Had Abbot Mills not been kicked out, he wouldn't have joined the Marines right then. Had he not joined the Marines, he never would have met Chuck Harball.
And who knows where life might have then taken Sally Mills? She came from a well-to-do Portland, Ore., family. Her father was a banker and on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Board.
Sally was a teenager, attending Westover School in Connecticut, when her brother asked her if she'd correspond with a Marine in his outfit.
"I think Abbot had all these girlfriends in Portland who were writing him all the time, and Dad wasn't getting any mail," Charlie says. "So he asked his sister if she'd write to him. She was all of 15 or 16 at the time."
And so the correspondence began.
Chuck Harball was nothing like the boys Sally was used to. He was an honest-to-goodness horseback-riding cowboy who had grown up on ranches around the West. From the Pacific, from Japan and China, wherever the Marines sent him, he wrote to her and from half a world away in Connecticut, she wrote back.
For some four years the letters flew back and forth, even after Sally graduated and went off to Mills College, a private women's college in California. Even after Chuck came home on leave to Montana's Centennial Valley between Monida and West Yellowstone.
While he was home, his father had a stroke and died. As the oldest son in the family, Chuck was discharged from the Marines so he could take over the ranch for his mother.
Sally dated during the years of letter-exchanging, but long ago told another writer that her world - of California and Connecticut and country club boys - seemed to grow more shallow with each letter from Chuck. He wrote about the sickly calf they had brought into the house in the dead of a Montana winter to nurse back to health, of a horse that had to be put down, of sun-up to sun-down labor. The issue of what outfit to wear for a tennis match seemed less and less important to her.
And at some point, one of them suggested that, after all these years and all these letters, maybe they ought to meet.
"She was working in Yosemite Park in the summer, so he went down there and they met for the first time," Charlie says. "Next thing you know she's hopped in the car with him and he took her back to Montana to meet his mom."
Without telling her parents a thing, Chuck and Sally crossed Nevada and Idaho, then left the highway virtually the second they entered Montana. It was 32 miles of dirt road to the tiny frame house that held several Harball children. Years later, Sally would recall asking if she could use the bathroom, and being pointed back out the front door. She momentarily thought she had said something offensive, but no, they were just showing her the way to the outhouse.
There was no plumbing, no electricity. Water from an outdoor pump was heated on a wood stove and poured into a washtub in the middle of the kitchen for baths. Outside, snow-capped mountains provided the most spectacular scenery Sally had ever seen.
They'd known each other for years, and yet they'd only been together for days. After a dance at a nearby dude ranch, Chuck proposed. Sally accepted.
And Western Union delivered a telegram from Portland to the 19-year-old woman. Her parents had tracked her down.
"Come home now/STOP/," was all it said.
Twenty years after Chuck drove her back to Portland - and won over her parents the same way he'd won her heart - a 15-year-old kid (me) moved into the Harball's ranch house in Irvine Flats, so far outside Polson that it was actually closer to Hot Springs.
It was 1969. Their oldest daughter, Sally, had graduated from high school and moved back East, and even though their other two children, Katherine (known as Kayo) and Charlie, were still at home, there was a spare bedroom.
The 1,000-acre ranch spread out over mostly flat, dry land in front of the shaded home they had built to replace the old farmhouse, and a tree-covered mountain rose up behind it. They raised cattle, chickens and pigs, plus wheat and barley if the price was right. Kayo had horses, and liked to ride to the Flathead River a few miles away. There was a huge white German Shepherd (Spike, who once lifted a leg and relieved himself on the windshield of a Volkswagen that drove into the ranch, much to the shock and awe of the pamphlet-bearing religious salesmen inside the car) and cats. Inside the house, a sparrow flew around like it owned the place. Charlie had found the bird when it was a baby, fluttering helplessly about in one of the fields, and brought it home.
Petey, as the bird was known, would fly into the dining room for breakfast every morning and hop from plate to plate, helping himself to whatever food caught his eye. Sometimes he'd hop right through your food and, when he hopped across the table to investigate a plate on the other side, he never went around anything. He'd walk right through, say, the sugar bowl.
"That's when Mom got into the writing thing," says Charlie. "She wrote and re-wrote this little story about Petey. She had it in her mind it would be perfect for Reader's Digest."
The editors there rejected "Footprints in the Sugar Bowl." Sally put the writing aside for awhile, but years later, after the kids were grown and Chuck and Sally had sold the ranch and moved to a home on Flathead Lake, she returned to writing, taking classes to hone her skills. Eventually she saw three books through publication, including "Of Pearls and Pickles," which tells "the story of Sarah Lewis, a society girl from Portland, Ore., who, following a girlhood filled with eastern boarding schools, proper dances and luxury, marries a rancher from Montana."
