Sorted by date Results 126 - 150 of 305
SWAN VALLEY – Ninety-three-year-old Leonard Moore was the first speaker at the Aug. 3 Upper Swan Valley Historical Society (USVHS) program entitled Outfitting and Guiding in the Swan Valley and Surrounding Areas. Moore said, according to his mother's notes, his first packing trip into the Bob Marshall Wilderness was in September of 1926 - the year he was born. According to the USVHS website, Moore "rode in the saddle with his mother or in a pannier on the pack string's lead horse." When he w...
SWAN VALLEY – Outfitting is not easy, and it certainly won't make a person rich, but the memories and experience of breathing in the wilderness will reward and sustain the outfitter for the rest of his or her life. That's the bare bones of what the speakers had to say Saturday, Aug. 3 at the Upper Swan Valley Historical Society (USVHS) program entitled Outfitting and Guiding in the Swan Valley and Surrounding Areas. The yarns and anecdotes that filled out those bare bones, that is what made t...
SEELEY LAKE – Lively hit tunes from the 1960s and a bright pink stage greeted the large audience that assembled their chairs and blankets on the Double Arrow Lodge grounds Aug. 1 for the 2019 Montana Shakespeare in the Parks' (MSIP) presentation of "The Merry Wives of Windsor." The music and colors were the first hints that this production of the play would not be set in Renaissance times. It has become an accepted practice to set Shakespearean plays in more modern time periods. In a phone i...
SWAN VALLEY – Even though he was recently promoted to U.S. Army Colonel, former Swan Valley resident Matt Cooper returned to his hometown to march in the Fourth of July parade. Cooper said since there is no active military presence in Condon, youngsters don't have a role model nor an understanding of all the opportunities available to them in the military. He marched, as he has done for the past 20 years, to show Condon children that a kid from a two-room schoolhouse can work his way up w...
SEELEY LAKE – The number of presidential candidates apparently has stabilized, but for a while it seemed like every newscast announced someone new had thrown his or her hat into the ring – even though no candidate actually wore a hat and most spoke from podiums rather than from rings. Before the phrase "throw your hat into the ring" became an idiom, it was an actual occurrence in the world of boxing. An 1804 London newspaper, "The Morning Chronicle," reported; "The champions arrived at Wil...
SEELEY LAKE – "Things were a lot different then," Ruth Stebleton said, thinking back on the years from 1968 to 1970 when she served as a nurse in the U.S. Army. White shoes, white socks, white Army cap in place of her traditional white cap – that was the required attire for women nurses in that era. Basic training was also different for Stebleton, though some of that was fortuitous. When she reported to Camp Bullis in San Antonio, Texas, the barracks were already filled to capacity, so she and s...
SALMON PRAIRIE – When John Yajko graduated from college, he got a job as a football coach at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. It looked like the beginning of a promising sports career – until he received a draft notice. Not wanting to go into the Army, Yajko immediately went down to the Air Force recruiting agency and signed up. Hoping to become a pilot, he added his name to a long list of others who hoped for the same thing. In the meantime, he went first to Officers Training Sch...
SEELEY LAKE – John, reading a financial magazine, might say to his wife Mary, "Honey, it says here as a rule of thumb, we should have an emergency fund set aside equal to six months' worth of household expenses. We don't even have an emergency fund, but we probably should be putting some money aside." If that was perceived by Mary as a prelude to an unwelcome conversation targeting those expensive new shoes she just bought, she might deflect by saying, "Well, a rule of thumb certainly isn't a...
SWAN VALLEY – Imprinted on the tree slab segments above the door of the Swan Valley Community Hall are the words "Lest We Forget." Beneath them, another slab shows five saddled but riderless horses, the military symbol for fallen soldiers who will ride no more. To the right and left of the slabs are more than 100 wooden plaques containing the names and death-dates of military veterans who once lived in Swan Valley. According to American Legion Post 63 Post Adjutant Ray Opp, the Veterans Memorial...
OVANDO – Dave Miller joined the U.S. Army for altruistic reasons. As he explained, "I was reading and watching the news and stuff and I just thought Vietnam needed some help in their independence." Miller was pretty sure he knew what war would be like. He had watched the TV segments. He was ready to face the hardships, and even possible death, for the sake of helping another country gain its independence as the U.S. had fought and gained its own independence. Instead he found his sense of right...
How did the Easter bunny hop his way into a religious holiday? And why does a bunny lay eggs? Well, there's the spring proliferation theory, the ground-nesting bird explanation, the pagan goddess version and the adult joke-on-the-kids story. The spring proliferation theory points to the rebirth of plants and animals in the springtime. Christian religions connect that rebirth to the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday. The springing up of grasses and flowers, buds bursting on trees, birds layi...
SEELEY LAKE – For a second year, Clearwater Resource Council's Clearwater Partners Workshop hosted author, newspaper columnist and Master Gardener Molly Hackett. As she had the previous year, Hackett drew a large crowd to the Seeley Lake Community Hall April 6. She talked for 20 minutes about planting season extenders and then answered questions for another hour and a half on a whole range of gardening questions. Rightly, assuming audience members would be interested in ways to get plants s...
OVANDO – Bob Sheppard is a native Montanan but that doesn't mean he spent all his time in the same Montana town. Born in Conrad, Sheppard spent his early years in the western Hi-Line country – Cutbank, Shelby, Browning – and then high school in Helena. After that he spent a lot of time hunting, trapping and doing some outfitting in the wilderness parts of western Montana where there are no towns. In 1970 the Army broadened his horizons. With a draft lottery number of 60, Sheppard figured a sti...
