduate degree from Montana State College in Bozeman).

Roy’s Junction gave him another good story about the time he tried to drive across a shallow spot in the river, got stuck, didn’t immediately get his car out of the shallows -- and it froze over and he had to leave it until spring.

Soha also taught in the Crow Creek area near Toston, near where actress Myrna Loy’s family, the Williams, ranched in Radersburg. That job also meant 12hour days, including driving the school bus.

Myrna Loy isn’t the only famous actor from Montana whose life crossed paths with Soha.

At one time, Soha lived a block south of Babcock in the same Bozeman house where Gary Cooper lived in the 1920s, when he attended Gallatin County High School.

Cooper’s father Charles was a Montana Supreme Court Justice who ranched in the Wolf Creek area. (The story repeated ad infinitum in Helena legal circles was that Justice Charles Cooper could hardly be bothered to take the train from his Seven-Bar-Nine Ranch outside of Craig into Helena except to pick up his monthly paycheck.)

“Bronc to Breakfast”

Soha supplied a little-known detail regarding the how and why of Cooper ending up in Bozeman.

“He put limburger cheese in the radiators at Helena High and got expelled. So he spent his last two years at Bozeman.” Many people don’t know that Cooper originally went to Hollywood to work as a stunt rider, Soha continued.

“You can credit his English teacher at Bozeman for getting him into theater. He was handsome. He was tall,” and soon enough he was famous.

Cooper once joked that “In Hollywood they pay me $25 to fall off a horse. In Montana we do it for free.”

As an undergrad at Western and before the Korean War started, Soha enlisted in the U.S. Army National Guard, assigned as a cook. He graduated, taught school for three years, and by 1955 was commissioned a second lieutenant and sent to Ordnance School in Maryland at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

Soha would stay in the Army Reserves, a decision taking him around the world in a career spanning more than 30 years, including 10 years in Europe. He was stationed at Fort Lewis in Tacoma; Heidelburg, Germany and Zweibruken on the German-French border; Spain; and at a missile base 50 kilometers outside of Instanbul, Turkey. Promoted to full colonel in 1980, he finally retired in 1985.

Besides retiring from the Army after 30 years, “I’ve been developing property and raising kids,” he added. Soha has four sons.

He first retired to the North Carolina coast, developing oceanfront rentals. Now, all of this is after he retired from teaching, and retired from the U.S. Army. And he’s had a minor real estate empire. By his estimation, he has owned and sold 53 properties over the years, and is still in the game with a $1 million-plus property on the market in Big Sky.

Anything else?

For years, baritone Soha was in the Chord Rustlers, a local mens’ choral group, serving as president in 2002-2003.

But of all the historical, interesting moments in his life, nothing compares to his mother’s moments with the Russell family.

Soha shows a circa 1920 picture of his mother swimming in Lake McDonald with the Russells.

“He’d bring his famous clients up to his Lake McDonald Lodge,” Soha said, pointing to a picture of his mother standing in the lake with the Russells, all of them grinning like idiots and obviously happy.

“Mom spent three summers up at the cabin and the lake with the Russells, cooking, cleaning. They’d bring prospective clients up there. Entertain them at the lake. Take the train from Great Falls to the Park (Glacier).

“I don’t think she was ever paid more than $35 a month.”

He voices one thing he wished his mother had done at the time: “If only my mother had taken things out of his wastepaper basket, the stuff that Russell threw away All that paper; what it would be worth.”

She would babysit the Russell’s son Jack, he added, who grew up to have little interest in his father’s career. Jack would eventually have a career instead as a highway design engineer for the state of California. He died in 1996 in San Diego, estranged from his mother Nancy. According to an Aug. 11, 2014, article in the Billings Gazette, when Nancy died in 1940, she left her son no Russell art, and just a meager inheritance.

Soha’s own mother’s time with the Russells started before Charlie was really famous, Soha said. It’s no secret that Nancy Russell changed her husband’s life and his career.

“He didn’t care if he had four silver dollars in his pocket,” Soha remembered from his mother’s memories, “because they’d just go right back over the bar.”

With Nancy as his business manager, Russell stopped selling his paintings in saloons and took his art to Europe.

“In 1914 Charlie took 19 oils to London to the Dore Gallery. By 1915 he was exhibiting in New York, Chicago. By 1920 he took his collection to Los Angeles. My mom was still working for the family.”

Soha continued that “He had clients in New York and Texas. Selling a lot of art for $10,000. It was all due to Nancy. Maximum of $30,000 a painting, which was a lot of money in the 1920s. (Before Nancy) he’d have just sold it for 11 silver dollars.

“My mom really admired her. She came from extremely modest means. I don’t think she even knew her own father.”

As a young woman, Nancy had spent some time in the Midwest and had lived in Helena with her possibly widowed mother.

“She was just walking the streets, had no where to live for awhile,” Soha continued. “Not quite an orphan, but as close as you can get without being one.”

Nancy ended up working as the housemaid for the Roberts family in Cascade, the patriarch of which was a merchant and friend of Charlie Russell’s.

Russell was invited to Sunday dinner, with Nancy as the family maid, and “They immediately took to each other. Got married and lived in the (Robert’s) chicken house out back.”

Soha tells another story his mother shared regarding the gigantic oil Russell painted for the state capitol building in Helena. Commissioned in 1911 for $5,000, “Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flathead Indians” was so large (140” x 296”) “that it had to be painted in two sections and the roof lifted to get it out (of his studio).” That painting is now worth millions.

Soha has a favorite story of his mother’s about what supper time at the Russells’ might be like: “If they had ‘adult’ subject matter to discuss in front of my mother, they would start using Indian sign language that Charlie learned when he lived with the Blood tribe in Canada,” Soha added. (Russell loved his time on Montana reservations. “The Fabulous Flathead” has a photo of him, circa 1910, riding herd at a buffalo round-up at Pablo).

“My mother also typed the manuscripts for his books,” Soha remembered.

Russell died of a heart attack in 1926 when he was 62 years old. Ironically, Nancy would also die at 62, in 1940 in Pasadena, Calif.

“She was 14 years his junior, but they were very close,” Soha remembered. “She’d carefully reproduce his quaint spelling and homemade grammar.”

Soha’s mother is mentioned in a couple of Nancy’s books. She also continued over the years to periodically work as Nancy’s secretary.

Soha remembered that in 1938, while the family lived in Tacoma, she took the train to Pasadena to visit Nancy for two weeks. Since children under 5 could ride for free, Soha’s little sister rode with their mom and he had to stay home.

During that visit Nancy gave their mom two Russell bronzes, one each for him and his sister. His sister recently sold hers for $50,000; Charlie’s was stolen from his home sometime in the last eight years.

Before the theft, though, he loaned it circa 1960 for exhibition at both the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls and the Montana Historical Society in Helena.

His mother lived just 10 days short of her 93rd birthday. That was Soha’s shortterm goal, to at least match his mother’s longevity. Alas, Charlie missed his last life goal -- he died April 21, 2021, just two weeks short of his 91st birthday, and two years short of beating his mom’s longevity.

In the interview shortly before his death, he was asked if there are any regrets after all the years and all the history he made and witnessed: Yes, he admitted, one big one.

There was a girl. (There’s always a girl). Donna Jean, a high school classmate in Seattle. It seems they got their wires crossed in high school on how they both felt about each other, lost touch and nothing permanent came of what was a good friendship but should have and could have been more.

“I still think about her,” the thricemarried Soha said. “If only. She’s the girl I should have married. We would have shared 60-plus years together.”