Flathead Lake ON MY MIND
Written by Steve Smith | Published by Wayne Schile
For additional copies, please contact: Wayne Schile P.O. Box 309 Polson, MT, 59860 or visit: www.flatheadlakeonmymind.com
Copyright © 2015 by Wayne Schile • P.O. Box 309, Polson, MT, 59860 • All Rights Reserved ISBN: 978-1-59725-543-1 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner or the publisher. Published by Pediment Publishing, a division of The Pediment Group, Inc. www.pediment.com. Printed in Canada.
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Contents Foreword...................................................................................... 5 Introduction................................................................................. 9 Big Blue....................................................................................... 12 Memories.................................................................................... 27 The East Shore........................................................................... 35 Monsters.................................................................................... 52 Bill Barba..................................................................................... 55 My Own Ocean.......................................................................... 59 Funny Lady................................................................................. 63 Flathead Lake Map.................................................................... 68 Flathead Lake Lodge.................................................................. 71 A Port in the Storm.................................................................... 77 The Over-the-Hill Gang............................................................. 83 Terry Robinson........................................................................... 89 Captain John Eaheart................................................................ 96 Space Music............................................................................. 103 The Making of Flathead Lake.................................................. 107 The Flathead’s First Inhabitants............................................. 110 Wild Horse Island..................................................................... 113 Steamboat Days...................................................................... 123 In Hot Water............................................................................. 126 The UM Biological Station....................................................... 129 Historic Flathead Lake & Watershed Milestones................... 135 What Flathead Lake Means to Me.......................................... 139 Index......................................................................................... 153
INTRODUCTION
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About Us Stevedore “Steve” Smith is the author of Fly the Biggest Piece Back, a biography of Montana pioneer mountain pilot Bob Johnson, and ten other non-fiction books. A navy veteran, co-founder of the Montana Museum of Mountain Flying in Missoula, and a part-time school bus driver, he lives in Missoula and spends summers with his grandchildren at Flathead Lake, including Merissa, now eight, who is part mermaid. •••• Paul Fugleberg was editor of the weekly Flathead Courier of Polson, Montana, and co-publisher of the Courier and the Ronan Pioneer from 1959 to 1980. Prior to that he worked in Great Falls and Roundup, Montana; Canton, South Dakota, and Bishop, California. His articles and photos have also appeared in numerous national and regional magazines and daily newspapers. His other books include Proud Heritage: An Illustrated History of Lake County, the Lower Flathead, Mission and Jocko Valleys; Flathead Lake Steamboat Days; Buffalo Savers; Schnitzmeyer: Pioneer Photographer, and Montana Nessie. •••• Wayne Schile is publisher emeritus of the Billings (Montana) Gazette and a former Vice President of newspapers for Lee Enterprises. Wayne retired in 2000 after a 34-year career with Lee. He published papers in Decatur, Illinois, and Kansas City, Kansas, and was general manager of the Racine, Wisconsin, and the Mason City, Iowa, newspapers. At the Gazette, he published several books, including Montana on My Mind. Wayne and his wife, Maureen, live on Flathead Lake in the summer and now winter in Arizona.
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Foreword
“T
By Bruce Sievers
his has to be the greatest place in the world!” That was all I could think as I stood on the shore of Flathead Lake as a ten-year-old mesmerized by the huge expanse to the north of the peaceful, deep blue body of water bordered with towering, green mountains and sunlight sparkling off the surface. The year was 1951, and I was thrilled that my parents had just bought our place on Skidoo Lane. World War II was only six years in the past; Harry Truman was still President; Montana had been a state for a little over sixty years; Kerr Dam had raised the lake to its modern level only thirteen years before; and Flathead was a place where Missoulians drove over a long, seemingly ever-under-construction Highway 93 to spend their summers in small cabins by the lake. Now, more than six decades later, having lived and traveled all over the world, I realize how right on my original instinct was. Since that first year, I have spent a portion of almost every summer at “The Lake” – growing up with a gang of friends spending from dawn till dusk swimming, biking, water-skiing, fishing for shiners, learning how to lose golf balls on the Polson course (five dollars for a junior membership for the entire summer), exploring the woods, and roasting hotdogs over beach fires at night. Later, during my high school years, the cabin became a perfect “ham shack” for pursuing my crazy passion for shortwave radio. I spent endless hours climbing trees to string three-hundred-foot V beam antennas and exchanging faint Morse Code messages at three a.m. with ham radio operators in Russia, Japan and Australia. It was like a listening post on INTRODUCTION
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Kids fishing by moonlight on Flathead’s Skidoo Bay