It is, obviously, Sally's story, with the names changed to, as I'm sure she'd say, protect the guilty.
She had a children's book, "Mr. Shintz," published and her second novel was called "Footprints in the Butter." Yes, Petey wouldn't detour around the butter dish, either.
Take that, Reader's Digest.
She punctuated most every sentence with laughter and she found humor where others wouldn't think to look.
"She had a lot of kid in her," Charlie says. "She wasn't terribly worried about how she was received, especially in the family. She was a little more discreet in public, but around us, she felt she could be a little more childlike. She found joy in things the way children sometimes do."
Ranch life was hard, especially the early years. Marrying a few short months after they'd met in person for the first time, Chuck and Sally originally lived on his mother's ranch outside Monida before striking out on their own.
Charlie isn't sure how they came to buy the 1,000-acre spread 20 miles outside Polson, but guesses Chuck may have learned about the Irvine Flats area from his father. Back in 1918 or so, before Chuck had even been born, his father - then a foreman for rancher Billy Irvine - won Irvine's ranch in a card game run amok.
He took over the ranch for two years, until Irvine found a loophole and reclaimed the deed. (Irvine was married to an Indian, and back then the law required the Bureau of Indian Affairs to sign off on all transfers of deeds involving Indians - something that obviously hadn't occurred at the poker game.)
Chuck and Sally borrowed money from Sally's parents to buy their ranch and the farmhouse that sat on the land. It was isolated - you could see for miles and you could only see one other house - and the Harballs worked hard to earn a living off the ranch. Sally took a job as a secretary at Polson Junior High School and Chuck moonlighted as a swing-shift sheriff's deputy while they still worked their 1,000 acres.
Sally embraced the lifestyle so different from the one she had grown up in, although there were times she had second thoughts, Charlie admits.
"They really didn't have a pot to piss in at first," Charlie says. "I remember one story - they had one of those old wringer washers with the washboard for washing clothes and it'd just scrape your fingers down to the bone doing the laundry. One day Dad came in from the fields and Mom's crying, her fingers are bloody from washing clothes. Dad listened to her, then went out and got in his truck."
Chuck drove off without a word, leaving Sally to watch his truck wind down gravel roads until she couldn't see it any more. He was gone a long time.
When he returned, "He had a brand new washer and dryer that he'd bought in town with money they didn't have," Charlie says.
In 1955 Ladies Home Journal was doing a series called "How America Lives" and Abbot Mills - Sally's brother; the fellow who'd hooked them up in the first place - was a photographer working for the magazine. He suggested his sister and brother-in-law and their two daughters (Sally was pregnant with Charlie at the time) and their isolated ranch life for the series.
Abbot got the photo assignment - one of those pictures appears with this story - and brought a reporter out West to do the article.
"The Western genre was pretty popular back then, and people found the lifestyle intriguing, just like I think my Mom had when she was writing letters to Dad," Charlie says. "They got literally hundreds and hundreds of letters from people after that story came out. People would just show up at the ranch wanting to meet them."
They lived there for a quarter of a century, raised all three children on the ranch and Lord only knows how many pets. At one point, in addition to the usual menagerie, they had a calf (whose mother had died giving birth) named Bongo and a fawn (that Chuck had rolled while mowing hay) named Sweet Pea living at the house.
"A cow and deer that thought they were brother and sister," Charlie says. "They used to race around the house with the dog."
After their children were grown, the Harballs sold the ranch and bought a home on Flathead Lake. Later, the grandparents of six girls and one boy moved into Polson, where they lived until Chuck passed away in 2001.
Sally stayed on in the little brick house until she decided to move to Kalispell, where both Kayo and Charlie live.
Last spring, Kayo called me. Her mom had suffered some sort of seizure and they had flown her to Missoula for tests. I drove over to St. Patrick Hospital to visit Sally.
She seemed her usual self, finding something to laugh about in everything she said, even as she recounted the seizure that had brought her here. But she was a little confused and said things that indicated she thought she was still in the hospital in Kalispell.
Indeed, on a blackboard in the hospital room, a nurse had written in big letters, "You are at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula." I was standing in front of it.
I moved aside and told her I was going to change it to read "Deaconess Medical Center in Billings," or maybe, "You are at the Safeway in Tupelo, Miss."
She liked that and laughed.
The next day, exploratory surgery revealed spider-like tumors growing at the base of her brain.
"They don't have a lot going for it," Charlie says. "For younger people they'll do chemotherapy, but all they can do is arrest it. Surgical intervention isn't any help because they can't get all those tentacles. And it doubles in size every 11 days."
Early on the morning of Aug. 5, Sally Mills Harball died at Brendan House in Kalispell. She was 74 years old. She was a mother, and an author, and a person of great humor. And she was a rancher's wife.
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