Summer school at the University of Montana in 1977

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Mount Sentinel had one of its grass fires that year. The first day the Missoulian newspaper headline said that the mountain had been destroyed. The next came a retraction, admitting that the mountain was intact, but the grass had burned. As usual, the fire was blamed on children.

My family and I had moved back to Missoula from Southern California the previous fall, when I resumed working on the journalism degree that I had abandoned 8 years previously. We had spent a cold winter in the warm apartment of student housing, one of the x’s. Sisson apartments. We had fun that year, and for the four years following as I finished journalism, then a pharmacy degree. I stuck with journalism because I had promised to do so, on an application for a $150 scholarship that I received in 1967 from the Montana Newspaper Guild. Eight years later I took courses from some of the same professors from 1967. Bob McGiffert. Nathaniel Blumberg. Also new ones. Jerry Holloron. Don Miller. This last one taught photography, and I took his class the following summer after I re-enrolled. Man! It was good to get back to Missoula. I walked into Elrod Hall and got the key to our apartment in Sisson. Just like that. Then we moved in. Missoula smelled like fall that September. I remember that it was the 22nd when we rolled into town. We had two Volkswagens. One of them had a disabled motor because it blew up just outside of Bozeman. I had been towing it behind a U-Haul truck. I had left the VW in first gear and when I towed it the engine started smoking and the volks got hard to pull. Later I took the burnt engine apart and found lots of small metal pieces that smelt like–burnt metal pieces.

Our kids were 2,4 and 5 years old. Our daughter was too young for school, but our younger son could go to Mrs. Everingham’s preschool at the university. Our older son went to a Montessori across from the campus. At least for a while. He had bad asthma and ended up in the hospital.

We couldn’t afford to pay the hospital bill, so I visited financial aid on campus. The man there got me a job helping with audio visual aids. That meant setting up projectors of various kinds in classrooms around the campus.

I went on a Cushman motor scooter to show a film in the science building. One about the baobab tree. The projector was at the front of the classroom, which shined onto a mirror that in turn shone on the back of a translucent screen. I got the film started. Then I left the projection room to watch the film.

What a fascinating film! The baobab tree is so important to a host of African creatures and people too. As the final credits rolled, I ducked back into the projection room.

The room was a great mass of film, piled up like hair on a barber’s floor. I saw to my dismay that the film had jumped off the take-up reel (because the reel was slightly pinched together).

I spent the next hour in the room winding up the errant film, which had much dirt and dust. I wound up the film by removing the reel from the projector and putting fingers in two of the peripheral holes, then going hand-over-hand. I mean, finger-over-finger.

I had only one more misadventure before I resigned my position with the audio visual service. The audience was about 500 world history students and I was trying to show a film that had been produced by Hitler for propaganda. Unfortunately the film warbled and ran poorly, until the professor came back and hissed, “turn off the sound! It sounds comical!”