the universe. Flathead later became for me a retreat for writing, hiking, reading, and meditating on life. To lie on the dock alone in the quiet of the night staring up at the vast panorama of stars – thinking of the light arriving from those mysterious sources millions of years in the distance – felt like peering into a dimension of trans-human experience. My first real job was at Flathead, as a cherry-picker at a neighbor’s place. Our friends, the Blakes, owned a small orchard at the end of the lane, and I was hired to pick Lambert cherries (the best in the world!) at five cents a pound, with the side benefit of all I could eat. I think that set my life expectations that jobs were supposed to be both hard work and enjoyable. Then there were the fishing contests with my mom, in which we would keep track of our daily catches of the abundant, delicious Flathead Lake Kokanee salmon. It was only after I left to pursue my career in California that I heard about the tragic story of the demise of those salmon through the introduction of an unusual species of shrimp into the lake – another example of the hubris of failed human attempts to “improve” the environment. The Flathead has a truly special quality in the spring and fall when summer residents are gone – quiet, brilliant, brisk days with the scent of wood fires in the air, and snow beginning to show up on, or retreat from, the mountain tops. One of my best lake stays ever was a week one early spring when I was furiously absorbed in finishing my doctoral dissertation to meet a deadline at Stanford. As I hacked away on my old Smith-Corona while being warmed by the fire, I experienced a kind of Dr. Zhivago 6
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moment – pure nature and books. How much better could it get? (And I completed the dissertation!) Another memorable time was spending the quiet fall months at the cabin before heading for a job in Washington, D.C., when my then wife and I were awaiting the birth of our son. That fall included an exhilarating canoe camping trip to the remote wilderness of Upper Kintla Lake in Glacier Park. The lake can be magical – few places on earth can match its amazingly refreshing breezes, transparent waters and spectacular sunsets. It can also be angry at times. Anyone who has witnessed a big storm there has experienced gigantic blasts of thunder and lightning, freight-train winds, and blown-down trees. One of these storms, preceded by an ominous black sweep of sky in the north and bringing with it six-foot waves, came perilously close to swamping my mom’s and my twelve-foot fishing boat when we were out on one of our fishing expeditions. Out of gas, we almost lost an oar to the waves before straggling ashore on a neighbor’s beach. We felt as if we had survived the Perfect Storm. And then there is Polson, the small, funky town on the southern end of the lake. Polson has never seemed to change; although businesses come and go, struggling to survive through the quiet winter months, the town has essentially retained its old-style Fifties character over the past six decades. Some of my favorite memories involve feasts on hamburgers and butterscotch milkshakes at the old Price’s cafe. Big Fork, with its vibrant arts life and thriving restaurant scene, is a glitzier alternative on the north end of the lake, but it seems a little overly hip-conscious compared to the traditional down-home quality of Polson. More than anything, Flathead Lake has meant family. Almost four generations of the Sievers have shared the common experience of the cabin at the lake. Now, having my wife, my son, his wife, and two grandsons able to spend time at the cabin and getting to have many of the same experiences as I had during the summer, is an irreplaceable gift. The Flathead is a place of on-going memories and family convening – a sort of anchor for our clan. My two sisters and their families feel the same. “Going to the Lake” is commonly understood in our families to be the time when we see cousins, nieces and nephews, in-laws, grandchildren, and miscellaneous boyfriends, girlfriends, and lifelong chums. We do not need formal reunions – we know we’ll have our annual family convergences at the lake. As I look back, I think of the dramatic transformations in physical appearance of the shoreline and lifestyle that have occurred at Flathead since we have been there. In the fifties we knew everyone on Skidoo Lane, took turns delivering the mail and plowing the road, shared in the harvest dinners up at the Montecahto Club, listened to each others’ conversations on the party-line phone, and helped each other out pulling stumps and INTRODUCTION
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putting heavy boats in and out of the lake. Since that time, much has changed – gentrification, new docks adorned with jet skis and pontoon boats, paved roads, cable TV, the Internet and cell phones (no more partyline crank phones – two longs and a short), a Super Walmart, and even street lights on the lane (to my dismay), and lots of new people, many of them from other parts of the country. Yet, despite all the changes, the beauty of the lake remains; so does the sense of community of the people who reside there. In human experience, it’s only in hindsight that we look back and realize how our personal stories of growing up fit into the larger picture of human change and development. And I now understand what a unique privilege it has been to spend those early years at Flathead and to have had it become an oasis of calm, refuge, connection, and renewal for me through every phase of my life’s journey. It has been responsible for some of the best days of my life. Flathead has truly become part of my soul, and I know it will remain so through the rest of my days and those of future generations of our family. I have known Steve Smith and Wayne Schile since high school days in Missoula, Montana, in the late 1950s. Flathead Lake has been an important and cherished part of all our lives. Their book has been a long time coming and is a labor of love. I hope you find it interesting and, more than that, compelling. Bruce Sievers Tiburon, California Bruce Sievers attended Paxson Grade School and Missoula County High School in Missoula, Montana, in the 1950s. He went on to Stanford University in 1959 and eventually earned a doctorate in political science from Stanford. He studied at the Freie Universitaet Berlin as a Fulbright Scholar. He was the founding executive director of the Montana Committee for the Humanities in 1972 and the California Council for the Humanities in 1974. In 1983 he became chief executive officer (CEO) of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, a private foundation in San Francisco. President Obama appointed Sievers to the National Council on the Humanities in 2013. He’s the author of Civil Society, Philanthropy and the Fate of the Commons, published in 2010. Currently, he is a visiting scholar and lecturer in political science at Stanford University and a visiting scholar at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at the Haas Center for Public Service. His life is busy, but not too busy to keep him away from Flathead Lake in the summertime.
