Dan Struckman: The Lost Years

1962-1969

Junior High

I entered 8th grade at Parkview Junior High School in Dillon.  Our science teacher acted like he was demented.  He’d tell us a fact, then immediately ask us what he just said.  Repeatedly.  As if he were a robot.  At first I’d raise my hand, but after a few of these I gave up.  Most of the class also sat like zombies.  

I think the science teacher was explaining geology.  Or mineralogy.  Could have been interesting.  After all, in Missoula I often prowled the geology building and questioned the geology students, even looking through their microscopes when they made thin sections of minerals.  

I wanted to escape Dillon, even mentally.  We weren’t allowed to close our eyes, rock back and forth, and hum, the way I wanted.  The other 8th grade teachers were less crazy, sometimes entertaining, even if heavy handed.

An 8th grader named Monte Proulx got me to go with him on his afternoon paper route delivering the Dillon Daily Tribune.  I was shocked when he lit up and smoked a cigarette.  He even inhaled.  None of my 8th grade friends ever did that, except as an experiment.  

When I got home I breathlessly told my mother that Monte was bad.  I was experiencing culture shock.  A few years later, in high school, Monte told me he wanted to be a paleontologist.  Later that year I saw someone hitting him in the face and he cried.  Last I heard, Monte committed suicide.  One moving experience of Dillon, Montana.  

I felt I was isolated in Dillon, but gradually I became friends with Jim Feathers, Allen Lenhart, and Kirk Bergeson, because they got tired of hassling me.

Dillon, population about 4,000, is the county seat of Beaverhead County, the largest county in Montana.  It is east of the continental divide, despite its location in the extreme southwestern part of the state.   The divide makes a wide curve to the north, west, and south, carving out the area of Beaverhead County.  The closest big city is Butte, a tough mining town on the continental divide with a proud history of union activism.

My new friends in Dillon told me of the vigilantes of the ghost town of Bannack who, in the early days, hanged Sheriff Henry Plummer and his gang of road agents.  They didn’t teach me this lore in school; I learned it from my three classmates as we trudged across the park each day after school. 

Jim, Allen, and Kirk, collectively, were bigger/stronger/smarter than I was, but at least they were townspeople.  Many of the other students lived in the smaller towns, or on farms and ranches elsewhere in the county.  These three didn’t smoke or drink and they played on the school sports teams.  I think they wanted to haze me.

That year I got a spanking with a wooden paddle when the principal caught me hiding beneath the librarian’s desk.  Made me cry it hurt so much.

I thought Dillon was brutal.  I was skinny and tall and used to my Missoula friends and the university.  Dillon had Western Montana College, with its spindly buildings, which I explored evenings, much as I did in Missoula at the university.  Trouble was, the buildings were old and securely locked and the college library had mostly obsolete books without much of any history in them.  Same was true of the Dillon city Carnegie library.  The books were old and toothless. 

The era of Civil Rights got almost no notice in Dillon Montana in the mid-1960s.

To quote Wikipedia:  “Dillon is known statewide for its decades of success in high school sports. The boys’ basketball team won the Class A State Championship in 1990, the school’s first state title since 1946. Since 2000 the high school football team has played in 11 Class A State Championships, winning eight. The boys’ basketball team has played in eight Class A State Championships since 2007, winning five.” 

High school

Most of us participated in sports.  We were co-champions in  Class A football with Columbia Falls in 1967.  We did well in other sports too.

My friend David Duncan and I played with his walkie talkies and did some drinking together.   He did a little bowling, but didn’t go out for sports.  He died of AIDS.  I looked up his obituary and I was surprised when I saw that he was gay.  Nobody talked about being gay or lesbian in high school.

Although Stevensville, Montana, continues to be a major host of the John Birch Society, an anti-democratic, top-down, right-wing organization, originally created to oppose the “conspiracy to promote communism” in the US,  I think Dillon was not far behind.  

I made a photograph of Tom Struckman, about 1964, with nephews Chris and Chuck Angel in Dillon, Montana.  I used my grandmother’s Argus C-3 viewfinder 35mm camera.  I wanted to get a picture published in the highschool newspaper, The Beaver, but the great action shots of high school football games were not clear enough to satisfy editor Tim Pilgrim.  Eventually I succeeded at making clearer pictures. 

In 1969 I traded the Argus C-3 to Larry Felton for some pot.  He returned the camera to me years later in Tustin, California, but I don’t remember what happened to it.  I think I gave it to my brother.

By the time my sister brought my nephews from Bozeman to Dillon to visit I was getting better at taking pictures. Of course I developed and printed my own. 

My darkroom was a closet in my upstairs bedroom. Very handy for me, large enough. At one point I developed B&W 8mm movie film and ended up splashing great quantities of chemicals all over the floor.

Tom lived with us because he was expelled from the University of Montana when he stopped going to classes.   He had to retake some basic courses at Western Montana College.  He didn’t much respect the faculty. He said they had an English professor who hadn’t heard of Leslie Fiedler.  Tom said Western was a glorified high school. Our mother taught there until her retirement in 1975.  

I enjoyed high school, although I did poorly my first year because I needed glasses and I was too vain to wear them.  During algebra class we learned that President Kennedy was assassinated when Principal Bun Lodge announced it over the intercom.

I went out for every sport I could, except skiing and wrestling.  Our first football game took place in Butte in a Butte High parking lot that had dirt and sawdust.  The Butte kids were chubby and wore old fashioned helmets without face masks.  They tossed dirt in our faces and when they tackled one of us three or four would pile on.  We won 6-0.

Basketball didn’t work for me because I never developed good ball handling skills.  My sophomore year I was on the second junior varsity team of mismatched jerseys and misfits.  We lost a game to Lima, Montana, when our team made fewer than 15 points–but man! We could pass!  We were dazzling passers.  Eventually our coach quit; Lost interest, I think, because none of us tried to make a basket.

Track was my favorite sport.  I was a slow runner, so my event was the mile.  Two of our freshmen, Les Gordon and Miles Ramsay, could run a mile fast enough to win races; Les ran his in 4:47, respectable for a 14- or 15-year-old, even today.  

Took me much longer than all the others, about 6 minutes, but I didn’t quit, even though some of the officials wanted me to, because they had to stand around waiting for me to finish in order to set up the low hurdles.  Teammate Steve Ferris asked me if my strategy was to start last and get slower.  

My senior year I switched to the half mile.  I developed a new way of running where I sort of stuttered my feet up and down instead of trying to stride.  Mr. Bridenstein advised me against that, but my coaches told me not to listen to him.

Ultimately, I ran fast enough to earn a third place ribbon, finishing in about 2:20.  This amazed coach Jim Corr,  who said, “Wow!  You were really running!”

I did my best work in theater and in journalism.  I auditioned for plays and got big parts.  You can do that in a small high school that emphasizes sports.   

My brother told me about Marvel Comics, especially Spiderman.  My friends and I tried to invent our own comic book, but we lacked the technology.  We created a few pages we planned to print with an A.B.Dick stencil printer, but we didn’t get far enough on the project.  I wrote a letter that was published in Spiderman #39.

I often went to Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings in Dillon.  Jim Feathers and I became best friends, inseparable.  Of course, when we went to Methodist summer camp at Flathead Lake the counselor separated us when we told her we were inseparable.  

I had one of the best weeks of my life at camp.  They were liberal with sex education and one of the female camp counselors had me and the rest of a coed group leaf through a Playboy magazine!  She complained the women didn’t look good to her, but to me they were big and bouncy and thoroughly delightful.  I don’t know if they did that with Jim’s group. 

During high school I had a summer job moving irrigation pipes for Joe Helle, a major rancher in the Dillon area.  Joe ran cattle and sheep all the way from Yellowstone Park to Dillon, but he had to keep his barley crops watered with sprinklers.  That’s where I and a couple others came in.  The job meant getting up at dawn, driving five miles to the barley, shutting off the line of fifty 40-foot aluminum pipes, then moving them sixty feet.  We moved about three or four lines apiece, I and a couple other irrigators.  Then it was back home until about 4 p.m. when we’d move the pipe lines again.  We kept the lines straight by aiming them at a distant mountain.  Sometimes there’d be a fish or a snake in the pipeline.  At the beginning of the summer we watered dirt.  By the end of the season the barley was so tall it was hard to walk through.  The mosquitoes were fierce and we used many cans of Off! spray.  We were dirty, tired, and stinky.

