She wasn't rich, and she didn't invent any fancy contraptions to help mankind. She didn't cure any rare diseases, didn't hold any public offices, didn't make the headlines.
No, the thing about Myrtle Edna Partney Harbison McLaughlin is that she lived to be 96, and that she lived all those years in her own home, and that her family put other parts of their personal lives on hold, and gladly, so that she could live her last with grace.
“She wasn't flashy,” said longtime friend Anna Lloyd. “She wasn't the center of attention. She was just an all-around fine person. You don't find people in this world any better than Myrtle.”
And the world, Lloyd said, is more than a little bit poorer for her passing. She died the morning of Aug. 15, at her home in Hamilton, surrounded by family.
That's how Myrtle came into the world, too, without fanfare but with family all around, on March 15, 1911, the second youngest of eight born to a pair of hardscrabble Missouri dirt farmers, Rose and Edward Partney.
The family had clothes on their backs and shoes in the winter, but not much else.
“She talked about digging sassafras root on the farm,” granddaughter Joslyn Jellison remembered, “and finding wild quail eggs under the hedge. She'd go hunting those eggs and cook them for breakfast.”
Myrtle was barely into her teens and the country barely into the Great Depression when she left home to find work, to follow a brother, Zealous, to St. Louis. There, she took a job in as unlikely a place as a Missouri farm girl could find, on the line in a big-city licorice factory.
“She hated it,” Jellison said. At the end of each shift, the boss would make her sweep up all the scraps of licorice that had fallen on the dirty floor and dump them back into the vat.
“She wouldn't eat licorice at all after that,” Jellison said. “At least, not until the day before she died.”
Who knows. Maybe she knew she was going, knew that whatever was going to take her, it wasn't going to be dirty licorice. Or maybe she longed for the flavor of youth, one last taste.
“I think she knew it was time,” Jellison said, “when she asked for a piece of red licorice.” Myrtle worked the St. Louis factory for most of two years, Jellison said, navigating the city's rough neighborhoods with the help of her elder brother.
But finally the big city proved too scary, too citified, and she moved west, to Montana, where her sister had once done ranch work, and now was marrying the mayor of Butte.
Those were dusty-dry Prohibition days, when only the pharmacists were allowed a little alcohol, to mix their meds. But back behind the pharmacy in Whitehall, and in other towns, too, was a speakeasy, and there Myrtle found work.
“She had integrity and values, a respect for the rules,” Jellison said. “But a lot of people at that time resented the government's interference in their personal lives. I think because it was in the back of the pharmacy, the speakeasy had a note of respectability.”
It certainly was respectable enough for Edwin Harbison, a carpenter by trade who also carried an occasional paintbrush. It was a time of lethal lead paints, and Harbison liked to have a drink or two now and again, just to flush out the toxins, or so he said.
And so perhaps that's where they met, there in the Whitehall speakeasy, but no one quite remembers anymore. What they do know is that Myrtle and Ed married in 1933, roamed the region hammering nails, landed in Montana's Bitterroot Valley in 1948.
Harbison built the Ravalli County Bank, the Banque Club, the Rocky Mountain Grange. Myrtle built a home, raised a daughter, called her Shirley.
“All the time I was growing up,” Shirley said, “all the kids wanted to play at our house, because mom would play with us. She'd climb trees, or get down on the floor and play jacks, or go out and play hopscotch. She was young at heart, and she kept that youthful spirit right through to the very end.”
Myrtle was, by all accounts, a tremendously devoted wife, mother and friend, always giving more than she took, always there when needed.
But she was also a trickster.
More than once, Ed cracked the hard-boiled egg she'd packed in his lunch only to find out it wasn't so cooked. More than once, he munched into a cheese sandwich only to find the slices still wrapped in plastic.
“She kept her family close,” Shirley said, “she loved to play tricks.”
“You could see the happy light shining out of her eyes,” Jellison said. “She was a beauty of the truest kind.”
Myrtle was a practical joker, and a camper, an angler, a hunter.
