Missoula Magazine Fall 2011

summer fall 2011

25 and counting Celebrating Saturdays at Washington-Grizzly Stadium

strokes to victory

feels like home

local coach makes a splash

a look into the UM president's home

zemke's wolfpack

marchi ranch

world war II pilot's story

beef at its finest in western montana missoula magazine

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missoula magazine

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letter from the editor

L

azuli buntings are gaudy little birds, cupped easily in the palm of your hand. Erick Greene introduces them to newcomers as “bluebirds, shrunk in the wash.”

I met both – Greene and the buntings he was studying – on the slopes of Mount Jumbo in June of 1994. I was wowed.

Crouched behind a serviceberry bush a quarter-way up the slope, Greene explained why he was listening to the warbles, buzzes and beeps of a particularly brilliant male bunting. “It is only recently that wildlife biologists began to recognize animals as individuals,” he said.

Already, he knew this about lazuli buntings. Each of these tiny songbirds is a very distinct individual. In fact, he said, each male’s song is an “acoustic fingerprint.” Play me a song and I can tell you exactly which bird made the music.

So, all these years later, I was intrigued when Joe Nickell pitched a story about Erick Greene’s research. How had the Missoulian’s arts reporter crossed paths with one of the University of Montana’s world-renowned ornithologists?

And then came the story: Turns out, those little shrunken bluebirds learn and create their music in precisely the same way jazz musicians make their music.

In Greene’s words: “Jazz is about some old guy playing a tune, a young guy comes along and learns the riffs but then does it his own way. That’s exactly how these birds are learning their songs. They’re listening to what’s out there, imitating what they hear, and then putting those riffs together in uniquely individual ways.”

This fall edition of Missoula magazine is filled with stories of wonders, both natural and manmade. Reporter Nick Lockridge takes us back 25 years to the first afternoon of football in Washington-Grizzly Stadium. (Could a quarter-century really have gone by so quickly?) Reporter Betsy Cohen and photographer Linda Thompson reminisce about their six years on duty as the Missoulian newsroom’s Sunday “crew,” on the occasion of Linda leaving our midst for a new and faraway adventure in Sweden.

And from Bill Speltz comes the story of Olympic gold medalist David Berkoff, now coach of a Missoula Aquatic Club team and a prominent local attorney. He could coach swimming almost anywhere; same with his lawyering. But he chooses Missoula. Without hesitation. “Every time I fly home to Missoula, I feel like I’m going to the best place in the world,” he says.

Lately, I’ve been reminded of that quote from Berkoff – as friends and relatives came home for summertime visits (and wished they didn’t have to leave), as UM students returned for fall classes (so obviously filled with joy as they floated downriver on tubes or danced on downtown streets), as coworkers left on vacations and returned – happy for the time away and the adventures of other places, but even happier to have such a place to call home.

To come home to.

Wrap yourself in this season of homecoming and glowing afternoons, store up the warmth for winter’s coldest days. We’ll be back on the first day of December with another edition of Missoula magazine, and more stories to tell.

bookmark it!

Go online to Missoulian.com all fall for:

grizzly football!

Follow Missoulian sports reporter Fritz Neighbor’s live commentary from Grizzly football games at Twitter.com/Missoulian. In between, check out his blog at grizblitz.com.

entertainment!

Joe Nickell knows all about art openings, live music, festivals and theater happenings in the Garden City. Keep up on all the fun!

Check out his blog, NickellBag.com.

microbrews!

Western Montana is home to an evergrowing number of craft breweries. Matt Pritchard will keep you informed about the new fall flavors being tapped and where the latest brewery is opening at GrizzlyGrowler.com.

high school sports!

Follow your favorite teams, cheer on your favorite teenager and celebrate school champions with Missoulian sports reporter Nick Lockridge. You’ll find his posts at prepcentral.com.

city hall!

There’s never a dull moment when it comes to Missoula City Council, proposed building projects and town politics. Keila Szpaller will keep you informed on her blog, missoularedtape.com.

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missoula magazine

missoula magazine

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missoula.com flagship magazine missoula is is thethe flagship magazine of of the the missoulian missoulian newspaper newspaper

publisher john vanstrydonck publisher stacey mueller editor sherrydevlin devlin

editor sherry jim mcgowan sales & marketing art director director kate murphy photo editormike kurt lake wilson

assistant art director

art director mike lake photo editor kurt wilson

assistant art director megan richter advertising director kristen bounds

online director mcgowan writers jim jenna cederberg

betsy cohen

writers tim akimoff sherry devlin

betsy cohen lori grannis nick lockridge

gwen florio bob gadbow meseroll

daryl chelsi moy

lori grannis

fritz neighbor michael jamison

joe nickell

bob gregmeseroll patent

michael moore bill speltz

kate murphy barbara theroux

joe nickell photographers greg tom patent bauer

michael

jodi rave gallacher

linda thompson kurt wilson

photographers bauer graphic design tom jesse brockmeyer michael gallacher diann kelly linda mikethompson lake kurt wilson megan richter josh quick graphic design diann kelly

advertising sales megan jacquerichter walawander 406-523-5271 chris sawicki sales assistant youa hollyvang kuehlwein

advertising sales jacque walawander distribution Available in more than 160 racks

523-5271 in western Montana, Missoula magazine is a natural extension for people who read and rely on the Missoulian newspaper. Reaching 80,000 to 90,000 readersdistribution .Availablehas in more 160recognized racks in western daily, the Missoulian longthan been as Montana, the most Missoula.com magazine source is a natural for peopleMontana. who read and rely on magazine the thorough, in-depth of extension news in western Missoula Missoulian newspaper.

Reaching 80,000 toanother 90,000 readers daily, the Missoulian hasbest long takes this award-winning coverage step, showing off the very been recognizedinas the most in-depthBy source of news inon western Montana. of Missoula words andthorough, photographs. capitalizing the Missoulian’s Missoula.com magazine takes award-winning coverage another step, showing presence throughout the this region and utilizing its established chain of off the very best of Missoula words and photographs.

By capitalizing on the Missoulian’s distribution, Missoulain magazine and Missoula.com website reach more presence the region andany utilizing its such established chain ofindistribution, Missoula. readersthroughout in more places than other publication western Montana.

com magazine and Missoula.com Web site reach more readers in more places than any other publication in western Montana.

No such part of the publication may be reprinted without permission.

©2011 Lee Enterprises, all rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

No part of the publication may be reprinted without permission. ©2007 Lee Enterprises, all rights reserved. Printed in the USA.

on the cover:

on Springer the cover: Ryan pedals along the Clark Fork River with a delivery of football debut on the Washington LeGriz Petit Outre players breads make boundtheir for downtown Missoula restaurants.

Grizzly Stadium on Oct. 18, 1986. coverby photo bythompson Kurt Wilson

cover photo linda 6

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inside this issue

vol.5 no.3

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contents all year long 9 14 18 20 24

the way we were missoula cooks on the fly missoula reads thirsty missoula

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parting shot

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fall 2011

in season 10 26 32 36 42 50 56 62

festivals of plenty 25 and counting strokes to victory zemke's wolf pack feels like home marchi angus ranch sunday sisters jazz birds

You fight a war with the sword you’re issued.

Hubert Zemke Jr., page 36

strokes to victory

with coach berkoff

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the way we were

1946

big hunt Bonner resident Clarence Nelson has a photograph taken with an elk he shot in 1946. Nelson has the animal loaded onto a vehicle homemade from what had been a Model T. The rifle is an octogan barreled 30-30.

Photograph courtesy of R. Wade Nelson

missoula magazine

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happening in western montana

festivals of plenty by sherry devlin

f

photos by kurt wilson and linda thompson

all may be Missoula’s best-kept secret. The golden air, sprinkled with lightly falling leaves. The long and balmy afternoons. The laughter and loudness of Griz football Saturdays.

There are apples and apricots and plums to be picked in backyard groves, cider to be pressed. School books to stuff into backpacks. Schedules to stuff with soccer and volleyball games, back-to-school nights and PTA meetings.

Backyard trails on Missoula’s wrap-around hillsides are less crowded now, but more glorious than ever. Venture outside of town and the possibilities are endless: Fall is good to us here in western Montana.

We couldn’t possibly list all our favorite comings and goings of fall, but we did want to give you a little starter list – five not-to-be-missed fall events to get you on your way.

The rest is, happily, up to you!

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University of Montana Homecoming Some of my favorite memories of fall revolve around the University of Montana Homecoming parade: marching along Higgins Avenue with the Cub Scouts, collecting great gobs of candy with the Brownies, cheering on the everunpredictable Red Wave middle-school band, waving to friends on floats and politicians on the stump, the piles of leaves and throngs of parade-watchers along University Avenue.

And the football game: a perfect fall afternoon – sunny skies more times than not, warm and beautiful colors, great football, awesome fans.

This year, UM’s Homecoming events run from Sept. 25 through Saturday, Oct. 1. The fun starts with a pep rally at Southgate Mall from 1-3 p.m. on the 25th, and continues through the week with all manner of open houses, receptions, more pep rallies, socials and dances.

The Class of 1971 is meeting for a reunion, distinguished alumni will be feted, runners will compete in a Homecoming Hustle 5K race early Saturday, just as tailgaters light the first barbecue grills. The parade, as always, begins downtown at 10 a.m., followed by the football game at 1:05 p.m.

This year’s Homecoming opponent: the Northern Colorado Bears. Grizzlies vs.

Bears. Sounds like a lot of growling!

most gifted practitioners on festival week, an artful arrangement of readings and workshops that is the love and work of Kim Anderson at Humanities Montana.

This year’s edition is set for Oct. 6-8, and will likely include authors Thomas McGuane, Mary Clearman Blew, Rick Bass, James Lee Burke, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jonathan Evison and Alan Heathcock and ... well, 75 writers are on the list of presenters.

This year, in addition to the book fest’s events, Humanities Montana is partnering with the Western Literature Association, which will present its annual conference in conjunction with the festival, Oct. 5-7.

Normally closed to the public, the literature association is going to open the doors during its Missoula get-together – a real treat for Festival of the Book participants.

For more information, including a full schedule of events, go to http://www. humanitiesmontana.org.

Humanities Montana Festival of the Book My dad used to tease that I was “a poet but didn’t know it.”

I wish.

In fact, I am a lover of poetry and have been as far back as I can remember, beginning with a beautiful volume of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” handed down from my mother. So, too, am I a lover of stories: fiction, non-fiction, spoken and sung and written across the pages of books and newspapers and magazines.

Which is how I found my way, many years ago now, to the Montana Festival of the Book, one of the most revered rituals of fall in Missoula.

Ever a writer’s town, Missoula gives itself over to the written word and its missoula magazine

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fall events

Stevensville Scarecrow Festival

Montana CINE Film Festival

A few Octobers ago, Peter Pan welcomed visitors to town. A very old, scary, decidedly brittle Peter Pan. Those brave enough to continue on quickly came upon a giant crow devouring a man in a wheelbarrow. And a frightening, straw-filled rainbow trout. And a super scary waitress-witch presiding over a favorite downtown cafe.

Stevensville’s annual Scarecrow Festival, the wicked brainchild of the Stevensville Art and Sculpture Society, is delightfully frightful – and a must-do of fall in the Bitterroot Valley.

The scarecrows appear on the first Friday and Saturday in October – Oct. 7 and 8 this year, as part of downtown Stevensville’s First Friday festivities. Besides the incredible scarecrows, you’ll find pumpkin-carving contests, horse-drawn wagon rides, open houses, music, refreshments and a lot of good old-fashioned hospitality.

More information is available by going online to www. mainstreetstevensville.com.

As for the scarecrows, they’ll be judged by both a juried panel and the public. If they dare ...

Autumn is, after all, the season of back-to-school, backto-studies – back to engaging our brains. So it is fitting that the Montana CINE Film Festival brings its educational offerings to Missoula this Oct. 17-23. Food for thought in the season of learning.

In its eighth year, the festival was established as a cinema event that brings understanding and perspective to critical global issues: cultural, social, political and environmental.

This year, the festival has added a co-sponsor: the University of Montana’s International Programs. Also new will be the participation of several Russian scientists and filmmakers, and an attendant collection of thought-provoking Russian films.

Another buzz at this year’s festival, which has as its home Missoula’s historic Roxy Theatre, will be the film “Cultures of Resistance.” Can music and dance be weapons of peace?

Filmmaker Lara Lee found the answer after traveling across five continents torn by violence.

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In addition to film screenings, the CINE Film Festival includes daily and evening roundtables, seminars, Q&A sessions with filmmakers, receptions, a preview party and a benefit event. For more information, go online to www.wildlifefilms. org.

Missoula Festival of the Dead The night of Nov. 2 will mark Missoula’s 19th Festival of the Dead parade, an eclectic and artistic celebration honoring life and death – and inspired by the Spanish Dia de los Muertos.

Thousands of spectators (and skeletons) line Higgins Avenue in downtown Missoula for the passing of enormous bony puppets, University of Montana art students showing off huge steamroller prints, performance artists, skateboarders and the occasional accordion-playing skeleton.

There is music and drumming, dogs (this is Missoula, after all!), fish bones and human bones, photographs and shrines to the beloved departed, and a grim-reaper grand marshal.

One year, I watched the eerie procession in the rain. From inside my car.

With the windshield wipers going and a hot cup of coffee steaming the windows.