The summer before our senior high school year Feathers got a job with me moving the pipes.  We got about $10/day, quite a lot in 1966.  Trouble was, Joe Helle paid me a bonus for being in charge of teaching Jim the ropes.  Joe let me drive the truck and tractor when needed.  When Jim found out I got paid more than him, he was pissed since we both did the same amount of work.  

Because he lived five miles out of town, Jim slept in our basement and every morning I’d wake him at 4 a.m. and we’d eat cereal in silence.  The wet, strenuous work, the getting up in the dark, the cold cereal, and the fact that I got paid more than he did, put our friendship on the rocks.  We didn’t speak, until at one point we were practically punching each other out.  Jim was so mad he threatened to burn down Joe Helle’s by-then golden fields of barley. 

Jim and I didn’t speak until late in our senior year when he stuck out his hand to me and suggested we mend our friendship.  I took it and promised to be his friend once more.  That was more than 50 years ago and we’re still friends.

At my 50th high school class reunion my first impression was to encounter fellow student Wade Hansen.  Well, not exactly.  Two anonymous looking old women leafed through their pre-printed name tags for my name, but couldn’t find it.  I didn’t tell them my name because I wanted to know if they recognized me.  Wade was talking to another ancient woman and hadn’t noticed me.  To my surprise the aged women were the same age as I.  Classmates.

Hard to find enough superlatives when talking about Wade.  At the ten-year reunion he had the most children.  Wade and I enthusiastically shook hands.  His hand seemed about three sizes larger than mine and made of steel coated with … with whatever fingers are coated with.  Finger material, I guess.  

You see, in 1966, Wade and I set a speed record for climbing Mount Torrey (11,147 feet, second highest mountain in the Pioneer Range), about thirty miles, or so, from Dillon.  I told Wade it was my only real claim to fame.  We were about seventeen when we — Wade, actually—got a wild hair to race to the top of the mountain from Moose Meadow, and he invited me along.  I remember that we scrambled directly up the boulders.  Wade reached the top a little before I did.  When I joined him, he held his hand up and counted, “One, two,” …and we both touched the top at the same time, on three.  We filled out the paper in the register, leaving some coins as souvenirs for the next climbers.

 “Do you remember how long it took us?” he asked me.  I replied I thought it took us two hours. “One hour, forty minutes,” he said.  Then he added that he and his kids were going to climb two mountains that weekend.  He invited me along.  Scared the hell out of me.  I told him I had to work (I did).  Later, I got an idea for an excuse that would sound plausible.  “No thanks, I can’t climb the mountain.  I’ve got to get a colonoscopy,” I would lie.

Grandmother Ellen Bonde 

Grandmother moved with us to Dillon.  During those years she journeyed to Norway and France with Aunt Corinne.  Her eyesight was poor from cataracts.  She said she was afraid a doctor’s knife would slip, so she refused surgery.  

She got sick my senior year in high school.

In 1967, I overheard the doctor, who spoke loudly like he was talking to a deaf person: “Ellen, do you want to die?  Is that—is that it?”

She always suffered in silence, a Norwegian.  Like I said, grandma didn’t trust doctors and I knew she especially didn’t trust this German bully, the one who prescribed great maroon mercury tablets for her kidneys.  

Doctors still made house calls in those days.  Mercurials were once considered legitimate medications for inducing diuresis.

Our house stunk.  Mother gave Grandma soft-boiled eggs she then vomited.

We talked about fixing a hospital bed in our front room because Grandma was too weak to make it upstairs.

You know, I could have carried her in my arms, but she disliked me.  She didn’t trust me.  Said I stole her kitchen utensils.  Well, I did. Also, I used to pawn her projector screen and camping stove for beer money.  Either one of her things would net me $5 from Gracie’s Second Hand Store, the price of a case of Lucky Lager.

Nonetheless, I carried her up the stairs to her room that Sunday. 

When I got home from school the next day I learned that Mother sent Grandma to Barrett’s Hospital by ambulance.

Our house was two and a half blocks away, so I walked over to see her.  The building was old, granite, and easy to get around in.  Smelled like carbolic acid antiseptic.

Grandma and I often fought.  She called me a “little piece” and a “puke.”  In turn, I had called her a “nasty old bitch.”  The abuse was always verbal and mutual.  I don’t know who started it. She had strong right-wing political views.  My views were merely oppositional to hers.

However, at the hospital after a few pleasantries, she thanked me for visiting her.  She told me, “You are a good boy.  Your Grandma said so.”  She asked me to get her purse for her. She gave me a five dollar bill, too.  Sort of hurt my feelings because I didn’t visit her to get money.  I was her grandson, after all.  I wanted to cry.  Even so, I soon bought a case of beer.

The next time I saw her, that next Sunday, Grandma was in Park View Nursing Home, across town.  When Mother and I visited her the skin on her eyelids looked swollen and greasy.  Her breathing was labored.  Her half-closed eyes were jaundiced and had a kind of wild look as she surveyed us.  Even so, I’m not sure she knew who we were.  If either one of us spoke to Grandma, I’m not sure what we said.

My sister, Carol, drove from Bozeman to Dillon that day, to be with our mother.

Ellen died that night.  She had reached her goal:  She lived to be 80, and like, nine days.

However, she died without ever learning what happened to either her son or her cat.  Both disappeared, entrusted to others for their well-being.  Neither returned.  No bodies were recovered.

The last years of her life, Ellen looked to me to be bitter and depressed. She held her head in her hand.  Looked like she might cry. 

Her remarkable son Buddy, whom she lost in WWII, went into the army, destined for the European war.  She saw him once again when he came home on leave, but that was it. 

Her beloved Siamese cat? It disappeared in Missoula when I was in the seventh grade.  

One day her son was in England, writing letters, telling her about “limeys,” then . . . nothing.  He was gone.  Missing in action.  A month later she got a telegram from the War Department stating he had been killed in action.

Ellen died without learning details of what happened. 

Her cat?  Early in 1962,  I took it for a walk in a makeshift rope harness.  A block away from our Missoula home, I tied it to a tree so I could visit my friend Chuck Mann who often peed in his basement drain.  An hour later, I noticed a loose dog running away from where the cat was tied up.  Only the rope remained. Grandma didn’t believe me when I told her.

“I think you did away with my cat,” she said. 

The summer after I graduated high school I spent a week with the forest service planting trees near Sheridan, Montana.  I quit that job, broke up with my highschool girlfriend.  Well, she broke up with me.  Devastated, I drove the red 1960 Studebaker VI three of my friends and I bought for $60, to Eugene, Oregon, to visit Tom.  I should have asked permission from Les Gordon because the title was in his name. 

Tom and his friends got me stoned on pot at the ocean beach, so I thought I was ready for a life of higher learning at the University of Montana.  Tom told me about hippies and showed me some copies of the Berkeley Barb.  

Craig Hall

The first day at the University of Montana Mother insisted on helping me make my bed to get me settled.   I was mortified that my mother was there helping me move into Craig Hall.  Then it was a freshman men’s dormitory.  She continued tucking in the sheets and blanket.

“Please mother, don’t,” I begged her.  “Just leave me here! Go!  Please!”

For background, I must note that there are grand old dormitories at the university.  But Craig Hall doesn’t come close.  It is ugly, plain and square, like it has a military crewcut.  It stunk like a locker room.  Sweat, only mingled with the odors of shoe polish and Brasso.  The R.O.T.C. guys were always shining their brass belt buckles.  Lots of guys didn’t change their underwear very often.

