FOUR

SMALL-TOWN AMERICA

WE’VE ALL HEARD THE DEFINITION OF THE AMERICAN Dream: having the precious opportunity to have a good job, buy a house, and to ensure our children inherit a better life. Those aren’t just words. To many of us they are a sacred trust, something we must work hard to ensure for future generations. Holding tight to that ideal, we not only ensure a better life for those who come after us but for this blessed nation as well.

When it comes to family life, I am definitely living the American Dream.

I’ve been married to Lolita (Lola) Hand since 1992. We have three amazing kids: Jennifer, Wolfgang, and Konrad. Even though I work in Washington, DC, we call Montana home, just as my family has done for five generations—six, if you count my kids!

Family lore has it that the Zinkes—my father’s family—came to the Dakotas in the early 1880s, nearly a decade before North and South Dakota were states. Those Zinkes were farmers. The name, incidentally, is pronounced “zinc-ee.” It means “prominent nose” in German. I’ve always taken that as a good thing: so much of life is about sniffing out opportunities, truth, even a good burger! Apparently, the original Zinkes were well equipped to do that. Certainly I’ve always followed my nose.

The Zinkes made their way from what had become North Dakota to eastern Montana, then to Kalispell, Montana—the county seat of Flathead County, which also includes Whitefish—before ultimately ending up in Whitefish sometime in the 1930s. My grandfather Oswald Adolph “Ole” Zinke married a Montana girl—my grandmother Earleen Grace Johnston, who was born and raised in the little prairie town of Bainville, Montana.

You couldn’t call Grandma Zinke a local girl, at least not as far as Whitefish is concerned: Bainville is on the opposite side of Montana from Whitefish. That’s just shy of the distance from Chicago to Washington, DC. Montana’s not just Big Sky Country; it’s big country, period!

At any rate, my paternal grandparents got married in the late 1930s—family lore is a little sketchy on the details—and started having kids. Two of each gender, including my dad, Ray Dale Zinke, in 1940. My grandfather and father maintained the tradition of being blue-collar workers who made their livings with their hands; they were both master plumbers. My grandfather started Ole’s Plumbing and Heating, which was right on Central Avenue in Whitefish, and my father carried on the family business by working for him. In fact, my father earned the title “master plumber” at age seventeen; he was the youngest person to do so in the history of Montana. I’ve always been proud of that fact, and that’s a corollary to what I was saying before about each successive generation doing better than the last: each of us should always strive to do something better—maybe not work-related, possibly devoted to community or church—that promotes pride of family. Grandfather Zinke did that for me.

My father went on to be the first in his family to get a college degree and graduated from Montana State University with a passion for drafting. After college, he stayed in construction and worked in asphalt-laying operations, plumbing, and drafting. He tried doing jobs outside the drafting profession, such as designing houses, but he wasn’t an architect, so that didn’t last long. I give him a lot of credit for trying something outside his comfort zone. That’s how we grow.

Dad worked for and ultimately ran several companies, including construction and plumbing contracting. He was pretty successful in most of his endeavors and for the most part operated on a handshake. I’ve often asked myself, “Was he happy?” It’s a tough question to answer because he didn’t complain or share a lot of his concerns. But I do know this: he loved his family and he was proud of them. That can go a long way to making any man or woman content.

People in my mother’s family weren’t exactly slouches either. The Harlows trace their roots back to the Pilgrim days at Plymouth Rock. The family made its way west, settling for a time in the Mount Vernon area of Illinois before migrating to eastern Montana to look for work during the Great Depression. That was when my grandmother was young. Talk about wondering what was inside someone’s head: What does a young woman, of that unliberated time, in the grip of that kind of economic morass, think about the future? Often we find the answer to that in their actions.

In 1920 my maternal grandmother—then known as Esther Eiben—left home at age fourteen to work as a handmaiden and was given a loan to go to college. I’ve long suspected her eagerness to leave was motivated by more than a quest for independence, although she certainly was strong-willed and smart. Her mother had died early on, and my grandmother was the oldest of the children.

I believe that after her mother’s death her father viewed my grandmother as a surrogate for his wife. That meant raising the other kids, performing household duties … and whatever other duties were assigned to her. My grandmother was a very private and reserved person. I don’t know if her father ever sexually abused her, but she never talked about him and rarely spoke of her family at all for that matter. But she was a kind and loving grandmother to the point of spoiling her only daughter and especially her grandchildren. She was a terrific cook and had a passion for gardening. Viewing her Whitefish home from the street, you’d see rows of flowers planted in the finest English garden tradition. Every window had a flower box; every border was neatly manicured and free of weeds. She devoted a lot of her passion to her gardens and to making things grow. I take after her in that way.

My family still lives in that home now, and the house is considered iconic, partly because of the flowering trees and the exotic plants that my grandmother had nurtured into maturity. As you might imagine, that was a rarity in Montana.

Grandma graduated college before she was eighteen. She was the first member of our family to do so. After graduating, she became a schoolteacher at a Native Indian one-room schoolhouse in the open plains of frontier Montana, near the town of Richey. Those were rough times known as the Dirty Thirties from the dust bowls and poverty. At one point, the county owed her $1.50, which it couldn’t pay, so they gave her a warrant against the treasury. I’ve actually tried to find out if the debt was ever paid, just out of curiosity. If it wasn’t, the interest on that sum would be pretty impressive by now.

During the same period, my mother’s father, Arthur R. “Art” Harlow, found work in constructing the Fort Peck Dam as part of the Public Works Administration. The dam is just about a hundred miles northwest of Richey, but the workers—there were thousands of them—were scattered in makeshift camps throughout the region. Grandpa Harlow was based in a “man camp” within a day’s travel to my grandmother’s schoolhouse.

As you might imagine, with that many men around and relatively few schoolteachers, there was a lot of jousting for my grandmother’s attention. There was one other worker, in particular, who like my grandfather decided he would compete for her affections by chopping wood. My grandfather was a crane operator, and he worked the night shift, and this other guy worked the day shift.

So my grandfather would cut wood for my grandmother and leave it on one side of the schoolhouse, and this other guy would cut wood and leave it on the other side of the schoolhouse. Both of them knew they were courting the same girl. I’m not sure why my grandmother picked my grandfather—either he was better at chopping wood or he looked better doing it or both. Or maybe there was something else, the same thing I felt when I first laid eyes on Lola, my future wife: a connection—nonverbal but very, very real. You’ve probably felt it. I guess we all have. But she did pick him, and they were married on Thursday, October 24, 1929—the day the stock market started its slide into what would become the Crash of 1929 five days later.