Somehow it seemed the perfect vantage, although I’d advise standing a little closer in quieter weather, lest you miss the full effect of the hoots and howls – and the jangling of bones.

“We celebrate life every other day,” said a spectator that dark and rainy night a few years back. “This is a day to honor the people who came before us – and celebrate life.”

The festivities begin after dark on Nov. 2. For more information, contact tarn. ream@umontana.edu or call (406) 5497933.

Sherry Devlin is editor of the Missoulian and Missoula magazine. She can be reached at (406) 523-5250 or by email at sdevlin@missoulian.com.

Strong Futures Start with Strong Foundations.

In Missoula, business growth and The University of Montana’s growth go hand-in-hand.

Help ensure our community’s future success by supporting the 2011 University of Montana Foundation Missoula Business Drive.

For more information, contact Lauren Clark at 243-2456 or visit SupportUM.org.

Paul Sepp: Partner & Shareholder Anderson ZurMuehlen & Co., P.C. | 2011 Chair, Missoula Business Drive

missoula magazine

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missoula cooks

bread basics

i

by greg patent

photos by michael gallacher

n the 1930s, Clive McKay, a professor of animal nutrition at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., showed through his research that diet affected health and longevity in animals. If the same principles could be applied to people, he reasoned, then they’d lead more healthful lives.

New York state mental hospitals, aware of McKay’s research, asked him to help improve the quality of their patients’ food. Finding that the patients tended to eat more bread than average people, McKay decided to see what he could do to improve its nutritional content.

Over time, and with the help of the hospitals’ dieticians and bakers, and the Dry Milk Institute, Cornell bread was born.

What set Cornell bread apart from other breads at the time was its increased protein and vitamin content contributed from three sources: full-fat soy flour, raw (untoasted) wheat germ and nonfat dry milk. These are the hallmarks of Cornell bread.

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In the 1950s... home baking was very much alive, and bakers were quick to add Cornell bread to their families’ diet.

In 1955, McKay and his wife Jeannette published “You Can Make Cornell Bread,” a booklet of 54 recipes using the basic Cornell bread formula.

In the 1950s, a lot of people ate white bread every day, but most commercial varieties had low nutritional value because they lacked the bran and germ of the whole grain. Home baking was very much alive at that time, and bakers were quick to add Cornell bread to their families’ diet.

My wife and I started baking Cornell bread in the early 1970s, soon after we found a recipe in The New York Times. The basic recipe makes two tall light-textured loves that are golden in color on the inside. The bread is delicious fresh or toasted and makes excellent sandwiches.

Even though I can buy excellent commercial bread of all kinds

today, I still bake Cornell bread every now and then. There really is nothing quite like it.

I use a combination of bread flour and organic unbleached all-purpose flour when I make this bread, and I have also had great success with half-organic whole wheat flour. White whole wheat or regular whole wheat flour work equally well.

Greg Patent is a food writer and columnist for the Missoulian and Missoula magazine. Visit his website at www.gregpatent.com. You can write him at gregpatent@gmail.com. Michael Gallacher is a photographer for the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5270 or by email at mgallacher@missoulian.com.

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missoula cooks

basic cornell bread ingredients 6½ cups flour, a combination of equal parts unbleached organic all-purpose flour and bread flour, or just the unbleached flour, plus more as needed (measure flour by dipping dry measuring cup into flour sack, filling to overflowing, and sweeping off excess. Total weight of flour is 2 pounds + ½ ounce) 2 packages (4½ teaspoons) quick-rise or active dry yeast ½ cup soy flour ½ cup untoasted wheat germ ¾ cup instant nonfat dry milk powder 4 teaspoons fine sea salt 2 2/3 cups warm water (105 to 115 degrees) ¼ cup corn oil or other vegetable oil ¼ cup honey

This recipe makes two big, gorgeous loaves, each weighing about 2 pounds. I use a stand mixer equipped with a dough hook. Soy flour and raw untoasted wheat germ are available in most markets.

Store them in the refrigerator. You can use the dough to make dinner rolls, sweet rolls, cinnamon sticky buns and much more. Feel free to substitute whole wheat flour for half the white flour.

directions In the bowl of a stand mixer, stir together the flour, yeast, soy flour, wheat germ, dry milk powder, and salt. Add the water, oil, and honey and attach the dough hook. Beat on low speed until you have a wet dough with all the dry ingredients mixed in, 2 to 3 minutes. Stop the machine, cover the bowl, and let the dough rest 10 minutes.

Knead on low speed for 3 to 4 minutes, then on medium speed for another 3 to 4 minutes, until the dough is very moist, smooth, and elastic. The dough may not clean the sides of the bowl during kneading. At the end of kneading, the dough will be sticky. If it seems too wet, knead in only 1 to 2 tablespoons more flour. But don’t add too much. The lightness of the baked loaves depends on a wet dough.

Lightly oil or coat with cooking spray a 6-quart straight-sided bowl or other straight-sided container. Scrape the dough into the bowl and turn to coat all over. Pick up the dough and work it briefly with your hands to form a smooth ball; it should feel supple, smooth, and elastic. Pull it between your hands and it will stretch at least a foot. Return the ball of dough to the bowl and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Let rise at room temperature until almost tripled in size, 1 to 1 ½ hours; dough will almost reach top of bowl.

Grease or coat with cooking spray two 9-by-5-by-3-inch loaf pans. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and divide it in half. Pat each half gently into a 9-inch square to redistribute the yeast cells. Form each square into a loaf by rolling it up tightly jelly-roll fashion and pinch the edges to seal.

Turn the loaves seam side down. Use the sides of your palms to crimp the edges and tuck them under the loaf. (See photo sequence).

Place loaves in pans and cover loosely with lightly oiled (or sprayed) plastic wrap. Let rise at room temperature until loaves look puffy and light and centers have risen 2 inches or so above the rims of the pans, about 1 hour.

About 30 minutes before the loaves are ready, adjust an oven rack to the lower third position and preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Discard plastic wrap from the loaves and place pans in oven.

Bake 40 to 45 minutes, until the loaves are well-browned and sound hollow when you remove them from the pans and rap their bottoms. An instant-read thermometer inserted into the center of the loaves will register 200 to 205 degrees.

Cool loaves completely on their sides on wire racks, 3 to 4 hours. Wrap airtight. Loaves stay fresh 2 to 3 days. They may be wrapped airtight and frozen for up to 1 month.

Makes 2 large loaves.

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missoula magazine

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on the fly

foul-weather friend

by bob meseroll

i

photo by michael gallacher

t’s October.

Many fishermen are now afield with their bird dogs.

The day dawns gray and gloomy. A light drizzle falls and there’s a nip in the air.

That means just one thing to me: baetis, the foul-weather fly fisherman’s best friend.

The baetis mayfly is commonly referred to as a blue-winged olive, although its wings are not actually blue and its body is only somewhat olive. It’s one of the first mayflies to hatch on our Western rivers in the spring and one of the last in the fall.

It’s one of the hardiest mayflies around. On some spring creeks where the water temperature does not vary a great deal, baetis can hatch during the winter months.

And for reasons known only to the baetis themselves and to the most astute entomologists, they just love to come out and play on a gray day.

“The temperature is down and clouds are always a good thing,” said Kingfisher Fly Shop co-owner Jim Cox, describing baetis weather. “That’s one of my favorite hatches on the Clark Fork.”

“Once the clouds come out they blanket the water,” seconded Taylor Scott, a guide who works at the Missoulian Angler Fly Shop.

And sometimes even the most astute entomologists can’t come up with a definitive answer for why baetis love the gloom.

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“I think most of us would say that hatches of BWOs often come off really heavy in the worst of weather,” University of Montana entomologist Diana Six said, adding that her specialty is terrestrials, not aquatic insects. “We see them hatch when it’s cold or dreary, but it seems they really perk up when it gets choppy and rainy and generally angler unfriendly. Why? Good question.

“I am an evolutionary biologist, among many other things, so I tend to think of these behaviors as having an advantage or they probably wouldn’t have evolved. But in this case I have to say I just don’t get it. I don’t think it gives them more time to dry (expand) their wings. In fact, the worse the weather is, the fewer actually seem to make it onto the surface and off the water and the more cripples you see on the surface (and the better the response by the fish). So that would argue against greater survival at that time – come up then and you drown and or get eaten.

“But, there must be some reason. The bugs are smarter than me this time (as is so often the case).”

I

’ll offer two examples to buttress our arguments for the fly’s proclivity to hatch in foul weather.

The first was Oct. 10, 1989. My first day as the assistant sports editor at the Billings Gazette was the previous day. When I arrived for work, all my belongings still in cardboard boxes in my

apartment, my boss told me to take the next two days off.

My boxes weren’t going anywhere, so I headed to Fort Smith to fish the Bighorn.

It was the perfect storm of conditions: No wind, a high but thick overcast, an occasional sprinkle, and temperatures cool enough that you wanted a sweatshirt. On top of that, maintenance was being performed on the Afterbay Dam, so the flow was reduced, making it possible to easily cross the river and also congregating the fish.

Predictably, the blue-winged olives started early and kept up all afternoon. The action was so furious, I stopped counting fish – all caught on various blue-winged olive patterns – and stopped fishing when my shoulders ached.

My second argument is probably even stronger. It was early October of 2009 and my buddy Dale was visiting from Samoa.

Normally a great time for fall fishing, it was unseasonably cold and records were broken left and right.

But when you’ve come that far to fish, well, you’re going to fish.

Temperatures were in the 20s when we set out on the Bitterroot in the morning and didn’t warm much above freezing throughout the day. We even tried applying Pam cooking spray to the guides on our fly rods to keep them from freezing up.

Quite honestly, I had low expectations. But darned if the blue wings didn’t hatch. We didn’t catch great numbers of fish, but to have any dry-fly fishing in that weather seemed nearly miraculous to me. It was the blue-winged olives that made it happen.

T

he list of blue-winged olive patterns is as long as my 5-weight.

Cox has a favorite.

“We have this one that’s a parachute blue wing,” Cox said.

“It’s an olive-bodied dub with a black fibbet tail and a black hackle around a white post. It’s evil, it’s a bad bug. I’ve been fishing that ... for 30 years.”

One thing that I’ve found to be true for any hatch is that it pays to have multiple patterns in your box. If you miss a strike while using a particular pattern – and you don’t prick the fish or otherwise alarm it – it’s best to show them another pattern.

“I think if you can deal with fishing cripples that small, that the cripples are a really good alternative,” said Cox, a sentiment that was backed by Scott. “Quigley cripples in gray are great bugs.”

My personal favorites are sparkle and compara duns. They’re easy to tie and don’t require hackle, which can be tough to come by these days.

But I’ve also reverted to some old-school patterns in recent years. The thorax pattern is durable and easy to see on the water, which is good for aging eyes. And the really old-school standard pattern with hackle-tip wings can be a killer on flat water.

Attractor patterns can also be effective. Cox suggests a No. 16 royal Wulff and Scott likes a size 18 parachute Adams.

“If I’m dropping something off a dry fly, a size 18 or 20 hare’s ear (nymph) or something small that imitates the nymphal stage of those guys is good,” Scott said. “Maybe a foot under your dry fly so it looks like it’s swimming up, getting ready to hatch. continued on page 66

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missoula reads

reading montana

t

by barbara theroux

photo by kurt wilson

his fall, two organizations that honor and promote authors and literature of the West will present conferences in Missoula from Oct. 5-8: the Western Literature Association and the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book.

The Western Literature Association is a nonprofit, scholarly association that promotes the study of the diverse literature and cultures of the North American West, past and present. This year’s recipient of the WLA Distinguished Achievement Award for an influential scholar in the field of western American literature (creative writer or critic) is Thomas McGuane.

For the 12th straight year, the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book will bring together the region’s finest writers to celebrate reading and writing in one of the Inland Northwest’s biggest cultural events. The participating authors and presenters list expands during the months of preparation to well over 75 names.

Here are some of authors to be feted at October’s event:

“Driving Home: An American Journey”

by Jonathan Raban

For more than 30 years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an Englishman transplanted in America, about what it means to belong, to feel rooted.

The essays in “Driving Home” span two decades as Raban charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history and current events. Stops en route include a Missoula bar, a tea party convention in Nashville hosted by Sarah Palin, the Mississippi River in full flood, a trip to Hawaii with his daughter, a steelhead river in the Cascades, and the hidden corners of his adopted hometown, Seattle.

He deftly explores public and personal spaces, poetry and politics, geography and catastrophe, art and economy, and the shifts in various arenas that define our society. Whether the topic is Robert Lowell or Barack Obama, or how various painters, explorers and homesteaders have engaged with our mythical and actual landscape, Raban has an outsider’s eye for the absurd, and his tone is intimate, never nostalgic, and always fresh.

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“This Is Not the Ivy League” by Mary Clearman Blew

Mary Clearman Blew’s education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana.

She graduated to a oneroom rural school, then escaped, via scholarship, to the University of Montana, where, still in her teens, she met and married her first husband.

“This Is Not the Ivy League” is her account of what it was to be that girl, and then that woman-pressured by husband and parents to be the conventional wife of the 1950s, persisting in her pursuit of an education, trailed by a reluctant husband and small children through graduate school, and finally entering the job market with a doctorate in English only to find a whole new set of pressures and prejudices. This memoir is Blew’s behind-the-scenes account of pursuing a career at a time when a woman’s place in the world was supposed to have limits.