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Introduction
W
By Steve Smith
ayne Schile and I sat together on the West Shore of Flathead Lake in the summer of 2012 and talked about his idea of collaborating on a book about Flathead. We have strong attachments to the lake, having spent countless days, weeks and months here, mostly in the summertime, over more than fifty years. Wayne was ready to start; he would publish the book. I was not ready; writing a book requires significant time and effort and I, like Wayne, have children, grandchildren and other interests that consume most of my time. In essence, I told my friend since high school days, “Thanks for the opportunity, but no thanks.” We sat together on the lakeshore in the summer of 2013 and again talked about a Flathead Lake book. Same story, one year later: thanks, but no thanks… Come the summer of 2014, Wayne, back at Flathead from Arizona with his British-born wife, Maureen, once again broached the book idea. I had been thinking about the matter through the winter and, this time, said, “I’m in, but: • “I don’t want to try writing a history of the lake. Much of the history already is on paper and between covers; no sense in re-inventing the wheel; • “I haven’t the time or energy to head out with a tape recorder gathering hundreds of anecdotes from hundreds of folks who have loved and enjoyed Flathead Lake through the decades; INTRODUCTION
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• “I haven’t the knowledge, nor the stamina, nor the interest, to delve into the political controversies, environmental issues and assorted squabbles that have swirled around the lake for more than a century.” Wayne and I agreed that plenty of interesting material that could go into our book already has been written. For instance, I pointed out, author Bryan Di Salvatore once wrote the most readable piece I had ever seen about Wild Horse Island. Maybe, with Bryan’s permission, we could use it. Veteran newspaperman Paul Fugleberg of Polson likely has forgotten more about Flathead Lake people and events than most of us will ever know. Wayne and I agreed on that and wondered if, perhaps, Paul would let us put some of his words and photos back to work in our book – fully credited, of course. (Now in his mid-eighties, Paul eagerly threw in with us and gave us his blessing; neither Wayne nor I can thank him enough for the help and cooperation he has given us.) I told Wayne about a 1985 book, Flathead Lake, From Glaciers to Cherries. The late R.C. “Chuck” Robbin, historian and teacher, researched and wrote it. Maybe we could borrow, selectively, from it. (Robbin’s wife, Charlotte – “Char” for short – who lives in Great Falls, and son, David, were enthusiastic about our book project and readily gave their permission for us to quote Mr. Robbin and use a few chapters. So did The Big Fork Eagle weekly newspaper, which published the book.) Professor Emeritous David Alt, retired from the University of Montana geology faculty, had written about Flathead Lake’s origins. Could we use his expertise? My role in the book, I suggested to Wayne, would be to compile some words and photographs of other writers. Beyond that, I’d produce my own material for the book – say, a dozen chapters or so. I told Wayne I would like to write my contribution in the first person – a memoir, if you like, hitting the high spots of my more than sixty years of being around Flathead Lake. People, places, things and events that had caught my attention while I was enjoying the lake and, also, while I was on assignment as a reporter and columnist for the Missoulian newspaper. The way I put my idea to Wayne was that I would take our book’s readers in tow and we’d go for a quick verbal promenade around the lake – up one shore and down the other – touching on people and places nobody would dare to leave out of a Flathead Lake book. (Who would write about the lake without mentioning sweet cherries? Or the native tribes that called the Flathead area home long before explorers and settlers arrived on the scene? Or the dreaded Flathead Lake Monster? Or the lake’s proud old steamboats? Or the Copper Cup Regatta? Or salmon and mackinaw?) Wayne and I understand that a beautiful photograph is worth at least a thousand words. We agreed on the idea of enhancing our book with 10
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photos – black and white, as well as color. As we sat by the lake midway through June 2014, we looked at each other square in the eyes in lieu of a handshake. Our book project was launched! Wayne went on his way, back to his nearby summer home and dinner with Maureen; I drove into Polson, bought a stack of yellow legal tablets and some felt-tip pens, and returned to the lakeshore and a picnic table that looked like a good place to sit and start stringing words together. I’ve been gathering photographs and stringing words together (now on a Smith-Corona typewriter that Wayne gave to me) ever since early summer. Now it’s mid-October and I’m strung out, so to speak. (Out of self-defense, and in the interest of you, the reader, Wayne suggested a limit on my output; we spent years in the newspaper industry and he knows I’m capable of droning on until readers nod off to sleep.) I hope you enjoy our book, which features a beautiful piece of Monte Dolack artwork on the cover. Thank you, Monte, and you, Mary Beth, for your splendid work through the years. Also, if I tried to list and thank the dozens of people whom I asked for bits and pieces of information, I’d need two more pages. If you’re reading this, folks, you know who you are; also know that Wayne and I are deeply grateful for your help. I am grateful to Kashia Yurek of Missoula, who persuaded me that, while a nice big felt-tip pen applied to a blank sheet of paper is an adequate word processor, there are, perhaps, better options in this, the Age of Computers. Kashia’s small business, A to Z Word Processing Inc., took my ugly scribbled and typed manuscript and turned it into presentable pages fit for readers’ eyes. Thank you, Kashia, for your hard work, helpful suggestions and interest in this project. Finally, sincere thanks to Wayne Schile, who conceived this project, recruited me for his writer, and got the wheels turning. Writing my contribution has been a terrific adventure! Steve Smith Flathead Lake
INTRODUCTION
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CHAPTER ONE
Big Blue
I
love Big Blue. Few ifs, ands or buts about that: I love Flathead Lake. Loved it way back when, love it now, and likely will love it until the end of my days. Maybe I’ll be like the late John Schile, who, with his wife, Mildred, owned and operated the Kings Point Marina on Flathead in the 1960s, ‘70s and early ‘80s. Seriously ill in the mid-1980s and leaving Flathead for the last time, Mr. Schile managed a feeble wave and sadly said, “Good-bye, lake.” Who hasn’t felt the emotional pain of saying a final good-bye to a beloved person, place or thing, such as a pet? Tears fall and there’s an unspeakable sadness in knowing that the person, place or thing is about to become, at best, a fond memory or, at worst, a never-ending heartache. I was touched when my longtime friend Wayne Schile told me about his father’s final farewell to the lake of his life. I imagined, for a moment, how I’ll feel when I take one Kings Point Marina, painted in 1979 last look at the lake of my life and then turn by the late John Schile. away and depart for the great unknown. My feelings for Big Blue are such that I think I’ll be doing well to manage a wave such as John Schile’s. I’ll be hoping that heaven is my next stop, but wondering why I can’t just stay at the lake. After all, aren’t Flathead Lake and heaven pretty much one and the same?
