ARLEE - He had never felt so tired in his life, and that covered the last 91 years.
Arnold Helding was in the woodworking shop in his basement, building a candle holder, when the feeling washed over him.
He finished two parts of his project and, finally, drove the 10 miles to his daughter's house. Linda Schure tried to get him to go to the doctor, but Helding didn't want to.
He was feeling a little better. He drove home.
“About 6 o'clock I had another attack and said, ‘OK, something's wrong,' ” Helding says.
He climbed back behind the wheel and drove back to his daughter's house again. (A friend would later tell him, “Now I know the definition of a dumb Swede.”)
Once there, Linda's husband Bob, a physician, whispered in her ear.
“Your dad's in congestive heart failure,” he said.
“He whispered because normally they don't operate on someone Dad's age,” Linda says.
In fact, the first doctor they saw in Missoula that night, Linda says, announced, “Mr. Helding, 91 is a great age to die.”
“Luckily, Dad didn't have his hearing aid in,” Linda says.
“I didn't think I'd had a heart attack,” Helding says, “because I'd always been told you got a pain in your left arm if you were having a heart attack, and there was no pain at all. I was just more tired than I'd ever been, and short of breath.”
Doctors examined him. Aside from the fact that his heart was having great difficulty pumping blood to his organs, Helding was in good shape for his age.
More importantly, he was in good spirits.
Did he think it was his time to go? Heck no, Helding told them. There were still pheasants out there to be hunted, and fish to be caught.
“I guess they're not going to spend $70,000 to operate on you if you're just going to go home, sit there and die,” Helding says. “There was a time I thought I'd be tickled if I lived to see the year 2000, but now that it's 2007, I'm not ready to be done yet.”
“He just loves life,” says Dr. Matt Maxwell of the International Heart Institute of Montana. “He has a very youthful outlook, and that's a big predictor for how someone that age will fare with open-heart surgery. He came in with a smile, vigor and plans for the future that indicated he'd have the wherewithal to get through it.”
So about five weeks ago, Maxwell cut a 7-inch incision in Helding's chest, and performed double-bypass surgery.
“They could'a just sent me home,” Helding says. “And they told me that, too. Ninety-one is a good time to die.”
Well, not always.
Arnold Helding's dog tags from his service during World War II hang from a deer mount in his room. Helding completed 67 missions as pilot in the 479th Fighter Group based in Wattisham, England.
Lt. Arnold Helding climbed in the cockpit of his P-38 Lightning at Wattisham, England, and noticed the 20-millimeter bullet hole about a foot away.
He'd been that close to death on his previous mission during World War II, and hadn't even realized he'd been hit.
“You're shot at all day long,” Helding says with a shrug. “You kind of expect to die. I got hit over Germany by anti-aircraft fire once and it blew my front wheel tire off. I guess that one could have hit the motor just as easily.”
Instead, he completed his mission - the 479th Fighter Group escorted heavy bombers during operations against targets on the continent - and survived a difficult landing after returning to England.
“Had to kind of bounce it off the runway,” Helding says. “I slid off in a rainstorm once and ruined a brand-new P-38. Three of us went off that day. We just couldn't stop them. I landed with the needle sticking on the empty mark quite a few times, too. One time, the motor quit just as the tail wheel touched.”
He spent two days flying over Omaha Beach during the Battle of Normandy. But Helding wasn't in the cockpit the day his plane, nicknamed “The Lucky Lady,” went down over France.
“I wasn't supposed to fly that day,” Helding says, “and a buddy was flying my plane. Fellow name of Lutz. He used to tell us he had a bird dog so good that he could run a covey of quail down a gopher hole, put a paw over it, and let them out one at a time for you to shoot at.”
When Helding was issued the new P-38, he asked the squadron painter, Fred Hayner, if he could paint the image of a woman his brother had sketched on a napkin - a gal with dice for earrings and a bikini top made of 8-balls - on the nose of the plane. “Hayner the Painter” complied.
The Lucky Lady was shot down while Lt. LeRoy Lutz was at the controls, and the pilot stayed with the aircraft in order to make sure it didn't crash into a French village. When Lutz finally cleared the town and ejected, it was too late and the plane was too low.
He was killed, but the village was spared.
“There was a little boy, 10 years old, who watched it all happen,” Helding says. “He went and found the wreckage, cut the nose art out, and spent the next 51 years trying to find the family so he could give it to them.”
The nose art now belongs to Lutz's brother. Hayner the Painter re-created his artwork on a piece of aircraft skin for Helding, and it hangs on a wall in a room in Helding's home that is covered with photographs and memorabilia from 91 years spent on this earth.