I was familiar with all of the dormitories because, as an adolescent growing up in Missoula, I used to explore the university buildings every night after school.  I did so for at least two years, hundreds of forays into the unknown. I knew secrets about the buildings.  I had crawled through tunnels connecting the buildings.  I pooped in many bathrooms.  In the early 1960s when “Batman” was a popular television show, the “H” on the word “BATHROOM” had been rubbed out. 

I was only mildly amused then; I am less amused now.

But God! In 1967, as a freshman, I was lonely!  I had lived in Dillon since the eighth grade and I didn’t know anyone in Missoula except one or two of my friends from high school who attended UM.  I looked for some hip people around campus, but I couldn’t find any.  Dave Duncan lived in Craig and I could usually borrow money from him. I had a scruffy beard, but my hair was still short.  I was worried about my hair so I borrowed hair conditioner from Dave.  I was geeky and out of place.  Les Gordon and Kirk Bergeson were somewhere, but I didn’t encounter them.  Turns out Penny was a freshman the same time I was.  Her roommate was Judy Seidensticker, an excellent student from Dillon.  I didn’t learn about that connection until much later.  Judy eventually died of cancer in Colstrip, Montana.

My dorm room had a grimy ground-level picture window, a marvel of architecture.  Marvelous because it had been designed as if to eliminate any possible grace or beauty.

It was closest to the north outside door of the building, where countless feet tramped past my door to class every morning.  The sound of anxious feet made me feel anxious too, like I had to join in the rush.  

Fellow journalism student Jim Grady, from Shelby, lived upstairs on the second floor of Craig.  He said his passion was to write fiction.  He wrote Six Days of the Condor, a novel that more than repaid him for his effort.  Jim and I lived parallel lives and we knew of each other, but I believe he was a much more serious student than I, and he has gained immense stature as an investigative journalist and author.  He is also a decent human being.

My accommodations:  Unsatisfactory.  Just like my roommate,  I can’t remember his name, the super straight college freshman.  Not artistic.  Not cool.  Not rebellious.  Totally beat down by the establishment.

He had bad habits: he kept his hair short, he shaved, he didn’t like me, he talked in a loud voice, like someone from New Jersey.  He had learned these habits at a military academy where his parents sent him.

He said he had been a teenage criminal. Like me, he majored in journalism, the principal  thing we had in common, although he said he didn’t care about journalism.

We treated each other politely, at first.  He suggested I sleep on the bottom bunk, so I did.  After all, my covers were neatly tucked by my mother.

I laid down on the bottom bunk and he climbed up to the top.  I pushed my feet up against the springs overhead to jog him up and down.  He responded by threatening me with a shocking surprise that would be quite painful if I did that again, so I didn’t.

He told me that he didn’t like me.  He said he rejected all of my values.  Hippie values.  Peace, love, drugs, rock and roll, sexual adventures, and nonconformity.

One day, entering the room, he told me, “You are a nihilist!  That’s right, a nihilist.”

He laughed.  I had no idea what he meant.  He told me that we had practically nothing in common.  He didn’t like illegal drugs.  He said he lost a good friend from a heroin overdose.  Of course he was lying.  Wasn’t he?  I told him that hippies don’t take heroin.  Just psychedelic drugs.  For recreation and introspection.  For educational, spiritual, and scientific purposes.  Like getting high. 

(As far as I know, nobody in Dillon used drugs of any kind during our high school years.  There weren’t even rumors.  It was unheard of.  Underage drinking was widespread, though, and several of my friends used chewing tobacco.)

Even more disgusting, each morning my roomie brushed his head briskly for about 15 seconds with a pair of brushes he kept on his well-organized dresser.  In turn, I snubbed him and typically rolled out of bed chanting some secret hippie stuff.  I often put on yesterday’s clothes, and headed to breakfast.  Or else I rolled over and skipped my 8 o’clock class.  Or both.

After the first quarter I saw the military man roommate maybe once more, between classes.  He was friendly.  Said he got just one B, the rest A’s.  Hell, I did just as good as he did.  Well, not quite.  But pretty good anyway.  Good enough for the Dean’s list.

Hunting for hip 

Missoula always had counterculture types like bohemians and beatniks; now it had hippies.  Trouble is, I didn’t know any.  At least not in Missoula.  My only credentials were my old army field jacket and my experience getting high with my brother and his friends in Eugene. 

I wanted to find some hippies.  Some dope-smokers who would be willing to share with me.  Intellectuals.  Hipsters.  Counter-culture folk.

How to define hip?  I’ll tell you how I viewed it at the time.  A hip person wasn’t straight.  Straight people caved into the pressure from the town folk, their high school teachers, their adult relatives, their jock friends.  They joined fraternities and sororities.  These people made them get a short haircut and wear regular straight clothes and abstain from pot and drink alcoholic beverages and smoke tobacco cigarettes.  Also watch TV.  In short, straights were not rebels.

As I said, straight people were well-groomed and cared about television and sports and didn’t question the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.  Straight people were mean.  Straight people were knee-jerk patriotic and were allied with the old guys who belonged to the Elks or Masons or some other organization.  They were the problem. Hippies were part of the solution, the revolution for peace and justice and harmony. 

When I got up each day I did my best to act naturally.  I stopped borrowing hair conditioner from Dave Duncan.  My hair was growing long, same with my beard.  In that way, I hoped to attract persons of like interests, especially girls.  Interest in being a part of the counterculture.  You see, the counterculture women dressed in flowing dresses in glorious colors, exercised the freedom to seek self-gratification.  Men sought the freedom to shun the military and war. In those days all young men had to register for the draft in their hometown.

One day before lunch, near the door to the Lodge, this guy with a brown leather jacket, army boots, and long hair sidled up to me and asked me in a hushed tone, “Do you know where I can buy some pot?”

“No,”  I said.  “But I hope I can find some.”  The person was Larry Felton, destined to become a close friend for the next sixty years.

Cafeteria Hippies

I usually found Larry Felton, a charming guy with leadership skills,  among the hippies at the UM food service where we always shoved a bunch of tables together and feasted as a group of bearded and long-haired men, and equally long-haired women.  Our meetings on weekdays often lasted until the food service personnel ushered us out.  The group was impossible to miss.  At first I was intimidated.  Brenda Fleming told me “the look” was the thing.  People who wouldn’t belong were those who clung to the strict rules of conformity.  The stakes were high.  Straight society had Vietnam to hang over the heads of men, like the sword of Damocles.  

Kim Thompson scooped ice cream for the students at the dining hall.  She said she developed a powerfully muscular arm.  One scoop for most, two if she liked them, three if she loved them.

John Herman

John-John Herman, as Kim Thompson called him, was one of the original cafeteria hippies in 1967. He was a couple years older than the rest of us because he earned money as he drove a truck for a bread factory in North Carolina.  John was an artist. A graphic artist, I mean. He took drawing classes at the University of Montana. Once he even promised he would graduate in 1972. “How about you?” he asked. “Sure,” I replied. Then we shook.  Neither of us graduated in 1972.

There were perhaps a dozen of the cafeteria hippies, a loose-knit group.  Larry Felton said he thought he was invited by Brenda Fleming who noticed the peace symbol pinned to his coat.

Feeling ignored by the straight college freshmen and women, I gravitated toward the hipper, geekier, looser, pot-smoking types who frequented the food service dining room.  Frank Sonnenberg served us food and washed our dishes.  This was the beginning of his profound influence.  Brenda said she remembers him.

I remember seeing Frank at the outdoor anti-war rallies that fall.  He had a charismatic, intense, but friendly look.  When the time was right for demonstrating solidarity, Frank was a leader.  This wasn’t new for him.  He started attending international relations functions in Missoula sponsored by UM political science instructor Barclay Kuhn before Frank got out of high school.

Frank was easy to get to know, easy to talk with.  He was friendly, like you’d expect a rural kid from Chinook to be.  He wasn’t a huge person, physically, in fact it was common knowledge that he’d been ill.  But he was genuinely kind. 