The late 1920s and ’30s were a rotten time to be out of work. The problem was that when my grandmother married my grandfather, she had to give up her teaching position. You read that right: she had to resign. Not wanted to. Not chose to. At that time, schoolteachers in the plains of Montana were not allowed to be married.

There was a reason for this. It may be difficult to fathom, especially for those who grew up accustomed to the powerful aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but our state and many others used to have what they called “marriage bars” or “marriage bans” to women’s employment. Why? Interested to see what my grandmother was up against, I found this from 1899: seeking to dismiss Anaconda’s sole wedded schoolteacher, the superintendent explained that the lady was “married and is not in need of the salary which she draws from the schools.”¹ Exceptions were occasionally made for married women whose husbands were permanently debilitated—a not uncommon situation in the plains, where work was very physical, often dangerous, and injuries frequent and extreme. Yet as late as 1927, even the somewhat progressive Helena Independent maintained that: “Single women with their living to make should not be penalized by having positions open to them otherwise taken by women who have married failures.”²

So my grandmother couldn’t get a position just because of the Great Depression. After all, the hardship the family was suffering was hardly unique. Ironically, my grandmother’s employment termination occurred in Montana where the first woman ever was elected to Congress. Jeannette Rankin was elected to the office before women could even vote. It is the same seat that I am proud to hold now.

My grandfather kept food on their table by taking what jobs he could: some through the Works Progress Administration and some on his own. When the United States entered World War II on December 7, 1941, my grandfather was thirty-two years old and a father—a little old to volunteer for active duty. But he did his bit for the war effort regardless. He built runways in the bitter cold on the island of Adak, Alaska, in support of the Naval Operating Base the US Navy set up in 1942. A small note in World War II history is that the United States suffered more casualties in the Aleutian Chain due to cold weather than were killed by the Japanese.

After the war, Grandpa Harlow put in an application to run a Chevrolet dealership. This was back in the days when dealerships—like most everything else in the United States—were family owned and operated. When one became available in Whitefish, he put what little he had in his life’s savings on the line, and together—Grandma Harlow was the accountant—they made the dealership into one of the most successful businesses in Whitefish.

Harlow Chevrolet opened its doors in the early ’50s.

As part of the dealership, Grandpa Harlow built what was then one of the finest garage showrooms in Montana at the time. The typical lineup in the showroom proudly displayed three cars in it: a luxury car, like an Impala or a Caprice; a midrange car like a Nova or a Corvair; and then either a truck or something sporty, if the dealer was lucky enough to get a Camaro or a Corvette. That was all the inventory the business could fit in its showroom—and all the market could bear at the time. Folks mostly came in and ordered cars with the options they wanted rather than picking one off the lot.

Back then, the profit margin on a car was around 25 percent, and car salespeople had a lot of room to make deals. If you were buying a vehicle, you could barter—trade construction jobs, eggs and milk, or whatever you had as part of the price. I rememember making frequent trips with my grandmother to an old farm just outside of town to pick up eggs from a farming family who needed a car but did not have the cash to buy one. We needed eggs, they needed a car, and with a handshake the deal was done and everyone was happy. That sense of community and finding ways to make things work are important.

Grandpa Harlow did pretty well. By 1955 he was successful enough and well liked enough to become president of the Whitefish Chamber of Commerce and a leading voice in town. My parents, Ray Dale Zinke and Jean Montana Harlow, met while they were both attending Whitefish High School. She was class of 1957; he was class of 1958. They were married in July 1958, and my older brother, Randy, was born less than a year later. My dad began attending college in Bozeman. He was a young father, and my grandpa Harlow offered to help him attend college and get a degree. I was born in 1961, and my younger sister, Jamie, came along three years later.

My earliest memories from Bozeman were those of an inquisitive kid, which makes sense for a university town, right? Unfortunately, most of my curiosity was that of an active two-year-old.

We were living in a single-wide trailer that had aluminum doors. I once opened the door just a crack on an especially windy day. For a two-year-old I had a pretty good grip on it, so when the wind caught the aluminum door and used it like a sail, I sailed right along with it—out the door and onto the sidewalk. I wound up in the hospital with a concussion, a bunch of scrapes, a whole lot of bruises, and a taste for flight.

Another time, while I was learning to pull myself up on things, I toddled over to the stove, where there was a pot of boiling water on the burner with a handle sticking out. I grabbed the handle and got a quick shower of scolding water, which earned me another trip to the hospital.

Well, what small kid hasn’t learned the hard way? And, boy, how those memories stand out!

After my father graduated, we moved from Bozeman back to Whitefish. It was a return home for my parents and a coming home of sorts for my siblings and me. We moved into a little one-story nine-hundred-square-foot home on the lake near the railroad tracks.

While I was growing up, Whitefish was a railroad and timber town. Whether it got its name from being shaped like a fish or perhaps from Indian legend, the town itself was incorporated in 1905 after the Great Northern Railway came through. Whitefish supplied the railroad with timber year-round and blocks of lake ice for refrigeration in the winter. Timber and the railroad brought the community to life.

You may not have heard of our town, but you’ve certainly heard of Glacier National Park. Whitefish is just west of the park, and the area is renowned for its natural beauty and recreation. People come from all over the world to hike, camp, and fish there.

I’ve always loved the outdoors. Actually, let me rephrase that: I’ve always loved the American outdoors. There’s something new and grand about them, even today. Maybe because the recent history is still so palpable. It’s no accident that Native American culture is rich with spiritualism born in these places. When you’re out in the plains or mountains of America you can’t help but hear the words of Genesis 1:10: “God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”

The word good cannot have more meaning than this! And if you need reinforcement, ask soldiers who have returned home and they will tell you that kissing the soil of these United States comes right after kissing their loved ones.

