For years now, the Missoulian has sent its reporters to the many communities outside Missoula each week to sniff out the stories of people who make western Montana a place unlike any other.
We know that life can sometimes be slow in the small towns that ring our city, but in the dozens of burgs we cover on our weekly Hometowns page, we know that life can also be more than a bit interesting.
January in Bigfork
Neal Brown’s been a truck driver, an airplane builder and a rum-and-slum landlord who owned both a Flathead Lake bar and the apartments across the street. He was a hopped-up micro-beer brewer before becoming a chocolatier, and lately he’s been toying with ocean sailing in a custom-made wooden boat.
As founder and owner of Mojo Chocolates, Brown sells his truffles in New York and Boston and San Francisco, and in downtown Bigfork, too - and everywhere they’re considered as fine as chocolates can be. Which is saying something, really, considering how very fine chocolate can be.
“When I got going on this,” he said of his kitchen, “I didn’t even know what a truffle was. I knew zero. I didn’t know zip. All I knew about making chocolate I learned from watching the movie 'Chocolat,’ you know, with Johnny Depp.”
In 2000, Brown found himself at a church fundraiser. A woman had brought homemade chocolate truffles, and he figured if he could learn to make those, his annual Christmas-gift dilemma would be over for good. “I told her I’d be the high bidder on those if she’d let me come to her kitchen when she was making them.”
Now, from his 8-by-20-foot kitchen, Brown makes those truffles - and other chocolate delicacies - for the masses.
Michael Jamison, Missoulian
February in Thompson Falls
The first thing you should know about Wanda Thorpe and her husband, Warren Winter, is that they are allergic to cats. The second thing you should know is that they care for more than 50 of them.
It’s not as silly as it sounds. Only 17 of the cats, you see, actually belong to Thorpe and Winter. The rest they help care for at the Thompson River Animal Care Shelter while the animals await new homes. TRACS has come a long way since Thorpe and Winter helped to found it just over a year ago.
TRACS has an office and cattery up and running, and a facility for dogs under construction, on five acres of leased land outside Thompson Falls. So while the cats they are allergic to have separate quarters now, the dogs they take in are still housed on Thorpe and Winter’s property overlooking Steamboat Island on the Clark Fork River outside Thompson Falls.
Now the push is on to find new homes for all the cats. TRACS, an all-volunteer, no-kill facility, took in 289 cats and dogs in its first year of operation and adopted out 252.
Vince Devlin, Missoulian
March in Saltese
Signs of spring are, well, different up here.
Umpteen feet of snow were draining off the roof of his Old Montana Bar on the last day of February when Bryan Teeters nodded toward the only street in town. “I was out there last week kissing the first piece of asphalt,” he said.
This is good old-fashioned Montana snow country. Ten miles from Idaho, on the lee side of Lookout Pass, Saltese catches nature’s best fluff and stores it until summer. There’s no weather station there, but Lookout Pass claims to get 400 inches of snow a year. Saltese can’t be far behind.
So what does spring mean in Saltese? It’s Brenda Teeters, Bryan’s wife, jumping in his topless jeep on this sunny, runny day and driving down to the far end of Only Street to Mangold’s store. The mayor of Saltese trots behind for a ways, then stops to sniff a snowbank.
“That’s Raider,” Bryan Teeters says. “He’s a smart dog. He’s my best friend.”
Spring means great snowmobiling.
“It’s go-anywhere snow right now,” said Mangold.
The Mangolds moved to Saltese some 25 years ago from Utah. It was like a slap in the face at first, all this snow in a town best described as remote, despite the fact that the main interstate arterial in the northern U.S. runs smack dab through it.
Now, said Terri, “I love it here. I don’t know if I could actually even move to, like, Missoula.”
Kim Briggeman, Missoulian
April in Arlee
In a language immersion school, every object has a label to remind students how to describe the world around them. So in a sense, the expansion project going on at Nkwusm Salish Language Immersion School here is adding to its dictionary.
From a single classroom and hallway kitchen six years ago, Nkwusm now is filling a former bowling alley with white boards, desks, student art and recording equipment. From that time just six years ago when only a couple children showed up for class, Nkwusm now has 39 regular students in preschool through high school grades. It’s divided into three multiage classes, each with a certified teacher, a fluent Salish speaker and a teacher’s aide.
“We tried this once before in 1994, but it failed for lack of experience and direction,” said Nkwusm co-founder and director Tachini Pete. “Now we start kids when they’re 3, 4, 5 years old. That’s when they learn most easily. We do math and science and all the other areas, but the main focus is language.”
Head teacher Pat Pierre added that Salish’s concise power relies on the speaker’s facial expressions and hand gestures. “You can express a paragraph in a single line,” he said. “It comes in the motion of a hand or the tone of voice. If I tie my hands behind me and try to tell a story, I’d have a hard time.”
When Pete started his efforts to open an immersion school in 1994, there were 200 fluent Salish speakers in the community. Today, that number has dropped to 57, and the average age is 76 years old.
“But now when our kids are making presentations to the elders and they’re seeing our kids out there speaking the language, you can see it’s almost like we’re taking a weight off their shoulders. There’s a glimmer of hope in there now.”
