Reminiscing with classmates on Griz-Cat weekend is a lonely affair for John Harrison.
Most of them are on the wall in the Missoula Sigma Chi house library, in framed memorials to their service in World War II.
“Billy Holt. There's a public housing project in Great Falls named for him. He was shot down in battle off Guadalcanal. He was picked up, but the boat that rescued him was sunk the next day.
“James McNally. His son was a great pitcher for the Yankees. He was captured in the Philippines and marched out in the (Bataan) Death March. But he died on a Japanese boat that was sunk by a U.S. submarine.
“This is a shrine to me,” Harrison said as he looked at the portraits during a visit Friday before the Brawl of the Wild. “Most of them are classmates. There was a wall like this in the Sigma Chi house in Bozeman, but they've lost the pictures. These two chapters of Sigma Chi lost more men who were killed in action in World War II than any other fraternity in America. The class of '42 football team was two-thirds Sigma Chi, and all of them were killed in the war.”
Harrison started college in Bozeman, where he played three years for the Bobcat football team and joined the Army Reserves. He transferred to Missoula in 1936, attending two years of law school here before he “got in trouble with a professor.”
“You got thrown out, Dad,” his daughter, Molly Howard, said. But the issue wasn't too academic. Harrison promptly got his law degree from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
“The night I graduated was the fall of France,” Harrison said. He was called to duty and assigned to the 7th Army Corps. He went overseas in September 1943 to help plan the invasion of Europe. Nine months later, he landed at Utah Beach, Normandy.
Throughout the war, Harrison said Sigma Chi fraternity brothers would update one another on the status of their fellows. That this was a global conflict mattered little to the network. They passed news of heroics, survivals and tragedies across two oceans.
And sometimes across decades. One day in Belgium, Harrison was searching for records of soldiers killed in action, and went to inspect a group of graves. One had the name Quaintance.
“I told the British officers I was with, ‘That guy has a British name, but I've known one from Boulder, Montana.' ”
Twenty years later, Harrison was trying a lawsuit in Billings with another attorney named Quaintance. He mentioned he'd seen the Quaintance gravestone in Europe.
“He damn near fainted,” Harrison said. “He said the family had been trying to find him ever since the war was over.”
William Quaintance, UM class of '43, had been listed as missing in action for years. The Sigma Chi network once again made the connection.
Being from Montana just added to the tight fabric of relationships. For more than a century, the state has sent more than its share of sons to the nation's wars.
“I think we've been taught that we owe something to this country,” Harrison said Friday. “Maybe we're more patriotic than some places. It's a small state, with small schools. Maybe that's where we learned our obligations. I think we're closer to reality than a lot of places.”
Harrison served 10 years as Lewis and Clark county attorney. Then he was elected to the state Supreme Court, where he served 34 years. He was one of the three justices who upheld the 1972 Constitution when it was challenged.
Despite his experience at both UM and MSU, Harrison has remained true to his Bobcats. The 1932 game was a particular favorite. The Bozeman squad had an average weight of 137 pounds, he said, but still triumphed 19-6.
“During Prohibition, they would run a special train - $2.50 a ticket - from here to Butte,” Harrison recalled of the 1930s Griz-Cat games. “The drunkenness and the bad language got out of hand, but the bootleggers got rich. The trains finally said they didn't want to put on old cars for us any more.”
Now 93, Harrison is in the town where one grandson, Chase Harrison, is going through activation week at the Missoula Sigma Chi Beta Delta chapter, which this year celebrates its 100th year at UM. Chase's twin brother, John, will undergo the same ceremony at MSU in two weeks.
“That's my real idea of what I belong to,” Harrison said of his blue-and-gold loyalties. “We're the hopeful people. And I've got a $5 bet on this game I'm going to pick up from my daughter.”
Reporter Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at rchaney@missoulian.com
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