I lived what I thought was a relatively privileged life in a small town. Everyone knew Harlow Chevrolet, and everyone knew who I was. Thanks to Grandpa Harlow, I could use his charge account at the small businesses in town. If I needed paint or lumber for a project, I could get it pretty easily. If I wanted to get a birthday present for one of my friends, I had a charge account at Haynes Retail Drugs and the local Coast-to-Coast Hardware store. That was pretty impressive in those days! On the other side of the family, my grandpa Zinke also had a tab at the local Pastime Pool Hall and Bar where the tradesmen and other blue-collar men often could be found for a couple hours after work. I say “men” because at the time the Pastime did not have a women’s bathroom. The entrance of the Pastime had a small room with glass cases for cigars and tobacco that was separated from the bar with classic Western-style swinging gates. The bar inside consisted of an open room with a long wooden bar and mirrowed back wall on one side and pool tables on the other side. There was a back door for escape and a door just inside the swinging gates that led downstairs to the beer coolers. I knew the layout well. When I was still in grade school, I used to look through the swinging gates to see whether my grandpa was perched on one of the tall red stools. If he was not, I would walk straight in and right down the stairs to the basement. I would then grab a case of Oly Pops (Olympia Beer) and tell the barkeep “to put it on Grandpa’s tab” on the way out of the swinging gates. If you had a job in those days, most of the barkeeps would keep a tab open for you. On payday, the two most interested were the barkeep and the wife. With a case of beer on my shoulder, I would then walk straight out the door like I owned the place and cross Central Avenue in the direction of my grandpa’s plumbing shop. I would cut the route short into the alley and put the beer in the waiting trunk of a few neighborhood schoolkids. After they paid me for the beer, I would march right back to the bar and pay off the tab. Provided that the tab was paid, no one was the wiser. Being the supplier of beer to the high school kids had its privileges. For one, I was paid a dollar for every case, which was a lot of money in 1971, and secondly I had friends in high places and never had to worry about getting a ride or getting beat up. I was a “made man” early.

About the same time I was running this distribution business, I was also responsible for running the cash proceeds from Harlow Chevrolet to the bank at the end of every business day. Grandpa Harlow was in charge of sales and service, Grandma Harlow was the accountant, and my job was to run the cash and checks to the bank. That’s a family-run business!

At the end of each day, I’d grab the bank envelope and make one stop on the way to the bank: I’d go next door to Whitefish Taxi, which was a bus, taxi, and tow truck service. That business was run by Roy Duff, who was part of the Montana National Guard for more than four decades before retiring as a lieutenant colonel. Roy had seen action in World War II in the 41st Division 163rd Infantry. He served in three Pacific campaigns under the legendary General Douglas MacArthur.

Roy was wounded in 1944. As a result, he was awarded the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. After he recuperated, he rejoined his unit in the Philippines. His unit was supposed to be part of the invasion of Japan, but the ground invasion was called off after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As it happened, his unit was among the first to enter Hiroshima after the city was bombed.

If Japan hadn’t surrendered, Roy would have likely been killed, along with millions of other Americans, during that invasion and I never would have known him. Let me pause a moment to talk a little about that. I’ve seen a map of the plans for the invasion of the mainland in the war with Japan, and let me tell you: that is one sobering document.

The plans consisted of two separate actions. The first was Operation Olympic, which was scheduled to begin about November 1, 1945. The second was Operation Coronet, which would have begun March 1, 1946. The Sixth Army was responsible for the first assault. Except for a feint by three infantry divisions (a floating reserve), the first landings were to consist of three Marine Corps divisions, one cavalry division (mechanized), and a muscular six infantry divisions. Those boys were going on along the coast of the East China Sea and the Pacific. The second assault in the Pacific—against the big island of Honshu—was comprised of a massive floating reserve of ten infantry divisions and one airborne division from the First Army, and a main assault force of nine infantry divisions, two armored divisions, and three marine divisions from the Eighth and Tenth Armies. Rough calculation: a division consists of anywhere from ten to twenty thousand troops. You do the math.

Consider those ghastly numbers, the hundreds of thousands of certain casualties on our side and the probably greater number of deaths among the Japanese who would have been defending the island. Many of those would have been civilians, armed with whatever was handy since the Japanese army was low on everything by that point. Think of the widespread starvation from blockades.

The cost of securing Iwo Jima, the stepping-stone to Japan, had been monstrous. There were twenty-one thousand Japanese soldiers on the island when we arrived. Only about two hundred survived. On our side: seven thousand marines were killed and twenty thousand wounded.

One battle. One small island. And that wasn’t even the Japanese homeland.

The nuclear bombs we dropped were a horror, but I believe they forestalled a greater horror, the inch-by-inch taking of a land that would have refused to be taken. World War II would have lasted another two or three years at least and impacted our ability to help in the rebuilding of Europe. The world would have been a completely different place today.

And let me remind you that each of those people we were committing to Japanese soil as adversary and defender was a person. I recently had the honor to read an unpublished, typed letter written in March 1943, titled “Aboard a Troop Train from Camp Upton to Destination Unknown.” A large contingent of infantry was leaving the Long Island, New York, base by train, shipped in utter secrecy to avoid loose lips sinking ships and the potential for fifth columnists to sabotage a troop train.

The first thing that struck me was a cigarette burn on the side of the typescript. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” as the saying went. I pictured a nervous kid, typing on a portable typewriter as he and his fellow soldiers contemplated the near future—since the future just beyond that, combat in Europe, was probably unimaginable.

After passing through Penn Station in New York, the soldier wrote, “It was then that speculation began as to where we were going… . According to our local Admiral Byrds we were in either Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Indiana, or any one of the other forty-eight states of our Union.”

More than thirty-five hours later they “got the shock of our lives [when] the sergeant finally broke down and said, ‘Fort McClellan, Alabama, soldiers.’”

I quote this yellowing, unsigned document because it is the best way I know of conveying to you what I myself have experienced, just what you’re getting when you sign on as a soldier. We don’t have a draft now, so the military life is something young men and women elect to do today. Back then, you didn’t have a choice. And you were with other young men who didn’t have a choice.

Yet you went.

Service to country.

My point is that war is both macro and micro—the big impersonal picture and the small very human one. In the army, in politics, decisions have to be made on the macro level: the greatest good. But one cannot, must not ever forget that that pullback is comprised of countless people, from masses of people on Iwo Jima to one scared kid on a troop train. My God, I have been proud to know and serve with so many of them. It chokes me up just to write about it.

Wow. I have certainly swerved a little wide of where I started, with Roy Duff of Whitefish Taxi.

Roy was a cigar-smoking old soldier who had a bark you could hear from the sidewalk. I would “report” to his desk and stand at attention. He or his wife, Norma, would give me the bank envelope and a dime for my delivery mission ahead.

Roy’s dime, along with the dime my grandmother would give me, was enough to keep a little change in my pockets, so for a kid that was a pretty good deal. It certainly was an easy job: the only thing I had to remember to do was avoid an Irish pub called Casey’s Bar on the way to the bank. Casey’s Bar was where the guys who worked the Great Northern Railway drank. They were a rough and lively lot. They would never rob me, but they would call out, “Hey, kid! Whaddaya got, kid?”

I learned to cross the street and avoid them. Sometimes the best way to resolve conflicts is not to engage. I learned early to pick my fights.

Roy Duff was one of a generation of men who came back from World War II and built up this country—including Whitefish. Like my grandfather, Roy served on the chamber of commerce. Roy went on to be elected mayor of Whitefish in 1955 and served two terms. The Whitefish armory is named after him.