“She was a good shot,” Shirley said. “She put meat on the table.”
She was a mushroomer, a huckleberryer, a chokecherryer. A gardener, a lover of tiger lilies, of gladiolias.
Myrtle was an occasional gambler, a three-handed pinochler, a word puzzler, a reader. She read the Bible, and she read joke books, and she read American Indian history, because she had a little Cherokee in her, she said, from way back.
She listened to John Denver, and to Lawrence Welk, too.
She had faith in her beliefs, but not always in her church, was a voter, but never political.
Myrtle was a sewer, a crafter, a keeper of chickens and grower of raspberries. She was a hater of lies and of meanness and of cruelty. She put up sawhorses in the living room, to work on her quilts.
“You can't explain her,” Shirley said. “She didn't fit in a nutshell.”
Myrtle Edna Partney Harbison McLaughlin was tiny compared to her name, 100 pounds soaking wet, as they say, and every bit of it “fiery spirit.”
To feed that spirit, she and Ed joined Hamilton's Federated Church, a space shared by Methodists and Baptists because neither had the money for a place of their own. And just as those believers bridged their differences, Jellison said, Myrtle likewise learned to see across the life's gulfs.
Perhaps that is why her daughter and four granddaughters and even her great-grandchildren all were able to bridge their own distinct differences and work together to keep Myrtle in her home.
“It was a privilege for all of us,” Jellison said, “to take care of her the way she always took care of us.”
It is a remarkable legacy, really, here in this modern and civilized age of retirement homes, to have three generations put life on hold to take daily care of the fourth.
“That's what she taught us,” Shirley said. “You take care of the people you love.”
Myrtle took care of everyone, took care to help found the Commodity Center, for years Hamilton's only second-hand store. It's where families still find clothes for the kids and dishes for the table, and it's where Myrtle volunteered countless hours.
She raised her own daughter, then raised a nephew, some nieces, even took in her own mother.
“She opened her home to them all,” Jellison said. “She and grandpa were always there, arms open for everyone.”
But Ed was sick. He didn't let on, but he knew it couldn't last. Maybe it was all that lead paint. Who knows.
In the late 1960s, he quietly started looking for an income that would keep coming beyond his years.
“At that point in time, there were very few places where retired people could comfortably live,” Jellison said. “And trailers were all the rage.” So Ed built the infrastructure for Hamilton's White Bird trailer court, finished in 1971, “and he barely got it done before he died.”
Myrtle stayed on five years, working, keeping the court going, before she up and eloped with an old friend, Clifton “Mac” McLaughlin.
“He showed up one day and said, ‘I've got this ring here. Let's take off and get married,' ” Jellison said. “It was so good for her, to have somebody come and get her like that. Just to be wanted. All the pictures of her from that time, she just glows.”
And that's how Myrtle's name got to be so long, by loving and by collecting family. Together, she and McLaughlin hit the hills, digging dinosaur bones and hounding rocks and panning gold. They even staked a little mining claim, up on Grasshopper Creek.
He was a retired science teacher, an amateur geologist, and she a lifelong student of what the world offered.
They landed, finally, at the White Bird trailer court. Where else?
Mac died 21 years later, and to be sure, it's hard to find many of Myrtle's old friends these days. There's a picture of her and the other women of Eastern Star, 18 in all, taken the year she was Worthy Matron of that religious club. All but four have since died.
Martha Brien, one of those four, remembers a woman who was “very much a homebody, very, very good to her family. She was kind and good and loving, and that family was everything to her.”
When Myrtle quit smoking, cold turkey at age 80, it was not for her own health, but because of Mac's.
“Imagine that kind of will power, not for yourself but for your family,” Shirley said. “That's what mom was all about. That's what she taught us. Our family has always taken care of each other, and she was the root of all that.”
And now Shirley knows Joslyn and the other daughters will be there for her, their daughters for them. It is a tremendous inheritance, this knowledge of security and of caring and of love.
“She showed us what was truly important,” Jellison said. “None of us will ever forget that.”
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