We cafeteria types were not locked into having to ask for dates to get together for university-sanctioned social events.  Like in sororities and fraternities.  Frat boys were not cool.  They reeked of sexism, alcoholism, and underarm deodorant and aftershave cologne.  My friends shunned all that.  We looked and smelled naturally.  Of sweat, of tobacco and incense.  Sometimes–rarely, really–of marijuana.

Larry Felton noted recently that his father’s family lived in Chinook, Montana, and that was his first home, although he was born in Havre, because that’s where the hospital was located.  He moved away within a couple years, but returned often to visit.  Chinook always seemed to him to be a Norman Rockwellian kind of place.

Looking back, I find it remarkable how most of the prominent Missoula hippies hailed from the Montana highline.

Those days were the nascent time of hard rock and blues music.  I know that’s hard to believe now, but it was.

The folk music scene was drawing to a close in 1967.  It had been reviled by the anti-communist John Birch Society that spread propaganda lies like, “buying a Bob Dylan album puts money in the hands of communists; even buys the bullets that kill our soldiers in Vietnam.”

The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan were some of the pioneer musicians prior to 1967, followed closely by the “summer of love” psychedelic San Francisco bands:  The Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix.  I almost forgot Procol Harum, which also started out in 1967.  From the east coast came Velvet Underground.  Frank Zappa came in that first wave.  Creedence Clearwater Revival came in later.  Also about a year later was Cream and a list of newer bands.  Raw energy, message of freedom, anti-war, anti-establishment.

The straights in Missoula, on the other hand, listened to top 40 hits:  A few big stars making music highly processed with violins and horns.  Pabulum.

We didn’t shun all responsibility, although the straights often tried to portray us that way.

Like Brenda said, it often boiled down to hairstyle, to our looks.

We hippies bravely fought the pressure to conform to “straight values.”  Someone yelled at me from a car to “Get a haircut!”  My mother told me to get a haircut.  My high school track coach threatened to pull my beard out with a pair of pliers.  My sister’s adult friend told me in a forceful way that my long hair was unacceptable.  There was a song on the radio with the lyrics”  “…are you a boy or are you a girl?  With your long brown hair you look like a girl?”  Anti-hip songs with messages opposing marijuana, other psychedelic drugs, mocking the anti-war movement.  We had to stand up tall for our values.

That’s what we were about.  Freedom to explore new ideas, to have hip friends, to be members of an underground culture that could fulfill the American dream of self-determination.

Recently, Larry Felton had this to say about the “us and themness” dichotomy of the times….It sheds some serious light on the deep roots of our current partisanship and culture wars, right up to the “Woke Libtards” and “MAGA Deplorables” of today.

I liked to sing folk songs, then Beatle and Bob Dylan songs.  Didn’t everyone sing?  I bought and discarded one cheap guitar after another.

Women had strict curfews at their residence halls.  Men didn’t, so we’d follow the women home, planting ourselves inside the parlor in front of the blaring televisions.  We’d claim to be waiting for specific individuals.  I got kicked out because I insisted on entertaining one of the women by letting her sit on my lap. 

We dressed like clowns because our government was turning us into soldiers, shipping us off to Vietnam to be traumatized or killed.  Or both.  We’d rather get stoned and get thrown out of the women’s dormitory.

Cold, snowy, evenings, we walked down to the University Congregational Church to the downstairs coffee house, The Melting Pot, for a few hours, then we’d be back to the dorm rooms to listen to heavy acid rock:  Rolling Stones, Beatles, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Blue Cheer.  We sat on the edge of beds, toked weed, and smoked regular tobacco cigarettes.

I first saw Jerry Printz in 1967 at the Melting Pot coffeehouse filled with smoking, coffee-drinking hippies and college kids.  He was a member of Einstein Intersection, a rock band that performed a song with the lyric “girl you’re . . . out of sight.”  Printz was the lead singer.  Mike Fiedler was there.  Charles Lubrecht was another and I don’t remember the names of any others, but the group was tight.  Jerry owned his own PA system, a big deal in those days.  He later let me plug my guitar into it when I lived with my brother across the river on Hartman street. Mike Fiedler made fun of my loud playing, telling me he was “equally impressed by my amplifiers.”

I don’t remember when I became close friends with Jerry Printz.  He was a year older than I.  He wasn’t a college student.  We did have lots of friends in common, though, including Fiedler.  Jerry and I argued about Mike.  He said Mike used a ton of drugs and as a result, was crazy.  I said Mike didn’t act crazy at all.  Well, Mike simply rolled his eyes back into his head and murmured, “Jacks and no jacks back,” and “I’ll have what the boys in the backroom will have,” and “No fibbling or bibbling out.”  Our arguments always ended when Jerry asserted that he knew Mike better than I did.  True. Perhaps.

But I was sure Mike spoke the truth:  i.e., no fibbling or bibbling out, even though I later argued that point with my mother who assured me that “of course there is fibbling and bibbling out.”   “No there isn’t!” I insisted. 

Dana Graham was just another pea-coat clad hippie girl in our universe at the University of Montana back in 1968-69.  Once when we guys were hanging around the steps of Brantley Hall, she sang “Danny boy” to me.  Hell, she sang to everyone in those days, not just me.

Because she was a year ahead of us in school, I remember that she once showed a girlfriend and me some work she did when she worked for someone in the botany department.  She would look into a microscope and draw what she saw, then color it with watercolors.  This impressed one of my girlfriends so much she mentioned it to me later.  

We were all becoming freakish hippies in those days.  Our folks mostly paid for school and we took classes and smoked a lot of cigarettes.  

Funny how a person can insinuate herself into the consciousness over time.  Dana was one who gradually came into focus.  There was the time she sang.  There was the time she showed us the drawings colored meticulously with watercolors.  There was the time she tied a scarf around her head and we smuggled her into the dormitory.  I remember we smoked pot with her and the rest of our friends in a dorm room.  

We all smoked pot until a while back when we found it interacted with our heart medications.  Recreational pot is legal where I live.  I think it mimics dementia with its short-term memory loss.  Now, more than fifty years later, none of us use it very often.  I don’t use it at all.

The Hobo by the river

Three of us in Missoula in the middle of fall, 1968, walked down to the Milwaukee Road tracks.  To smoke marijuana?  Maybe, but I doubt that we had any.  I think we were just wandering around in the light snowfall, probably skipping morning classes.  If I remember right, it was Becky Cuffe, Virginia Baker, and me.

The railroad tracks held a fascination for us because in those days hobos traveled through, sometimes setting up camp along the tracks on the south bank of the Clark Fork River.  At most, a few hundred yards north of the University where we were students.

These days the tracks are gone and people run and bike there.  Hoboes are simply “homeless” people these days, without the classier moniker.  

That chilly day, I’m thinking Becky led the way.  In fact, the whole adventure was probably her idea.  Depends on what she had been reading.

The Madison Street Bridge, where the tracks ran under, offered some protection from the snow, but not the cold breeze from Hell Gate Canyon. 

An old man sat by a campfire there.  We headed his way.  Finally, Becky walked up to him.

“Hi,” she said, “do you mind if we visit?”

The man looked up at us.  I doubt if we — two women and one man — looked threatening.  Especially because Becky smiled broadly.  She had a round, freckled face and dark red hair. 

The man said simply, “Okay.”  He had a stubble of whiskers.  He wore denim coveralls and a fleece-lined denim coat.  His hat had earflaps.  He looked like he needed a bath.  He had no luggage.  I figured he was a wino.  Becky took him for more than that.

I wished I had brought my camera, the Argus C-3 I got from my late grandma.

After saying hello, Becky told the man she thought he looked very wise.  He smiled and didn’t disagree.  We were all into Eastern religious stories with holy mendicants.  Wise people and kings who posed as poor wanderers. 

Memories are not clear, but he urged us to visit the university library to seek important secrets within books.  “They have the secrets, but you have to look carefully because they won’t tell you where they are,” he said.  He didn’t tell us more than that.

It started snowing, just a few flakes, so Becky invited him to eat at the student dining facility.  She said she thought she could sneak him in.  “I’ll pretend you’re my dad,” she said. 

He declined her offer.  He sat by his fire as we three students hunkered around it.  Then we stood and returned to the campus.

