Leaving Montana--Chapter two, part 3

Gradually Grandpa’s business took hold. The settlement of eastern Montana in the early 20’s was slow. Eastern Montana was settled on a misconception—a misconception fostered by the railroads since the 1880’s—that farming would be easy and crops would be abundant. Normal weather brought rainfall adequate for grain crops in the wet years —about 11 inches a year. But the fact was and is, Montana is a dry state. The Rockies suck the last of the moisture out of moist Pacific airflows, and everything east is a desert, lush with wild grasses in the spring but sparse once the skimpy spring rains stop. Although large amounts of water surged down the Missouri and Milk from headwaters in the Rockies, irrigation beyond the floodplains near the river was primitive: farmers depended on crops like winter wheat that could soak up the thin, melting snow and the spring rains and mature before the hot, rainless summers set in. Other grain crops gave a decent yield in years of average or better than average rainfall but failed in the drier years. Drive in any direction from US Highway 2 around Malta, Sacco, Wolf Point, Poplar and beyond the barbwire you will find the old tire ruts and collapsing sheds and cabins of homesteads settled in optimism and abandoned by the hundreds when a cycle of wet years gave way to a longer cycle of dry years, when little would grow and grasshoppers ate what whatever survived .

During Grandpa’s first years some of the farmers who had the luck and skills made a go of it. Throughout that part of Montana raising cattle wasn’t bad if a rancher could buy or lease enough rangeland from the government to support a herd. To feed a single steer required several acres of the thin summer grasses, and even more land was needed to grow enough hay to feed a herd through the long harsh winter when grazing was close to impossible even for the hardiest breeds.

Gradually Glasgow developed the character of a settled town. Frame houses replaced the cabins and shacks, a few businesses invested in brick buildings, the commercial base became broader than just subsistence farming and ranching. People needed insurance and banks and schools. School teachers and bank clerks and secretaries needed groceries and dry goods and coal and oil and gasoline to heat their homes and power their cars. After a few years Grandpa was doing well enough that he rented his own store and expanded his stock, although he still depended on his cousin Cliff to help finance his operation.

Sometime during these years Grandpa sent for his sweetheart, Lotte Peterson, years younger and still in Lithuania. Grandma lived for years after Grandpa, but she never talked about her childhood or family or her early years in the United States. After I moved East for college I only saw her three of four more times, and then always for short visits; I was so fully involved in the present moment that I didn’t think to ask her to tell me the story of her childhood or early years in the United States. I know that after they were married she stayed behind in Chicago while her daughters Leah—my mother—and Nonie were little, venturing to Montana only during the summer. A few of the highly ornate pictures taken of them as a family at that time suggest that Grandpa was doing well enough to own a good suit and to afford the services of a photographic studio.

Eventually, Grandpa built a house in Glasgow and the family moved west. His store, The Fair Store, moved into a new building that he owned. There are stories from that time of camping trips to Glacier Park, far to the west on Highway 2. I have seen the heavy canvas tent and slept in the dense kapok sleeping bags they used—the gear for a camp would have weighed three or four hundred pounds for the four of them.

I don’t know when they cut their ties to Chicago, but the few things I know about Mom’s childhood took place in Glasgow. Most of the stories about the years before Mom married are not about her family but about the times of boom and bust. The busts were huge, not only in Montana but throughout the country. There was the long dry cycle that led to the dust bowl years, where thousands of farms and farm towns failed and for years cars stuffed with children and with a family’s few possessions tied on to the roof and fenders could be seen on the roads in almost any season. There were locust plagues—years when the grasshoppers would devour a good crop in a few hours, when the noise of grasshoppers eating and flying kept people awake at night, when the sun was obscured by dark clouds of grasshoppers moving from one field to the next. And there was the Great Depression when more farms and businesses and towns failed leaving the never-prosperous Montanans in even worse shape.

There was one boom, highly localized, and it made Grandpa rich enough that he was mostly retired before he was sixty-five. One of the Roosevelt Administration’s economic recovery projects was to build an enormous earth dam—the ‘biggest landfill dam in the world”--across the Missouri River just above where the Milk joins it, at a site called Fort Peck. The dam was part of a much larger set of projects to control the seasonal flooding of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers that every few years inflicted enormous damages on the towns and farms laid out all the way down the rivers to the Gulf of Mexico. The dam put hundreds of farms out of business as the reservoir behind it filled, but it also provided employment for several thousand unemployed people, mostly men whose jobs had disappeared in the depression. Glasgow, just fifteen miles from the construction site, grew in a few months from a quiet, unexceptional farm town into the main staging and supply area for a huge construction project. Grandpa’s Fair Store suddenly had customers--lots of them--with a regular paycheck in their wallets. His store went from the small cash transactions of farm wives and townspeople, many of whom he had to provide with credit during the three seasons when no cash was coming in, to the continuous, years-long prosperity of a town with an industry, if only a temporary one.

