It’s your basic A.B. Guthrie/Ivan Doig/Piegan and buffalo/Sweetgrass Hills/missile silos and oil derricks landscape, what some would call nothingness.
And that’s just the backdrop.
Their acrobatics grace the cover of the newest Montana Historical Society calendar, which in 2009 is dedicated to the history of Montana sports in society. For 8 1/2 bucks, or free to society members, you get sepia-toned glimpses of a curling team from Butte and Fanny Sperry Steele riding a bronc at the Gilman Stampede outside Augusta in 1919.
There’s an impromptu boxing match at state Sen. Kenneth McLean’s sheep shearing camp near Miles City in 1905, photographed by Evelyn Cameron.
“Looking at the boxers’ faces, it doesn’t look like a grudge match,” said Richard Sims, director of the Historical Society. “Just guys having some sport.”
The Butte curling team photographed at the Holland Rink.
C. OWEN SMITHERS/Montana Historical Society
L.A. Huffman captured a behind-the-hooves shot of three racehorses pounding down the dusty track at the Custer County Fairgrounds in Miles City. Spectators on the infield sit astride their own mounts or on horse-drawn buckboards.
With just a few exceptions, there’s sky. It stretches, obviously blue, over January’s shot of downhill ski racers dwarfed by snow ghosts at the top of what’s probably Big Mountain in Whitefish. It silhouettes September’s “timeless rodeo scene” of a cowboy catapulting spurs to the heavens - and head pointed the opposite direction - from the rear end of a high-kicking bareback bronc.
August brings Logger Days in Libby. Two widely disparate-looking men on opposite ends of a crosscut saw (aka, the misery whip) do their thing as timekeepers and judges look on.
“That’s one of my favorite pictures, because I’ve been there,” Sims said. “I’ve worked the ol’ crosscut saw myself. I feel their pain.”
The Havre girls’ football team poses with their coach in 1924.
BRAINERD/Montana Historical Society
The state Historical Society puts out one of these calendars each year, as a gift to current members and a lure to potential ones. Last year, the theme was quilts, in full color. A couple of years before that the focus was on cooking, combining recipes with historical photos of culinary settings.
Sports have historically helped knit together isolated communities in this wide-open state “as kids travel a long way on a team bus to play basketball or eight-man football,” Sims said.
But you won’t find many garden variety sports shots in the calendar. The only sign of a basketball is in a photo accompanying an essay at the front. Women in bloomers are playing on an outdoor field in west Missoula, with a derby-wearing referee and spectators on the sideline. The caption identifies the player third from left as Jeannette Rankin, future U.S. congresswoman.
The football photo also focuses on women, a dozen of them cross-armed in a team photo of the Havre girls’ gridiron team of 1924.
The paradox of too many historical photos is that a side slab of the history is missing. A moment is frozen in place and time, but what time? Which place?
September’s flailing bronc rider is unidentified, as is the rodeo arena in which he’s taking flight and the year in which he’s doing it.
So the sleuthing begins. There are no billboards on the white rodeo chutes, so we’re immediately back to, say, the 1960s. Rodeo dress is mostly timeless, but hat styles have apparently evolved. Those that top the visible heads of men in the background are high-crowned, tight-fitting affairs, again emblematic of the pre-1970s.
And what about the boy in a white T-shirt who sits on the fence? He’s wearing white high-top sneakers and his pant legs are cuffed. Aha! It’s the 1950s, or we miss our guess. The venue could be anywhere, though the best bet is it’s in central or eastern Montana. This sky is unfettered by mountains.
“Cars are really the telling things” in dating a photo, Sims said. But he adds, “That’s part of the fun is maybe people helping fill in the missing information.”
A women’s basketball game in Missoula includes player Jeannette Rankin, third from left, who later represented Montana in the U.S. Congress.
Montana Historical Society
Which brings us back to the Spinning Marvels. Who were these young ladies, putting on a show on a cloudy July day on a wooden platform next to the racetrack in Shelby in 1958?
Well, that was Kay Cochran (now Weiser) spinning Mary Skeslien (Welker), with Roxie Mitchell (Allred) standing in the background. It was a four-girl act. The other spinner, Linda Lux (Johnson), isn’t in the photo.
“That was one of the very least dangerous (stunts) we did,” observed Welker, the only Spinning Marvel who calls Shelby home 50 years later.
“We’d get on their shoulders, two on the ground and two on the shoulders, and they were spinning while we were on their shoulders,” she said. “And there was one called the double-back bend, where there were two spinning and two doing the double back bends over their arms.”
Mitchell’s grandparents owned the roller rink in Shelby, and her father, Roscoe, performed in a spinning act in his youth. That’s how the girls got started. Cochran was a freshman in high school and the other three eighth-graders when the act was launched.
The ’58 fair in Shelby was the “first time we really performed for anyone,” Allred said.
It wasn’t the last. For the next four years, as the girls went through high school, “Grandpa Roy” Mitchell hauled them to gigs in his Volkswagen van - to county fairs and events from Kalispell to Scobey, and from Billings to Lethbridge. They were even on TV a few times.
“Roxie’s grandfather put together two pieces of plywood for us, 8 by 8 feet, and we had to stay on that little square,” she said. “That was our floor. We packed that little thing everywhere.”
To a basketball tournament in Cut Bank ... to a talent show in Taber, Alberta, where they took second prize.
“At the time it was new and different,” Allred said. “No one else was doing what we did. There were other roller skating acts, maybe not in Montana but throughout the country. The unusual part was it was four teenage girls. Usually there were men involved, because there was a lot of lifting.”
“We had a lot of fun, and I think we each made $25 a night,” said Welker.
The girls got married and went their separate ways after high school. Allred lives in Mansfield, Ohio, and Weiser is in Indianapolis. Johnson lives in Great Falls.
They keep in touch and three years ago got together in Helena for a spin down memory lane.
It’s not known who was taking pictures of the Marvels in Shelby that day in 1958. But a similar shot showed up in historian Michael Malone’s “Montana Century,” published in 1999, and more recently in a junior high Montana history textbook published by the state historical society.
Allred recently visited her mother, who lives in Missoula.
“I knew this calendar was around, but we went to the Book Exchange in Missoula and there it was, on display,” she said. “I was ... I couldn’t believe it.”
She experienced a moment of pride and surprise, Allred said, “mostly because when we did it, this was not our intention.”
“I mean, we’re all, like, 63 years old now. At the time we were, what, 13, 14, 15? Our intention was not the Olympics or anything. We just had a lot of fun and my grandparents and parents, and (the other girls’) parents were all very supportive.
“We just had opportunities to do this and we did it, but it wasn’t like any kind of plan that 50 years later somebody would put us on a calendar.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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Jess Allred wrote on Nov 16, 2008 8:51 AM:
Great reading, especially the article about my wife Roxie and her friends, The Spinning Marvels, so many years ago. The photographer was Jack Gilluly (spelling). He shot many photos that day in '58, and subsequent to then, also. Thanks for the nice piece. Jess Allred "