“West of Here”

by Jonathan Evison

On the westernmost edge of the American continent lies a rugged alpine wilderness of virgin timber and free-flowing rivers choked with endless runs of sockeye and steelhead. Since the dawn of recorded history, the Klallam Indians have thrived upon the bounty of the Elwha River.

In 1889, on the eve of Washington’s statehood, the Olympic Peninsula remains America’s last frontier. At the foot of the Elwha River, the crude and muddy outpost of Port Bonita is about to boom, unified only in their visions of a more prosperous future that impels the damming of the mighty Elwha to harness its power.

More than a century later, the great Thronburgh Dam is marked for demolition, having blocked the very lifeline that could have sustained the town. Evison has written a grand and playful odyssey, a multilayered saga of destiny and greed, adventure and passion.

The novel develops as a kind of conversation between two epochs, one rushing blindly toward the future and the other struggling to undo the damage of the past.

“West of Here” chronicles the life of one small town, turning America’s history into myth, and myth into a nation’s shared experience.

DRACULA

October 21–30, 2011

SHE LOVES ME

December 2–11, 2011

ONCE UPON A MATTRESS January 20–29, 2012

GODSPELL

March 16–25, 2012

WEST SIDE STORY

April 27–May 13, 2012

(406) 728-7529 • www.mctinc.org missoula magazine

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missoula reads

“The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon”

by William M. Adler

In 1914, Joe Hill was convicted of murder in Utah and sentenced to death by firing squad, igniting international controversy. Many believed Hill was innocent, condemned for his association with the Industrial Workers of the World-the radical Wobblies.

Hill’s gripping tale is set against a brief but electrifying moment in American history, between the century’s turn and World War I, when the call for industrial unionism struck a deep chord among disenfranchised workers; when class warfare raged and capitalism was on the run.

“The Man Who Never Died” does justice to Hill’s extraordinary life and its controversial end. Drawing on extensive new evidence, Adler deconstructs the case against his subject and argues convincingly for the guilt of another man. Reading like a murder mystery, and set against the background of the raw, turn-of-thecentury West, this essential American story will make news and expose the roots of critical contemporary issues.

“Once Upon a River” by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in 16-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother.

But the river, Margo’s childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman traveling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to the decision of what price she is willing to pay for her choices.

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“Real Common Sense” by Brian Kahn

In “Real Common Sense,” Home Ground public radio host, Brian Kahn faces up to America’s critical problems-and then shows how the principles and values of America’s Founders can provide the moral compass we need to turn things around.

In easy-to-read, common sense language, he shows how we have gone off course as a country, emphasizing consumerism over citizenship, entertainment over education, “me” over “we.” It’s time to cut through the rhetoric, smoke, and spin, and get back to our core American values. By reconnecting with our founding American principles, he argues, we can create a future worthy of our grandchildren. By rediscovering the moral compass our Founders put into place, we can create a united America, and a future worthy of our grandchildren.

“West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West,”

edited by Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland

What does it mean to be a Westerner? With all the mythology that has grown up about the American West, is it even possible to describe “how it was, how it is, here, in the West?” Stegner and Rowland invited several dozen members of the Western literary tribe to write about living in the West and being a Western writer in particular.

“West of 98” gathers 66 literary testimonies, in essays and poetry, from a stellar collection of writers who represent every state west of the 98th parallel.

In “West of 98,” Western writers speak to the ways in which the West imprints itself on the people who live there, as well as how the people of the West create the personality of the region. The writers explore the Western landscape – how it has been revered and abused across centuries–and the inescapable limitations its aridity puts on all dreams of conquest and development.

They dismantle the boosterism of manifest destiny and the cowboy and mountain man ethos of every-man-forhimself, and show instead how we must create new narratives of cooperation if we are to survive in this spare and beautiful country.

“L.A. Mental” by Neil

McMahon

For psychologist Tom Crandall, the city of Los Angeles seems to be going insane, plagued by a series of strange events that extend to his own life as well. Not only did his drug-addled brother, Nick, nearly jump to his death over a Malibu cliff. He’s been blackmailing members of his wealthy family, including brother-in-law Paul, who is financing a movie by a mysterious company called Parallax Productions.

Determined to find the truth, Tom heads to the surreal film set in the valley, where he meets Parallax head Gunnar Kelso, a former physicist with odd theories about power and human behavior. Though everything seems normal, something isn’t right. The more Tom digs into Nick’s breakdown, the more he learns about Parallax and the enigmatic Kelso.

Parallax, it seems, has dark ambitions that extend beyond Hollywood, deep into the highest levels of government. Caught in a terrifying conspiracy that threatens his own sanity, Tom must find a way expose the truth before it’s too late.

“The Voice of the River” by Melanie

Rae Thon

Seventeen-year-old Kai Dionne and his dog Talia are missing. The search for these two spans a single day, from the time Kai leaps in a halffrozen river to save the dog to the hour he and Talia are recovered. Each person who comes to the river brings his or her secret needs and desires; each has known loss, and all are survivors: a homeless boy tries to find himself, his lost twin, his double; a childless mother grieves for her son and daughter; a man who shot his father recalls a tender, intimate night when the father was kind, not afraid or angry. Kai and Talia belong to, and are loved by, a whole community. As strangers work together toward a single cause, they become familybound by love not only to the ones lost, but to all who gather.

continued on page 66

continued on page 73 missoula magazine

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thirsty missoula

a game-day tradition:

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bloody mary

by jenna cederberg

photo by tom bauer

he cocktail might be complicated, but the tradition is simple.

Before University of Montana football fans head to their seats inside Washington-Grizzly Stadium, they reach for a Bloody Mary to get them ready for the action.

The tailgating must-have is a potent mix of ingredients, always including vodka and tomato juice but otherwise mixing variations of Worcestershire sauce, celery salt, horseradish and a host of other spices.

Don’t forget the toothpicks, because you can’t serve a Bloody Mary without its garnishes. Olives, pickles, beans, prawns, lemon slices, celery, asparagus. Its flavors are as diverse and robust as the colors of fall.

This is not just the usual whiskey or beer – which also flows freely during home-game tailgating events.

The Press Box Casino Sports Bar and Restaurant on East Broadway observes the Bloody Mary game-day tradition by offering fans its take on the drink made from a secret recipe and piled high with olives, lemon slices, celery stalks and its signature pickled green bean.

Traditionally a morning drink, the 16 ounces of spicy smoothness is a perfect warmup to beer and whiskey flowing

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Don’t forget the toothpicks, because you can’t serve a Bloody Mary without its garnishes. Olives, pickles, beans, prawns, lemon slices, celery, asparagus.

Its flavors are as diverse and robust as the colors of fall. throughout the day. Fans can take a quick walk across the Van Buren Street footbridge to grab a drink and brunch at the Press Box. “A Bloody Mary just tastes so doggone good with breakfast.

Add a Grizzly football game and you’ve got the perfect occasion for a Bloody Mary,” Press Box owner Gordi Fix said.

Lynette Dahm can tell you a thing or two about Bloody Marys.

As a bartender at the Press Box, she makes hundreds each Saturday when the Griz are at home. She makes 20 gallons of Caesar mix (a Bloody Mary with clam broth) and 15 gallons of Bloody Mary mix on Friday.

That way, she’ll have it ready when the crowds flood the bar looking for cocktails before the game. It’s not unusual for the Press Box to serve 200 Bloody Marys and 250 Caesars on game day.

While she can’t reveal the “seven or eight” ingredients of the Press Box’s secret recipe, Dahm said the key is to keep all the elements of the drink intact. Even during the rush of game day, the Press Box doesn’t skimp on garnishes.

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hose who set out to create their own Bloody Mary will find well vodka works fine for most mixes, Dahm said, as long

as it is smooth.

The must-have garnish, Dahm thinks, is olives.

For a twist on the tradition tailgate toddy, Krisco Liquor on Reserve Street has cucumber or bacon vodka.

“Bacon vodka makes an exceptional Caesar or Bloody Mary. I think it’s the key to an excellent drink. For a different twist, we can add cucumber vodka as well,” said Jacque Thomas, president of Krisco Liquor.

You can find any number of pre-made mixes for Bloody Marys at Krisco, which also sells its share of whiskey in the fall.

Krisco opens at 8 a.m. on home game-day Saturdays to make sure everyone can get their wares before tailgating begins.

The Press Box’s Fix puts it this way: Bloody Marys and football Saturdays in Missoula go together “just like baseball and hot dogs.”

Jenna Cederberg is a reporter for the Missoulian. She can be reached at (406) 523-5241 or by email at jcerderberg@missoulian.com.

Tom Bauer is a photographer for the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5270 or by email at tbauer@missoulian.com.

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The University of Montana Grizzlies run out of the tunnel entering Washington-Grizzly Stadium on Oct. 18, 1986, for the first game in the new facility. “The neatest thing then, and to this day, was walking down that dang tunnel and running out onto the field,” says Brad Salonen, a former player. “There’s no better feeling.”

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25 and counting written by nick lockridge photos by kurt wilson and dwan feary

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t’s difficult to pinpoint when Montana Grizzly football first started to become the beast it is today, but one could make a good case for Oct. 18, 1986.

That’s the day the University of Montana unveiled its new $3.2 million on-campus stadium and, fittingly, the Grizzlies scored 17 unanswered points in the fourth quarter to rally for a 38-31 victory over conference rival Idaho State.

It would be the first of many nail-biters associated with the facility. Griz Nation just didn’t know it yet.

Montana’s football program, under the direction of first-year head coach Don Read and his new pass-oriented offense, was struggling at the halfway point of the 1986 season when the Grizzlies first set foot inside the concrete, acoustically superior fan fortress called Washington-Grizzly Stadium.

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“We were still finding out who we were,” said Kraig Paulson, UM’s senior fullback that season. “At halftime we made some adjustments and then went out in the second half and found a spark, found some of that momentum that has kind of defined that place. Looking back on it, there’s so many big things that have happened at that place. To trace it all back to that day is pretty cool.”

This fall marks the 25th anniversary of the grand opening of Washington-Grizzly Stadium. The football team does not play a home game on Oct. 18 this year – Oct. 15 vs.

Portland State is the closest date – so this is a look back at that special day.

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ctober 18, 1986 was a sunny autumn day filled with pregame, halftime and postgame dedication ceremonies throughout the stadium. The Griz, who were 1-3, played their first two home games of the season at their old haunt, Dornblaser Field, so there was a buzz in the air despite the team’s struggles.

Plenty of tickets – general admission

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seats cost $6 – were available at the gate, skydivers with smoke billowing from their heels landed at midfield and members of the Delta Gamma sorority house released red, white and blue balloons at the end of the national anthem, which was delivered by area barbershop quartets, the UM Marching Band and the Missoula High School Tournament of Roses Parade band.

The Missoulian predicted 8,000 fans would attend the opening of the stadium, which had a capacity of more than 12,000 at the time. It turns out, 10,580 fans showed up to witness a quirky, back-and-forth contest that featured a record-setting performance

by UM’s star quarterback and receiver – an omen for a school that would become one of the best in the Football Championship Subdivision at passing the ball.

Harley Lewis, Montana’s athletic director at the time, remembers very little of the actual game or the pomp that surrounded it. He still had a stat crew to run after all. But he certainly remembers how satisfying the day felt.

“You don’t forget certain times in your life and that’s one of them,” said Lewis, who served as A.D. from 1976-1989 before moving on to a job with the NCAA. “To build a football stadium at the University of Montana was a long-term and long-involved process.

It was one of my goals at the time I took over and it took all 14 years.”

The debut of Washington-Grizzly Stadium followed years and years of campaigning, fundraising and construction.

However, UM’s new stadium wasn’t the only thing starting from the ground up.

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ontana’s football program had been in a tailspin since a work-study scandal in the 1970s, which pushed out legendary coach Jack Swarthout. His two immediate successors managed just 41 wins over the next 10 seasons. With troubles on and off the field, Grizzly football was in jeopardy.

“When I took over, the University of Montana was not in good shape athletically,” Lewis said. “There was quite a lot of sentiment on campus from the faculty and the

Left: Buoyed by a fumble recovery late in the game, the Grizzlies began a tradition of dramatic late-game comebacks over the next 25 years. Above: First-year head coach Don Read, seen on the sidelines on the right side of this photograph, calls the new stadium “frosting on the cake” on his decision to come to Montana.

Right: The University of Montana marching band celebrates in the stands.

students, who couldn’t figure out why we even had to have an athletic program. We had a lot of barriers to overcome and issues to address.

But we knew in order to take (the) Athletics (Department) to where it is today, we needed a football stadium.”

That task fell on a lot of shoulders.

Lewis lists UM presidents Neil Bucklew and James Koch, all the coaching staffs – including Larry Donovan, who stumped for support of the stadium well before Read’s arrival – the lead architect of the project, Jerry Ballas, and his vision for future expansions, and the community as a whole among those deserving credit for their contributions to the project.

Most of all though, the group was beholden to Dennis Washington, the Missoula businessman and contractor whose name was affixed to the facility after a $1 million donation by his company, which built the stadium with the help of in-kind donations. It couldn’t have come together at a better time.