It was people like Roy who first inspired me to respect the sacrifices veterans make.

Watching the annual Memorial Day parade in Whitefish is a story worth telling. Each Memorial Day, the local chapters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion would conduct a military-style parade march. By a “parade march” I mean the veterans would organize and march together in groups according to the conflict they served in. While my grandpa Harlow did not serve in the military, he would ensure all the grandchildren were issued small American flags and positioned at the end of the driveway to wave and cheer as the procession marched by. The distance of the march from city hall to the cemetery was just over a mile with one stop along the way to cast a wreath into the water from the bridge over Whitefish River. At the head of each group of veterans were the American flag and service flags adorned with the battle ribbons earned in blood. Flags mattered to the veterans then, and they do now for those who served and fought for them. I especially remember the World War I veterans and how they marched. In the early ’70s many of the doughboys were still alive, and I recall they marched with rifles shouldered and were sharp in cadence. Some even wore the uniforms of a conflict that no one alive today ever witnessed. One of them was my grandfather’s neighbor Mr. Haake, who lied about his age and enlisted to fight overseas when he was just sixteen. Even though he was in his seventies when I was young, he could still toss off a twenty-mile hike like it was a Sunday stroll. In his late eighties, Mr. Haake would walk to Kalispell and back—a twelve-mile journey each way. That doughboy could still march! When I mowed his lawn for fifty cents, he would talk to me about the importance of making the rows straight and lecture me on the importance of attention to detail. He also shared stories with me about his experiences when he was a young man driving ambulances on the battlefields of the Great War. “I never saw a German soldier, but I saw a lot of mud and mortars!” He was the first person I knew who wore a uniform, and he inspired me, both in terms of his love for his country and his desire to stay fit and healthy.

The World War I doughboys were followed by veterans who had served during World War II, including Ed Schenck, who enlisted with the 87th Infantry Regiment but was transferred to the 82nd Airborne. Schenck was one of the few who participated in all of the four major Airborne parachute operations in World War II. He stayed active in the reserves for years after the war, even while he and a few of his army buddies decided they were going to build a ski hill. They played with several names, including “Hell Roaring” and “Ptarmigan,” but settled on “Big Mountain,” which today is known as Whitefish Mountain Resort. It is one of the few ski runs and resorts in the United States to be designed and constructed by local community members. I worked as a dishwasher at the resort before I had my driver’s license and remember Ed’s attention to detail. When setting banquet tables, Ed used strings to make sure every plate and setting was lined up in perfect order. He was a paratrooper to the core!

My neighbor was Karl Hinderman, who also served in World War II. Karl was in one of the first classes of cold-weather training in the US Army’s elite 10th Mountain Division, which specialized in skiing and combat in winter and mountainous terrain. Since he was one of the few who knew how to ski already and was better than any of the instructors, upon graduation he was given the job of instructor and put in charge of the course.

Karl taught me how to use a map and compass. He, his youngest son, Jan, who was my age, and I would go camping, and Karl would set up a compass course. I’m sure it was similar to what he did for members of the 10th, but I’m also willing to bet that he didn’t have gingersnap cookies placed at the end of the compass points when training them. I later set up the same kind of compass course for my kids when we were fortunate enough to have time to camp.

After Karl and the other World War II veterans passed by in the parade came those who served in the Korean War, and bringing up the rear were the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War. Even as a child, I recognized that the Vietnam vets were different than those who preceded them. Rather than the tight rows and cadenced march of the elderly doughboys from World War I, the ranks of the Vietnam vets resembled more of a social stroll. Some wore uniforms, and some wore a mix or no uniform at all. None shouldered arms. By age, they were the youngest in the parade, and their stride should have been sharp and crisp. Instead, they walked with an uneasiness that highlighted that their separation from the others was deeper than just the walking distance between them. Like the Vietnam War itself, those who fought in it found themselves to be isolated from both the other veterans and the civilians for whom they fought.

It’s been more than fifty years since America entered the conflict in Vietnam in 1955 to first “contain” communism by the commitment of a few advisors to ultimately seeing 47,424 US casualties and the deaths of more than 1.4 million in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos before President Gerald Ford evacuated the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975. While I was too young to fight in the jungles of Vietnam, the war came to me every night courtesy of Walter Cronkite and the five o’clock news. My family, like millions of others across America, watched intently the scenes of firefights and reports of mounting casualties. Whether you watched to see if you could spot a relative or, like our family, had concerns for a child soon eligible for the draft, the war in Vietnam was front and center. With the backdrop of the domestic “Revolution,” as celebrated at Woodstock and by local flower children dispensing “flowers for peace” to patrons at the post office, the late ’60s and ’70s were an unsettled time in America. The war was unpopular, and those who fought in it were often shunned and even abused. The remarks by a former deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), who was a helicopter rescue pilot during the war, may have summed it up best: “When I got back to the states, I took off my uniform in the San Francisco Airport and threw it in the trash. I remember that mine was not alone. The cans were overflowing with uniforms from those who had landed before me. We did not want to be spit on wearing a uniform walking out.” There were no bands and no crowds cheering at the gates for those who were returning from answering the call to duty. In many cases, there was not even a simple “welcome home.” Today’s servicemen and servicewomen may take off their uniform in the airport for different reasons. They may not want all the attention and accolades. The overwhelming public support of our troops today may be in part due to our shame over how we treated our veterans of Vietnam.

I recently had the honor of touring Montana as its sole congressman to conduct a series of ceremonies in recognizition of the Vietnam veterans for their service and to present them with a fifty-year Vietnam War Commemorative lapel pin and a certificate signed by the president. The ceremony was similar to a military awards ceremony, complete with the presentation of colors, invocation, and the awarding of the lapel pins and certificates. I wore my navy service dress blues out of respect. During an outdoor ceremony in Helena, the heavy rains that promised to spoil the day literally stopped just before the microphone was turned on as I recalled my experience watching the Memorial Day parade as a youth and observing today’s visitors to the various war memorials in Washington, DC.

Among war memorials, the Vietnam Memorial is strikingly different. Rather than iconic stone columns and heroic statues that stand high above the ground, the Vietnam Memorial’s low contours are reminiscent of a remote firebase rather than an Arch of Triumph. The names of the fallen are etched into the black granite wall in chronological order according to when they fell to enemy fire. For those who served in the war, the ritual of visiting the wall is remarkably similar. When approaching the monument, there is a brief pause and hesitation followed by a slow walk into the entrance. The dark granite inside is a return to the jungles, rivers, and firebases of Vietnam. When the veteran nears his or her period of service on the wall, a finger rises to point to and trace the names of the fallen. After a brief moment of recall, the hand braces above, and the head is bowed in silent remembrance. While the firefights have long ended, for many the pain of the war remains and the wounds are unhealed.