OVANDO – Jon Krutar's story begins and ends in Ovando with a 28-year military career in the middle. Growing up in Ovando, Krutar attended a one-room schoolhouse with a fluctuating attendance of between five and nine students for all eight grades. He went to Powell County High School in Deer Lodge where he was a four-year letterman in football, basketball and track. His athletic abilities earned him a track scholarship to the University of Montana where he was one of the university's top h...
SEELEY LAKE – When 20th Century-Fox chose Missoula as the location for its January 1952 world premier opening of the motion picture "Red Skies of Montana," it was a momentous occasion for the city. The premier was a whole day event which included a police-guard parade with film stars waving from a Cadillac, planes flying overhead and a 135-guest reception and dinner at the Florence Hotel. Then came the showing followed by an after-program at the Fox Theater featuring a group of smokejumpers i...
SEELEY LAKE – Proud parents, friends and siblings, some carrying flowers, entered the Seeley Lake Elementary gym Friday, March 8. The flowers were in anticipation of congratulating a favorite budding actor or actress on his or her acting debut. With the help of scripts, props, costumes and lots of guidance and direction from Chance Carter and Staci Weider from Missoula Children's Theater, SLE students presented a stage adaptation of Frances Hodson Burnett's childhood classic, "The Secret G...
SEELEY LAKE – On the evening of March 9 a crowd of more than 40 people packed into the Grizzly Claw Trading Company for Alpine Artisans' Open Book Club hosting of author Jeremy Smith. The presentation, Smith's third for OBC, featured his latest book, "Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called Alien." Smith's book traces "white-hat" (i.e., good) hacker Alien from her MIT college days to her present position as CEO of a 30-person "penetration testing agency" hired by b...
SEELEY LAKE – If Joe bought a fancy new computer, he might boast to Cindy, "It has all the bells and whistles." Nevertheless, if Cindy were to take apart his computer, she would find neither a bell nor a whistle among the pieces of hardware. So how did this phrase, meaning fancy additions beyond those essential to the use of the item itself, come into being? No one knows for sure, but that does not keep anyone from speculating. One theory connects the phrase with trains, especially steam l...
Part I of "Answering the call" discussed how Parcell's early career in the Marine Corps was interwoven with his law enforcement career with the Missoula County Sheriff's Office. After two years in Hawaii, Parcell was again deactivated and in 2003 he moved his family back to Condon while he resumed his civilian law enforcement career as Deputy Sheriff in the Seeley Lake and Swan Valleys. However, in just under a year he was once again activated, this time in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom....
SEELEY LAKE – Twenty-five people, most on snowshoes, showed up at the River Point Campground to learn about Seeley Lake's "West Side Story." The Feb. 16 excursion was sponsored by the Seeley Lake Historical Society and led by long-time resident Ron Cox. Cox's first story referred to the snowmobile races that used to take place on Seeley Lake. Cox said one year Bruce Copenhaver drove a bulldozer onto the ice to scrape a course for the race. According to Cox, "[the bulldozer] went into the d...
SEELEY LAKE – Though residents in the Seeley Lake and Swan Valley area know Robert "Bob" Parcell as the local Deputy Sheriff, woven through his award-filled law enforcement career is an equally distinguished and impressive military career. Backed by a Forestry Degree from Northern Arizona University, smokejumper certification and several summers of firefighting, in 1974 Parcell enrolled in U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidate School. He said he had brothers in each of the other services and t...
SWAN VALLEY – "I just want to say I am not a hero," Swan Valley resident Marc White stated in an interview to discuss his military service, which included participation in Desert Storm. "I'm just a guy who did my job. That's it. I'm not anything special." Three military coins which carry the words "excellence" and "outstanding performance" would seem to contradict White's statement. White, whose father served in Vietnam, grandfather in World War II and great-grandfather in World War I, said e...
SEELEY LAKE –Children and adults gathered Dec. 29 for the official opening of Seeley Lake ROCKS' new ice skating rink at the Seeley Lake Elementary School field. The Seeley Lake Lions Club supported the event with tables full of cookies and other treats, coffee, hot chocolate, a warming fire and a warm welcome for everyone. They also had a table of donated skates for use for free. Like many of the younger children, six-year-old Virginia Arroyo found her first attempt at skating unsettling and sh...
OVANDO & SEELEY LAKE – Margaret Bauer said her family likes to make gingersnaps. She said, “We like the smell; it fills the house. Everybody likes to eat them for snacks and we give them as gifts.” Shawna Jarrell said her grandma’s punch always makes Christmas Day special. It’s a concoction of Hawaiian punch, Kool-Aid, 7-Up and orange juice. For Ovando’s Fly family, Christmas dinner is always surf and turf – some kind of seafood and steak. For Sharon Jacobs it’s apple pie that makes the Christmas meal special. She added proudly, “I mak...
The carol "O Holy Night" is a favorite at Christmas time, especially when sung by someone who can, as Huffington Post puts it, "raise the rafters on the '-vine' of 'Oh night di-.'" The song itself has a controversial history of highs and lows, ecclesiastical machinations, popular support and even, as the story goes, the ability to stop a war. The song originated in 1847 in the small French town of Roquemaure when a priest asked town poet Placide Cappeau to create a poem for Christmas. Cappeau ag...