Domes were springing up all over the country, including in Flagstaff, Ariz., Moscow, Idaho, and Pocatello, Idaho. Montana didn’t have anything to show its recruits. Some weren’t even taken to Dornblaser. The seating there was rickety, windy and far-removed, both from the field and the campus, making it tough to be a Griz fan – or a player for that matter.

“I came from Great Falls High and I think we had a better stadium than (UM) did,” said Brad Salonen, who was a sophomore on the 1986 team, but had watched his older brother Brian play

at Dornblaser from 1980-83. “You had a diminishing fan base, an antiquated stadium and now they were digging this big hole back there behind campus.”

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ead, who was hired after the decision was made to build a new stadium that would bring the football team back onto campus, got to witness that hole being filled in. Soon he would fill the Grizzlies’ roster with top-notch talent.

Read came from Portland State, which wasn’t part of the Big Sky Conference yet, but he knew Missoula well enough to know that the coaching staff could use the town, its beautiful surroundings and the school’s sterling academic reputation to rebuild the football team.

“Montana always had great potential,” Read said. “WashingtonGrizzly Stadium was just frosting on the cake.”

The architect of UM’s 1995 national championship team, Read coached just two games at Dornblaser, but it was enough to get the same feeling Griz fans had experienced for years.

“The grass wasn’t even very good over there. It really was a second-class operation as you looked across the Big Sky Conference, probably the worst in the Big Sky,” said Read. “So to go to Washington-Grizzly Stadium was a huge improvement.”

Better dressing rooms, better seats and that boisterous crowd – what an advantage, he thought.

“The atmosphere changed drastically,” said Read, who served as Montana’s A.D. for a stint before retiring in 2005. “There were

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some big changes in feelings and emotions, in a positive way, as opposed to being at Dornblaser.”

Read made sure to pay his thanks. But it was Washington who delivered one of the more surprising thank-yous at the conclusion of the ISU game.

“After we won the game, Dennis Washington came into the locker room. It was one of those things where Coach Read said this guy made this happen. But he wasn’t looking for much attention. It was a ‘thank you,’ a ‘great job’ and he was out of there,” said Salonen. “You look at Dennis Washington and his wife and what they’ve done for the University of Montana over the last 25 years or more ... it was an amazing thing.”

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he contributions to the construction of Washington-Grizzly Stadium were a thing of beauty, but the team’s lead-up to it’s unveiling certainly was not.

The Griz were shellacked by Boise State 31-0 the previous week, to drop to 0-3 in conference. Two weeks before that, in its final game at Dornblaser, UM escaped with a controversial 42-37 win over Eastern Washington – which wasn’t a member of the Big Sky yet, either – for the Grizzlies’ first win under Read.

The team was on a bit of a roller-coaster ride heading into the Idaho State game, which wasn’t really a hot ticket considering the two sides would meet again in four weeks in Pocatello – UM won that one as well – and each of the two meetings was only worth half of a game in the conference standings.

Idaho State featured a balanced offense, led by senior tailback Merril Hoge and a quarterback with the fortuitous last name of Mariani.

The Griz fell behind 14-7 on a 5-yard touchdown pass from Gino Mariani to Hoge early in the second quarter and ISU led 21-13 at the half. UM scored the only TD of the third quarter, a 24-yard hookup between quarterback Brent Pease and flanker Tony Lambert, to knot the score at 21-21.

That’s when Hoge and the Bengals began to pull away. They scored on two straight possessions, grabbing a 31-21 advantage on Hoge’s 1-yard scoring plunge with 11:35 to play. But in an uncharacteristic display of composure – which would become a hallmark of Read’s teams – the Griz fought back. And fought back. And fought back.

First they scored on an 11-yard touchdown pass from Pease to fellow senior Mike Rice, who wound up catching four TDs that day, to narrow the gap to 31-28. On the ensuing kickoff, Hoge coughed up the ball in his own territory to set up a game-tying field goal by UM’s Eby Dobson.

Hoge, the future Pittsburgh Steelers standout and ESPN analyst, was injured on the play. His fumble was the first in five games by Idaho State, which dipped to 2-5 that afternoon.

“I remember the game vividly,” said Hoge, who would play eight years in the NFL before concussions forced him to quit football. “It was one of my uglier days.”

Because the field was so new – chunks of sod were coming up, some recall – the underground sprinkler heads had little protection and were exposed in some areas. It proved to be detrimental to Hoge, who was injured on the play, and ISU’s hopes of an upset.

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“As I was getting tackled and going down, my knee hit one of those risers and I fumbled,” Hoge said. “It was the most severe pain I’ve ever had in my life. It was one of the few times in my career that I can remember not finishing a game. It swelled up so bad, I couldn’t move it.”

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he Bengals, who moved the ball at will just 10 minutes earlier, made their biggest mistake of the game with about four minutes to play. Facing a fourth-and-1 at ISU’s own 29-yard line, head coach Jim Koetter decided to go for it.

UM defensive end Pat Foster stuffed Idaho State’s Butch Caston, the same back Foster stood up the play before on thirdand-1. It was a questionable play call. “(The Griz) had scored on their last three possessions and we weren’t doing much on defense,” Koetter told the Missoulian after the game. “I felt like we had to make a move to keep the ball.”

Three plays later, Pease and Rice hooked up for the gamewinner.

“It was a horrific game, the way it ended,” Hoge said. “I’ll never forget that.”

It was also an unforgettable day for Pease and Rice.

Pease, who a year earlier was running the Wishbone offense under the soon-to-be-fired Donovan, set school records for completions and touchdown passes in a game. It was an equally impressive effort by Rice, whose position coach that day was a young Robin Pflugrad, who would become UM’s head coach in 2010. Rice finished with a school-record 12 catches for 150 yards.

Pease threw for 364 yards.

“Looking back on it now, I don’t know if anybody who played that day knew what it was all leading to,” said Paulson, who’s currently the defensive coordinator at UNLV. “We just thought we’d won a hard-fought game over a good football team.”

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ashington-Grizzly Stadium has undergone three renovations since its debut 25 years ago, but there is one element that has stood the test of time, Salonen said.

“The neatest thing then, and to this day, was walking down that dang tunnel and running out onto the field,” he said.

“There’s no better feeling. That’s a highlight of that stadium.”

Salonen said he can’t imagine what 25,000 fans sounds like compared to the 14,000 fans Washington-Grizzly Stadium was drawing toward the end of his career. Salonen knows much bigger games followed the one that took place on Oct. 18, 1986, but perhaps Griz fans can reserve a special spot in their hearts for that special day.

“That one kind of set the stage,” Salonen said. “There have been some incredible comebacks in that stadium. If the Griz are down 7 or 10 (points) in the fourth quarter now, people know they’re going to win.”

Nick Lockridge is a sportswriter at the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5298 or by email at nlockridge@missoulian. com.

Kurt Wilson is photography editor at the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5244 or by email at kwilson@missoulian.com.

In a tradition that remains today, the team celebrates the victory with the fans on the east side of the stadium.

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strokes to victory with coach berkoff

by bill speltz

photos by kurt wilson

t’s a glorious sun-soaked morning at Splash Montana and Dave Berkoff is at his usual poolside post, pacing occasionally while his protégés peer in his direction.

Berkoff is sporting a plain baseball cap and a pair of flip-flops you’d find for a dollar at Old Navy. There’s nothing about his attire or demeanor to indicate the guy is a three-time Olympic gold medalist, a former world record holder, a Harvard grad or a member of a thriving local law practice.

He just looks like a swimming coach. A mild-mannered one at that.

What you don’t see is the believer inside Berkoff. The one who knows from experience almost anything is possible in a pool with the right work ethic and attitude.

Granted, this believer has mellowed a bit. Tempered his expectations, if you will. Tailored them in a town where swimming ranks well down a list of sports interests that includes Montana Griz football, skiing, kayaking, tennis, soccer ... heck, even lacrosse and rugby are making major runs now.

The cutthroat days of Berkoff’s competitive swimming career, which started way back when he was a kid in suburban Philadelphia, are a speck in his rearview mirror. Yet the inner confidence remains. It reveals itself in his spoken belief that Missoula, Montana, can produce national-level swim competitors with the right compass.

Berkoff has made significant sacrifices to that end. Five years ago, he cut back on time spent practicing law so he could devote more to coaching for the Missoula Aquatic Club. These days he puts in 20 to 25 hours a week mentoring swimmers, wedging it in between his profession and 500 hours a year spent on multiple USA Swimming committees.

“Thankfully my partners at Garlington, Lohn and Robinson are somewhat generous and okay with it to some extent,” Berkoff said. “Obviously they’d like me to bring in more revenue to the firm, but I think they understand this is something that benefits the community and builds young lives.”

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In the first rays of the day, Missoula Aquatic Club swimming coach Dave Berkoff, right, talks with team members before practice begins.

Berkoff, with his stopwatch constantly at hand, watches swimmers as they make early morning laps. missoula magazine

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erkoff has been a MAC swim coach on and off since moving to his wife Shirley’s hometown of Missoula in 1992. He got back into it by accident in 2007 and found he enjoyed it more than ever.

Then two years ago came a key juncture when he had a heart-to-heart with his most serious swimmers.

“At that point, we only had one kid who had made the Junior National level, which is about two levels down from Olympic Trials,” he said. “I sat down with the whole senior group. There’s about 30 of them and they range in talent and ability from making state-qualifying times to junior national level.

“I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we took a bunch of MAC swimmers to Olympic Trials? Why don’t we set a team goal of four MAC swimmers going to Olympic Trials in 2012?’

Surprisingly, everybody in the group said it was a great idea, most of them knowing they didn’t have a chance in hell of making it.”

That meeting was the impetus for Berkoff making a more serious committment to coaching. His senior program has made major strides, with five swimmers headed to Winter Nationals in December.

“I’d say legitimately we have three or four kids who have a real good shot at making Olympic Trials by next year,” Berkoff said. “You’re in the top 1 percent of swimmers in the world if you’re making U.S. Olympic Trial qualifying times. They’re very fast.

“To have kids at that level from Missoula is pretty amazing. I think the MAC has only had one other Olympic Trial qualifier in the last 20 years and that’s David Cromwell 10 years ago. We’re kind of breaking new territory and it’s fun.”

Berkoff understands what it takes to be successful at the

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highest level, but he’d be the first to admit it requires something different to be an effective youth swim coach in Missoula. His maturation process as a father and swim mentor has been crucial to his newfound enjoyment and success with a whistle around his neck.

“With age comes perspective and maybe a little more appreciation,” the 44-year-old said. “I think I was frustrated early on in my coaching because I achieved personally a real high level and I was very serious about swimming. Probably more serious than 99.9 percent of the people about something.” t used to be a source of frustration for Berkoff when his swimmers didn’t share his level of passion. Then about a year ago he came to the realization he does and maybe always will care more about swimming than any of the swimmers he coaches.

“While that was somewhat of a depressing thought, on the other hand I thought, ‘No, that’s absolutely necessary if you want to be a good coach,’ ” he related. “You have to care more than the athletes because you’re setting the bar. They know where the limit is. If you don’t care more then you’re not going to see the best out of those kids.

“In some respects I guess I let go of that frustration and said, ‘It’s OK that I care more. It’s OK these kids are going to be kids and be distracted a million different ways and I just have to deal with that and be okay with it.’ That has led to me enjoying coaching a lot more, just letting go of the high expectations when I need to.”

Berkoff compares his level of obsession as an Olympic swimmer to that of his border collie and its obsession for playing ball. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he was stockpiling six medals in the backstroke, it took every ounce of

I

“I like to equate coaching with farming,” says Berkoff, a three-time Olympic gold medalist. “Put seeds in the ground in the spring, and then hope there’s good rain and enough sunshine and then at the end of the season see what you’ve got.” physical and mental energy he had to fend off the competition.

As a coach he’s learned to live with the fact there are varying levels of committment. Dealing with kids on an individual basis, and with parents who want the best for their kids, is his ultimate coaching challenge.

“I like to equate coaching with farming,” he said. “Put seeds in the ground in the spring and then hope there’s good rain and enough sunshine and then at the end of the season see what you’ve got.

“I try as best as I can to include everybody. At times, I think kids and parents think I favor one group over the other. It’s hard to balance the social issues, the conflict issues teenagers go through, trying to please all the parents and kids, trying to coach each individual a little differently. I try to learn every season, see what worked and didn’t.”

Being the father of two children has helped Berkoff fine-tune his communication skills with kids. But it’s still a work in progress.

“I have to get into the mind of a 16-year-old and see what issues are creeping up,” he said. “There’s a lot more to coaching than I ever thought and part of learning how to do the psychological and social part is the most challenging.”

While he pours his heart into coaching, Berkoff calls himself “the quintessential clueless swim parent.” He says his 10-year-old daughter is “totally self-motivated.” Her younger brother is more low-key when it comes to swimming.

“I want to be a dad to them and a swim coach to the swimmers I coach and not confuse them,” he said. “Eventually when my kids move up to my group I’ll have to readjust that and be more of a coach when they’re at the pool. But I’ve seen a lot

of situations where parents coach their kids and it can be very unhealthy.”

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erkoff could coach swimming in a lot of different places for a lot of prestigious programs. That’s a given. He favors his current situation because it’s kids and it’s Montana.

“I wouldn’t say I dislike people, but I dislike big cities,” he said. “I think it’s an unhealthy way to live.