Oh yes, I don’t remember when he said it, but at one point he got a wild, far-off look, rolling his eyes toward the eastern sky.

He told us that sometimes he could “hear the music.”  He repeated this but did not elaborate.

Elrod Hall 

More about John Herman. He rolled his own cigarettes. He always had to roll just one more when he and Larry Felton were roommates at Elrod Hall. He was paranoid. He was paranoid about being paranoid. He knew how to bargain for a bag of weed, but I remember only the times he declined the purchase because it cost too much, or had too many stems and seeds. 

Looking back, the worst drug experiences I had were with legal drugs:  tobacco cigarettes and alcohol.  Alcohol wouldn’t have been much of a problem, because none of us bought it very often.  We were too young.  But a friend of ours from Billings, a Hispanic youth named Ramon, got caught with a six-pack of beer and was expelled from the university.  I always believed the real motive for his being expelled was racism.

The rest of us smoked marijuana so that the smell reached the resident assistants, and we got no punishment. Gary, a bearded hippie from New York, called our RA a tyrant.  

I got in trouble with my RA for typing late into the night.  I wrote some of my most enlightened pieces at night in those days of youth, of innocence, of freakishness.  

I hung a carpet up on the wall and put the typewriter on a stack of towels to deaden the noise, but the clacking typewriter was too loud.  The following quarter I was moved into a corner room on the first floor of Elrod Hall, over the laundry facility.  That facility proved to be a meeting place when I didn’t return home for Thanksgiving holiday my sophomore year.  There I spent time with the guys from the East Coast, such as Steve Franklin from Philadelphia.  I didn’t wash my clothes often, but during the holidays when the residence hall was empty there wasn’t much else to do.  I don’t remember how I ate, but I did have a sausage or two hanging out my dorm room window.  

Smoking weed and taking LSD made it impossible for me to write my assignments for journalism school, so I applied to change my major to English, despite my utter lack of knowledge about what a degree in English would take, as far as academic work. 

Water

My second year at UM I thought I was a rock and roll star because of a brief stint with a band we named “Water.”  It was Gordon Simard on vocals, me on my electric Gibson hollow body, John Herman on drums, I don’t remember our bass guitarist, but he was our manager and got busted for selling weed to highschool kids.  His lawyer was expensive, so he had to move to Idaho and work in the silver mines of Kellogg to get out of debt. 

“Water” played perhaps three or four gigs before our bass guitarist got busted.  We did one or two Missoula sessions at a roller rink, another in the UM Copper Commons ballroom, and one in Helena at a dance in the Civic Center.  “Water” had a repertoire of three songs:  “Keep on Chooglin,’” by Creedence Clearwater, and “Slow blues.”  The third song was “I ain’t Superstitious,” after a cover by Jeff Beck.  We played these songs for extended sets to satisfy the time requirement to play for a high school shindig.

We had just the one paying gig, the one in Helena.  After expenses for fuel, trailer and equipment rental, each of us musicians got a few dollars, enough to buy a hamburger to tide us over until we returned to Missoula.  We were tired and hungry from lugging the heavy equipment up and down the stairs to the Helena Civic Center.

Now, 50 years later, I spent maybe 40 minutes on the phone with my old pal Duck Lenhart, who gave me credit for wearing a big felt hat and for helping him decide to be a conscientious objector during Vietnam.  I just remember trying to get him to smoke weed the summer of 1967, but he was resistant to the idea.  

First move to Seattle, early spring of 1969

As I said before, by the end of my fall quarter at Missoula, I was ready to quit the university.  That in itself was a thrill because I wrote my final exam in world literature as a personal attack and critique of the professor who taught us.  I let him have it, his sniveling ways, his apologetic demeanor.  I ended up with a B, much to my surprise. 

I was recently devastated when my blonde hippie girlfriend telephoned me at Christmas when I was in Dillon to break up with me.  She said she was engaged to marry her old high school sweetheart.  I thought she loved me!  

The sickening shock turned to intense sadness.  Soon, I took the bus to Missoula, then a train to Seattle to move in with my brother near the University of Washington.  Tom was living in the back of Bill and Mary Reynold’s house.  Bill and Mary let me sleep on their couch in the front room until I could find a place of my own.  They had an ample supply of Lebanese hashish, which I smoked.  They also had a fine stack of R. Crumb comix, which I read.  Also a fine stack of blank paper, on which I drew.  I fixed many peanut butter and honey sandwiches, which I ate.

I tried earning money selling the underground newspaper, the Helix.  I had limited success.  Eventually Larry Felton and several others–Scott Hendryx, Skip Reising, John Herman among them– also quit school and arrived in Seattle.  Bill Yenne and others also came to Seattle for the summer.  A bunch of them rented a huge house on Thomas Street on a hill near Lake Union.

Larry, John, Skip and I got jobs on the MV Theresa Lee,  a king crab processing ship docked in Lake Union getting fixed up for the next season in Alaska.  I refused to cut my hair and beard, so the captain wouldn’t let me go to Alaska with the boat.  

I didn’t stay in Seattle long. I couldn’t earn much money and Tom and I missed Missoula. I talked him into moving back to Montana.  We left early one summer morning in his 1953 Chevy.  We had clothes and some mattresses and blankets.  

Back to Missoula, summer of 1969

Once we crossed from Idaho into Montana, Tom stopped by some ponderosa pine trees.  We hugged the trees and kissed them.  Then we drove on to Missoula.

We drove up and down several Missoula streets.  We stopped at some attractive brick places with “for rent” signs, but nobody would rent to a couple of scroungy-looking types like us.  Tom drove over to Hartman Street to see Peter Koch. 

Peter rented a long, low-slung, brown shingled house, on the edge of Kiwanis Park on the Clark Fork River.

Tom was in front of me, asking Peter if we could stay with him in his back room.  “You are welcome to stay, Tom,” Peter said, and I pushed in right behind Tom into the back room, floor to ceiling with every imaginable esoteric book about Eastern religions and scholarly works by all of the great thinkers of the world.  We were soon sound asleep.  

Peter knew we liked to take mind-expanding drugs, that we enjoyed making music for hours on end, and we enjoyed the summer Missoula weather.  We didn’t worry too much about food to eat or clothes to wear.  If things got bad enough we figured we could find jobs doing something to earn some money.   

I heard Peter say once that so-and-so “owed him a job,” if he ever got short of money.  That was my idea of work.  You did some to get some money.  The rest of the time you made music and art.

Peter’s back room connected to his kitchen by a hallway with access to a bathroom.  The kitchen accommodated one butt at a time, and Peter’s living room, which he had converted to a generous bed. had some chairs around it.  Peter slept on the bed.  The rest of us sat on the edge of the bed and played our guitars.  I’d drum or play blues chords, Tom used to turn his Gibson classical guitar over and drum on the wooden back.  Peter supplied the dope and papers and we toked freely. 

Days passed, Peter, Tom and I went fishing up Gold Creek, then cooked the trout in Peter’s kitchen, serving brown rice along with.  

Michael Lynn Fiedler

I told about Mike Fiedler.  He attended my first birthday party in Missoula in 1950.  We were childhood friends, went to Kalispell, saw a movie or two during our grade school years, but mostly we didn’t see each other often.

I saw Michael play with “Einstein Intersection” a year or so before I went to Seattle.

In the late 60s in Missoula, we had some magical summers with Michael.  I think Mike had the mental illness that makes you shout obscenities at strangers.  Only Mike shouted random things he heard in conversation.  I’m thinking of Tourette’s syndrome, although none of us had a name for the behavior then.  Jerry Printz said Mike was permanently spaced out from taking speed.  I disputed that then, and I still do.

Look!  I’m at Kiwanis park near the Clark Fork River on a June morning in Missoula in 1969.  A figure on a 1950s women’s bicycle is peddling this way, a blue bike with tractor seat and basket on front handlebars.  It’s Michael Fiedler.  He is smiling, rolling his head, clucking.  He has some flowers from someone’s garden. That’s how he appears.

