Bear Paw Meanderings

Often when I think of Labor Day, I think of the various labor I have struggled with during my 75 years on this orb called earth.

I started working early. I learned that there was nothing in high school for me but if I could keep my grades up, I could get out at 3 p.m. and go to work at the downtown Havre store that bore my grandfather’s name. That was good enough for me to keep my grades up because I loved working in that great store which sold high grade merchandise for men and high grade shoes for everyone and had a dry cleaning department and a shoe repair department as well. I worked there all during college and loved every minute of it. Unfortunately I had a father and two uncles who were not as interested in the store and it closed in 1964 right after the death of my father.

So, I went to work at college getting a degree in something and that was education. I taught English, history and was a high school guidance counselor for the next ten years in Glasgow. Those were great years. I was made to be a teacher and thought the subject matter was great as well and I learned several valuable lessons in Glasgow. One of the most important was that if I assigned a theme a week and corrected them and graded them, it was my writing that was going to improve. That was quite a lesson.

I always felt that I could be making more money so I quit teaching and started selling Chevrolet cars in Havre for Angstman Motors. I hated that job. That was the only place where I could see very nice trade-ins driven by nice old people that would fall apart just sitting on our lot. It was also a time when some hot shot would want to take a car on a test drive when it was 40 below and the car had not been started for a week. Not good.

I quickly left the wonderful world of automobiles without ever understanding internal combustion engines. Is there a fire burning somewhere under the hood and is that what propels the car ahead or not? See, I still don’t know.

From there I went to selling mobile homes and there was my time to make a lot of money. It was a boom time and I bought into the Gallatin Dealership in Havre and sold and sold and sold. However, then oil and gas burst and the boom was over and the mobile home industry was never able to pick up the pieces in Havre.

I worked with preservation work for a time, which I enjoyed and then became the assistant to a driven man who was building RV parks, convenience stores and motels in Havre. That was an experience and when my time was over there, I was happy.

I spent a decade or more driving red busses in Glacier National Park and to this day still help with the training of new drivers. While there I helped to build standard narratives of all our routes and to this day it is wonderful to be riding along with a driver and hear my old narrative on Logan Pass as we drive along the Garden Wall!

Now I write, dream of the old days and write more about what I dream about.

I guess it is all good. My time with the Blaine County Journal and the Big Sandy Mountaineer have been some of the best ever. As long as I can be true to that old writer’s dictum, write about what you know about, I will be just fine and as you gentle readers see, I have done that one more time.

Thanks for the memories!