When it came to the pinning portion of the ceremony in Helena, each veteran was individually recognized by rank, name, and service. It was an honor to watch many of the vets with disabilities fall in line, and when they were recognized, they would stand erect and march forward and proudly render a salute. Looking into the tearing eyes of a brother or sister in arms, I was humbled to salute back, extend my hand, and say, “Bravo Zulu. Welcome home.” It was a moment of recognition, reflection, and, I hope, healing for those who have lived through the experience of Vietnam. It was a welcome home that was long overdue. As the ceremony ended and we were walking back to our cars to travel to the next town, the sky darkened and the torrential rains similar to those before the ceremony began once again. It was as if God himself was at the ceremony and was shedding a tear for the sacrifice of those who fought in Vietnam.

As I learned about our country’s military history and how these wars had been fought differently—as bloody, sustained holding actions, without a commitment to win—I realized why I saw what I did. These men had fought a mush of a war, one with unclear goals from the top and a counterculture back home that couldn’t separate the flawed thinking of Washington politicians from soldiers simply trying to do their duty. Soldiers in Vietnam saw the rules for combat change on a daily basis, which in some cases tied their hands. The enemy didn’t operate under those restrictions, of course, which meant that soldiers saw their platoon members—friends—get cut down in front of them without the ability to fight back on the same terms.

The “rules of engagement.” They were bad then, worse now. If anything has to change in the field, it’s that. Ideas like having to be certain an enemy is armed even when you know, with absolute certainty, that it is the enemy. We’ve had Taliban fighters firing upon unarmed villagers as we were en route to help fight them off, then stopping and laying down their arms when we arrived—and we were not permitted to engage. We’d leave, and they’d continue their massacre. I’ll talk more about these restrictions later; suffice to say that when I was active, the rules of engagement occasionally put up unintended barriers to defense and offense that put American fighting personnel in unnecessary danger.

In the years since the Vietnam vets came home, our country has fought more wars like this—wars in which we fought with honor only to have politicians give back everything we won. This is the most unfair thing a country can do to those who answered the call to duty and sacrificed.

When I wasn’t sledding or building forts, my early life in Whitefish was about what it should have been. I fought with my siblings and played with the other kids in town, most of whom were from either railroad or timber-working families. But all that changed in the third grade when my parents divorced. It was a pretty acrimonious divorce, and the three of us kids often got caught in the middle of the fight.

I was lucky, though: Grandma and Grandpa Harlow lived just a few blocks from me, and I spent a lot of time either at their home or at the Chevrolet garage getting to know every tool in the shop. The garage was located on the best corner in town, where every parade would pass by the large display windows. Whitefish was and is home to one of the top-ranked winter festivals in the world—the Whitefish Winter Carnival. Among the featured attractions are the famous “yetis,” folks dressed in white canvas overalls adorned with brown leather and fur masks and boots in an attempt to resemble an Abominable Snowman. During the parades they contribute to the merriment by kissing the girls and chasing kids. My friends and I used to go down the street to the local five-and-dime store and purchase a straw and a bag of peas for one of those dimes I got for delivering the bankroll. Back in the early ’70s, smoking was common, and the yetis made it a habit to duck into the alley behind the garage before making their long walk down Central Avenue. Armed with a peashooter and an excellent firing position, I would open the bottom of one of the large garage bay doors a crack and take aim. The yetis would always have pillows tucked inside their overalls to add volume. They would take their masks off for a quick smoke and be subject to hearing the sound of peas hitting their puffy costumes. No head shots, just the somewhat muffled impacts. They never could figure out the source of the green projectiles, and the last drag on the Camel was more important than spending time in pursuit. Years later, when I became a yeti in the parade myself, I would always cast a glance down that alley and smile.

In addition to shooting peas outside of a garage, I would go to church every Sunday with my grandparents. I divided my time between the fire-and-brimstone faith of my Missionary Baptist grandfather and my grandmother’s Missouri Synod Lutherans. From the Baptists, the joke was that the Missouri Synod Lutherans, who in some ways are even stricter than the Catholics, were so private that even the pastor didn’t talk about religion.

I probably learned more from Grandma Harlow than from any other person I’ve known. And not because she talked a lot. As you may have gathered earlier, I wish she had! The things I could have learned about her life and experiences. But I learned all right. From her example. My grandmother was self-reliant, hardworking, innovative, frugal, and modest. She believed—and so do I, with all my soul—that charity should not be a role played by our government. She was heavily involved in charities but always anonymously; she wanted nothing to do with headlines or credit.

I owe my conservative values to her as well. Like my grandfather, she recycled and saved everything in the event that someday they might find a use for it. The barns were filled with scrap lumber and parts for cars that we no longer owned. If you travel across the plains of Montana, you will find that a lot of farms and ranches practice much of the same philosophy. Some call it hoarding; others call it storage. I owe a lot of my fiscal conservativism to the stories told by the children of the Great Depression like my grandparents.

All that said, while I choose to live my life as a social conservative, I’m very much a social Libertarian—not liberal but Libertarian. I believe that there is a role for government, but that role is limited, very limited. In general, unless it involves abuse of small children, the elderly, or the unfortunate, the government should stop at your mailbox. Unless you are causing harm to your neighbor, the government should not assume the role as the moral compass. The Constitution is the framework to keep the power of government from intruding on our God-given individual rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” The best form of charity is a charity that is supported and distributed by a local community and not some faceless bureaucrat in Washington. You should reach out and help your neighbor in order for your neighbor to become self-reliant and share in the opportunity to obtain the American Dream. Sure, there are communities worldwide, many of which I support, that need our help to have clean water, education, and basic human needs. But in my experience it is always better when a community is given the tools to rise up by itself. It doesn’t matter what race, religion, political party, or background your neighbor has; when your neighbor is in need you give a hand. My grandfather used to say, “If your neighbor’s barn is on fire, you don’t ask why; you just put it out.” It’s just what you do.

If my grandmother taught me conservatism and self-reliance, she also taught me the virtue of giving assistance when it was needed—and when it could help someone stand on his or her own feet. In addition to Teddy, Grandma loved another Roosevelt: FDR. She didn’t feel the programs in response to the Great Depression during his presidency morphed into entitlements. She just thought charity was something you had to do when people needed it and when they wanted a chance to work for themselves.