“When I first moved here I wanted to get my master’s degree and move on. Then I met my wife and she’s from Missoula. I said maybe I have to live here, went to law school, got a good job and it fell into place. I love it here. Every time I fly home to Missoula, I feel like I’m going to the best place in the world.”

He’s doing his best to make Missoula better with his passion for swimming. A passion that has made life richer for a lot of kids.

Three of his former MAC swimmers are members of Pac10 swimming programs. Even more are or will be swimming collegiately.

Stay tuned for even bigger and better things to come.

“The most satisfying part is watching kids achieve something they didn’t think they could do, whatever level it may be,” Berkoff said. “The other thing is watching kids graduate from a program and go on to swim in college. To me that’s the most meaningful part. It opens another doorway for them.”

Bill Speltz is a sportswriter for the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5255 or by email at bspeltz@missoulian.com.

Kurt Wilson is photography editor for the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5244 or by email at kwilson@missoulian.com.

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Zemke's Wolfpack by fritz neighbor

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Painted for display purposes, a P-47 of the 56th Fighter Group is shown after the war ended.

H

ub Zemke’s life was made for the movies.

There’s really no other way to put it. Born in Missoula to German immigrants, Hubert Zemke was a standout boxer who was nicknamed “The Hub” by none other than legendary Missoulian sports editor Ray Rocene. An all-around athlete growing up, Zemke studied forestry at the University of Montana and lettered for the Grizzlies football team in 1933.

And then, well, things became interesting.

By the end of World War II Zemke had not only led the most successful flying squadron of the war and rewritten the rules of air-toair combat, he wound up in command of a prison camp – that he was imprisoned in.

All of this is easy enough to find. Zemke co-wrote the books “Zemke’s Wolf Pack” and “Zemke’s Stalag” with British author Roger Freeman, who grew up watching P-47s take off from the Boxted base near his home.

This was Zemke’s “Wolf Pack.” He had taken over the group in September of 1942 and spent several months whipping it into shape. The early results weren’t good: There were losses and for weeks his fighters missed the heavier action altogether.

Finally the 56th’s fortunes began to turn, along with the Allies’ fortunes in WWII. When he passed away at the age of 80, Zemke’s obituary was, like his personality, a bit on the short and succinct side. All that ran in the Missoulian was eight paragraphs regurgitated by the Associated Press.

He was an Army Air Corps cadet in 1937, and before his retirement from what became the Air Force in 1966, had been awarded the Silver Star, Purple Heart, Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal and Legion of Merit.

A quote in that Sept. 1, 1994 Missoulian read: “Wars are stupid. They are not acts of gentlemen no matter how much we try to romanticize

them. You can’t kill anyone chivalrously. You just kill them.”

F

our years after Zemke’s death, the movie “Saving Private Ryan” arrived, with its brutal and chilling opening sequence of the D-Day invasion. In 2001, the “Band of Brothers” miniseries aired on HBO. Here we had depictions of war short on romanticism and long on the realities of armed conflict.

Zemke saw plenty of that reality. In August of 1943, Zemke led his squadron over Europe and found a group of twin-engine, two-man Messerschmidt 110s attacking American B-17s. He picked one and dove at it.

“I dropped down to position dead astern and slightly below, trying to keep his tail plane between my aircraft and the aim of the gunner,” Zemke wrote. “At around 300 yards I fired a short burst.

“The next instant a body came hurtling out of the Me

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Flying Ace by fritz neighbor Stan Cohen, founder of Missoula’s Museum of Mountain Flying, met Hub Zemke more than 20 years ago at a gun show.

“He was selling pistol grips, believe it or not,” said Cohen.

But make no mistake, Cohen knows all about the late Zemke’s life as a squadron leader and World War II ace, and he would be pleased if everybody else knew, too.

Zemke is honored in an exhibit that takes up a small portion of Cohen’s cavernous museum that, despite its size – it’s big enough to the hold the DC-3 that dropped those ill-fated smokejumpers in Mann Gulch in 1947 – isn’t easy to find.

It’s on the east edge of Missoula International Airport, a stone’s throw off Aviation Way; the easiest way to get there is to hit the main airport entrance, go east on Aviation and then execute a quick right and left past the rental car washing bays.

Once you get there, you’ll see Zemke as the centerpiece of a three-panel display honoring two other aviation figures linked to Montana: Charles Lindbergh and Kirby Grant, who played the title character in the “Sky King” television series. Grant is buried in Missoula.

Could there be more for “The Hub”? Certainly.

Zemke’s life and career made him “Man of the Century” for the local chapter of the Sigma Nu fraternity, to which he belonged while he attended the University of Montana.

The chapter, in fact, has a display honoring him, but lacking a P-47 parked at the Museum of Mountain Flying, it may be hard to take the full measure of the man.

“To be quite honest with you, most of the people who come in, they’ve never heard of him,” Cohen said. “It’s understandable. Unless you’re into World War II stuff, why would you?

“I’d like to see as much publicity on him as possible. He’s Missoula’s only ace.”

The Museum of Mountain Flying is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., seven days a week from spring through the early part of September. From fall until spring, tours can be arranged by calling (406) 721-3644.

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Aces of the 56th Fighter Group, shown here in 1944, are, from left, Col. Hubert Zemke, Lt. Col. David Schilling, Lt. Col. Francis S. Gabreski and Capt. Fred J. Christensen.

110 and passed under my plane.”

Germany lost 25 fighters in the conflict to three for Zemke’s group. It was the start of a dominant time for the Wolf Pack.

It began an era nearly a year in the making.

Zemke’s early command saw P-47s go down with pilots aboard, frozen in a dive. He noted it was perhaps fortunate that the Thunderbolt – a snub-nosed, heavy fighter with a powerful air-cooled engine – wasn’t getting far enough over Europe to engage German fighters.

At the beginning flight time was barely 2.5 hours, but this fact may have let his pilots gain valuable experience with the plane ahead of later conflict. That is, it kept them alive while they caught up to their adversaries in skill.

But Zemke also was concerned with increasing range and getting refinements and improvements to the new fighter.

All of this in one manner or another happened, and in the meantime he figured out how to best utilize the supercharged P-47.

The strategy was to gain altitude and use its superior diving speed to attack the enemy and then use that speed – the P-47 could top 400 miles per hour in level flight – to recover altitude for another attack.

On Aug. 16, 1943, the group used drop tanks and forged deep into enemy air space. Zemke was flying at 27,000 feet when he saw the Messerschmidts.

It was the first of many routs and by the end of the war the 56th Fighter Group had downed 667 German aircraft. Not bad for a plane that weighed as much as eight tons, or 6,000 pounds more than any other fighter; a beast that needed a longer runway and more time to gain altitude.

“Y

ou fight a war with the sword you’re issued,” said Hubert Zemke, Jr. He says this in a matter of fact, all-business manner that he likely inherited from his dad.

It took his father some 40 years to put his war experiences to paper, and only after his death did the son – he introduced himself as “Hub Zemke” over the phone – get the full measure of the man’s World War II experiences.

The books, printed in 1988 and 1991, certainly helped.

“The Air Force forced him to write those,” Hubert Jr. noted.

“He didn’t willingly write them.

He had no reason to.”

The first book in some ways lent an air of mystery to the flying ace. The elder Zemke mentions wedding a woman of Italian

descent named Maria just five days after they met; he then tried to get the marriage annulled. The priest said no and that Zemke “had got to try and make it work.”

In subsequent pages he mentions that she is pregnant and little else.

“We had good and bad patches,” he wrote. “But sadly the marriage never really worked out.”

The 1994 AP obituary made no mention of survivors, but in fact Hub and Maria Zemke, who were married 35 years, were parents of Hubert Jr., as well as a daughter, Marsha.

Maria, now 92, lives with Marsha, who is married with two children, in Washington.

Hub Jr. lives in California. He’s also married (Tessa) with a son who’s a graphics designer and a daughter who is a journalist working in Europe.

“I am very close to my mother,” Hubert says. “I was very close to my father. I’ve lectured on my father.”

He lent his voice to the documentary, “Missions that Changed the War: Germany’s Last Ace,” that now shows on the Military Channel.

The ace is Gunther Rall, who had over 275 victories; he was shot down by a member of Zemke’s Wolf Pack and lost a thumb in the process. Rall very nearly shot down Zemke before he in turn was forced to bail out.

Z

emke would learn all of this after the War, most likely through the press – and it was interesting the role war correspondents played in his life.

He expressed distaste for the running totals of squadron kills that ran in the Stars and Stripes newspaper. It made it seem too much like a game and underplayed the lifeand-death consequences.

Z

emke himself ended up with 17 air victories, and many of those German men died. On one occasion he witnessed a German pilot bailing out of an aircraft shot up by an Allied fighter. The man at the bottom of the parachute was on fire, so Zemke made a pass.

“I fixed him in my sights and fired, to put him out of his misery,” he wrote – an action, historians say, that was frowned upon. Zemke himself would wind up parachuting out of a stricken plane; and if an enemy fighter were near?

Few if any of these stories were told to his son. Zemke stayed in the military until age 52, and, “You don’t make ice cream all day and then come home and eat it,” reasoned Hubert, Jr. “You have other

continued on page 67 missoula magazine

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Photo by Brett Thuma

Fine art in various media

September

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w w w . b i g f o r k . o r g 40

missoula magazine

OctOber

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w w w . b i g f o r k . o r g missoula magazine

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UM Pres Home Josh

Feels Like Home by chelsi moy

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photos by tom bauer

t

he 83-year-old Italian Renaissance house on the corner of Gerald and Keith avenues has been home to five university presidents, a math professor, a doctor and countless numbers of University of Montana students.

So it’s easy to feel a bit like a visitor.

“It truly is the university’s home,” said Mary Engstrom, wife of UM President Royce Engstrom and the latest occupant of the official residence of the university’s First Family.

Paintings by Montana artists and scenes of the West

selected by Mary Engstrom from the Montana Museum of Art and Culture permanent collection decorate the walls of the 1928 home. The mahogany wood and cobblestone floor, which receives an annual polish, shines in the afternoon sun.

The home has 16 bedrooms, including a master bedroom, library, dining room, living room, four guest bedrooms, six bathrooms, kitchen, office, sewing room and a small threedoor garage.

The main floor is where the couple hosts university-

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" It truly is the university’s home" The entryway of the home features a curved staircase, Philippine mahogany woodwork and a cobblestone floor.

The library can hold 20,000 books and is a favorite gathering spot in the house.

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sponsored galas and events, while the private residence is located on the second floor. The university furnishes the library, living room and dining room, but the Engstroms have added a personal touch.

The turquoise glass bowl that was once Engstrom’s mother’s gives color to the glass coffee table in the living room and in the corner is a grand piano that Royce is learning how to play in his spare time, which anymore is limited to the occasional Sunday evening.

In the library, family photos and pictures of their adult children are proudly on display. However, the premier spot on a middle shelf is reserved for their only grandchild, 6 months old and dressed head to toe in Griz gear.

The library holds 20,000 books, though many of the shelves are somewhat bare to the surprise of Barbara Theroux, manager of Fact & Fiction bookstore. Royce Engstrom, who comes from a chemistry background, has plenty of technological and laboratory equipment, but not enough books to fill such a large library, said his wife. They’re fans of trading books or giving them away after reading.

Theroux promised to donate a collection of books

by Montana authors to help fill some of the space in the library of the presidential residence.

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D

ating back to the very beginning of the house at 1325 Gerald Ave., there were ties to UM. A UM math professor began building the residence in 1928 and finished construction at the height of the Great Depression in 1932. It cost $100,000, money that Dr. Nels Lennes earned from writing and selling arithmetic and algebra textbooks.

The colorful rock lining the home’s exterior was gathered from McNamara’s Landing on the Blackfoot River near Potomac.

Bernice Ramskill, whose mother was a secretary in the math department under Lennes, said the house was built as a replica of the professor’s family home in

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the Chicago area.

The entryway and library are built largely of Philippine mahogany, with extensive carved paneling in the library.

The Holland tiles are still in place in two of the six bathrooms.

Two features that tend to spark excitement among guests are the original copper door hinges and the invisible touch-latch closets in the entryway.

Engstrom presses on a wood paneling.

What looks like nothing more than a section of the wall opens, which often prompts visitors to ask whether the couple has come across any secret trap doors.

Upon Lennes’ death, the house was purchased in 1954 by Dr. Stephen Preston, a Missoula physician, who owned

Unusual copper door hinges often attract the attention of guests.

"On the rare occasion we get home before sunset, we sit there. It feels like home" Mary Engstrom, on the home’s back porch.

the house for a year before selling it to the university for use as the Law House.

Between 1955 and 1960, it was a residence for 20 to 30 unmarried law students. When the number of unmarried law students dwindled – and those remaining were unable to pay the maintenance costs – the university sold the home to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Montana under the condition that the church, should it eventually sell the home, offers it to a university group.

The Newman Club, a Catholic campus ministry organization, was established and the home served as housing for 25 Catholic male university students. It was sold back to UM in June 1974 for the purpose of housing the

Ben Steele, The Bataan Death March, oil on panel, ca.1950, 30 x 48 inches

War Torn: The Art of Ben Steele Paintings and Drawings from the Bataan Death March September 23 - November 19, 2011 This exhibit features artwork from the MMAC Permanent Collection by Montana artist and WWII Bataan Death March survivor Ben Steele. Steele’s life story is an extraordinary account of survival, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Meloy & Paxson Galleries at the PARTV Center | 406.243.2019 museum@umontana.edu | www.umt.edu/montanamuseum Made possible by an Anonymous Donor, MOLLI, Montana Arts Council, and a grant from Humanities Montana, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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college president.

