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ST. MARY - On Nov. 19, this tiny town on the eastern edge of Glacier National Park lost half of its year-round population and a good portion of its sense of humor.

Lester Johnson died. He was 96.

Lester and Ruth, his wife of 73 years, were the only folks in St. Mary who didn’t board up their windows and head for other climes during the sometimes-brutal winter months on the Eastern Front of the Rocky Mountains.

“We used to go south for the winter,” Lester admitted to me in 2006, pausing with perfect comedic timing before adding, “to Browning,” which is 20 miles down the road from St. Mary.

Photographer Linda Thompson and I stumbled on the Johnsons while working on a series where the Missoulian traveled six two-lane highways across Montana over the course of the year, writing about the assorted people and places we found along the way.

We had left the Canadian border just a few minutes earlier and started our trip down U.S. Highway 89 when we came upon St. Mary, which was doing an excellent job of impersonating a part-time ghost town. Plywood covered everything from cabin windows to gas pumps, and the cold wind that slid off Glacier’s mountains on a cloudy April morning somehow made the place seem even lonelier.

Except for when a rare vehicle passed through it on 89, we seemed to be the only humans in the whole town - that is, until we turned off on a dirt road that led up a hill, which we hoped would lead us to a bird’s-eye view of St. Mary.

At the top we came to a house whose windows weren’t boarded up. Smoke wafted from a chimney. A car sat out front.

Ruth Johnson came out of the house, as surprised to see a car pull into her driveway as we were to find one parked there.

In the summer, that’s not the case. Johnson’s of St. Mary is host to tourists from around the globe from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and bustles during the warm months. The restaurant, RV park, campground and bed-and-breakfast also rents out cabins, and Lester and Ruth’s home sits smack dab in the middle of it all.

Yes, St. Mary would be a wonderful place, Lester announced that morning, if it weren’t for the summers and all the people who showed up.

What???? Ruth couldn’t believe what she’d just heard, and gently chided her husband for suggesting the Glacier tourists who had supported them and their family for more than half a century weren’t a welcome site each year.

But Lester was just kidding, you could tell. It was a fun morning visiting with the Johnsons.

Lester Johnson’s obituary last month summed it up best: In his life, he truly did watch the sun rise on one era and set in another.

He was born before there had ever been one world war, let alone two. He remembered an artist named Charlie Russell coming to his elementary class to speak. He delivered milk to Great Falls homes using a wagon and a team of horses. He helped build the Alcan Highway that connected Alaska to the Lower 48.

“There was one winter, I must have been 4 or 5,” says one of Lester’s sons, Hugo, “we spent up Logging Creek south of Great Falls in a Forest Service cabin while Dad sawed trees with a cross-cut all winter. We took a goat in with us so us kids would have milk, and the goat had a little one while we were in there and we had to tie it on one of the horses to get it out the next spring.”

When one of his grandchildren asked him what the most memorable change was that Lester had seen in nearly a century on this earth, he didn’t hesitate with an answer.

“Electricity,” Lester told his grandchild.

There was no running water available, let alone electricity, when the Johnsons decided to lease some tribal land and start a roadside hamburger stand in St. Mary in the late 1940s.

They had come to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation to ranch, but there was never enough money in it to take care of their kids.

“We started the restaurant with no experience, 10 pounds of hamburger and a loaf of bread,” Lester told us in 2006. “We hauled our water in barrels from the St. Mary River. We slept in a tent behind the restaurant for five years. We got electricity in 1952.”

Ruth ran the restaurant while Lester worked the ranch, “but I gave it up after three years and sold the cattle to buy this land on the hill,” he said.

Johnson’s of St. Mary has grown since then, and Lester - whose mobility was curtailed in a horseback riding accident 20 years ago - was known for chasing bears out of the campground in his electric golf cart.

The menu at the restaurant these days includes many touches of Lester’s humor, in the “answers to frequently asked questions” section, which include:

• No, the wind has never blown like this before.

• Yes, the Johnsons live here year-round.

• It is about 55 miles across Going to the Sun Road. The Canadian border is about 20 miles. Calgary is 180 miles north. Great Falls is 160 miles south. We don’t know how far it is to New York or San Francisco, go to the bottom of the hill and turn left, ask when you get closer.

Lester and Ruth met at a Halloween party and dance at the Pleasant View Hall in a rural area south of Great Falls.

“My mother taught in a country school near there,” Ruth says. “I didn’t dress up, but Lester was dressed in a big white thing. I don’t know what he was supposed to be - a ghost, I guess.”

He sent a cousin to pick her up the next morning, and on their first date, they went to services at the Red Butte Methodist Church.

They got married in 1935. Lester was 23 years old.

Ruth was 16.

They worked all across Montana - from the dam at Fort Peck, to the mines in Butte - and beyond during the Great Depression. The Johnsons came to the Browning area to work the family ranch after Lester’s father died.

Their union of 73 years produced five children, and Lester would have told you that the only bad thing about living 96 years was burying two of his children.

While Lester was a cancer survivor, his son Randy, who was superintendent of schools in Browning, and daughter Betty Dee, who ran the Red Eagle Motel next to Johnson’s of St. Mary, weren’t. They’re buried in the family cemetery on a hill behind the RV park.

Another daughter, Kristin, is terminally ill with the disease. Kristin lives in Seattle but runs Johnson’s in the summertime.

“She’s the brains, I’m the labor,” says Hugo, who adds that Johnson’s will be open again this summer. “But she’s on so much chemo, everything hinges on her health after that.”

Kristin lectures around the country about cancer, and is the reason the family asked remembrances of Lester to be sent to Gilda’s Club of Seattle, a meeting place for people with cancer and their families.

While it was difficult for him to get around after the horse landed on his right leg 20 years ago, Lester remained sharp up to the day last month that he fell down. By the next morning, Ruth says it became clear to her that he’d suffered a stroke, and they took him to the hospital in Cut Bank, where he later died.

On Aug. 22 - when the plywood is off the windows and the town is humming with people - the Johnsons of St. Mary will invite anyone and everyone who knew Lester to celebrate his life at Johnson’s of St. Mary.

“He loved everyone, and it’ll be a big picnic,” Hugo says. “My sister said he loved that golf cart, too, and so we’ll give him one last ride in it up to the family cemetery. I told her he loved his pressure cooker, too - should we put his ashes in that?”

So maybe Lester’s sense of humor isn’t gone so much as it’s been passed on to Hugo.

From Lester Johnson’s final resting place you can see beautiful St. Mary Lake, Red Eagle Mountain and Triple Divide Peak off across Highway 89, in the national park that drew the tourists that kept this family fed for more than half a century.

And, of course, Lester Johnson will also be able to keep an eye on the campground, RV park and restaurant just below - even in the winter, when St. Mary’s population will now be Ruth.

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