A lot of the government programs under FDR did just that—like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) under the New Deal. The president had an inspired vision of a work-relief program that ended up hiring nearly nine million people. Unlike far too many modern-day welfare recipients, WPA employees rebuilt our infrastructure. The infamous “Going to the Sun Road” in Glacier Park and the Fort Peck Dam Project in eastern Montana were examples of federal work projects. They raised bridges, erected buildings, constructed roads, built public parks, and gave us modern airports. They kept people employed, they gave people training that they could bring to private enterprise, and they kept our country together at a time when very real socialist and communist threats were promising rose gardens that would have destroyed us. I have toured Job Corps camps, today’s version of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) with a twist. They take young adults who went off the tracks and offer job-skill training and a fresh start. No one gives them much; they earn it. The program is making a difference but is not a charity; it is an opportunity.

Grandma didn’t wait for the government, though. She believed in charity, and she taught me to believe in it too. She just felt it should come from the individual and the community. To her, charity was something that, as a member of society, you did. She gave to all the town charity organizations, such as the Lions Club, Kiwanis, and orphanages.

My grandmother taught me how to be kind. I learned how to be stupid all on my own. But then, boys are going to find ways of being stupid. This is pretty much a given. And when you’re a young kid and are inquisitive, unafraid, and have access to things like train yards, gravel pits, and explosives, there are all sorts of ways to be stupid. Later on we’d add girls to the list of things we found age-old ways to be stupid about, but for now it was train yards, gravel pits, and explosives.

Stupid may be too strong a word, actually. I came through childhood with all of my fingers and toes and some really good times under my belt, so how dumb could I have been?

Whitefish was a railway town, so a lot of our fun focused on the railroad yards and the trains. In the winter we spent a lot of time “hooky bobbing.” If you live in a major city, you’ve probably seen that harebrained activity: matching speeds with a vehicle, ducking low, grabbing the bumper, and hitching a ride. When the ground was icy, we’d grab on to a train’s ladders or handrails or whatever else we could get ahold of as the train was leaving the yard. The idea was to stay on our feet, skating along the top of the ice as we were dragged by the train. If the ladders or rails we were holding on to were wet, our mittens would freeze to them, and when it came time to let go, we sometimes ended up with bare hands.

We weren’t completely stupid: expert hooky bobbers knew to grab on to ladders near the front of each car so when we did let go—or if we got bumped off—we’d have enough time to scramble to safety before the wheels got us.

As I’ve moved around the country, I’ve heard this sort of grab-and-go activity called by a lot of different names: skitching, bizzing, and bumper-, ski-, or skate-hitching. Decades after I was young, boys are equally adventurous—or equally stupid—everywhere.

The thing about hooky bobbing is that you weren’t supposed to actually go inside the boxcars; the goal was to hang on for a joyride on the outside ladder and try not to get thrown off. But one time a friend and I were going to hooky bob on a boxcar that was waiting in one of the yards. When we peeked inside, we discovered a couple of Playboy magazines on the floor. So we hoisted ourselves up into the car to have a look.

Of course, the train started moving. We were distracted, because … well, it was Playboy! By the time we were done with our periodical review, the train had left the yard and was going too fast for us to jump out.

We rode that train to Troy, Montana. That’s a straight seventy miles if you’re a bird. The route between Troy and Whitefish includes a couple of tunnels, one of which goes on for miles. We were two kids in a boxcar going through dark tunnels without any idea when and where the train was going to stop. I remember crying during the dark patches and thinking I was going to be in trouble in the light. Most of all, I was scared and wanted to go home. The total trip was about ninety miles by rail.

Hours later, but what seemed like two lifetimes, we arrived at the small timber town of Troy near the Idaho border. The train finally slowed, and we jumped off. We were lucky. About the time we jumped we saw a train going the other way, and we figured it had to at least pass through Whitefish, which was a significant switching point. So we climbed onto the back of a grain car—not where the grain was; these cars have a little alcove at the ends—and made it back to Whitefish in time for dinner. My mother did not find out until I was out of college.

The rail yard in Whitefish offered something that is at least as interesting to boys as trains, if not more so, and that’s explosives. A quarter stick of TNT isn’t enough to derail a train, but it does make a hell of a noise when a train runs over it. This was the point, actually: the rail workers would put three emergency compression charges on the rail to indicate to the engineer that there was an emergency up ahead. The trains would roll over them, and the resulting bang! bang! bang! would let the engineer know he needed to put on the emergency brake.

The rail yard used to store dynamite, caps, fuses, and percussion charges in an old caboose in the middle of the yard. The caboose was one of those old-time cars where the toilet was just a hole that went straight through to the tracks, the kind that couldn’t be used while the train was in a station because it would stink up the entire terminal area. The practice was that riders simply did not use the toilet while the train was still in the yard.

Another digression: this reminds me of a true story I heard from a soldier who had been on a troop train during World War II. As in the war before it, a lot of kids were called up to fight. And countless stories, still very green in the memory of veterans, came from that war and from troop trains when the boys had the time to write home.

The old veteran was telling me about how the latrine was in the back of the car and he went to use it. He turned the knob several times, and when it didn’t respond he figured it was in use and went back to his seat to wait. When the soldier came out, the other man went in, closed the door, and immediately flung it open and stepped out. He told me the odor was “positively obnoxious,” and even holding his breath didn’t help. He didn’t know how he was going to stay in there for the time needed to do his business.

“I swore not to go into that shithouse even if I had to burst,” he told me.

He drank as little as possible, ate sparingly, and did not go back inside, he says, for the two days and a night it took to make the journey.

Anyway, back to my train yard. We’d time our runs for when the railroad police had passed by our target—that caboose. The caboose didn’t have any wheels, so it wasn’t going anywhere, which meant—I hope—that the toilet was never used for its intended purpose. We used it for an unintended purpose though: some of us were just small enough to crawl underneath the car and climb up into the caboose through the hole.

Once in, we’d help ourselves to whatever we wanted along the rows of stacked crates of explosives. Then we’d make our escape over to the gravel pit and set off whatever we’d gotten with gasoline or whatever other fuse system we could devise. Aerosol cans wrapped in gasoline-soaked rags and black gunpowder were among our favorites.

I actually started my demolitions education in the gravel pits of Whitefish. For instance, early on, I learned that you need a long trail when using gasoline and never to add gas to the flame. And I was making Molotov cocktails long before I knew the name for them. It was around the second grade when I first started playing with explosives. (For those of you who led less volatile childhoods, a Molotov cocktail is a jar filled with a flammable liquid, a cloth wick dipped in that liquid and protruding from the neck of the bottle. Light the cloth, toss the bottle, wait for the boom. It is named for Vyacheslav Molotov, an acolyte of the tyrannical Joseph Stalin, who used a lot of them during his storied career.)