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Hard for me to acknowledge, but my love for Big Blue isn’t unconditional. Truth be told, it intensifies in the summertime and early fall when Flathead is at its biggest (full pool) and bluest (blue sky, of course, makes for bluer water than a somber gray sky.) Come the dead of winter – December, January and February – I tend to fall out of love with the lake. Big Blue, battleship gray now and roiled to huge, menacing waves and frothy whitecaps by ferocious south-bound storms out of Canada or east-bound storms out of the Pacific Northwest, can, and frequently has, exhibited Great Lakes-like behavior. Then somehow, love wanes; respect and awe take its place. Fear, too, if I’m on the water in too small a boat. I’ve been in that fix and once is one too many times. June, July and August also can be treacherous on the lake. Writing about Flathead and Wild Horse Island in Islands Magazine in August 1982, Missoula, Montana, author Bryan Di Salvatore noted that the lake is “known for storms that can turn a bright and calm summer afternoon into a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse.” Far too many grim headlines through the decades back up that statement: • Blue Bay resident drowns in lake • Kalispell man apparently drowns in boating accident • Body of kayaking doctor found in The Narrows • Couple drowns off Wild Horse Island The legendary, ill-fated Lake Superior iron ore boat Edmund Fitzgerald likely could have stood up to a rip-roaring Flathead Lake wintertime storm, but hundreds of hell-for-stout docks through the years completely flunked the test and wound up kindling on Big Blue’s beaches for next summer’s bonfires. Indeed, I love Big Blue, but part of loving it is to swim in it once its sparkling water, down from the mountains, has lost its arctic zing and offers humans fun, relaxation and recreation rather than instant hypothermia. That’s in the good old summertime, which, it seems to me, arrives too late in the year and departs too early. The saying “here today, gone tomorrow” is appropriate for Big Blue summers, but that reality only makes Flathead summers all the more precious. Ah, summers on Big Blue…! •••• It’s Saturday afternoon, August 2, 2014, and along with hundreds of other people I’m gazing in amazement at more than thirty gorgeous wooden boats – speedboats and cabin cruisers – moored in snug slips at the Acqua Pazza Restaurant Marina in Lakeside, Montana, on Flathead Lake. The occasion is the ninth annual Big Sky Antique & Classic Boat B I G B LU E
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Show. Their mahogany decks and sides polished to a shine, their muscular inboard engines clean and gleaming from open access hatches, the boats speak of days gone by on Flathead and other lakes around the country. Larry and Barbara Schroeder of Kalispell, Montana, have brought The Barb, their 1946 StanCraft twenty-five-foot day cruiser. (StanCraft is a familiar name around Flathead Lake. W.H. “Billy” Young and one of his sons, Stan, founded the StanCraft Wooden Boat Company in 1933 on the shore of Caroline Point near Lakeside. The company’s literature
Wood boat on Flathead Lake. (Michael Gallacher photo)
claims the StanCraft boat-building factory was the first on Flathead. Stan and Delores Young’s eldest son, Syd, and Syd’s wife, Julie, bought the business in 1970 and moved it to Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho, in the early ‘80s. Today, StanCraft is a third-generation operation: Syd and Julie’s youngest daughter, Amy, and her husband, Robert Bloem, bought the company in 2010 and continue to build classic wooden pleasure boats they advertise as beautiful, fast, and possessing a “butter-soft, level ride.” 14
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A Lee-Craft sedan cruiser under way on Flathead Lake. (Ole Lee Jr. collection)
Alex and Margene Berry of Lakeside are showing Minnie, their 1959 Chris-Craft sea skiff, a twenty-two footer. Another Chris-Craft, Emotion, belonging to Ron Tjaden of Rollins, Montana, is a nineteen-foot utility boat. Nevin and Elizabeth Bryant from Idaho are showing Molly, their 1932 Gar Wood, an eighteen-foot speedboat. David and Sally Holand of Somers, Montana, have Nomad, their twenty-six-foot-long, 1955 StanCraft day cruiser. Also in the show are John Crose’s eighteen-foot Lyman Islander, Goes 2 C, out of Kalispell, and Evening Star, a twenty-one-foot Century Coronado belonging to an Omaha, Nebraska, couple, Bruce and Lynn Lowry. Why so much interest in classic wooden boats and shows where they’re on display? “Those classic beauties – whether it’s an original StanCraft or a sixteen-foot Lee-Craft runabout – are becoming more valuable over time,” Mason Niblack, an enthusiast from Polson, Montana, told reporter Lynnette Hintze of Kalispell’s Daily Inter Lake newspaper in 2012. “These days, many wooden boats are considered works of art from Lee-Craft boatworks at Somers a bygone era.” (Lee-Craft boats were (Ole Lee Jr. collection) built on Flathead Lake near Somers, B I G B LU E
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Foredeck of a classic wood boat, Flathead Lake. (Michael Gallacher photo)
Montana, a few miles up the shore from Lakeside. Norway-born Ole Lee Jr. built his first boat, a wooden model, in 1938, and expanded from there to eventually build fiberglass boats.) Mason Niblack said he spent “most of a lifetime” teaching at universities all over North America, but “whenever and however” he could, he “returned to Flathead Lake.” Niblack told his interviewer that “the lure of the lake has been unrelenting,” pulling at his soul “like the tug of an ocean tide” since he first laid eyes on “the wondrous body of water” at age seven. Niblack said he also thinks it important to preserve “the connections between Flathead Lake and those who use it.” He added, “Water is a means of getting people together. Boating is just one activity. It’s a unique and historic use of the water and it’s connected with how cultures communicate with each other… The thing about wooden boats is that there are stories – lots of stories – that come with the wood, weathered or polished.” The weather on this second day of August is as dazzling as the boats 16