Born in Missoula in 1915 - he still drives by his first home, at 910 Grand Ave., from time to time - Arnold Helding grew up fishing the Clark Fork River, shooting rats at the dump behind the Wilma Theatre building and hunting gophers in the fields now crowded with box stores along North Reserve.
He was shot once, poking around on the river's banks when he was in seventh grade, by two boys who laughed after putting a bullet in Helding.
It took him six weeks to recover. The .22-caliber hollow point is still in his leg.
Helding remembers when a trout-stocked fountain, rather than three big red X's, stood outside the Northern Pacific Train Depot at the north end of Higgins Avenue, and college students would run a fishing line down their legs and out their pants to catch fish without anyone noticing.
As a teenage messenger boy for Western Union, “I knew every prostitute in Missoula. The whorehouses were along Front Street,” Helding says, “and they used us to shop for them and deliver their medicine.”
“I saw some people there who wouldn't have wanted to be seen,” he adds with a wink.
The women sold their services for $2 back then, Helding says, but tipped him as much as 50 cents when he made deliveries.
He worked as a carpenter, a gold miner, a fire lookout. Attended Forestry School at the University of Montana for a few quarters. And he was holding down two jobs when he met his future wife.
Becky Schall used to accompany her father Ed to the K&W Meat Market in Missoula, where the Arlee rancher would sell some of his cattle. Arnold Helding, a policeman at night and a butcher by day, noticed her.
During her senior year of high school in 1939, Becky was in the market with Ed and asked Helding to join her at the ranch for some horseback riding.
“I was going with another girl at the time,” Helding says. “In fact, that was the only other girlfriend I ever had. Girls interrupted my hunting and fishing too much.”
But he went horseback riding with Schall, and his second relationship with a woman lasted slightly longer than the first - 64 years.
Arnold and Becky were married in 1941. They took his 1935 Plymouth Coupe to Placid Lake for their honeymoon.
They had two children, Carl and Linda.
On Christmas Eve 1959, Arnold came home and announced he had just purchased half ownership in Wood's Second Hand Store and Pawn Shop on Alder Street.
“Mr. Wood called me in and said he was getting old and kind of cranky,” Helding says. Wood's son, Tom, worked at the store but suffered from polio, and his father wanted someone he trusted to join Tom in running the store.
The Heldings were in the second-hand business for more than 30 years.
Some of Helding's wooden sculptures sit on top of a piano alongside a photograph of his late wife, Becky Helding. “She played a lot of ragtime,” says Arnold. “Becky was a very accomplished piano player.”
On Dec. 18, 1981, in the middle of the night, an airline pilot saw a house on fire far below him.
He radioed the control tower in Great Falls, which called authorities in Missoula, who phoned the Arlee Volunteer Fire Department.
The home of Arnold and Becky's son, Carl, was burning down.
Carl told his wife to jump out the window. Then he turned and headed into the flames and smoke in an effort to save their 17-month-old son, Camas.
Neither made it out alive.
“One of their neighbors called me and said Carl's house was on fire,” Helding says. “I went outside and the whole sky was Š”
He doesn't finish the sentence.
“It ruined Christmas,” says daughter Linda. “Mother never got over it.”
Carl had a daughter, Heidi, from a previous marriage, and she is Arnold Helding's only grandchild. The French-made pocketwatch that has been handed down through the men in the Helding family for more than 300 years will go to Heidi's son, and Arnold's great-grandson, Ben Peters.
Like Helding, the watch is still ticking.
Once their children were raised, Helding had trouble keeping Becky off the farm.
Becky loved to play ragtime piano, but more than that, she loved her horses.
The Schall family, of course, is well known on the rodeo scene, and Becky raised and raced thoroughbred horses. In the 1970s, Arnold and Becky built a new home on the property where she kept her horses north of Arlee.
Today, the fireplace in the living room is full of mounts taken by Helding - a Dahl sheep, a stone ram, two Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep and a fuzzy, teddy bear-like desert ram that, were it real, would make up a North American grand slam.
The house is full of antiques, many found during their years in the second-hand business.
But it is a basement room where most of the treasures are - photographs and memories from a life long lived.
Helding's leather World War II pilot helmet and dog tags hang from the antlers of a deer mount. There's a picture of Helding, who votes on aviators nominated to the National Aviation Hall of Fame with John Glenn Jr., the first American to orbit earth.
Everywhere are pictures of Heldings and Schalls, past and present. Many are from hunting and fishing trips. Many are of Carl. Lots are of Becky, who died in 2005.
There isn't much room on the walls for more. But there's some.
And Arnold Helding has every intention of making more memories.
Among other plans, Helding gave Dr. Maxwell some dry flies before the operation. He promised his heart surgeon he'd take him fishing next summer.
Ninety-one, after all, can be a good age to live, too.
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