Several times I’ve been tripping along on an idyllic Missoula scene:  green lawns and a creek, a bridge, wildflowers and birds.  An elfin figure wearing a sailors watch cap appears, grabs me by my arms, hugs me.  His smile is huge, his teeth are uneven, one or two missing.  My childhood friend!  Always shaggy long black curly hair and a dense beard.  Looked like a pirate!

He’s wearing sandals, black pants, colorful shirt, colorful scarf.  Does he have any dope?  No, but it’s early yet.  He pulls up and we greet and we hug!  We barge into Peter Koch’s little house, people still asleep in there.  The air is cool.  Hungry?  Peter is the ultimate host.

We put on some rice to cook.  Brown rice, whole grain, unpolished.  Peter spent most of his money on marmalade and expensive coffee from Broadway Market.  You know the place, Cipolato’s grocery.  Peter smoked expensive Balkan Sobranie tobacco or Gauloise cigarettes when he could get them.

Michael could come up with some amazing street drugs to share later in the day.  First we had to navigate the crowd of hippies that were wandering around Peter’s house.  They are Peter’s age, about 5 years older than us.  Probably from Eugene or Seattle.  I thought they were probably bringing in some psychedelic drugs to sell.  Of course I had no money to buy them.

An outspoken woman in a long hippie dress teases Michael.  She is evidently put off by Michael’s tics and vocal outbursts.  She says she understands him, she says she knows why he blurts out “Fuuuuuuuck!!” and rolls his eyes.  She follows him across the yard as he tries to avoid her.  “I’m alright, Frank,” he blurts breathlessly, in a bass tone somewhat higher than a distant jetliner.  

Yet she persistantly teases him.  He finally turns to her and angrily demands she stop.  Mike looks like he could get physical.  She is taken aback, relents.  Yet, Mike does seem to be a bit incapacitated by his Tourette’s, and for some reason, the woman is dissatisfied about its authenticity, his inability to stop the grunts, the tics, the “Jacks and no jacks back!”

Someone said Michael once fell off a bar stool at the Missoula Club.  That episode with Frank Dugan was the source of another tic and repetitive outburst, “I’m alright, Frank!”

Last I heard Mike and some friends went to Texas to establish some sort of commune.  Word from his sister, Debbie Apraku, and from Gary Stiles via Colleen Kane was that Mike died of a heart attack in the wilderness there.  Mike was close friends with many, especially Charles Lubrecht, Swain Wolfe, and too many others for me to list because he lived in Missoula and I’ve lived 40 years in Billings.

Back to Seattle again, later in 1969

I was sweet on Dana Graham for a week or so in Missoula when I still lived in the back of Peter Koch’s house.  Dana and I traveled with three or four others to Seattle in Bill Yenne’s orange Volkswagen bug, she on my lap.  We fell out of love as quickly as we fell in.  Once we got to Seattle she dumped me.  She fell madly in love with a cute, curly-haired fellow who happened to be there.  I was sad for, like, a day.  Sadness is great for singing blues and I remember rocking it at Larry Felton’s place in Seattle.

I ran into Frank Sonnenberg again on a street in Seattle, and he said we could crash at a friend’s house across the bridge from the university.  I don’t remember who the generous soul was, but his floor was large enough to accommodate me for a few days.  Frank got me a job selling circus tickets by phone for a few bucks an hour.  Frank knew how to survive.

Frank was politically active in the Seattle scene, so I went with him to several protests.  

He and I were walking across town one sunny day and he stopped.  “Isn’t that mary jane?”  Frank pointed at a spindly plant growing from a flower bed.

“Sure enough!” I said, snatching it up.  “Let’s smoke it!”  It wasn’t fully mature, but it had some fine leaves.  We were rewarded with a buzz.

It wasn’t bad weed at all.  I still smoked tobacco in those days and I always had some papers and matches handy.  As Frank and I made our way to “hippie hill” at the University of Washington, he told me that he used to broadcast marijuana seeds in the vacant lots around Missoula.  That’s when I first learned he knew about agriculture.

Frank was the kind of friend you could have a conversation with that might last five or ten years, picking up the thread the next time one of you was in town.  His generosity in planting the seeds went right along with his generous personality.  Frank and I got separated at an anti-war protest amid clouds of teargas and I didn’t see him again until years later.   

However, I heard about Frank’s whereabouts because he and some others from his hometown of Chinook formed a psychedelic band, called “The Golden Floaters.”  I think they operated on an astral plane that included more than guitars and drums.  

A couple of my girl friends crashed at the home of the Floaters.  In talking to them I later learned that Frank was ill, and had to poop out of colostomy.  

When I was in Missoula I visited Dave Thomas and some of the Floaters.  That’s when I learned a little about poetry, about alchemy.  About the Cosmos of the Floaters.

I forgot to mention the “Golden Floaters” was a term descriptive of the turds of those who followed the zen way of macrobiotics. 

Back in Missoula again, summer of 1969.

I rode a freight by myself back to Missoula.  By then Tom had moved from Peter’s house to a tiny house across the road.  Tom let me sleep in his living room on a mattress.  I was at a loss.  My life had no direction.

Once when I asked Peter Koch to share some of life’s secrets with me he said “the more places you’ve been, the better off you are.”  Did I think he was trying to get me to leave?  Didn’t matter if he was.  I knew I needed to get moving.

I resolved to seek my fortune.

Here’s some background:  My old high school friend, Duck, had a stack of Marvel comics more than fourteen inches high, and this wasn’t counting the comic book-size plywood they rested on.  This stack stood beside his pallet in the basement apartment that was on the far west side of Missoula. 

Less than two years later Duck would abandon his Marvels in the farming community of Richfield, Idaho, where he and the three members of a hippie blues band lived in an abandoned hotel in the tiny Idaho town.  They hoped to live in psychedelic freedom to make music.

I hoped to visit them.  

Tim Rogers and I were at Tom’s Hartman Street house in Missoula when we decided to head to Idaho to get jobs in the silver mines.  I suggested we “fortify up” with a swig of wine.  We did, and we hitched in the rain to Wallace Idaho, where we asked the local police to let us sleep in a jail cell for the night.

We slept on cots in jail. I remember Tim and I discussed military service.  Tim said he wasn’t opposed to serving and that he thought I acted like I was too good for it.  I disagreed, but we fell asleep. In the morning we each got a sack lunch from the jailer. 

We inquired at a couple of silver mines in Wallace.  You had to join the union and have proper safety equipment, like boots and eyewear.  We didn’t have any money to get those.  Discouraged, we caught rides south through Idaho the next day with a guy in a small truck.

Tim and I spent the next night in a city park in Boise, roughly across the street from the Rescue Mission.  We arrived too late to check in for a bed, so we unrolled our bags under some bushes.  The next day we panhandled for breakfast, faking a British accent.  Hell anything would have brought results better than my plain Montana way of speaking.  Tim said buckwheat pancakes filled you up better, but you had to have at least a couple dollars for breakfast.  Didn’t take long when we were desperate and faking an accent.

The rain stopped and I still had one tab of LSD and a small amount of Prince Albert tobacco, so we hitched out of town.  I took the acid.  Didn’t occur to me that we were not likely to find a ride to the remote village of Richfield, a town of about 400, but a car dropped Tim and me close enough to see the water tower and grain elevator in the distance, across the smooth-looking grassy lava bed.  The roadmap called it the “great Idaho lava bed.”  It didn’t seem so close once we tried walking across, cutting the distance to less than twenty miles.  The buildings looked near enough to almost touch them.  It was afternoon and the weather was warm.

Turns out we just needed to walk down into a ravine and up the other side in order to once again see the water tower and grain elevator of Richfield.  I marveled at how like the ocean during  a storm the land seemed, undulating where you couldn’t see anything but the side of the next swell until you crested the top.  We struggled this way for several hours before I began to fatigue, the distant water tower and grain elevator not seeming to get any closer.

