Teenagers on towers

It was fun, interesting and unusual. Talking about a meeting April 30 with Leif Haugen. He’s the man who’s been serving on fire lookouts for 30 summers and noted for his photos and stories of that adventure.

Leif continues his quest for historic info about the unique work and recently asked Ivan O’Neil to meet with him and bring others who manned Flathead Forest lookouts as teenagers during World War II. The five of us who came have remained good friends and are still alive in our mid-80s.

Those attending were Ivan, Jack King, Walter Bahr, Ivan’s cousin Bob O’Neil and yours truly. We’ve lost one of our originals, Erick Fehlberg, the grandson of Bill Adair, founder of Polebridge. We were all members of the high school class of ‘46 and known each other more than 70 years.

There was no meeting agenda, just recollections of our times in the wilderness. All recalled rangers flabbergasted at how much we ate. Lookouts were supplied with 60-day rations, but most of us ran out in half that time, so extra supplies had to be brought in by pack horses. We paid for our food on a set monthly rate, thankfully not a per pound basis. We got our money’s worth.

The federal government had to lower the employment age limit from 18 down to 16 because so many adults went to war. Somebody had to watch the woods. Most of us wouldn’t hit 16 until late summer or fall, but Carter Halseth, chief forest dispatcher, put us on anyway. Can’t help but wonder what current child labor law enforcers would think about that.

Here’s a story. Late in the summer, one of our group got the idea of making “high mountain” huckleberry wine. Put crushed berries in a glass gallon jug with some sugar and let ‘er brew. The rest of us think he got impatient and put in a little yeast. Whatever, it was a recipe for disaster.

When it was time to come down, three of us went to get this character at his lookout trailhead. We found a smelly and quite purple friend. Shaking from hiking out had made the jug explode. Went off in the backpack powerful enough to knock him down, not to mention what it did to the pack and all of the stuff in it.

For some reason or another, we couldn’t get our odorous friend to ride outside Holly Eastlund’s old sedan, and to make things worse he had a dog. The long ride from the North Fork to Kalispell was not a fun event. Two of us and the dog got car sick beneath odorous gear stacked to the roof.

Besides manning isolated lookouts, we teens also cleared the trails and hung telephone lines. There were many tales about that, like finding a dead bull elk with yards of wire wrapped around his antlers. In that incident, the adult crew boss was a well known old South Fork poacher who knocked out the elk’s ivories because “this will buy me some fun at the Kalispell cat house.”

Our meeting should probably have been taped for all the memories that came out, but maybe Leif Haugen got a few written down.

A serious thought about that group who took on the challenging job at a young age. Bob O’Neil became a college professor, Walt Bahr a banker, Jack King founded two banks and was president of the National Independent Bankers Association, Ivan O’Neil created the well known string of Western Building Centers, Erick Fehlberg became a top geologist for Shell Oil, while I did well in the radio-newspaper world.

I am not pointing this out to crow about my friends and myself. There is an important message here. “Giving young people a chance at meaningful work and responsibility has a very positive effect on their entire life.” We were lucky.

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist. He lives in Kalispell.