UM presidents who have resided in the home include Richard Bowers, Neil Bucklew, James Koch, George Dennison and now Royce Engstrom.

T

he Engstroms have resided in the home not quite a year, but they’ve opened their doors to the neighbors and hosted countless gatherings for university guests, alumni and supporters. Even before the Engstroms had fully moved into the presidential residence, they made sure to have their porch light on for trick-o-treaters on Halloween, passing out candy.

Visitors are often struck by the home’s beautiful entryway, and to add to that grandeur, the couple chose a painting from the UM museum’s permanent art collection to showcase on the upstairs wall, which is visible to those standing in the entryway.

Mary Engstrom chose an A.D.M. Cooper painting, “Indian Encampment,” to recognize the Native American culture in both Montana and South Dakota, where the couple resided for 28 years.

Coincidentally, and unbeknownst to Engstrom at the time, it’s the same painting her husband selected during the 2009 Campus Picks exhibition at the

Montana Museum of Art and Culture, where faculty and administrators chose their favorite artwork from the museum’s permanent collection and wrote why they liked it.

“For me, this painting captured the combination of the land, the sky, and the people who inhabited the open landscape,” Royce Engstrom wrote in 2009. “The darkness of the sky is indicative of the storms that so often characterize life on the open plains, and that is what first drew me to the piece.

The realism of color and tone, combined with the detail, make this piece especially appealing. The scene immediately brings

A.D.M. Cooper’s “Indian Encampment” hangs above the home’s grand stairway, and is one of the Engstroms’ favorite artworks from the Montana Museum of Art and Culture Permanent Collection.

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An untitled painting by Delbert Gish is another artwork selected by the Engstroms to hang in the residence.

Several stained-glass details are set in the windows of the dining room.

Montana to mind.”

While the house is grand in many ways, it’s the back porch, which points west toward the large backyard, which Mary Engstrom is most fond of. Where there was once a swimming pool is now a brick patio with two cement benches.

Three large arborvitae trees act as a natural fence shielding the home from a bustling Higgins Avenue, and several raised wooden flower beds line the fence, which Engstrom planted with herbs, wildflowers and rhubarb.

“I’ve gardened forever,” she said. “I love to garden. I had to do that for me.”

Sitting in their rustic bent twig rocking chairs staring at the backyard is the place Engstrom enjoys most, she said.

“I love this patio,” she said. “On the rare occasion we get home before sunset, we sit there. It feels like home.”

Chelsi Moy covers the University of Montana for the Missoulian. She can be reached at 523-5260 or at chelsi.moy@missoulian.com.

Tom Bauer is a Missoulian photographer. He can be reached at 523-5270 or by email at tbauer@missoulian.com. missoula magazine

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by lori grannis

T

hinly veiled behind a cloud of dust, he stands a paragon of masculinity: Angus Bull No. 395 – a 2,900-pound package of traffic-stopping muscle and testosterone.

Flanking him on either side, Bull No. 161 and Bull No. 175 – fullblooded Japanese Wagyu, both. On first appearance they are far less formidable, but in truth are worth twice the price per pound.

In the paddock beyond, cows and heifers form a concert of eyes that peer between weathered fence boards at the knotted sinew. In unison, the three square their shoulders, as Bull No. 395 settles into a stalwart stance that rocks a chunky brisket to and fro.

T

his is beef at its finest. This is Marchi Angus Ranch.

In the kitchen of his home, perched atop a cliff lording high above the swirling rapids of the Flathead River, Polson cattle rancher Jon Marchi lugs a mammoth coffee table book to the kitchen’s center island.

It’s the sort of epic tome one might purposely lay across a whole lap to admire stark black-and-white images of Yosemite, shot by Ansel Adams, or delight in the frame-by-frame shock of Helmut Newton’s iconic portraiture.

But no earthly monument, nor lean and hungry model, graces these pages. Called simply “Breeds of Cattle,” this 20-pound volume is chock full of the world’s bovine breeds.

Marchi cracks the back of the book’s thick spine and leafs easily to a section with dog-eared pages, then points a worn finger at the Japanese Wagyu breed. Stout.

Compact. Horned. Black or red in color.

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photos by kurt wilson

The bull on this page could be the spitting image of either 161 or 175 – take your pick.

Inked in record books as the seventhever member of the American Wagyu Association, Marchi is part of history in the making – one of a cadre of ranchers squiring this fledgling breed to the forefront of U.S. and Montana agri-business.

For years, he grazed herds of hearty Scottish Angus on five ranches spanning 2,000 irrigated acres. But since 1996, when Marchi began breeding Wagyu into his line with semen procured from Washington State University, Japanese Wagyu have shared this landscape.

Marchi initially bred Angus to Wagyu for 50-50 crosses. Today, his herd runs even more pure – with papered Wagyu steers averaging 15/16ths (or 93.75 percent) pure on slaughter day.

For cattle to be considered Wagyu, both the American Wagyu Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture say they must be at least 50 percent crosses.

“Meat from 50-50 crosses can be erratic, though,” says Marchi. Even with the stability of the Angus breed as an able cross, “most would still only offer the quality of Angus beef – not Wagyu.”

An old faded photograph in the Marchi home shows a young Jon standing next to a showmanship trophy, holding on to the end of a halter rope attached to a large red Hereford. He is beaming. It is the 1961 Carbon County Fair – a time when his family owned cattle in Red Lodge.

Marchi hasn’t owned a red Hereford steer since. Nor any other colored breed, for that matter. A fascination for Black Angus since 1974, and for Wagyu since 1996, means he now only bets on black.

Beyond color, distinctions between the Angus and Wagyu breeds are most

“Initially, there was a lot of resistance to the breed in the U.S. because of aesthetics,” says Wagyu cattle rancher Jon Marchi. “People thought they looked like a dairy cow with horns.” missoula magazine

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noticeable at head’s crown: Angus bulls don’t have horns. Both bulls and heifers in the Wagyu breed do.

“Initially, there was a lot of resistance to the breed in the U.S. because of aesthetics,” he says. “People thought they looked like a dairy cow with horns.”

But never mind how this breed looks.

In the end, it’s all about taste.

J

Polson cattle rancher Jon Marchi initially bred Angus to Wagyu for 5050 crosses, but today his herd runs even more pure, with his Wagyu steers nearly 94 percent pure.

Below left: A young Marchi shows a red Hereford at the Carbon County Fair in 1961.

Below right: Jon’s wife, Liz Marchi, handles the day-to-day sales of the Wagyu beef.

ust beyond that 20-pound picture book, executive chef Zach Bernheim of Kalispell’s North Bay Grille forms Wagyu beef patties in the Marchi’s ranch-house kitchen. Once removed from a sizzling cast iron pan, these palm-sized chunks of ground beef will barely be contained by miniature slider buns.

A few feet farther, a pair of perfectly marbled ribeye steaks sit on a platter awaiting the grill. Marchi and Bernheim have set them out to demonstrate the intricately marbled fat laced throughout, and point to the fact that no adipose has been trimmed from its borders; it can all be found within the steaks’ borders.

Chef Bernheim says top cuts of Wagyu are so tender they can be sliced through with fork alone, and that the quality of the beef is so high its grading scale surpasses regular USDA standards.

“On a scale of one to 12, Wagyu will always grade higher than the best prime-graded beef by between two and seven points,” he says of the breed that also garners distinctions from “black” to “platinum.”

According to the USDA website, for a Wagyu steer to win a grade of 12 would be rare, but a routinely good subject will probably score a 10.

“As a frame of reference, a great prime grading for regular beef is around a six,” Marchi adds.

M

ost people don’t associate the Wagyu name with Kobe-style beef. It’s a bit like the Champagne region of France and its sparkling wines. Produced outside the region, no sparkling wine can legally be called champagne, yet most of us classify any and all bubbly as exactly that.

No matter how you slice it, whether Kobe-style beef is found in Japan, or in the U.S., it all originates with the Wagyu breed, says Marchi, “It’s the same beef.”

Still, the lore that surrounds Japan’s Kobe-style beef grows broader by the decade.

Americans unfamiliar with the Wagyu breed sit rapt with wonder over how they

are supposedly raised: It is said that Kobe beef breeds are fed an exclusive diet of beer mash, and are rubbed down daily with full-body massages, like princes and kings.

“Well, that’s not exactly true,” Marchi says.

Cattle are massaged with large wooden rollers, and have tenders who are assigned 10 steers each, he says, but that’s to oversee their well-being in extreme confinement.

Tenders with rollers keep blood flowing and watch over an investment that barely has wiggle room, according to Marchi. So special handling owes more to land scarcity and exorbitant prices per acre – where herds don’t have the luxury of grazing like Montana cattle – as much to the mistaken belief that confinement will net a more tender steak.

It also owes to the reverence the Asian country has for what they call a “national treasure.”

But one thing is true: Even Marchi’s herd enjoys a little beer now and then – thanks to mash procured locally from Big Sky Brewing.

As for the Japanese Wagyu, less natural forage (grass and alfalfa) necessitates a diet higher in the byproduct grain mash. Wagyu born here have greater access to forage and are fed a smaller percentage of mash.

T

wo decades ago, a single 8-ounce portion of Kobe beef hit tony restaurant plates at over $100 – from Tokyo, to San Francisco, to New York.

These days, when a restaurant purchases a whole Wagyu steer, the Marchis are selling the meat at an average price of $4.50 to $5 per pound for ground beef, and around $9 for primals.

Primals may amount to 200 pounds, and ground beef to 300 pounds – making it a beefier purchase than most households care to endeavor.

But even in the current elevated beef market, the value for restaurants is good, and may rival grass-fed sources offering far less marbling, taste and tenderness.

North Bay Grille and beef purveyors at other fine-dining spots in western Montana (The Raven, Blue Canyon, Tamarack Brewing Company, Ranch Club) continue to order and reorder Marchi Wagyu, affirming it by default as a commodity well within grasp.

continued on page 69 missoula magazine

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55

co-workers & friends

sunday sisters by betsy cohen

f

or six years, Missoulian photographer Linda Thompson and I took “Sunday drives” to find stories for the Monday newspaper.

It was a memorable time, but like most good things, our Sunday partnership came to an end recently when Linda packed up her family and moved to Sweden to attend graduate school.

Unlike most of the working world, Sunday was not our day of rest. It was, in fact, the first day of our work week – our Monday.

Together, we were the only two members of the reporting staff to work the same odd shift – Sunday through Thursday.

And Sundays were special.

With no one else in the newsroom, the success of the Monday paper relied upon the two of us producing a photo-story package to anchor the front page.

The pressure was, at times, intense: Stories we planned didn’t always happen, or a source changed the appointed day and time for an interview at the last minute. Often, there was just not a lot happening on Sundays in Missoula, which made finding something to cover a challenge, especially when a story did fall through.

And then there was the occasional Sunday that exploded with so much breaking news, getting it all reported and photographed before press time was a minor miracle.

This past June 12 was one such Sunday.

The day started out calmly enough, with an assignment to report on the YWCA’s Secret Seconds remodel, and to write and photograph a story on the ongoing Clark Fork River flooding. Along with her

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photos by linda thompson

front-page assignments, Linda also had a sports photo to take at a folf tournament.

All was busily on schedule until David Burgert fired a gun at two Missoula County sheriff’s deputies, and a manhunt was under way for the former Project 7 leader in the mountains that surround the Lumber Jack Saloon west of Lolo.

After six years of Sundays, though, we didn’t miss a beat.

We had long ago learned to pack many changes of clothing and energy bars, make sure one of our cars had a full tank of fuel, keep cellphones fully charged, let the boss know when plans took a new turn, and not to make dinner commitments that couldn’t be canceled.

So off we went on the manhunt, rolling out of town with cellphones to our ears, warning our respective spouses we didn’t know when we would be home.

Exciting, yes. But in truth, it was just another Sunday, another one that lived up to our two mottos: Expect the Unexpected. And, Failure is Not an Option.

C

hurch services, presidential candidates, rodeos, peace rallies, opera auditions, dog shows, summertime festivals, parades, car wrecks, floods, fatalities and the opening day of big-game season are just some of the stories that filled the first day of our work week and the front page of the Monday Missoulian.

When the going got weird or quirky or stressful – and it did – we relied on each other to stay focused,

The mood in the car driving back to the Missoulian was sober, having just watched loved ones say goodbye to members of the Montana National Guard at Missoula International Airport in January 2010.

During a welcome home event on a Sunday nearly a year later, we saw the couple in this photo happily reunited.

Working on Sundays means covering a multitude of churchbased events, from Catholic to Methodist to Lutheran, and in this case, the historic St. Francis Xavier Parish.

Some Sundays are so much fun to cover, it’s impossible to call the day’s assignment “work.” Covering the Helmville Rodeo, where the old West and the new West happily collide, was one such Labor Day weekend in 2009.

Sundays are a popular day for political candidates to draw a crowd. Joe Biden attracted a full gymnasium and 1,200-some people who came to hear his Kalispell stump speech on Sept.

7, 2008. When the mayor of Kalispell accidentally introduced him as Joe O'Biden, the then U.S. vice-presidential candidate quipped that his Irish grandmother would love hearing that from up in heaven.

