Ellen Baumler's Blog, page 33

Kirby Grant

Here’s a bit of Montana trivia. Kirby Grant Hoon Jr., who used the stage name Kirby Grant, starred in the 1950s television series Sky King. Remember that? He was born in Butte in 1911 and grew up in Helena where his father, Kirby Grant Hoon Sr., was postmaster. Kirby Jr. was a 1929 graduate of Helena High School. In the series, he played wealthy Arizona rancher Schuyler King, nicknamed “Sky,” who fought bad guys and rescued people with his airplane. His niece Penny, who lived with him on the...

Friday Photo: Grass Dance

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, ST 001.308N. A. Forsyth called this photo "The Grass Dance of the Blackfeet." He probably snapped it between 1900 and 1911.

Dorothy’s Rooms Part 2

The demise of Dorothy’s business partly came about because of her civic conscience. Downtown Helena was seedy and deteriorating, and Dorothy hoped to set a good example. In the fall of 1972, she received a $500 federal Urban Renewal grant to refurbish her building. Aspiring politicians saw publicity about Dorothy’s property as detrimental to Helena’s reputation. An undercover officer visited Dorothy’s Rooms. He maintained that she sold him a drink without a liquor license. He then paid twenty...

Dorothy’s Rooms Part 1

Prohibition and World War I brought reforms, and Helena, along with two hundred other American cities, closed its old red-light district in 1917. The women re-emerged in other locations billed as “furnished rooms.” Such places never mentioned exactly what was “furnished.” Madams Ida Levy, Pearl Maxwell, and a few others ran businesses above the Boston Block and the St. Louis Block on South Last Chance Gulch.

Ida Levy. Photo courtesy Susan Bazaar.By 1927, Ida Levy operated her “rooms” upstairs...

Friday Photo: Chuck Wagon

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 981-256Rodrick "Butch" Munroe prepares to feed the cowboys on the LU Bar cattle roundup in eastern Montana in August 1904. The man on the right is LU foreman Ben Fleming. L. A. Huffman snapped the photo.

Early Aviation in Montana

Eugene Ely and Cromwell Dixon celebrated aviation firsts in Montana in 1911, and ironically, both young pilots met tragic ends soon after. Twenty-five-year-old Ely was already famous as the first pilot to take off and land on a naval ship. The well-known aviator was also the first to fly an airplane in Missoula. On June 28, 1911, he took off and landed at the baseball field at Fort Missoula. He made three successful flights, the third with his mechanic as a passenger. It was the first dual fl...

St. Mary's Mission Historic District

Jesuit priests and lay brothers founded St. Mary’s Mission—the first mission in the Northwest—in 1841. The Jesuits closed the mission in 1850, returning in 1866. For the next quarter century, they helped the Salish adapt from hunting to farming as the buffalo disappeared. The priests supported and advocated for the Salish people and provided medical services and spiritual guidance to both Indians and whites. When the U.S. government forced the impoverished Salish to leave their beloved Bitter...

Friday Photo: First Elected Women

On this day in 1919, Montana became the thirteenth state to approve the Nineteenth Amendment.

Not all women favored suffrage. Those against it, called “Antis,” argued that no woman could possibly find time for politics without neglecting her family. Harriet Sanders, wife of pioneer attorney and politician Wilbur Fisk Sanders, countered the opposition, saying that suffrage made women better mothers. Better mothers kept better homes, and their children were better educated. Better homes and...

Montana State Prison’s Most Unusual Inmate

Paul Eitner was perhaps the Montana State Prison’s most colorful character. He was a German immigrant who worked as a porter at a Miles City saloon and lived in a local boarding house. One evening in January 1918, Eitner picked up his .38 revolver, strode down the hall and fired three times at a fellow lodger. The man died three days later. Eitner’s motive was never clear. At the last moment in court, he changed his plea from self-defense to guilty, hoping for leniency. The judge was not symp...

Thomas Dimsdale’s School

Health was among the many reasons that people came west to the booming gold camps. They believed that the high mountain climate could cure tuberculosis, but they did not realize that primitive living conditions and brutal winters could neutralize healthful benefits. Thomas Dimsdale was one of those pioneers afflicted with tuberculosis who came west for the mountain climate. He opened a private school in the winter of 1863-1864. Students paid two dollars a week to attend classes in this tiny c...