A few months ago, while in the hospital recovering from a serious motorcycle accident, Rick Gale remembers his doctor asking him those standard medical questions:
Do you have any allergies? Are you taking any medications? Do you smoke?
It was that last question that almost cracked Gale up. He replied, “You don’t know what I do for a living, do you?”
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In the Chronicle’s police reports on Sept. 9, the incident read like this:
“A 17-year-old boy needed medical help after someone caught him stealing from vehicles.”
That someone was Eddie Steinhauer, and the police report as printed doesn’t hold a candle to Steinhauer’s account of what happened on Story Street that night.
At about 9 a.m. most days, Sharon Harvey unlocks an uninteresting wooden door in an alley downtown, climbs down a steep and wobbly metal staircase and starts her day as the last employee of the Allied Manufacturing Company.
AMC was founded in the 1950s by Bozeman’s notoriously secretive businessman William J. Sullivan. The factory makes two products, both invented by Sullivan: a jeweler’s solder called Tix and Crazy Ducks, a magnetized novelty that has been sold by the millions since 1956.
Thirty-five years ago, no one could have known that the order of birth of a pair of identical twin boys in Minnesota would lead to an almost poetic, mountain-climbing themed coincidence.
Long-time third-grade teachers Lynn Johnson, Jan Savko and Diane Thomas all retired at the end of the 2009-2010 school year, closing the textbook on 113 years of combined Belgrade teaching experience.
It was the winter of 1950. Earl Vining had only been in Korea for a few months, and already he’d been wounded twice.
“When they sent me back again, I knew I was going to get killed,” Vining, now 78, said.
Then, one day, a lieutenant popped his head into the hospital tent and asked the question that Vining credits with saving his life:
“Does anybody know how to run a bulldozer?”
I just got back from an interview for my next Backroads story, due out Monday. This will be the third Backroads in a row to profile a local veteran — the series is a lead-in to Memorial Day at the end of the month.
I interviewed Earl Vining, a 78-year-old veteran of both Korea and Vietnam. Earl is a talker, and reporters love talkers. The problem, though, is that you wind up with more material than you can possibly fit into the column inches allotted to your story.
I guess that’s why the journalism gods created blogs.
Anyway, here’s a story that Earl told me during our interview today.
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For my latest Backroads article, I visited for about an hour with World War II veteran submariner Richard Clower at the retirement community where he lives in Bozeman.
Depth charges, death and good friends: World War II veteran Richard Clower remembers his time aboard the submarine USS Seahorse.
The two Montana State University English professors see strong ties between Twitter and some of the best poetry of the past century.