We weren’t just destroying things, though. The railroad used to store wooden ties and posts for bridges in the yard, and there was a plywood plant where we could get a nearly unlimited supply of wood, so we would spend a lot of time building these great forts in the gravel pit. Some of them were huge, multistoried buildings that were pretty solid.

Of course, after we’d finished building them and playing around them, we usually blew them up.

When we blasted, only on rare occasions was it strong enough to give concern to the neighbors’ windows (to this day, I can still hear the “whumph” of the blast and the crack, then tinkle of the glass), but we never got in trouble. The railway people always thought it was the lumber people clearing with explosives, and the lumber people thought it was the railway people doing demolition, so nobody gave a damn.

Did anyone ever get hurt? Not too seriously. A few kids got a little burned, but ultimately a quarter stick of dynamite is a lot more to a kid than it is to an adult, and we all made it through our childhood more or less unscathed.

In 2008 after I retired from the service, my wife and I established the Great Northern Veterans Peace Park in the same old gravel pit once used for demolition training and building forts. Together we created a children’s sledding hill in a setting that recognizes the contributions of the railroad and the veterans to the community. After reshaping the hills, removing obstacles, and adding topsoil, the park offers a place for families and kids to enjoy playing together. The sledding hills are named after famous battles, and the kids’ smiles as they speed down the slopes are a reminder of why we go off to war. We had a pretty clear idea what we wanted the park to represent. We looked at traditional military memorials honoring the sacrifice and remembrance of the fallen, but in this case we wanted the park to celebrate life—which is, after all, the reason why veterans fought the battles they did.

Unscathed physically in my youth by exploring the railway lines and learning demolitions, my otherwise happy childhood was challenged by my parents’ separation and later divorce. And that divorce was pretty nasty. At times my parents would use us kids as bargaining chips and leverage against each other. It was right around this time that I started spending a greater amount of time outside and taking refuge with my grandma Harlow.

My parents’ divorce was rough. Divorce is tough for any kid. Hell, it’s tough for any adult. But I knew a lot more about the bitterness between my mother and my father than any kid should. There is no need for a child to know all the ugliness and pettiness that can go on between two people who used to love each other but don’t anymore. I’m a bit at a loss to explain the mechanism that makes it happen. It’s too simple to say “familiarity breeds contempt,” though it can; some of us felt that in the military. Even a good officer with good soldiers can be a terrible “fit.” In marriage, maybe the bonds of physical attraction go stale; having too little money while raising a family applies pressure; the challenges facing two-income families where the hours don’t intersect, or one spouse has long, long hours on the job; physical or emotional liaisons with others are desired or formed; possibly a little of all of that. All I knew as a kid was that I loved both my parents and did not want to have to make a choice of loyalty and love between my mom and dad.

Incidentally, there is something inherent—I guess you’d say narcissistic—about telling your life story, about asking people to understand and embrace the kinds of feelings the author has for his or her family. That’s part of my intention, but I also want to encourage everyone reading this to cherish your parents or children or grandparents, to go that extra mile to find the beauty and good in them. There’s a part of me—and maybe that’s one reason I love meeting my constituents—that would love to see those feelings in the eyes of everyone I meet when they look at their family. My God, what a gift … what blessings we have around us. Sometimes it doesn’t take more than simply opening our eyes or pausing to take a breath to enjoy them.

My mother and father splitting wasn’t the only way our family fortunes changed that year. Right around the time of my parents’ divorce, grandpa Harlow had a stroke. It wasn’t fatal, but he had to give up his Chevrolet dealership. Remember how my grandma Harlow couldn’t keep her job as a teacher when she got married in 1929? In some ways things weren’t much better for women in 1973. Chevrolet didn’t allow women to take on dealerships. Simply because she was a woman, the heir apparent, my mother, was not allowed to take over the dealership our family had built. This was before GM and the other Big Three promoted minority ownerships. It was an actual policy of prohibition. That was after the women’s liberation movement had begun, after the term “Ms.” had been coined, after towering figures like Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem had appeared on the world stage. Even now, I find it pretty inconceivable.

Before grandpa Harlow had his stroke, his son-in-law—my dad—had tried his hand at being a car salesman, but he really wasn’t cut out for it. Even if he were, after the divorce grandpa Harlow wouldn’t have turned the dealership over to my dad. And my brother and I certainly weren’t going to take over the dealership—we were kids.

That pretty much exhausted the supply of Zinke/Harlow men who could have gotten the dealership transfer from General Motors. Grandpa ended up selling it for around $150,000. That was a lot of money in 1973, but there was a real and unexpected downside: since he no longer had a business, he and grandma lost businessman status in a small town. I don’t know how much that truly mattered, though I’m sure it smarted. They were the same folks they’d been the day before they sold it, but, as any politician will tell you, real connections and authority come from interaction and pressing flesh and hearing what people have to say on a daily basis. Without that, you’re a memory. And unlike sharply delineated events like love and war, many memories fade.

Grandpa’s life wasn’t over, though: not by a long shot. He recovered and was active again, primarily with his stable of fourteen Tennessee walking horses—a smooth-gaited breed he introduced to Montana. Throughout his time in Whitefish, he showed them, and other breeds, regularly at horse shows: he and his buddies in the Mountain Trails Saddle Club brought home their share (and then some) of ribbons too.

Grandpa Harlow was tough, and he lived to see me join the SEALs in the last years of his life. When not deployed or training, I would come home on leave. He was living in a manor and wanted me to take him home. I was gone more than 250 days a year, and my home was a parachute bag and a footlocker. By the time death caught up with him, though, he was a wreck, primarily from years of working hard and active living. He didn’t smoke, except for the occasional cigar; it was just time, and probably his stroke from fourteen years earlier, catching up with him.

Grandma Harlow, the most important person in my world, had suffered a heart attack and died two years before at age eighty-two. I was deployed to the Philippines with the SEALs when that happened and did not know she had passed until after the funeral.

By the time of Grandpa Harlow’s death, all he left for his only child—my mom—was his house, a small farm, and the remains of a ranch that had once been much larger. We didn’t have any horses left at that point. As the saying goes, having a horse is a sure sign you have too much hay.

I wish I could have done more for him. Looking back on the lives of my grandparents, I am grateful for what they taught me and the values they instilled in me. It also makes me think how we can do better for our elderly and how important family really is.

There was something about growing up in Whitefish that softened the blow of my parents’ divorce a bit: you probably knew most of the potential suitors when your folks separated. The Petersens and the Zinkes and all the other families hung out together. They were all part of the same social clubs or community organizations. There was one summer in which every family seemed to go through a divorce—and then got remarried to someone else everyone already knew. In this case, my mother married Doc.