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Missoula came out in full force for the opening of the Mobash skatepark. Covering the event offered a front-row seat to watch skateboarding legend Tony Hawk.

The Mile-marker 124 fire sweeps through dry timber in the summer of 2007.

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Despite covering the speech as event-credentialed journalists, Sarah Palin cautioned audience members against media “moles” attending the Teen Challenge fundraiser where she was the featured speaker. “Be careful. There may be some media that sneaked into the room.”

A herd of curious emus make a good case for protective lens filters during an assignment at the Wild Rose Emu Ranch in the Bitterroot Valley in June 2007.

" Exciting, yes. But in truth, it was just another Sunday, another one that lived up to our two mottos:

Expect the Unexpected.

And, Failure is Not an Option."

cheerful and as objective as possible.

No matter what, laughter always found a way into the day, the deep belly-aching kind that makes your eyes water.

Often it happened in the middle of an assignment, like the time we met Gus, a wild goose who came and went from Pat and Jim Pulliam’s home on Mullan Road as if he owned the place, pooping everywhere.

Usually, animals were involved in the funniest assignments, like the time we were chased by a flock of emus and spit on by alpacas.

We couldn’t believe our eyes when a group of tiny Western Montana fairgoers inspired us to check out George the giant swine, who in 2005 held the five-time world champion title of “world’s largest pig” and weighed in at a whopping 1,173 pounds.

On Sundays, we learned that there is no end to the variety of things people choose to do on their weekends.

Take the Mountain Sharks Dive Club of Missoula for example. On the blustery last day of October in 2006 and in honor of Halloween, the dive club sunk pumpkin carving to new depths by conducting the traditional gourd surgery at the bottom of the Blackfoot River in 43-degree water.

S

torytelling is big on Sundays, and in Missoula people want to tell and listen to them, be it at an author’s book reading, sharing stories with the national oral history program StoryCorps, at powwows, and at Travelers’ Rest State Park.

Standing – sometimes sleeping – in line also seems to be a popular Sunday activity. Getting early front door placement for Black Monday, tickets to

the Rolling Stones concert, premieres for the “Harry Potter and The Fellowship of the Ring” movies, Grizzly football, and being assured of seating when presidential candidates come calling seem to bring out half of Missoula County.

This being Montana, the masses come prepared for the long wait with sleeping bags, portable grills, coolers of food, folding chairs, books and board games in tow.

One young couple arrived at Northstar Aviation before dawn on a frigid morning to be first in line when the doors opened for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s visit in April 2008. Although the romantic pair got props for being ambitious, they overslept in their shared sleeping bag and awoke to a long line of late comers who snaked around them while they slept. In the end, they did get seating, but they weren’t among the first through the door.

P

rofessional as we could be on assignment, once back in the car or the newsroom, it was impossible to not fall into fits of hilarity – or disbelief – over some of Sunday’s standout comments and experiences.

Try as we might, we could never stop noting the physical similarities between dogs and their owners at the annual Five Valley Kennel Club show or be distracted by the ill-fitting loincloths and leather breeches that more than few people wore to celebrate the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Then there was the Sarah Palin incident on Sept. 12, 2010.

It took all of our composure and professional training to keep our cool when the former Alaska

missoula magazine

"We were sisters of the road,

ready for the unexpected and to make the Monday paper, week in and week out, come high water or fire."

governor came to Missoula to talk at a Teen Challenge fundraiser.

We were among the handful of journalists invited to the event by Palin’s handlers, had undergone a background check and received special media passes.

Yet once we were there, corralled in a tiny visible space, Palin used many minutes of her talk to publicly ridicule us – the press – and described us as “moles” to her audience.

Linda kept her head high and continued to take photos, despite the rude shoving by the event’s handlers, and I continued to take notes throughout Palin’s speech.

Frustrated by the experience, it was a point of pride when the next day we were flooded with emails from Palin supporters who thanked us for our fair and accurate coverage, and by a Missoula police officer who wrote to tell us he admired our professionalism and work under fire.

O

n any given Sunday these past six years, Linda and I alternately overheated on the fringe of wildfires and endured subzero temperatures during the Christmas Bird Count at the Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge. We trundled to work at rude early morning hours to cover the Missoula Marathon, and we fought our way through crowds to cover skateboard superstars and hungry hordes at the University of Montana International Food Festival.

We saw more than our share of people in costumes, and became well versed in police scanner lingo.

When we worked holidays together – everything from New Year’s Eve to Labor Day – it wasn’t really a

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chore, even if it was on the clock.

A year ago, for instance, when July 4 fell on Sunday and we felt sorry for ourselves because we couldn’t celebrate with our own families, we stumbled upon one of our all-time favorite assignments: the Flynn Family Reunion.

More than 130 Flynns had flocked to the family’s original 1872 homestead to celebrate the holiday with their large, loving brood that encompassed seven generations.

In the shade of ancient trees and their historic home just off Mullan Road, the Flynn family swept us into their fold and refused to allow us to leave until we sat among them and shared their amazing smorgasbord.

We caved in to their pressure and found unexpected joy on a holiday we thought would be only work.

Rarely do one reporter and one photographer work a singular day together for so many years. We did, and our time together – our treasure hunting – finding and telling the stories of the people, places and events of western Montana were memorable.

Along the way, we became dear friends, sharing Sunday confessions in the front seat of the car as we drove up and down back roads and highways.

We were sisters of the road, ready for the unexpected and to make the Monday paper, week in and week out, come high water or fire.

Missoulian reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at (406) 523-5253 or by email at bcohen@missoulian.com.

Photographer Linda Thompson left the Missoulian in August for a two-year stay in Sweden.

Usually, reporter Betsy Cohen and I bow out gracefully when offered to join sources at mealtime, but we were no match for the Flynn family’s persistence in joining their delicious Fourth of July feast.

When the camera batteries start to fail and you’ve lost all sensation in your trigger finger, you know it’s time to go inside.

During this December 2005 assignment, we followed a team of hearty birdwatchers for an early morning subzero tour of Ninepipe National Wildlife Refuge.

Nurses administer H1N1 vaccines during a Missoula City-County Health Department free clinic at Sentinel High School in December 2009.

Although reluctantly awake at the very early morning start to the inaugural Missoula Marathon, the spirit of the event and summer sunrise offered inspiration that helped make the event a favorite to photograph.

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birds

Professor Erick Greene has spent years recording the subtleties of a songbird’s serenade. In his office at the University of Montana recently he listens to the distinct spectrograms of five different lazuli buntings.

Michael Gallacher

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by joe nickell

“Each mature male has an acoustic fingerprint – a bar code, so to speak”

I

n a brushy crease on the face of Mount Sentinel, the quietude of an early summer morning is pierced by a quick, high-pitched flourish of sound. To most human ears, if the racket registers at all, it evokes a single word: bird. To people who come listening for such things, those three seconds of warbled phrases evoke two words: lazuli bunting.

A small, thick-billed songbird with a head the color of a clear Montana sky over a bib of rust, the male lazuli bunting fills the foothills and ravines of mounts Sentinel and Jumbo with song during the summer months. He comes here from his wintering grounds in western Mexico to claim a small parcel of prime real estate, find a mate and sire a brood, as he and his ancestors have done since long before the sounds of hammers, cars and the occasional Rolling Stones concert began to fill the valley below.

Erick Greene has spent plenty of time in the company of these blue-headed songbirds. A biologist and professor at the University of Montana, Greene has made the western faces of Sentinel and Jumbo his own personal research laboratory.

But that’s not exactly how he sees it. To him, these hillsides are Missoula’s oldest jazz clubs.

“Jazz is about some old guy playing a tune, a young guy comes along and learns the riffs but then does it his own way,” says Greene. “It turns out, that’s exactly how these birds are learning their songs. They’re listening to what’s out there, imitating what they hear, and then putting those riffs together in uniquely individual ways.”

A slender, square-jawed man who stands at his desk and sometimes sleeps on a cot in his office, Greene speaks with the kind of animated gestures and crescendos of staccato chatter that mark him as a scientist more comfortable birding in the field than resting in the roost.

Yet in his office on the second floor of UM’s Health Sciences Building, Greene has lit upon some discoveries that transform our scientific understanding of birdsong, while intuiting tantalizing insights into the process by which we humans learn and become individuals.

If nothing else, his research completely wrecks any assertion that African-American musicians of the early 20th century invented anything fundamentally new when they began improvising around familiar tunes and calling it jazz.

A

ctually, Greene could have told you that last part long before he even decided to become a bird scientist. As a child, Greene’s first deep interest was music. It all began with an album that his mother gave him one Christmas, of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 1 and Italian Concerto, performed by the famed pianist Glenn Gould. missoula magazine

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A lazuli bunting, captured by Greene on Mount Jumbo in the mid-1990s, is delicately removed from the netting before being banded and released.

Kurt Wilson

Heather Pimley

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Greene knew nothing of Bach nor Gould. But to humor his mother, he put the album on for a spin.

“From the first few seconds, I was utterly transfixed,” recalls Greene. “I had no idea there were such sounds out there. It was weird and totally transformative. I must have listened to that record 500 times. I was lost, I was hooked.”

The young boy quickly began to devour the music of Bach and his Baroque predecessors. As he began to learn about the music that drove his passions, he discovered that an integral part of the performance technique of the period was improvisation.

“A lot of the Baroque and Rennaisance music is actually very skeletal on paper,” he says. “Everything else you hear – the little flourishes and elaborations around the melody – is improvisation. So it’s jazz, just not by that name.”

Greene himself began to play the harpsichord and organ, and even contemplated a career as a performer. Yet the songs of the wild proved a greater draw.

“I did a lot of classical music but also was passionate about the outdoors and

animals and communication and behavior,” he says. “So it ultimately was a natural marriage of my interests to go into this type of science.”

“I’ve always been fascinated in how we use sound in different ways,” he continues.

“That’s how I started these studies, asking questions about the function of different kinds of calls and communication.”

G

reene already knew that individual mature male lazuli buntings only sang one song over the course of their entire adulthood. He also knew that those songs were different from bird to bird.

“Each mature male has an acoustic fingerprint – a bar code, so to speak,” he says. “We call that his ‘crystallized song.’

They keep them for life.”

What wasn’t known was how the birds developed and differentiated those crystallized songs. So in 1992, Greene and a team of researchers began capturing male lazuli buntings on mounts Jumbo and Sentinel. Each bird was fitted with an individually color-coded leg band – “a little piece of unique bling,” Greene jokes – and then released.

At the same time, the team began recording and cataloging the calls of individual birds. Employing spectrogram readings, Greene developed a transcription system that visually showed the time and pitch patterns of the birds’ songs, much like sheet music.

What he found was that the songs of mature birds on Missoula’s signature hillsides were made up of utterances borrowed and recombined from other birds in the immediate area.

What’s more, he was able to observe that borrowing process in action with the yearling birds who were making their first return trip to the area.

“When the yearlings come in, they’re sexually mature, but they don’t have a song to carve out a chunk of real estate and attract the babes,” he explains. “They figure out real fast, you have to have a song or you’re not a player.”

P

ulling up a slide on his computer, Greene shows the spectrogram for one yearling bird’s recorded song, along with the spectrograms for the songs of six other birds.

“Here’s the most incredible example of song-borrowing I know of,” he says. “Here’s a guy with six different syllable-types in his song. When we ask where he got those, he borrowed each one from a separate song tutor – six different males who were spread out on the mountain from over past the ‘M’ to down above the golf course to halfway up the mountain.

“So he was wandering all over the bottom half of Sentinel, listening to a lot of males, and he compiled all this acoustic information in his noggin with a high degree of fidelity and then was able to repeat them in a combination that was his own.”

It wasn’t just the individual sounds, or “syllables,” that the bird borrowed.

“There’s some grammatical rules here that you can plainly see when you map it all out,” says Greene. “The first syllable is the first from this older male. The second is from this other bird’s second syllable.

With the rest, it’s not exactly a one-to-one correspondence – some of the birds have more or fewer syllables in their songs, but there’s no crossing lines where he has moved a syllable earlier or later than it appeared in his tutor’s song.

“So it’s evident that they do pay attention to syntax and some sort of bunting grammar.”

Granted, that’s not exactly pure

improvisation, in the way many of us think of improvisation.

“If he was a university student, he’d get kicked out of school so fast for plagiarism,” says Greene.

But then again, what is true improvisation or originality? Jazz wasn’t the first music to integrate improvisation into its basic structure.

Even Bach, the great composer, borrowed music from himself and others. This very sentence on the page may have never been written before, yet it is comprised of individual elements that have been uttered millions upon millions of times before. (The exact phrase, “millions upon millions,” produces more than 6.8 million hits on Google.)

Examined another way, how is it that a jazz aficionado can discern whether an old recorded saxophone solo is that of Coleman Hawkins or the Bird himself, Charlie Parker? How can you recognize the voice of a friend on the other end of a crackling telephone connection, without her mentioning her name?

Individuality and originality, it would seem, are intrinsically linked not only to creativity, but also to those things that never change: the unique set of overtones produced by our vocal cords as we sing or speak; the whorls on our

fingertips; and, importantly, the brushy hillsides or bustling streets where we establish and expand our perspectives on the world.

