She was 92. So was the club.
“I didn't know whether I could make it or not,” Rimel said.
Evelyn's response when she saw the finished product?
“I said: ‘At last,' ” she said with a laugh this week.
Rimel, who turned 96 in September, had made it.
So far it's available, for $39.95, only at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula, though George Tayer, Rimel's invaluable neighbor and “assistant to the historian,” is checking into other distribution points.
Fresh off the press, the book evokes not the smell of ink but the aroma of fresh-baked pies and pancake breakfasts for generations of Missoula folks, be they club members or not.
The attractively bound book is 192 pages long, many of them written through what Tayer calls in the foreword “an imaginary one-way glass.”
The 10 chapters, in general, are divided into the decades that have passed since the Orchard Homes Country Life Club got its start in 1911.
They chronicle selected minutes of the regular meetings at the club, an idea promulgated by President Theodore Roosevelt's Commission of Country Life.
But Rimel, writing on “those long, lined, yellow legal pads,” didn't simply copy someone else's handwritten minutes. She summed up years and decades and scattered her own observations throughout.
“Elder Care and jobs for Graduates from College or High School were a major concern since the sugar beet industry folded up,” Rimel wrote at the start of the chapter on the 1970s. “In 1972 some social security amendments rescued the elders from total dependence on their children.”
Late in the previous chapter, she noted the Oct. 24, 1969 meeting “was a 6:30 potluck after which Arnold Helding showed slides of the Moon Shot and landing and a film on the new Alaska. Donated to Search and Rescue.”
The chapter concludes a few entries later, after mention of the New Year's Eve dance on Dec. 31.
“The long jungle battle known as the Tet had been underway for some time,” Rimel wrote. “Casualties were mounting, draft resistance was increasing and the cost of the (Vietnam) war was multiplying. Poverty had doubled but the probe to outer space was bringing excitement. OHCLC membership was declining.”
Evelyn Rimel was born on a ranch outside of Wibaux in September 1911. The Orchard Homes Country Life Club was born Jan. 9, 1911, the child of a literary society that neighborhood youth had formed a few years before.
A 1928 graduate of Wibaux High, Rimel moved to Missoula with her parents, Agnes and William Rimel, and brother Raymond when it came time for her to go to college. They settled in the same house on North Grove Street that Rimel now calls home, several blocks north of the Country Life clubhouse on Third Street West.
The Rimels and Orchard Homes hunkered down into the Depression.
“The residents were still clamoring for better roads and the improvement of 3rd St.,” Rimel writes at the end of the 1920s chapter. “Truly the Club had become the hub of a wide community. The 1st talking movies came to Missoula in 1929.”
Rimel received the first of her two degrees from the University of Montana in 1933 and taught 19 years in Montana high schools, the final eight in Missoula.
The club thrived, including its youth. On a wall of the hall today hangs a framed Orchard Homes Student Roll 1941-45. There are 213 names.
The minutes from Dec. 14, 1945, noted a “first reading for membership of Evelyn Rimel, Harry and Pearl Meyer, James Jr. and Lorna Caras, Fred and Ida Stillings, and John and Ellamae Safford.”
Rimel left town and the club again in 1953, after receiving her doctorate from Syracuse University. She retired from the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 1979, moving back home to care for her ailing parents.
She has joined with hundreds of club members in the 28 years since she moved back, enjoying the Friday night potlucks and barbershop quartets, spaghetti dinners and the Old-Time Fiddlers, flea markets and Market Days, slide shows and white elephant bingos.
Somewhere along the line, Rimel took an interest in the club's roots.
She learned that, contrary to a short history written by club members and published in the Missoulian in 1951, the club was formed by six men, not a group of women.
Otto Benson, H.C.B. Colvill, J.P. Irving, John Kach, Edward Miller and Fred Parker petitioned the Missoula County commissioners to transfer the shell of a building once used by the Union Sunday School to the youth literary society.
They were told if they formed an official club, with officers, bylaws and - thank goodness - minutes, they could have the building.
“That's what they did, and they set the date of Jan. 6, 1911, for a community meeting,” Rimel said. “Then they divided up the people who were living in the Orchard Homes area at the time and knocked on doors and told them about the meeting.”
Nearly 100 people showed, and the club was off and running.
“Close to six years ago now, I was asked by a member of the Country Life Club if I would write the history,” Rimel said. “I said I'd try.”
Her hearing's going, but Rimel speaks with the exactness of the college professor she was. She gets around the house with a walker, and Tayer, a retired Navy man who helps Rimel out in the afternoons, brings a wheelchair along for her when they venture out.
“About 10 days after I said I'd try to do the history, Otto Benson came over to my house with a huge pouch of charts and maps and clippings of all kinds from the Missoulian through the years,” she said.
She had a collection of Montana magazines that mentioned the club. Then Tayer looked in a closet in the clubhouse's damp basement and found nine bound volumes of club minutes, in various degrees of decay.
He brought them to her house, and Rimel went to town.
“I tell you, I worked at the beginning gung-ho, like 12 to 14 hours a day,” she said.
With her legs dangling over her chair, she “popped a leg ulcer,” she said. Partners in Home Care came to treat the leg each morning for two months. She couldn't sit and write, so Rimel used the time to interview people via telephone for her research.
Writing the book chapter by chapter longhand, she went through revision after revision as more information rolled in. Three club members - Otto Benson, Ina Swanson and Janet Adam - agreed to act as an advisory panel.
Tayer would haul the written material piece by piece to Staples to makes copies for the panel to check. Finally, the book reached the typing stage. Employees at the computer desk at Staples agreed to do the inputting in their spare time.
“Finally they said, ‘We want no more additions,' ” Rimel said. “So I have some information that never got into the book.”
The final version went to disc on Jan. 11, 2007. Tayer took it John Rimel at Mountain Press, which laid it out and printed 500 copies through a print-on-demand company.
“It was a nice project to work on and a nice local history book to have available,” John Rimel said. “Certainly Evelyn and George did an outstanding job of poring through all those volumes of minutes.”
The names from the beginnings of the country life club are names “that are still around Missoula that you know and recognize - the Bensons from Benson farms, the Carases,” he said. “It's sort of a Who's Who of Missoula from back when Orchard Homes was on the outside edge of town.”
The club is believed to be the only remaining community-based Country Life Club in operation. It has roughly 150 members these days, Evelyn Rimel said, though the Friday evening potluck gatherings twice a month tend to draw 30 to 40.
“It's still in existence, but the original makeup of the club with teenagers and so on has changed,” she said. “Gradually, by 1980, the men's club had disbanded, the youths had been sort of treated badly because they made noise and stuff, and the women's club that was an auxiliary had also disbanded. So the membership is way down.”
She cast her eye across the street from the clubhouse at the heavy machinery busily installing a sewer system this week.
To be a member of the Country Life Club, you can't live in the city, Tayer explained.
But Missoula continues its inexorable march westward.
“For the last 30 years, the city has been threatening annexation all along the Third Street corridor,” Rimel said. “Right now they're digging sewers. No one knows what's going to happen.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com
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