His first name was John, but since he was a dentist everyone called him Doc—and he was a former marine. He was an enlisted man, an aviator who worked in transport during the Korean War. He was a radio operator and crewman. He was disciplined and, like most marines, never really left the service. I learned a lot from him, especially about how to love and appreciate the outdoors. That education is different when it comes man-to-boy instead of as part of a scout troop. You are mentored, not just shown how to do something or talked to. Doc also had three children, and the whole new family moved into the little house on the lake. Bedrooms were shared, and being outdoors was a welcome relief.

It was hard for my mother trying to raise two families. When you are raising six kids and later learning to be a single mom, you have to be fiercely independent and strong-willed. Mom could hold her own when she had to. She could also be very kind. For instance, when you live in a railroad town, you’re going to have hoboes—people who ride the rails from town to town, looking to trade work for a meal. I don’t know if that term is politically correct; all I know is that “hoboes” is what we called them. (I am not one for political correctness. More on that later on.)

The hoboes would usually come knocking at our door three or four times a week, and when they did Mom would try to find some sort of task for them, like chopping wood or raking the lawn.

Our house was known as a safe place for them to ask for work. Mom would make them a hearty meal of tomato soup and grilled cheese, which they’d take and very respectfully eat on the patio. We kids weren’t supposed to talk to them, but we did notice the chalk marks around our property indicating to other hoboes that there would be at least some sort of welcome for them.

My mother had her hands full with raising kids and keeping the house running. Between the two families, it was a poor person’s version of The Brady Bunch. But the two families living together under one roof is where any similarity to The Brady Bunch ended. On top of this, my grandparents’ health was deteriorating, and much of their finances were being depleted by growing medical expenses and care. The marriage between Doc and my mother lasted only about five years, and they separated as friends when I was in the eighth grade. Doc ended up remarrying, and I remain close to him today. Why not? He was a marine!

Things got a little less cramped in the house after the divorce and when my older brother went to college and studied chemical engineering at Montana State University, followed by an MBA from the University of Chicago. Randy and I have had a love-hate relationship all of our lives. He had better natural athleticism and was one of the smartest guys I know. When my grandfather got sick, he was older and shouldered most of the burden of helping my grandfather with his Tennessee walking show horses. I think he felt more comfortable in the academic world and focused his attention on physics and constant care of the horses. Strange combination, but it worked for him. Things changed between us when I was a senior in high school and Randy came home one weekend. I had already accepted a full-ride football scholarship at Oregon and had skipped my senior year playing basketball to lift weights and prepare for Division I athletics. Our last fight in the little house on the lake did not last long as he slipped into the tub and could not get up with me over him. The war was over between us, and since then I have always admired his successful strings of being CEO and a turnaround specialist of small technology start-up companies.

My relationship with my little sister, Jamie, has always been unshakable. I was a few years older, and our parents divorce brought us closer. After my parents separated, we used to go to the local Orpheum Theater to see movies together. We spent most of our childhood either at Grandma’s house or in Whitefish Lake practicing with the local swim team. Small note: The Whitefish Bullfrog swim team did not have a swimming pool and used the lake for practice instead. During the beginning of the season, there was typically snow in the mountains and lake temperatures could be in the high forties. The coach would line up the kids on the beach and throw balls out for us to swim around. Every lap required doing push-ups and jumping jacks on the beach. Thinking back on it, it was a lot like BUD/S training for kids, minus the underwater knife fighting, of course.

My first job as a protector of the innocent was fully “vetting” all of my sister’s suitors to ensure they acted like gentlemen and knew the rules without exception. Later in college, Jamie and I would spend spring breaks or summer hikes together. When I was twenty-one and she was a senior in high school, I took her with me to spend spring break in California. A couple of other Oregon football players joined us. What I remember clearly of that entire week was having fun with Jamie at Disneyland and how nice it was to have such a great sister. We’d have fun together, but I could also keep an eye out for her.

Jamie went to the University of Montana and then transferred to the University of Arizona. She worked long summer hours waving construction signs for our father on road projects across Montana. She was beautiful and blonde, so I am sure her waving that sign turned a few heads of the many long-haul truckers who passed by. She was also smart and tough when she had to be. She graduated with a degree in accounting and is brilliant at managing companies and making sure the books are perfect. It’s in her DNA, and I see the same traits my grandmother had in being independent and having the knack for running a business from the back room. Today, she and her husband own a fire and security firm in San Diego.

As I mentioned already, my father had become the youngest master plumber in the history of Montana. So after his separation from my mom, he went back to his roots and started a plumbing construction company. He became successful and started spending more time flying and finally taking some hard-earned vacations. Dad became so successful that he treated himself to a 1952 Beechcraft Bonanza 35. He loved to fly, and that plane represented a status symbol for him. It was the sort of plane owned by doctors and lawyers … and by my dad, the tradesman.

The Beechcraft Bonanza 35 was designed to be a high-performance aircraft. It had a low-wing design and a V-shaped tail that served as both rudders and elevators. It could hit speeds a lot faster than most personal planes could.

It also had a nickname: the Doctor Killer. The plane would shake at high speeds, and while it was a high-performance craft, it was also more difficult for pilots to fly. A number of those planes were involved in high-profile crashes. The plane that crashed and killed rock stars Buddy Holly, J. P. Richardson (“The Big Bopper”), and Ritchie Valens—the crash that inspired the song “American Pie” by Don McLean—was a Bonanza 35.

So was the plane that my father died in.

In 2004, Dad was a passenger in the plane, which was piloted by Steve Schuldheiss. By all accounts Steve was a conscientious pilot; he had just passed a BFR—a mandatory biennial flight review. After the instructor signed the pilot’s log, he told Steve to check the fuel tanks.

They had fuel, but they didn’t have a fuel-tank selector engaged on any of the tanks, so the plane couldn’t draw fuel from them.

Steve and my dad went up for a cross-country flight, and as they were returning to the airport in Kalispell, the plane began to sputter and stall. We happened to be in Montana on leave from San Diego, and my son Wolf and I were going to take a flight with my father. If not for a promise I made to my wife to have a family day at the lake cabin, both of us would have perished as well. People who saw the crash said the plane went straight down, plunging into a nearby house that was empty except for a dog, which also died in the crash.

It was after my father’s death that my mother admitted that divorcing him had been a mistake. They were young and brash. I knew they still loved each other but were too proud and hurt to admit it. She didn’t have to live with her admission long: she died in 2005 after losing her battle with cancer. It was the only time she ever lost a fight.