Every summer when I was in grade school I spent long hours in Grandpa and Grandma’s attic in their Flathead Lake home pouring through old copies of Life Magazine. They had kept every one, back through the Second-World War and the depression, to the very first issue. The cover story of the very first Life Magazine was about the building of the Fort Peck Dam. When I was eight I found it at the bottom of a tall stack of magazines that threatened to fall over on me and sat entranced, reading the story that explained Grandpa’s success as a business man, looking at the picture of happy—and probably half-drunk—workers dancing with women who had been brought in to provide lonely men in a desolate place with some company. In a country stricken with poverty, the government projects were providing enough money for carousing in saloons, for paying the grocery bill, and for buying supplies and a little bit of finery at the Fair Store.

When Nonie was off in college and Mom was already married, Grandpa began to build a summer cabin on a piece of land they had bought to camp on at Flathead Lake. The cabin got improved as it was built and turned out to be more of a house than a cabin, with knotty pine walls and larch floors and a large stone fireplace and an orchard out behind, a rock garden down in front. By the time I was born in 1941 Grandpa and Grandma were spending their summers there, turning over the management of the store to Grandpa’s assistant, Gene Benson, who ultimately took over. Gene ended up with his hand in the till and the store went downhill when it passed out of Grandpa’s hands, but not before Grandpa and Grandma had saved enough to live in comfort for the rest of their lives and pass a little bit on to Mom and Nonie.


When I was growing up, family stories were not told in either household, my mom’s or my dad’s: family conversations that lead to story-telling simply did not occur. At Dad’s house, talk of our family before he left would have probably made both Dad and Marj uncomfortable, and on the few occasions that I was alone with Dad in a car, going fishing, that isn’t what he talked about. At my home with Mom there was none of the “remember-when” conversations that often go on among brothers and sisters for her to correct or amplify: it was just the two of us, usually eating from TV trays in our living room. I don’t remember that we talked a lot during dinner, beyond what had happened to each of us that day. Because I was a boy, and Mom was not around to play with me in any case, she did not recreate the games of her childhood or talk about when she and her friends were my age. The same was true when I spent time with Grandpa and Grandma—and there was a lot of it before I was a teenager, often several months each summer. When I was at Flathead Mom was around for only a few days each year. She was working and my time with Grandpa and Grandma gave her both the comfort of knowing that I was supervised and happy, and provided her with a little time free of the responsibility of being the only parent for a little boy who could never sit still—unless, of course, I was reading.

So all of the stories of my Mom’s growing up, her high school and college years, her courtship with Dad? I never heard them, or if I did, it was when I was very little and she was talking with her friends knowing that I would not understand and would not remember. It was as though there was an unspoken conspiracy in both families that the time before the divorce was not discussed in my presence.

It could not have been easy growing up in Glasgow. For all the understanding and tolerance there should have been for European immigrants and their children in a state that had largely been settled by immigrants--and they were still arriving--some may have found Mom’s and Nonie’s Lithuanian and partially Jewish heritage an unnatural match for their own Christian and northern European roots. It was a part of the country into which very few Jews had found their way. I can only imagine this, because never once when I was growing up was this subject discussed. It was not that it was avoided or suppressed when it came up—it just never came up. Mom did not mention even the normal pains of growing up, let alone anything special about her own unique situation. Other parents might have cautioned their children or responded to their problems by talking about their own similar experiences. Mom’s warnings were never couched in stories; they were starkly presented as a set of absolutes: “Stay out of that part of town, there are rough kids there.” “She’s the kind of girl that melts easily, watch out.” “You can’t have a dog.” “You can’t play football. You wear glasses and they’ll get broken.”

Even the few clues that Grandpa was from a Jewish familiy—and to this day I don’t know for sure that he was—meant nothing to me in a childhood during which I rarely heard anyone evaluating another person by putting them in a religious or ethnic category. Grandma and Grandpa spoke with an accent, but so did a lot of children’s grandparents. Grandpa read Time Magazine and Life and the Reader’s Digest, but a few times I saw him reading a newspaper with strange characters that he had received from a family member in Chicago or Ann Arbor. When they came back from Phoenix they always give us a Hebrew National salami. That was it. After Dad left us I experienced no religious practices at home or at Flathead Lake. The absence of church-going or prayer or religious study was as natural to me as walking or riding a bike because we had no car. I never questioned either or thought much about why we didn’t own a car or belong to a church when everyone else did. We celebrated Christmas, and some of the ornaments on our tree when we were growing up were from Mom’s childhood. The only Christmas I had ever spent with Grandma and Grandpa in their Long Beach apartment they had a Christmas tree, although it was just a little one on a table. Even at Grandpa’s funeral, at which, at Grandma’s request, I arranged for my Methodist minister to speak at the funeral home, I did not understand or question what Grandpa’s religious beliefs were. Perhaps because this subject was never discussed, I knew instinctively that I should stay away.