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– sunshine galore and just enough of a puff of breeze to keep the ninetydegree heat in check and to help disperse a haze from forest fires burning in Washington state and Idaho to the west. To look far out over Flathead toward Big Fork and the lake’s East Shore is to witness a scene of beauty and peace in a world pock-marked by ethnic, racial and religious hatred and political turmoil. Marshmallow clouds float high in the blue sky and boats of every description – kayaks to motorboats, jet skis to sailboats – move about on an expanse of blue water big enough for everyone. People young and old are at play in this incomparable playground and one wishes the many troubled people in this troubled world could, for an hour or so, or perhaps even a day or month, partake of this loveliness and serenity. I am with my son, Conor; his wife, Carragh; their two boys, Cormick and Camden, and a nephew, Joe Wlaysewski. We have seen the show boats and have enjoyed a meal and refreshments on the patio of the marina restaurant. Now, in the late afternoon, we are in an inboard-outboard runabout owned by my sister, Linda, and are setting out for the southern part of the lake near Melita Island. We hug the West Shore, looking for big bald eagles in high snags and looking at the variety of dwellings – from little cabins to upscale, lodge-like homes – that line the lake’s beaches, coves and bays. Cruising along Flathead’s shoreline on cool, quiet evenings has been a favorite pastime on the lake for decades. Cormick, six, is joyfully steering the boat on an irregular course – port to starboard, starboard to port – until we come upon two islands, Cedar and Shelter. Shelter, the smaller, is the location of a multi-million-dollar, chalet-like, stone mansion. The spectacular place, under construction for years and seemingly never occupied, is for sale. We stop out in the lake, toss the anchor overboard, and go swimming off the boat. The setting – sunset silhouetting the nearby island’s stately pine trees, the shimmering and burnished surface of the water, and the presence of family – prompts me to mutter to myself and to the Great Spirit, “Life on earth simply doesn’t get any better than this.” I’ve thought a number of times over the years that Flathead Lake at sunrise or sunset surely must offer a preview of heaven. •••• It was almost seventy years ago that I first saw Flathead Lake, but my love for western Montana’s immense and enchanting body of cold, clear water has remained. A couple of decades ago, in fact, I came to realize – and accept the fact – that Flathead Lake owns me. I was living in western Washington state. Come summers, I found that Flathead was on my mind almost sunup ‘till B I G B LU E
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sundown. I was flat-out homesick – homesick for Montana, even more so for Flathead Lake. I wondered… • Was Big Blue at full pool (2,893 feet above sea level)? • How had the bighorn sheep wintered on Wild Horse Island? Were poachers still slaughtering the magnificent animals for their horns? • How was the sweet cherry crop doing? No hard rain or hail, I hoped, to split the sumptuous fruit and diminish the harvest. • How was the lake trout, or mackinaw, fishing? Good, no doubt. The big trout had been more than plentiful (too plentiful, it turned out) back when my kids were younger and my daughter, Erin, and I had fished “Mack Alley,” between Melita and Erin Smith with her twenty-five-pound mackinaw, Wild Horse islands, with a saltyon Flathead Lake, 1984. Caught from the late Ed tongued man named Ed Brester. Brester’s boat, Mac-A-Dew (Steve Smith photo) Ed, who fished like there was no tomorrow while his wife, Bobbi, held down the fort back at the Big Arm Marina, owned a well-equipped boat he had christened Mac-A-Dew. I had spent the best part of a day on board Mac-A-Dew while on an outdoor page assignment for the Missoulian newspaper. I had so much fun that I continued to fish with Ed on subsequent weekends. Erin took to Ed, and vise versa, and we spent many happy hours hooking and reeling in lunker lake trout. Erin’s biggest catch was a twenty-five-pounder; she brought the fish to the boat single-handedly, but Ed had to help her heft it over the transom and into Mac-A-Dew. Erin, ten or so at the time, was one proud girl. • What was happening on Skidoo Bay near the lake’s East Shore? Had the Sheridans kept their place on Finley Point? Did the remaining Sheridan brothers still like to water ski as much as they had in the late 1950s when we palled around together? • How about the Askevold boys, Gerald and David? What had become of them? Gerald, the elder of the two, had once chased after me as I ran like the wind up a hill to avoid a good thrashing. I was in grade school, Gerald in high school, and I had overheard people’s concerns about how close to docks and swimmers Gerald and his friends often water-skied. I had taken 18