We stopped for a smoke.  We had used up all of the good tobacco and now smoked the Prince Albert, chunks of coarse tobacco, like sawdust, poking holes in the Zigzag papers.  I suggested that we were on a fool’s errand.  Twenty miles wasn’t an abstraction anymore.  More like an impossibility.  I was wearing some spaced-out hippie boots that were blistering a hole in my ankle where the leather buckled with each step on the rocky lava surface.

Years later, in studying human anatomy, I would see the resemblance between the lining of the small bowel, with its several degrees of folding of villi and microvilli, to the surface of the great Idaho lava bed with its undulations.  Not more than a hands-breadth underfoot, but developing to degrees of undulations as large as houses.  This freaked me out.

Scared, I ran five or six hundred meters to a road that ran parallel to our trek toward Richfield, a name that now inspired horror.  I was especially horrified by the extreme visage of two women in cars that flashed past headed back toward Boise.  In my drug-induced state I clearly saw they were zombies with open faces and mouths contorted into the grins of death.  The next car that came along I flapped my arms like a great bird to flag it down.

The car stopped the way one does when one flags it down.  I was too terrified to speak, out of my mind on acid, but Tim calmly told the woman that I had made a mistake.  She was headed away from Richfield, our destination.  Tim and I turned back toward Boise, catching a ride with another.

Richfield turned into the impossible destination in a comic, drawn with a rapidograph pen.

You should know that hippies were not in fashion in 1968. In fact, one had to stick together with others for safety and for having fun!  I have a photo of Duck, Steve Star and Becky.  You know how it is fashionable these days to talk of hippies with “hippie names” like “Flower Girl” or the like?  That’s a lot of bullshit.

Here’s what the real names were.  There was Duck.  There was Giant, Little John, John-John, Becky, Virginia, Bin, Larry, Steve Star, Captain Bummer, Peter,  Hennessey.  I could go on and on.  

Tim and I went our separate ways when we returned to Boise.  I decided I’d flee the draft by going to Canada.  I don’t remember where Tim was headed.  I thought my best bet would be to go to the University of Oregon, then join those who wanted to head north.

Once in Eugene I found the hippie area, where I asked around for information about Canada.  I made a discovery.  I didn’t like the people who were headed north.  I didn’t want to associate myself with them.  Instead I hitched to Seattle.

Alaska via the Alcan Highway

At the University of Washington I found a notice on a bulletin board:  “Going to Alaska.  Riders needed to help pay for gas.”  

I phoned my cousin Blaine Ackley in Seattle.  He said he would lend me $10.  Afterward,  I phoned the number on the notice.  I asked the fellow if $10 was enough to pay for gas?  He said it was, so I met up with him and his Volkswagen van. I had my rucksack and sleeping bag and $10.

That’s how I went north to work in Fairbanks, Alaska, for a carnival.  I thought I was lucky to get a job with the Golden Wheel Amusements.  Huh.  More like greasy wheel amusements.  The pay was $1.25/hour, so I and this other kid had to move heavy steel carnival ride parts from the back of a truck three hours to earn enough money to buy a sandwich from a concession.  Steel parts, painted silver, caked with lots of old grease.  The owner of the carnival company was from the deep south, and so were his permanent staff.  The ones I met were vocally racist.  They talked about murdering blacks if any tried to break into the carnival compound at night.  As far as I know, none did, but the carnival people bragged about carrying weapons.

The other young kid and I did unskilled labor, like I said, lugging steel carnival ride parts from the backs of trailers, then helping set up the rides for the midway.  I don’t remember the kid’s name, but he had braces on his teeth and was from California.  We both worked for a 5-foot skinny southern guy, an ex-Marine, named Benny.  In Fairbanks during July, the sky never quite goes dark, so we worked until Benny was too tired to stay awake.  Once there was a rainstorm and Benny and the kid and I sat in the cab of the truck to wait for it to quit.  We had been working a couple days without sleep, so Benny nodded off.  You can bet the two of us quietly caught some sleep too.

I had a rucksack with two pairs of underpants, an extra pair of jeans and a few shirts.  That’s when I discovered you didn’t have to launder your clothes to feel cleaner.  You wore a set until you couldn’t stand them, then changed into the other clothes that were once too filthy to wear, but now seemed a whole lot better than the ones you had on.  I did that day after day, sleeping in the cab of another carnival semi, washing up in a strangely deluxe public men’s room.  We both wore raggedy greasy coveralls we found in a pile in the back of one of the semi trailers. Like the clothes in my rucksack, it seemed there was always one set cleaner than the rest.

The California kid and I quit the carnival after about a week.  I had maybe $50 when we hitched rides south to Anchorage with some GIs from a nearby base.  I remember getting an earful of curses from the carnival owner when he paid us.  The guy had gotten into a dispute with the owner of the amusement park so he was packing up the rides and concessions and leaving early.  We wanted no part of that heavy work.  I suppose if they had offered to clean our filthy clothes. . . .

In Anchorage I smoked some pot with my cousin Mike, hitched south to Palmer, where I worked a couple days on a dairy farm, then returned to Anchorage to buy a ticket to Seattle.

I flew back to Seattle, stayed a night with Larry Felton.  I remember he asked about everyone in Missoula, including Penny.  I said I didn’t know her very well.  

Then I rode a freight to Missoula, checked in with my friends Dana, Penny, Peter, and Tom.  I found John Herman living across the street from the university in an apartment where Food for Thought now operates a coffee shop.

Missoula in the late summer and fall of 1969

While I was in Alaska my friend Mike Fiedler got in trouble for swimming in the Rattlesnake Creek.  The judge ordered him to Warm Springs State Hospital for a mental evaluation.  Mike famously said, “Thanks, Judge.”

I tried some LSD at Tom’s the night before we were to take Mike to Warm Springs.

It made me nauseated.  I remember Tom gave me a couple aspirin tablets to help my symptoms.  I said I hoped the acid would make me crazy so I could go to Warm Springs and be with Mike.  Penny, whom I barely knew then, suggested that maybe I could homestead.  I think I nodded my head.

Railroad Worker

When I got offered the job on the Northern Pacific railroad my friend John Herman had just returned to Missoula from Seattle with wages he earned on the MV Theresa Lee when he made a trip to Alaska. Our other friends, like Larry Felton and Skip Reising, had shipped out to Alaska for the season. Larry was a wiper, a union designation for a helper in the engine room.  Skip was a career union laborer.

In the late summer of 1969 a bunch of us got jobs on a railroad steel gang.  Jerry Printz was one of the more experienced workers on the crew that included John Herman and me.  John and I were the youngest guys, and we got the worst jobs, setting spikes for a pneumatic hammer operator.  We’d take a spike and tap it into the railroad tie with a 2 pound hammer. I forget what Jerry’s job was, but we always had time to socialize after the day’s work.  

Getting a job on the railroad was almost too good to be true! After filling out the necessary Northern Pacific paperwork, John and I set out on a Thursday afternoon to catch up with the railroad section crew about 80 miles up the river, in the Little Blackfoot Valley, at Avon. The panel truck quit running numerous times, but we got it going again.

We got to Avon about 10 hours later, broke. I found my brother Tom and his friends who also had no money for us. 

Like I said, Tom showed us our outfit car that looked like a freight car, only it had windows and a floor for workers like us to live in. It had a couple of beds without mattresses, just springs. Luckily John and I had sleeping bags. We had no food. There was a store in Avon, but it was closed after 6. Tom gave us some breakfast cereal, but he had no milk. Did I mention that we had no money? 

John Herman and I were pretty hungry by Friday evening, when one of Tom’s friends gave us a ride back to Missoula. When John got his panel truck back to Missoula a week later he parked it in a residential neighborhood, removed the license plates, and we walked away from it.

At work we lived in the “outfit cars,” old wooden railroad boxcars with windows.  They had a couple of little beds at one end and a table and coal stove and icebox at the other end.  Our car had beds for us with springs and no mattresses. 

All the outfit cars, coal car, ice car, and equipment cars were on a siding.  We walked to the coal and ice cars and fetched fuel for our stove and ice for the icebox.  This all seems so quaint now, but it wasn’t then.  Sometimes we made music in the evening.  Guitar, blues harp, drumming.