Rob Chaney, Missoulian
May in Philipsburg
Tony and Ruth Ann Marchi fell in love with this historic mining town the minute they arrived in 2005. While on vacation in Montana, the part-time Virginia and Florida residents heard about the beautiful Flint Creek Valley and decided to go see it for themselves.
This marks their third Memorial Day weekend as part of the town’s business community. If timing in life is everything, the Marchis believed their trip to Philipsburg was meant to be. A “for sale” sign in the window of the M.E. Doe Building, a grand two-story Victorian in the heart of downtown, beckoned the couple and jump-started another dream they had long shelved: to own and operate an old-time soda fountain.
Built by M.E. Doe in 1887, the building housed Philipsburg’s first drugstore and soda fountain and, as the years piled on, several other business, including a hotel, a cafe, and a toy store. Although it looked every bit its venerable age, the building had survived the past century structurally sound and with all its original architectural charm.
A dream is one thing, but reality is a whole other world. For the first time in untold years, the M.E. Doe Building had again become a gathering spot. It was then the Marchis realized how fortunate they were. They didn’t know - couldn’t have known - the building they bought came with the community.
In the Marchis, Shirley Beck said, the community saw a couple who were ready to “dig their feet in like a calf at a new gate” to make their dream come true.
“When we saw that passion, over we went to give them a hand,” Beck said. “We left worked and changed our clothes and started scrubbing and cleaning.”
Betsy Cohen, Missoulian
June in Alberton
Funny thing about ink on paper: The combination creates truth.
Or it seems to, in the case of Alberton town’s name. Consider the evidence. Roberta Cheney’s book “Names on the Face of Montana” declares Alberton “seems to have been named for the Albert family, who came from Canada in the late 1870s and settled at Frenchtown. They homesteaded the area when Indian trails were the only roads.”
Or the Mineral County Historical Society’s “Mineral County History.” It states the Chicago, Milwaukee & Puget Sound Railway bought the area known as Browntown and “renamed the area Alberton, after its president, Albert J. Earling.”
Who’s right?
Surely the Montana Historical Library can settle the question.
Nope. The library has both references in its files. Neither trumps the other.
What about the residents?
Mike Albert, great-grandson of homesteader Alexander Albert, has recently moved back to Alberton and rekindled the debate. “It’s very hard to find really firm documentation,” Albert said. “The oldest thing I can find is my grandfather’s obituary from 1941.”
According to Alberton Historical Museum curator Fran Rogers, the Milwaukee Road bought a large property on the north bank known as the Brown homestead in 1907. The railroad announced plans to build a maintenance facility there, and subdivided the land into residential plots for auction. A man named Mark Shields bought the first two of those lots. He set up a general store in a tent on the north bank that formed the core of the future Alberton. Although he moved away two years later, he wrote a letter to railroad historian Harold Cole in the 1960s about what he remembered of the town’s origins. “It tells that the town was named for the president of the Milwaukee Road, Albert J. Earling,” Rogers said.
Rob Chaney, Missoulian
July in Dixon
Doug Baty’s grandfather settled here in 1910. Nearly a century later, Baty still works the same land, his fields lush with the aromatic crop for which Wild Plum Farm is known - garlic.
According to “The Complete Book of Garlic,” if you were going to bite into a raw bulb, you’d want to grab yourself a nice Inchelium, the kind that Doug and Antje Baty grow on the five acres of produce that largely support their family.
Antje Baty wasn’t ever supposed to eat the stuff. Born in Hamburg, Germany, she grew up at a time when her city home had its own little hayfield, where the family raised chickens and rabbits, and kept a kitchen garden. “For me, that was enough,” said Baty, who described herself as an old-fashioned sort of child. “I wanted to be a farmer, but I was born in a city of 2 million people. ... When the modern world moved in, I thought it wasn’t necessary. I didn’t want an indoor toilet. I didn’t want those things in the grocery store. I was in awe of plants, these things that feed us.”
Antje’s rebellious spirit propelled her from the old port city across the Atlantic Ocean, first to visit relatives in rural Iowa, then on a cross-country trip that included a stop in Montana, where she met a fellow named Doug Baty, 12 years her senior.
They had the property in Dixon, but it was no longer a working farm. Antje noticed garlic growing wild and wondered whether it would be possible to cultivate it. Not only was it possible, the Batys discovered, but the plant is uniquely suited to Montana’s climate.
Gwen Florio, Missoulian
August in Victor
In a recently published guide to cultural attractions in western Montana, there’s a small advertisement. It touts “a simple rustic space to preserve and explore Zen aesthetics as living art.” The Little Zen Museum in Victor is not actually a museum at all. Not yet, anyway. But inside the Rev. Genki Takabayashi’s and Leslie Gannon’s blue house with the unassuming exterior are valuables suitable for preservation behind glass cases or locked inside ancient temples. A 4-foot-tall Buddhist statue shaded in pink, purple and white is the paramount figure in the couple’s living room. The 300-year-old statue is Kannon, the goddess of mercy and also the god of compassion.
“She was saved from the Cultural Revolution,” said Gannon, pointing to the statue’s charred left knee.
