necdote adds to great Outlaws coverage
The Missoulian’s Saturday feature (August 23) on the Snake River Outlaws was excellent. Here is a heretofore undisclosed anecdote.
In 1953, the Outlaws were so outstanding they convinced the university student body president, Dan Lambros, and student business msanager, Don Cameron, to book the band for a Feb. 18, 1953 concert on the Student Union (now Theatre) front steps.
The Outlaws from Skid Row’s Sunshine Bar played before hundreds that cold February afternoon. “The Orange Blossom Special,” “Take the Night Train to Memphis” and “Devil’s Dream” reverberated from North Hall to Corbin Hall. Then the band went back to Skid Row for an evening at the Sunshine.
Disaster struck the next morning. Lambros was summoned to a hearing before the indomitable Dr. Maureen Clow, dean of women, whose power was legendary and whose tolerance for nonmainstream activities was minimal. Lambros (now a Missoula business tycoon of Double Tree Hotel and Southgate Mall fame) stood quaking before Dean Clow as she excoriated him for bringing Skid Row guitar pickers on campus to defile the freshmen girls with honky-tonk music. The student president justified his indiscretion by arguing economics (as businessmen often do). He asserted the afternoon concert cost only $25 dollars whereas the Community Concert series, not well attended, cost $4,200 yearly. Big mistake.
He retreated, cowed, contrite and chastened, directly to the Sigma Nu house where he confronted his confidante and counselor. “Jones,” he pleaded, expecting sympathy, “you remember that conversation where you said it was a great idea to bring the Outlaws on campus?”
Jones smiled and said, “What conversation?”
William Evan Jones, Missoula
Zentgraf speaks for herself, not others
Jeanette Zentgraf (in her guest column of Aug. 12) is certainly entitled to her opinion about the Montana Climate Change Action Plan ... and she is welcome to speak for herself. But I take exception when she states that “we American citizens are offended by ... the Governor’s Advisory Committee.”
I am an American citizen and I don’t recall telling her I was offended. I am offended when people presume to speak for me. My opinions happen to be considerably different from hers. The name of her group - Concerned Women for America - seems to lump me in with them. I am very concerned about America and one of my concerns is that groups assume names that can be misleading.
Please, when speaking, speak in the “I” and not for “me” unless you have consulted me.
Rusti Leivestad, Trout Creek
Save Montana by finding new ways
This summer feels like a big ripe peach to me - fragrant and juicy and sweet - and I’ve been sucking every last bit of juice out of it all month long.
Last weekend, trying to sleep on the shore of Wild Horse Island with that big bold moon trying its best to keep me awake, and Flathead Lake lapping at the dock, I thought about how we’ve all been saying the same thing: This is the way summers used to be in Montana. No long stretches of stifling 100-degree days, no blistering fires all around and smoke- and ash-filled skies. Hot enough for a dip in the lake, for a float down a river that’s still cold enough and deep enough to provide safe haven for trout.
I’m not normally gloomy, but this feels elegiac to me. Like this summer I am savoring could be the last of its kind or at least, a rare occurrence in the 21st century.
A full-page ad in a recent Newsweek magazine, from the People of America’s Oil and Natural Gas Industry, suggests that there’s enough oil on the Outer Continental Shelf to fuel 60 million cars for 60 years. A story in last week’s Missoulian reports the plethora of perils facing the critters that reside in Glacier Park as glaciers and vegetation that depend on cold temperatures begin to disappear, and the park’s denizens are increasingly isolated by development on all sides. Don’t we get it? Business-as-usual won’t work for the six-plus billion people on this planet, or the wild things and wild places that remain.
I desperately want my grandchildren to know, first hand, the sweetness of summer in Montana - not as a bedtime story, about the way things used to be. Isn’t that incentive enough to find new ways to live our lives and fuel our future?
Kristi Niemeyer, Polson
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