The train’s outfit cars were on a siding in Arlee when Jerry and I walked to a bar and bought some Thunderbird wine.  I remember buying it, well, someone bought it for us, probably Jerry, but I sure don’t remember drinking it.  I don’t think any of us drank alcohol much in those days.  We would have preferred to smoke weed, but it was kind of hard to get.  I think it was more of trying to fit into what I thought the image of a railroad gandy dancer was.  Gritty, creosote-smelling, wine guzzling.  I wanted to wear stinky coveralls and live the part, without actually drinking the T-bird wine. 

If I remember right, Jerry and his roommate — maybe it was my brother Tom — lived in a really nice outfit car, with a rug on the floor and mattresses on the beds, and a kerosene lamp or two for light.  John Herman and I had no lamps, no rug, no mattresses.  We had sleeping bags for our bare springs beds.  Also a nice hot coal fire in the stove.  We’d started the fire in the stove with kindling and kerosene, then added coal.  Amazing how a coal stove can make life seem better and brighter.

 In those days, before railroads were able to grind worn rails with a special machine the size of a diesel train engine, worn rails had to be removed and replaced by a group of men under the supervision of a very tough boss. Our boss’s name was Jim Wiedehoe. My brother called him “the Weeda.” Other laborers worked on “tie gangs,” but not us.

We steel gang folks called ourselves Gandy dancers, a traditional name. There were two kinds of workers on our crew. Spoiled white liberal arts major college students like John Herman, my brother and 5 or 6 friends, and me; and old grimy railroad guys, whom we treated with much deference. We laborers swung spike mauls and used other hand tools. The old guys operated power tools and drove the machines.

Here’s where the traditional term “Gandy dancer” came from, we were told. Our hand tools, like spike mauls, heel claws, long wrenches and a 3- or 4-foot bar with numerous notches. (This last looked like a six-foot glass cutter that could engage the side of a rail numerous ways to lever it over, rolling it.) We were told that the tools had been originally made by the Gandy Tool Company of Chicago.

One time a bunch of us, including Jerry, loaded Printz’ PA system into my brother Tom’s 1953 Chevy and went to Peter Koch’s relative’s cabin at Seeley Lake to noodle out some music.  Jerry said he admired Jerry Lee Lewis.   We all admired Jerry Printz, but he was always in pain.  I mean emotional anguish.  He hurt from his heart because a girlfriend dumped him.  Yet he always had a good sense of humor, a ready smile.  He was a true outdoorsman, he had experience in the Montana wilderness way before many people ever went there.  He knew how to live in a mummy bag before you could even find a mummy bag in a store.

Jerry loved to camp and he knew how to do it with style.  I remember another trip when we stopped in Bonner at a store to buy some fishing lures and pickled peppers.  Jerry called the peppers, simply, “pickles.”  Tom and I rented a tent and four or six of us hiked about a half mile in the rain to a little lake in the Seeley Swan valley.  Jerry caught some cutthroat trout right away.  He showed me the fish so I could know about that kind of trout.  I remember he opened the fish’s gut to see what it had been eating.  I was wide-eyed.

Whenever I saw Jerry I’d ask him how he was doing.  His answer was “the best I can.  The more you do, the more you do.”  Not earthshaking, but true.  Jerry spoke truth.

Penny Lou Meakins 

The first time I saw Penny Meakins she was with Dana Graham, entering Peter Koch’s tiny house in Missoula, on the edge of Kiwanis Park near the river. 

Penny was a beautiful woman with straight long black hair walking into Peter Koch’s house through the kitchen. Both she and Dana were obviously hip 20-year-olds. Somehow I remember they were in town from Billings or maybe Great Falls. Tom was drumming on the back of his Gibson classical guitar. I was sitting on Peter’s bed jamming on an old arch top I got from Bill Reynolds in Seattle. Peter was playing guitar, chanting. Nowadays, that would be called rapping.

Penny said, “Sounds like some good music in here!” or perhaps words to that effect. Made me feel glad they had strolled in. She soon rolled me a cigarette from a Zig Zag and some sort of tobacco that came in a round tin, maybe Balkan Sobranie. I was pretty full of myself. We did sound good. It was blues. We played into the night.

Life was looking good because my brother Tom and I had recently gotten jobs with the Northern Pacific railroad on a steel gang. Our friend Peter was happy because we were moving out of his tiny house where Tom and I had been staying for a month or more.

Jerry Printz was happy because we were going to be working with him. David Pevear and his wife were happy because they could pay rent with his decent paycheck. They had a VW camper van and would soon be living in a place of their own.

Everyone crashed at Peter’s house that night. At least I think they did. Tom and I had been living in the back bedroom of Peter’s house, a room completely lined with books, floor to ceiling. 

One small section of wall had a map of Paris where Peter lived when he was 20 and he had a letter of credit from a wealthy relative that allowed him to live freely in those days. Dana slept back there with us, but I don’t know where anyone else stayed. We went horseback riding the next day after someone fixed us some eggs for breakfast.

We went in David and his wife’s camper van. On the way through Missoula to Mount Jumbo, where we could rent horses, I remember riding in the back of the VW van with Penny.  That was when she and I looked into each others’ eyes. I thought something special was happening, but I didn’t know for sure. 

After several of us guys spent a week working for the Northern Pacific, Tom and his girlfriend rented a house on Missoula’s north side, near the roundhouse. They invited Penny and me to stay there too. Actually, we had no other place to go.

By then we were for all intents and purposes, an item.

My problem was that I was so afraid of going to Vietnam that thoughts of it kept me awake at night. I knew that the stones in the railroad track bed were somehow speaking to me about death. I was terrified.  I remarked on it.

I was proud to walk around downtown Missoula with Penny.  We visited the Double Front Cafe. We visited lots of soup kitchens on Higgins Avenue. Once this guy in a greasy apron responded to my request for “a light” by grabbing this huge foot-tall cigarette lighter and ceremoniously flicking it for me. He had only one thing on his menu, a soup.  Penny and I had soup.

Jerry, David, John, Tom and I were all proud railroad men, earning good money. I don’t know how much. I used to just hand the whole bundle of cash to Penny and ask her to pay the bills and buy groceries. Made me glad. For my part, I made a collection of oddball railroad spikes: some had 2 points, some 2 heads. Like that.  Penny stayed in this house on the northside with Pig, the dog, and Jessicahan, the cat.

I was damned happy!  The summer was turning to fall, and we had good friends. 

Ultimately I voiced the unthinkable: I needed to join the military service to face my greatest fear. I remember Penny reacted by saying she felt lost and alone. I believed that I likely would not return, so I needed to make myself as unsavory as possible. I acted crudely without saying anything mean to anyone else.

Made me crazy.  I specifically said our relationship was through, though it broke both of our hearts.

Some of my friends begged me not to join, making promises of hippie communes.  Peter Koch tried to scare me, telling me I’d have to crawl on the ground while someone held a machine gun to my butt.  He said I’d be told what to do.  How to wipe my glasses.

My sister applauded my decision, as did Captain Bummer.  “My uncle liked the Marine Corps,” he said.  “He stayed for six years.”

I know I visited Larry Felton in Seattle about this time, but I can’t remember exactly how things went.  Larry had a cheap apartment that I stayed at, and I cut my hair short with a kind of razor comb he had.  One reason it’s hard to keep track is that it took just a day to get from Missoula to Seattle, and another day to get back by hopping freight trains.

I felt strangely liberated.  Nothing in the great books we read in Henry Bugbee’s course, “Oriental Thought” prohibited my joining the Marines, certainly not the Bhagavad Gita. Peter said I was turning into a religious nut.

I consulted the I Ching.  “First the oblation, then the sacrifice,” was the cryptic answer.  Despite my desire to run away to Canada, I knew my fear of the Vietnam war was too powerful.  I wanted to change my mind, but I had experienced waffling on such decisions before and I knew what hell that was.

Peter told me that if I went to Vietnam and killed little brown people not to come back!