2 / FEBRUARY 2022 PRIME
Bozeman’s Charlie Soha had a great life. By Karen E. Davis - PRIME EDITOR Editor’s note: Bozeman resident Charlie Soha died in April 2021, just after giving this interview. We believe his life story and memories of notable Montanans of the 20th century should not die with him, so we share them here.
I
n his 90 years, he racked up an impressive list of firsts, lasts, eccentric personal trivia and, well, just plain historic tidbits. The historic trivia that usually gets the most interest goes back to what his mother Martha was doing circa 1916 in Great Falls. Your first trivia clue comes when you walk into Soha’s Bozeman home north of Sypes Canyon: dozens and dozens of Charlie Russell prints cover every inch of the home, from “Bronc To Breakfast” to “Laugh Kills Lonesome.” As a Great Falls high-schooler, his mom lived next door to an artist named Charles Marion Russell, and his wife Nancy. Yeah, THAT Charlie and Nancy Russell. That proximity segued into a job for Martha as the Russells’ housekeeper, typist, babysitter and secretary. Charlie Russell Soha is named after the artist and neighbor, who was mightily beloved by his mom. He was born four years after Russell died in 1926. He has no first-hand memories of the famous pair but carries a plethora of his mother’s stories about the couple. This chapter started in North Dakota with the death of his grandfather. His widowed grandmother, Mary Gabrielson, managed a railroad hotel in Kenmore, N.D., for $30 a month. Around 1910, she came to Great Falls with 15 cents in her pocket and his 7-year-old mother and her baby sister Elise. “I think my grandmother thought that with the new smelter in Great Falls, there
might be more opportunities for them,” Soha explained. His German grandmother spoke no English and would clean hotel rooms for $2 a day. As fate would have it, she moved to a house on the 1300 block of 4th Avenue North in Great Falls, and that Fate made her neighbors of Charlie and Nancy Russell. The current C.M. Russell Museum now sits on the site of the family’s former home. In 1923, Martha and her sister Elise moved to Los Angeles to work for five years during the Depression. Earliershe met Charlie’s father while working in a bank in Belt, Mont. They married and moved to the Pacific Northwest, first to Tacoma where Charlie was born in 1930, and then to Seattle prior to WWII. That placed him in line for his next gem of trivia: He went to high school with Bill Gates’ mother, Mary Maxwell. “She was a senior, Class of 1946, Roosevelt High, and had the lead in the school musical,” he remembered. “My chorus partner in the musical was Donna Jean Modahl.” (More about her later). Soha reminisced that he wasn’t much of a student and might not have graduated with the Class of 1948 but for a last minute, make-work “work study” gig as the school’s switchboard operator. “I set no academic records,’ he laughed. “I skimmed by on my smile and personality.” His first job? As a 9-year-old caddy at Seattle’s Montlake Golf Course. At the age of 12 he worked at the local A&P grocery and was a member of the clerks’ union by 13, during WWII. He also remembers hitchhiking to Montana when he was 16 and by 17 working as a dishwasher at the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone.
“Bronc to Breakfast”
Soha then attended Montana Western at Dillon for an undergraduate degree in education. Everywhere he went he seemed to fall into little pieces of Montana history. His first view of Dillon happened when a driver picked him up hitchhiking to school in Dillon and took him to the Andrus Hotel. It had opened in 1918 as “the finest hotel in Montana,” and Soha remarked that he felt he’d stepped back in time to a scene from a John Wayne movie. “A hotel full of rich ranchers playing poker in the middle of the day, 10 gallon hats. I couldn’t even guess how much money was in that room.” he remembered. Being in Dillon set the stage for his next piece of historical trivia: Before his junior year at Montana Western in 1951, he taught at the oneroom school at Roy’s Junction, just a dot on a map near Winifred and literally the junction of the railroad tracks. That put him 25 miles from Lewistown and pretty close to the middle of nowhere. Six kids from two ranch families and five grades. Due to the harsh central Montana weather, the Roy Junction school year ran just from Easter to Thanksgiving. All that for $250 a month, and an extra $30 to dig two latrine holes. His place in history? Soha believes that at 90, he is the oldest surviving teacher of
a Montana one-room schoolhouse – one that also had no electricity or running water. (He returned to Western to earn his undergrad degree in two more years, and in 1959 earned a graduate degree from Montana State College in Bozeman). Roy’s Junction gave him another good story about the time he tried to drive across a shallow spot in the river, got stuck, didn’t immediately get his car out of the shallows -- and it froze over and he had to leave it until spring. Soha also taught in the Crow Creek area near Toston, near where actress Myrna Loy’s family, the Williams, ranched in Radersburg. That job also meant 12hour days, including driving the school bus. Myrna Loy isn’t the only famous actor from Montana whose life crossed paths with Soha. At one time, Soha lived a block south of Babcock in the same Bozeman house where Gary Cooper lived in the 1920s, when he attended Gallatin County High School. Cooper’s father Charles was a Montana Supreme Court Justice who ranched in the Wolf Creek area. (The story repeated ad infinitum in Helena legal circles was that Justice Charles Cooper could hardly be bothered to take the train from his Seven-Bar-Nine Ranch outside of Craig into Helena except to pick up his monthly paycheck.)
