Pauline Manning, who owned a dress shop in town called Pauline's Apparel, was one of the six. She remembers the aspiring artists could only find one person with enough work to justify a show for their first art festival. A local banker gave them use of a small building on Main Street for their gallery. George Harris, the artist whose work would be featured, donated paint and the women put their husbands to work spiffing up the space.
“People wondered what in the devil we were doing,” Manning says. “We got our husbands in there with paintbrushes, the girls made cookies and lemonade, and we put on a little festival.”
The artists' cooperative has grown to include almost 100 members, and its juried festival on the Lake County Courthouse lawn attracts thousands of people who shop for the works of dozens of regional artists and craftspeople.
Like the first festival, the Sandpiper Gallery takes a commission from all the works sold and uses the money to fund scholarships for Lake County students who go on to study art after high school.
After being evicted from its second location in the expanding Polson Library, the gallery itself has landed in another new home, a block away from both the courthouse and the original site.
Manning finds it amusing that the storefront she took over for her women's fashion shop on Polson's Main Street back in 1955 and ran for 36 years has become the gallery space for the artists' cooperative she helped to found back in 1971.
And although she hasn't been in the new Sandpiper yet, Manning wants to take up painting and carving on a more serious basis again.
“I could be the second Grandma Moses,” she says. “Didn't she start painting when she was 90?”
Timing being everything, 90 happens to be the age Pauline Manning turned on May 11.
The difference is, Grandma Moses took up painting late in life - she was actually in her 70s, not 90 - while Manning is looking to restart a lifelong interest in art.
Several of her own paintings hang among works by other local artists in her home on 22 forested acres in the Mission Mountains, overlooking Skidoo Bay and Flathead Lake.
Manning has lived here in her mountainside home alone for 23 years, ever since her husband Lyle passed away in 1985, at the age of 68.
She gets by on her own just fine, thank you. In addition to her Toyota Camry, Manning has a four-wheel-drive outfit to climb the steep dirt road that leads to and from her house in winter. And she just invested in a medical alert system that, with the push of a button, will summon help if something happens to her.
“I guess I need to wear it around my neck, though,” she says with a laugh after picking the button-on-a-bracelet up from a desk.
Born in Great Falls in 1918 to Albert and Theresa Howarth, Manning had a typical Montana upbringing - so long as you don't count the three years she spent in South America as a child.
Manning does count them, of course, the years she spent 10,000 feet above sea level in the Andes mountains of Chile. Her father worked for the Anaconda Copper Co., and was transferred to Potrerillos, Chile, to set up a pipe shop for a new mine there.
“I was young,” says Manning, who was about 7 when the family moved to Chile. The journey involved a train trip to New York City, then a monthlong ocean voyage, including a trip through the Panama Canal, to reach South America.
“I remember each man had a horse to ride to the plant on the mountain,” she says. “They would bring the horses each morning and tie them to a clothesline. The men would ride them to work, then ride them home, and when they got home they just swatted their horse and it would run right back to the corral.”
On the weekends, she and the other American kids would borrow the horses and ride through the mountains.
“It was very barren,” Manning says. “There was no vegetation to speak of, just sand and rock. But there was a little oasis a ways away, and we would ride the horses to it, where there was water in the springs and trees all around.”
Albert Howarth was from England, and on the trip home three years later the family detoured to Liverpool for three months, where Manning saw her grandparents for the first and last time.
“My other grandparents were from Italy,” she says. “My grandfather was a bricklayer who came over to help build the big stack in Great Falls, and he built a brick house, too.”
Manning's parents bought the home after Theresa's parents died, and after returning from Chile and England, she grew up there, attending Great Falls' Ursuline Academy during high school.
The Catholic school was run and taught by nuns, and Manning says the sisters' shoes and rosary beads served as an early warning system for the girls.
“You could hear them coming if you were doing something you weren't supposed to, they'd jingle and click when they came down the halls,” Manning says.
She went on to Montana State College in Bozeman, where she majored in home economics and minored in English and art, graduating in 1940.
She also met her husband, Lyle, in college. Although he was also from Great Falls, they never met until they lived in Bozeman.
They married in 1941. Lyle joined the Air Force during World War II, and on a cross-country train trip while in the service, he stopped off in Polson to visit his parents, who had a place on Skidoo Bay.
“His dad knew this piece of land was for sale,” she says of the 22 acres where she's lived for more than half a century, “and so Lyle bought it. He said, ‘I'm going to live up there some day.' ”
And that's what brought Lyle and Pauline to Polson in 1946, after he got out of the service. Lyle worked at a couple of lumber mills, then at Western Bee in Polson. Pauline went to work for Mr. and Mrs. Borden in their women's clothing shop on Main Street.
“They needed two people, but a women's clothing store wasn't a place for a man to work,” Manning says. “A lady looking for a brassiere didn't like asking a man to help her find one, so they asked me if I'd like a job.”
Meantime, the Mannings built their home on the mountainside with the million-dollar views, hauling the rock for their massive fireplace from the far side of the lake themselves.
Mrs. Borden continued to operate the dress shop after her husband died, but when she fell into poor health, she offered to sell it to Pauline.
“We did ponder it for quite a while,” Manning says. “She finally said, ‘Why don't you buy it, run it for five years and see if you like it?' ”
Manning did, and the five years turned into 36 before, seven years after Lyle died in 1985, she sold out her inventory and closed for good.
There were tricks to the trade in a small town. You couldn't order too many of the same thing, and even then you had to know who ran in which circles, and gently steer a customer away from a particular dress if one of her friends had already bought one, lest they both show up at the same function in the same outfit.
She isn't sure why a town a fraction of its current size that supported two women's clothing stores - Pierce's, which later became Doreen's Fashions, was always just a few doors down from Pauline's Apparel - now has a much larger population, yet no shops devoted exclusively to women's clothes.
“I know a lot of people drive to Kalispell or Missoula to shop,” she says, “but by the same token, when I had the store, I had a lot of customers drive down from Kalispell or up from Missoula to buy from me. I guess the malls changed everything. There used to be nice dress shops on Main Street in Kalispell, too, but now they're gone.”
What isn't gone is Manning's interest in art, and her first project since turning 90 years old is to clean up the studio in her basement and get back to painting. Who knows? Maybe she'll one day hang a few pieces in the nonprofit art gallery she co-founded, which now occupies the clothing store she once owned.
Manning's friends are invited to drop in and wish her a happy 90th birthday on Saturday, May 24, when a reception in her honor will be held from 2-4 p.m. in the lower level of the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Polson.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)