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it upon myself to find a suitable rock and peg it at Gerald as he buzzed our dock in a rooster tail of glittering spray. I nailed him in his well-tanned, muscular shoulder, then stood frowning and chagrinned as he flipped away his tow rope and settled into the water a few feet from shore. I thought “Oh crap!” as he lit out after me. Topping the hill with Gerald close enough behind to breathe on me, I burst through the sleeping-porch door of our family’s rented cabin, wheeled about, then locked the door. Gerald, panting, ordered me to open up. I was panting, too, as I refused. Gerald huffed and puffed and called me a name or two then headed back down the hill toward the lake. I would have been justified in feeling like one of the three little pigs that had just foiled the big, bad wolf. One of my mother’s friends, Mrs. Nybo, saw the footrace and forever more addressed me as “Doctor Bannister.” An Englishman with some sort of advanced degree, Roger Bannister still was famous for running a mile in under four minutes. • Was there still the Wiki-Wow drive-in theater south of Polson along Highway 93? As a kid at Flathead Lake I had idled away more than a little time imagining the making out going on in the cars of Polson High School boys and their summertime dates. Those dates, I surmised, involved a bevy of easy-on-the-eyes, teen-age Texas girls who, during summers in the late 1950s, accompanied Houston petroleum geologist and oilman W.L. Goldston to Flathead Lake. Mr. Goldston and his wife, Iris, brought their daughters, Nancy and Patti, along with some of the daughters’ female cousins and friends, to the lake for water skiing, swimming and care-free good times. Brian Wilson and the rest of the singing California-born Beach Boys would have fit right in even though the jalopies of Polson high school boys, who liked to join in the fun, possibly would have brought curled lips and sneers from California surfer boys used to cool hot rods and neat woodies. My nostalgic wonderings continued as I thought about Flathead Lake from western Washington… • Were Polson’s annual Copper Cup Regatta boat races still a going concern? What had become of Flathead Lake hydroplane drivers such as Ray Boettcher, Eddie Pinkney, Al Copper Cup racing action on Flathead Lake. Croonenberghs, Harry Vassar, (Michael Gallacher photo) Pam Tierney, Dennis DeMers, B I G B LU E
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Jim Namen, Stan Young, Deloit Wolfe, Gene Bird, “Butch” Haines, “Chuck” Mercord, George Caras and Bill Cooksley? Begun in 1954 and featuring big-time hydroplanes – so called thunderboats with their massive RollsRoyce or Allison inboard engines – the Copper Cup, originally run on big Polson Bay, was a stopover race between Seattle and Detroit and the thrilling Gold Cup competition. For a few summers, sounds of the revving engines of Seattle’s incomparable SloMo-Shun IV and Detroit’s Tempo VII were part of the Polson-Flathead Lake summertime scene. Renowned Royal Canadian band leader Guy Lombardo owned Tempo VII and bankrolled the considerable expenses connected to it. The big boats, also known as Unlimiteds, faded from the Flathead scene because of logistical and financial issues. The Copper Cup Regatta, moved to the lower Flathead River just below the Polson Bridge (now known as the Veterans Memorial Bridge), evolved into a popular event with smaller race boats, both outboard and inboard. The regatta attracted throngs of racers, racing fans and other spectators from as far away as California, Colorado and western Canada. A featured driver one summer was a widely known airplane pilot who earlier had escaped from his native Czechoslovakia, then behind the Iron Curtain and under the rule of the Soviet Union. His name was Mira Slovak. I liked the Copper Cup races (which have been staged again during a couple of recent summers to gauge public interest.) The late Dennis DeMers in his As a kid, I used to think that folks just 280-inboard hydroplane competes in a designed a boat, built it, then went racing. Copper Cup Regatta race on the Flathead Simple. Not so, according to a Flathead Courier River near Polson in the early 1970s vacation guide item in 1981: “Drivers have to have (Paul Fugleberg collection) good judgment, a sense of timing, and hours of 20
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boat-handling experience to pilot these very fast machines around race courses in the quickest possible time – all that while competing against other drivers in turbulent water conditions. “To be a ‘qualified’ driver each year, these men and women have to pass a physical exam and belong to the American Power Boat Association. Drivers then must pass another test where they are required to remain in last place. Officials then judge drivers’ ability to handle a boat in disturbed water on the race course.” • And what of the fine old Retta Mary, an iconic sixty-eight-foot-long cruise boat that each summer took hundreds of passengers on peaceful evening cruises around the lake? Was her steel hull still seaworthy or had she fallen out of fashion and been scrapped? (Turns out she wasn’t scrapped and found new life as the cruise boat Far West out of Lakeside.) • And what of big Frank Hodge and his pile-driving, dock-building, paddle-wheel work barge, the S.S. Hodge? Hodge and his barge, the latter reminiscent of a two-fisted, no-nonsense vessel out of southeastern Alaska, were themselves Flathead icons in up-north places such as Somers Bay, Kalispell Bay, Point Caroline, Peaceful Bay, Angel Point, Woods Bay, Deep Bay and Hockaday Bay; mid-lake places such as Table Bay, Shelter Island, Yellow Bay, Cromwell Island and Big Arm Bay; and down-lake places such as Bootlegger Island, White Swan Point, Blue Bay, Whiskey Bay, Rocky Point, Safety Bay, Kings Point, Bird Island, The Narrows, Skidoo Bay, East Bay and Polson Bay. Big lake, Flathead, some twenty-eight miles long and eighteen wide.