Only close friends, family and neighbors have visited, but news of a Zen master living in the Bitterroot is often greeted with interest. The 75-year-old hails from a small midland Japanese town. His grandfather was the gardener at a nearby temple where Takabayashi eventually moved at age 10. He lived there for more than a decade and was adopted by his teacher.
Their lives today may not seem ordinary to some Montanans, but it’s normal to them. Takabayashi continues to sell his artwork. He spins ceramic tea bowls and fires them in a kiln behind the house. As for Gannon, she would like to share their lives - and the things they’ve acquired - with everyone.
“There’s so much richness, there’s no point leaving it in boxes,” she said.
Chelsi Moy, Missoulian
September in Corvallis
So in the middle of the morning, most fans of the Bitterroot apple orchard have yet to partake of its bounty. Only a pesky magpie reveals itself, swooping in over the Swanson orchards cut over Fred Burr Canyon. An apple crunches underfoot. Light raindrops pop against the papery leaves of 4,200 apple trees. The red bulbs press tightly against the tree boughs, and this year, barring severe weather and acts of God, the harvest at Mountain View Orchards will be abundant.
The farmer knows so.
“This is one of the biggest crops I’ve ever had,” says Charlie Swanson, named after his grandfather.
In 1910, the late Swanson planted one of the first apple orchards in the Bitterroot Valley and worked in it even at the age of 96. Nearly 100 years later, his grandson laughs at the idea of being anything other than an apple farmer.
Many apples won’t go to market. Some - and the magpie squawks a reminder - won’t go to waste, either.
“Everybody is out here to help us harvest the crop,” Swanson says. Most critters slink into the Corvallis orchard in the evenings. As many as 10 or 12 or even 15 mule deer and whitetail deer will rummage through his older orchard some nights, and they’ll stay until Nick and Doc chase them off. Nick is a sheltie, and his pal Doc, a springer spaniel, appears to take partial payment in apples. He gnaws on one as a picker plucks nearby. Even the cows help out.
Keila Szpaller, Missoulian
October in Lakeside
It’s not exactly Nashville, but there is a lot of music coming out of Lakeside these days.
Studio 501 isn’t flashy or pretentious, it’s not some acoustically magical cave, and the Beatles never recorded here, but the unassuming studio hidden in the pine trees behind this town of 1,951 is drawing a lot of attention.
“The atmosphere here is very relaxed,” said Steve Praetzel, the studio manager. “We’re not drawn to make a specific amount of money to keep our heads above water.”
That’s because Studio 501 is a project of Youth With A Mission, an interdenominational missions organization focusing on young people and serving communities worldwide in the areas of evangelization, training and mercy ministries.
Though this studio is affiliated with a Christian missionary organization, they don’t just work with Christian artists.
And it’s not difficult, in a community of less than 2,000 people, (for most of the year) to find out about a multitrack recording studio in your backyard. Praetzel said Studio 501, which he helped start in the early ’90s, began helping with production for local bands and area schools.
Timothy Alex Akimoff, Missoulian
November in St. Ignatius
It seems the only thing tougher than getting a huge project rolling is keeping it rolling.
As winter closes in around the Skate Ignatius skateboard park, its fans and friends are bracing for Phase II. The first phase produced $185,000 worth of rolling concrete for the community’s skateboard athletes. More than $200,000 in further improvements are on the drawing board.
That taste of success has brought complications. The skatepark has been criticized for attracting rough behavior in Taelman Park. It’s also brought attention to the park’s deteriorating tennis courts. But its supporters see a novel solution: Grow the appetite for recreation.
“I think a town should be proactive in providing things people don’t have in their everyday lives,” said St. Ignatius City Council member Marine Johnson, who also sits on the local parks department board. “The skate project really spearheaded the whole movement.”
The movement has a name: The Recreation Coalition.
In the past year, Taelman Park’s skateboard area has attracted throngs of riders, including many who travel miles out of their vacation routes to give it a try.
Rob Chaney, Missoulian
December in Lolo
Ava Cook is a volunteer’s volunteer.
She spends every Wednesday at the Missoula Food Bank, where she’s stocked the shelves for 15 years. Every other day of the work week, she spends part of her day with elderly women, helping them with shopping and other errands.
But the crowning achievement of Cook’s long volunteer career is the establishment of a food bank program in Lolo.
The seed was planted about five years ago when the Missoula Food Bank’s Dorey Rowland and Aaron Brock, appreciative of the energy Cook brought to her volunteer work, suggested the possibility of a satellite operation in Lolo.
“She just seemed like a natural to do it, because she’s so good with people and really has a great energy,” said Rowland, the food bank’s program manager.
The Lolo Food Bank is an ephemeral creature. It appears once a month - on the first Wednesday of each month - at the Lolo Community Center, on the south end of town. Cook and her group of three dependable volunteers have assembled food gathered from the Missoula Food Bank. And they’ve also made the monthly pilgrimage to Lolo’s Harvest Foods grocery store, which donates milk, juice, yogurt, sour cream, some meat and numerous items from the store’s deli.
Michael Moore, Missoulian
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