“We inherit what we inherit, we imprint on what we experience, and then we rebel,” says Greene. “That’s what being a teenager is all about; it’s what being a yearling lazuli bunting is all about. We have the same kind of neural pathways and processes as birds do in terms of infants learning to speak – it’s the same wiring diagram in the brain. It’s an ancient, conserved blueprint. It’s what you share with the dinosaurs.”

“And yet that’s also where innovation comes from,” he continues. “That’s what’s cool about culture and art: People are borrowing stuff and putting their own fresh twist on it. Seeing those connections is what’s really exciting to me.”

Joe Nickell covers arts and entertainment for the Missoulian. He can be reached at (406) 523-5358 or by email at jnickell@missoulian.com.

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on the fly

...continued from page 19 “They give a lot of action when they’re coming up from the bottom of the water chamber to the top. A lot of them try to swim back down, but they have these gas pockets that bring them up. Lots of them try to fight the current, trying to swim back down to the bottom. I think they say 70 to 80 percent of them die because they’re too exhausted trying to swim away from the surface because they don’t want to go up there.”

B

oth Cox and Scott agree about where to look for the fish during a baetis hatch.

“The backwater eddies, and I don’t mean big eddies, the little pockets at that time of year are isolated from the current,”

missoula reads

...continued from page 22

“The Feast Day of Fools” by James

Lee Burke

Celebrated crime master and two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke returns with his 30th novel, a gorgeously crafted, brutally resonant chronicle of violence along the Texas-Mexico border.

Sheriff Hackberry Holland patrols a small Southwest Texas border town, meting out punishment and delivering justice in his small square of this magnificent but lawless land. When an alcoholic ex-boxer named Danny Boy Lorca begs to be locked up after witnessing a man tortured to death by a group of bandits, Hack and his deputy, Pam Tibbs, slowly extract the Indian man’s gruesome tale.

It becomes clear that the desert contains a multitude of criminals, including serial murderer Preacher Jack Collins (whom The New York Times Book Review called “one of Burke’s most inspired villains”).

T

he Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College sponsors the Bakeless Literary Publication Prizes, an annual book series competition for new authors of literary works in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The Bakeless Prizes, named for Middlebury College supporter Katharine Bakeless Nason, were established in order to support emerging writers.

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Cox said. “If I’m fishing from the bank I put in a cast with a longer leader and let the fly line line up right against the bank, throw a curve in it so your bug is just a little off the bank and let it sit there without a drift.

The fish, that time of year, tend to cruise the banks and pull into these pockets. That works fairly well.

“The other thing is to walk out into the river and fish back into the banks. You get fish working beats at that time of year way more than you do for the rest of the year.”

Some of those little eddies will contain foam. The duns get trapped by the foam and make for easy pickings for the fish. The foam can make it difficult to see your fly, but it’ll be worth the trouble in the end.

There are other fall hatches that get a lot of attention on our rivers, like the

mahogany duns and fall gray drakes. Those flies are larger, easier to fish and elicit vigorous strikes, but I find those hatches somewhat less reliable than the baetis.

The blue-winged olive is an old, dependable friend.

“It signals a time when the season is winding down, you can catch your breath and you don’t see a lot of people on the river because a lot of people turn to hunting,” Cox said. “You see the tamaracks changing and the water’s really calm and you see that slow sipping rise form, which is a happy thing.”

Winners of the Bakeless Prizes will have their book-length manuscripts published by Graywolf Press. Two of the 2010 winners have Montana connections and both authors will be part of the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book.

They are:

Jane Nealon dreamed of growing up to become a saint or, failing that, a nurse. She idolized Clara Barton, Kateri Tekakwitha and Molly Pitcher, whose biographies she read and reread. But by the time she follows her calling to nursing school, her beloved younger brother is diagnosed with cancer, which challenges her to bring hope and healing closer to home. His death leaves her shattered, and she flees into her work, and into poetry.

“Beautiful Unbroken” details Nealon’s life of caregiving, from her years as a flying nurse, untethered and free to follow friends and jobs from the Southwest to Savannah, to more somber years in New York City, treating men in a homeless shelter on the Bowery and working in the city’s first AIDS wards. In this compelling and revealing memoir, Nealon brings a poet’s sensitivity to bear on the hard truths of disease and recovery, life and death. She currently works at Partnership Health Center in Missoula.

Many volunteers and supporters help make the Humanities Montana Festival a success. I salute you all and encourage everyone to become involved. Fact & Fiction Downtown is one of four bookstores that have worked with the Festival Committee during the past 12 years. It is an honor to work with the booksellers from Shakespeare & Co, Barnes & Noble and Fact & Fiction On Campus.

“American Masculine: Stories"

by Shann Ray, winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Fiction

The American West has long been a place where myth and legend have flourished.

Where men stood tall and lived rough. But that West is no more.

In its place, Shann Ray finds washedup basketball players, businessmen hiding addictions, and women fighting the inexplicable violence that wells up in these men. A son struggles to accept his father’s apologies after surviving a childhood of beatings. Two men seek empty basketball hoops on a snowy night, hoping to relive past glory. A bull rider skips town and rides herd on an unruly mob of passengers as he searches for a thief on a train threading through Montana’s Rocky Mountains.

Shann Ray Ferch grew up in Alaska and Montana, and lived on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeast Montana.

“Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse’s Life” by

Mary Jane Nealon, winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction

As a child, Mary

Bob Meseroll is an avid fly fisherman who is not conflicted by the urge to hunt. He can be reached at 523-5265 or at bmeseroll@missoulian.com.

Barbara Theroux is manager of Face & Fiction Downtown and a regular contributor to Missoula magazine and the Missoulian newspaper. Kurt Wilson is photography editor of the Missoulian.

zemke's wolfpack ...continued from page 39

interests; he loved the outdoors. It was always a good life.”

Hubert Zemke, Jr., is an expert on his father.

“If you’re into quantitative analysis, there’s this – the P-47’s kill to loss ratio was 8:1,” he said. “It was 3.5:1 for P-51s. He flew an inferior aircraft (though, it should be noted, very durable in comparison). Its weakness was weighing 14,000 pounds, but he found a way.

“They’d get altitude and then he’d stack his groups on top of each other for protection. Today there is a great deal of credit given the P-51 for winning the air war over Europe. It wasn’t until March 1944 that there was any quantity of P-51s in the European Theatre.”

The credit, he submits, belongs to the P-47 and the elder Zemke’s strategy. He was a leader, someone who was not vain, but protective of his men to the point of recklessness with higher authority.

“Many people, young and old, were very drawn to him,” his son said. “He was extremely honest. He walked the moral high ground.

“He led from the front: He was hit eight times by fire from the ground and four times from the air – and one of those was from a B-17. He didn’t ask anybody to do what he wouldn’t do. That’s why the 56th was the best in the theatre.”

W

hen Hub Zemke went down in Europe it was aboard a P-51.

Offering to take over the 479th Fighter Group and, he hoped, delay a desk job, Zemke left the Wolf Pack in the summer of 1944. He quickly put his stamp on the 479th, though the previous commanding officer Kyle Riddle was soon to return.

Zemke packed his bags on Halloween and then decided to fly one final bomber escort. He went down in a storm over

Germany, the right wing of his P-51 snapping into the fuselage. Bruised and freezing, Zemke eventually sought help from a couple of what turned out to be forced laborers.

He was soon captured and eventually sent by train to Frankfurt for interrogation, and it’s here his memoirs are the most chilling.

A

fter a week or so he boarded another train for Wetzlar, a distribution center for prisoners of war.

“Riding to Frankfurt station provided a good look at the destruction created by our aerial bombardment,” Zemke wrote.

“Whole city blocks had been flattened, rubble lay everywhere. What hadn’t been bombed out had been burned out.”

Once in Wetzlar, Zemke was witness to an air raid. The exhilaration of hearing the approaching B-17s was replaced by fear when the bombs began to fall.

“With a mighty vroomp, vroomp, the earth quaked,” Zemke said. “The

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doors flew open, frames rattled and the ramshackle wooden huts shook as if they were about to collapse. Then came silence – except for the drone of aircraft.”

Zemke figured a nearby optical plant had been the target, but when he rose, the plant was undamaged. The Allies had missed their target, and Zemke. Yet he wasn’t out of danger.

It was December 11 when he was sent back to Frankfurt. With “Kreigsgefangener” (Prisoner of War) stenciled on his jacket, he boarded another train. As it crept through the mountainside he struck up a conversation with a worried-looking 10-year-old German girl.

“At first shy, she quickly gained confidence and proved highly entertaining,” Zemke wrote. “My guards observed this exchange with some amusement. Not a great deal of the scenery could be observed as we wound along so I continued to practice my German on the little girl … when the blissfulness of the moment erupted into carnage.”

The train was being strafed by P-47s.

“Before my eyes splintered holes appeared in the wood panel opposite with a deafening crack,” Zemke wrote. “The little girl who had been beside me fell across my extended legs, the top of her head a bloody pulp.”

Once the planes left, Zemke, an obvious American prisoner, was faced with a hostile group of German civilians. A Wehrmacht lieutenant appeared and kept him from further harm.

Z

emke’s five months in the Barth prisoner camp ended with V-E Day, but he was liberated before that. Fearful that the German SS may exterminate the 9,000 captured aviators imprisoned there, he gradually built a relationship with the Kommandant, Oberst von Warnstedt.

As Germany’s surrender approached it was Zemke and von Warnstedt who arranged to have the camp’s guard personnel leave late one evening unbeknownst to the prisoners, who awoke to liberation the next day. It was another example of Zemke’s leadership.

The story doesn’t end there, and there is so much more: a trip to Russia to help pilots train to fly the P-40; or his stateside lecture trip in which his orders to return to command in England were switched to a desk job under General “Monk” Hunter in New York.

Zemke, figuring he hadn’t received the orders in writing, ignored them and caught a plane back to Europe, avoiding that duty and any sort of punishment for dodging it.

It helped that he was already recognized as an excellent flight commander.

“He was a very disciplined person,” his son said. “He made a point and he didn’t dwell on it. He had a leadership quality that could inspire just about anyone.”

So it was that Hub Zemke could avoid serving under generals he didn’t like and get his fighters to perform their best, to take command of a situation and identify strengths and weaknesses. Andy Rooney, the venerable “60 Minutes” commentator, wrote extensively on Zemke while a war correspondent, and then as a columnist.

“There are a lot of books that have been written about him,” said Hub Zemke Jr. “He was a tactician and a very good leader of people. That’s been said in a lot of different forms.

“I don’t know what else I could say about him.”

Except maybe that “The Hub” – Colonel Hubert Zemke from Missoula, Montana – needs to be better known in his hometown. His story might be the greatest movie never made.

Fritz Neighbor covers University of Montana football for the Missoulian. He can be reached at 523-5247 or at fneighbor@ missoulian.com.

Photos on exhibit at the Museum of Mountain Flying, Missoula International Airport.

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Wagyu beef patties, prepared and ready to eat at the Marchi Angus Ranch.

marchi angus ranch ...continued from page 53

Zach Bernheim reasons that 350 pounds of ground Wagyu – as a vanguard to get people accustomed to it – means diners won’t be expected to plunk down $45 for a ribeye.

He says it also makes buying whole Wagyu a much more sustainable prospect, considering the restaurant might routinely go through 80 tenderloins and 20 ribeye steaks per week.

“At that rate, if I was serving nothing but premium cuts, I’d wipe out the Marchi herd in under a year,” Bernheim says.

Liz Marchi handles most of the day-today selling of the specialty marbled beef, ensuring first-time and returning customers get what they need and understand the benefits of the breed beyond marbling – such as the fact that Wagyu is higher in unsaturated fats, including Omega-6 and Omega-3 oils.

As founder of Frontier Angels – a group of accredited investors providing equity capital to early and mid-stage entrepreneurial companies – like any other business, she learned how this one worked from the ground up.

“Beginning with the simplest of curves – like the difference between a bull and a steer, and between a heifer and a cow,” she says laughing.

Then there was the hurdle of having been a longtime vegetarian when she met Jon in 2001.

By the time they married in 2006, her eating habits had changed.

“I enjoy the meat as much as he does now – home-raised meat is wonderful,” Marchi says.

A

s abruptly as he took his stance, Bull No. 395 breaks formation first. The 10-minute steely-eyed standoff is over and he begins to mill the paddock with an edge of boredom. The others follow suit.

Jon Marchi says these three bulls will probably never end up on a plate. After all, they’ve got a lot of social oiling to do in this herd of 130 cows and maiden heifers.

Meanwhile, Bull No. 75 may not fare as well.

Recently castrated for repeatedly jumping a five-foot farm fence, he now stands docile behind a pack of cows – a massive shadow of rapidly diminishing muscle, marbling with fat by the minute.

Lori Grannis is a local food columnist and frequent contributor to Missoula magazine. She can be reached at 360-8788 or by e-mail at llgrannis@gmail.com.

Kurt Wilson is photography editor of the Missoulian. He can be reached at 523-5244 or by email at kwilson@missoulian.com.

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parting shot

p.s.

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missoula magazine

We march happily into another glorious western Montana autumn, following the lead of the University of Montana Marching Band. photo by michael gallacher

TMRR

Trout Meadows River Ranch Missoula, Montana TMRR

Trout Meadows River Ranch Missoula, Montana

TMRR

TMRR

Trout Meadows River Ranch Missoula, Montana

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