The pile-driver S.S. Hodge enters Yellow Bay. (Photo by L.D. Gross) B I G B LU E
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What’s more, places as deep as three-hundred feet. Talk to a dozen people and you were apt to hear a dozen sets of length-width-depth numbers. Widely agreed on, though, was the contention that Flathead was (and still is) the largest natural fresh-water lake west of the Mississippi. In any event, Big Blue was large enough and popular enough to support those two pleasure-boat-building enterprises – StanCraft and Lee-Craft. Were they still in business? I wondered from five hundred miles away in western Washington. I owned a 1958 Lee-Craft sedan cruiser with a hefty fifty-horsepower Evinrude motor. She was a Philippine mahogany plywood beauty that I purchased from the Kings Point estate of a deceased Missoula businessman. Ralph Brown had owned and operated Brownie’s In-andOut drive-in on West Broadway in Missoula; his eighteen-foot cruiser was his pride and joy. Financed with some book royalties, my new boat became The Write Stuff. My kids and I spent many memorable summers from one end of the lake to the other sight-seeing, fishing, swimming, snorkeling and picnicking. (Today, the boat is on display at Polson’s fascinating Miracle of America Museum.) A mighty lake such as Flathead should have its own monster for people to be wary of and speculate about. Indeed, like the Lochness Monster, there was the fearsome Flathead Monster – real in the minds of some people, imaginary in the minds of others. Stories about monster sightings were part of lake legend and lore. Was the monster legend spooking new generations of Flathead lakers? I often wondered. I hoped so. • And who could forget the annual Indian pow-wows that had long been part of the Flathead Lake-area culture? Pow-pows are summertime celebrations that bring together the region’s native peoples for dancing, feasting, visiting and traditional games. Fine dust from the outdoor pavilions rose into the afternoon and evening air as children and adults alike danced away the hours. Dust, though, was a minor irritant soon displaced by the loud, rhythmic thump of drums, the jingle of innumerable bells (called jingles) sewn into wildly colorful native garb, and the songs being sung in the languages of the trio of tribes that had lived in the Flathead area long before the arrival of white explorers and settlers. The names of the tribes are distinctive and melodious: the Salish, or Flatheads; the Kootenai, and the Kalispel, also known as the Upper Pend d’Oreille. I had been to enough pow-wows through the years that memories of them were forever part of me: the so-called fancy dancing, the intricate bead work, the buckskin dresses, elk tooth and shell dresses, feathers, aromatic and delicious fry bread, stick games, tom-toms and war drums, beaded buckskin shirts, leggings, feathered war bonnets, whoops and hollers and chants from an era long gone. 22
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Thousands of people remember their first view of Flathead Lake. (Kurt Wilson photo)
Truly, Flathead Lake, beautiful Big Blue, has owned me for years and will go on owning me. I could not forsake the lake if I wanted to. I’ve been back home in Montana since 1992 and will remain here except for whatever short journeys I take to other places. Big Blue is close at hand and that’s the way I like it. •••• I was a boy, maybe seven or eight, when I looked through the windshield of our family’s Chevrolet and saw a stunning view that I remember to this day. It was summertime and my father, mother, older sister and I were en route to what I now know is the West Shore of Flathead Lake. We were to meet a man my parents called Uncle Al and go with him in his boat to a place called Dream Island. We were southeast of Polson, on Highway 93, and had just come over the crest of Polson Hill, now known to be a glacial moraine. There, before us, in what Hollywood later called Cinemascope in its movies, was B I G B LU E
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a panoramic view of what I then thought must be the ocean. The biggest water I had seen before then was Rock Creek near Missoula, where our family went with friends to picnic and fish for trout. I shouted to my father to stop the car. Stop NOW so I could take in the view of what apparently struck me as spectacular. Awesome, kids today would say. My mother told me in later years that I was “stupified” by the sight of Flathead Lake from Polson Hill. At a dock on the mainland several hundred yards from Dream Island, Uncle Al waited in his boat. It was like no other boat I had ever seen and turned out to be a “speedboat.” A speedboat with a powerful marine engine inside or, as my father instructed me, inboard. Maybe Uncle Al’s speedboat was a Chris-Craft or Gar Wood, I never really knew. Whatever the brand, its engine rumbled like only speedboat engines under power can rumble. Uncle Al clearly loved his speedboat; he took our family for a long, rollicking spin around Dream Island and another island in the vicinity, Melita Island. Uncle Al, it turned out, was Albert Rochester, Kentucky-born and allegedly raised by African American mammies, who sometime in the early 1900s had found his way to booming Butte, Montana, and stayed there to make his mark. One day, along Butte’s teeming Park Street, he spotted a young woman named Eugenia Mueller, Genie for short. Legend has it that Uncle Al turned to a friend and exclaimed, “See that girl? I’m going to marry her some day.” He did just that. Genie, if I’m not mistaken, was an older second cousin to my Butteborn-and-raised mother, whose maiden name was Marie Mueller. Several Mueller brothers, who hailed from Wisconsin, were principles in Butte’s old Centennial Brewery; somewhere along the line some of them looked up from their beer-brewing long enough to check out a reputed paradise to the west and north called Flathead Lake. They bought lakeshore land and also acquired Dream Island. The island, I’ve been told, likely was a wedding present to Uncle Al and his bride, who came to be known to my family as Aunt Genie. The Rochesters eventually moved from Butte to Missoula and bought a house on McLeod Avenue in the university district. Uncle Al became a stockbroker and, I think, did well for himself, his wife and Jack, the son they had. Flathead Lake and Dream Island became their home away from home on summer weekends. Mother once noted that the Rochesters had “help” at their island summer home. Just a modest staff, I supposed, including a maid, a cook and a gardener, the latter to tend the many flowers Aunt Genie enjoyed. Uncle Al was a memorable, middle-age man the day I was introduced to him and joined my mother and sister, Sandi, in the rear seat of his speedboat. He liked speed and rarely backed off the throttle as we tore 24
