America's last sporting palaces

Reporting during the "Glory Days" of Hungry Horse Dam construction included running reviews of the good things accomplished for charity by the lady who ran the sporting place on a hill above Martin City's Main Street. Luckily, she didn't insist her business be advertised on T-shirts worn by the dozens of Little Leaguers she outfitted over the years. Can you imagine rooting for "Mabel's Cat House Kids?"

When the kindly madam passed on several years after the dam was completed, Mel Ruder ran her obituary, and he ended it with a modest understatement, "Mable was noted for her generosity."

While on the subject of the worlds oldest profession locally, perhaps it would be historically useful recalling the decline of brothel business in northwest Montana.

During the sixties when I was a bank loan officer, a lady came in and said she needed a loan. When we got to the part of the application where she was to give her employment she just flat out told me she ran "pleasure palaces." Said she had a house picked out in Libby and wanted to tie it up for 90 days with a large down payment and then activate the loan later that spring. Said she wanted to get things lined up before all the men started coming into Lincoln County to work on Libby Dam.

Beat around the bush a bit before asking why she wanted to wait three months before actually taking the money and she told me she wouldn't be moving in until her kids got out of school over in Seattle, where she was liquidating present operations.

I took her application money and presented her request to the committee on the following Tuesday. They discussed it back and forth and one officer said that would be our first loan on a sporting palace. Another one said the lady's annual income seemed much more reliable than logging or farming. By and large, the committee agreed it looked like a low risk loan; but then we remembered no one was sure how may cat-houses were going to be "tolerated" in Lincoln County during the dam construction, so the loan application was put on hold.

The loan was eventually made and we heard the actual red light "action" was kept well out of town up toward the dam. That made me feel better because it had bothered me thinking about that lady's little kids living in "a house." How were the little ones going to know "when daddy came home?"

Had another experience with ladies of the night while in the banking business, maybe 1966. A friendly, tall, buxom, red headed gal sat down at my desk and informed me that she operated "the house" out south of Kalispell and was looking for some remodeling and refinancing money. She was very candid in explaining how her business was doing and that it was growing enough that she needed more room and was putting on another "girl" in fact, she had one of "the girls" with her, a brunette who appeared to be in her middle thirties. I took the application and told her someone would be out to make an appraisal of the property.

Two days later new stores told about the owner of an alleged "house of ill repute located south of Kalispell' being sued by an irate man from Polson. The complaint filed into District Court said "Big Red" had talked the plaintiff's wife into leaving their home in Lake County in order to get into the whoring business and the offended man was charging "alienation of affections." He was seeking a judgment form the court to force his wife back to the hearth, home, dirty dishes, and whatever, as well as remuneration for punitive damages and legal fees and court costs.

I don't know the exact ending of this story, but I do know that Kalispell's last well-known house of ill repute was closed down at that time and "the girls" went elsewhere. In those days, there seemed to be an unwritten rule that a discrete madam could operate just outside the existing laws so long as her business kept a low profile and avoided problems which let the community know that was going on. I always figured Big Red either didn't get far enough out of town to do her recruiting or else she got state and county officials upset by not hiring through the local Employment Office.

One of my banking advisors way back then gave me this wisdom, "Doing business with painted ladies is not necessarily illegal or dumb, but it should be YOUR business . . . not THEIRS.