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around the lake, spray flying. He wore a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and steered his boat with one hand while stretching his free arm across the backrest of the front seat. Clenched between the index and middle fingers of his free hand was a cigar that seemed to me to be about an inch in diameter and a foot long. Periodically, he would glance over his shoulder and shout something over the howl of the engine that I could neither Al and Genie Rochester’s summer hear nor understand, given his pronounced home on Dream Island in the 1940s. Kentucky southern accent. (Linda Wlaysewski collection) That Uncle Al liked to go fast he demonstrated in a note penned in 1919 on a black-and-white photograph that I inherited later in life. The photo shows Uncle Al and my maternal grandfather, J.W. “Joe” Mueller, standing in the forward cockpit of an early-day biplane at the Butte airport. Says the note: Royal Joe and I took a ride in this 150-HP machine the other day. We were up 2,800 feet and traveled over 90 miles per hour. It’s a great sport and I hope to own one (an airplane) some day. (Grandpa Mueller’s nickname was Royal Joe because he had once held a royal flush during one of many poker games at his home on Platinum Street in Butte.) After our boat ride we clambered out of the speedboat at the Dream Island dock, which had a roof over it even in the late 1940s. We walked up a short, curving, geranium-lined path to the Rochester summer house. There, the adults visited and we ate a mid-afternoon dinner. As soon as possible I returned to the dock and spent an hour or so lying on my stomach near the speedboat and peering down into the cold, green water – the green, I guess, from seaweed growing on the lake’s bottom. I could see fish down among the dock’s pilings; I thought I never had seen anything quite so beautiful as this “aquarium.” At seven, or whatever age I was, I was too young to understand that not everything in Aunt Genie and Uncle Al’s life was beautiful and fun. They Veranda of the Rochester summer home on Dream had had their hearts broken, probably Island in the 1940s. (Linda Wlaysewski collection) sometime in the 1930s, when their B I G B LU E
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beloved son was killed in a night-time automobile accident on Flathead’s East Shore road. Jack, at the time of his death, was a university student in Missoula and was out and about with friends. The car that crashed was his; he was driving. I can’t remember ever going to Dream Island again while the Rochesters owned it. They aged, celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in Missoula, then, inevitably, began dealing with various illnesses. The last time I remember seeing them was in their fifthfloor apartment in Missoula’s Wilma Building. A color-tinted, framed photograph of Jack in his college days hung prominently on the apartment’s entry hall wall. Wearing a navy-blue swimming suit, Jack was standing on a rock near a Flathead Lake shore. I liked Uncle Al and Aunt Genie and went to their apartment to say good-bye before heading, at age eighteen, for navy boot camp in San Diego. A year and a half or so later, while I was at sea on an aircraft carrier, I received a letter from my mother. Uncle Al, she wrote, had driven to Flathead Lake with my father; they had gone out to Dream Island in our family’s outboard runabout. There, I read, Uncle Al offered to sell the island, complete with house and boats, for what, compared to today’s Flathead land prices, would seem to be an almost paltry figure. (Bear in mind that twenty-five thousand dollars in the early 1960s would be a considerably higher sum in today’s dollars.) My father, who was faced with putting three daughters through college and who was in the midst of starting a new business to replace one that had been lost in a hard-fought battle in a Butte courtroom, turned him down. I was home on leave when my father, leaning against his Cat D-4 bulldozer and telling me about the offer, asked me, “What the hell were mom and I going to do with an island?” I saw his point, given the fact that islands present some unusual logistical problems. Uncle Al sold some acreage on shore to my parents before he died. Dad and mother are long gone, too, but the land still is in the family and enjoyed to this day by their great-grandchildren, the grandchildren of my sister, Linda, and me, and by my younger sister, Sister Sharon Smith of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, Kansas. I like to think that the dusty old speedboat that is alongside my dusty old Lee-Craft cabin cruiser at the Miracle of America Museum is Uncle Al’s. Later, several owners later, Marcus Daly III and his wife, Juanita, bought Dream Island. I found myself back on the island in September 1981 at the invitation of Juanita, by then a widow in the wake of her husband’s death. I was forty and my visit with Juanita, a most gracious and hospitable woman, and her house guest, comic Phyllis Diller, was an afternoon and evening to remember.
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