Shay recalls her 'girl Friday' journalism career

Gladys Shay recalls when she was just a child seeing the lights and hearing the fire engines outside the window of her Kalispell home as firefighters raced to save a burning house.

“And I automatically started writing a story,” she said.

Journalism was in her blood, even at that young age. One of four children, her mother Ella was a homemaker and her father George was a mainline conductor for the Great Northern Railway who transferred to the Flathead in 1929 to drive the Galloping Goose passenger train between Columbia Falls and Kalispell.

Shay went on to be the “girl Friday” for Hungry Horse News founder and editor Mel Ruder for 30 years, covering society news, city council and a host of other topics.

Her journalism career, however, started before she went to work for Ruder. As a kid, she wrote for the Kalispell Times, a weekly newspaper in Kalispell.

“I took my troop news every week to the newspaper,” she said.

In her teens, Shay worked in the Kalispell Times mailroom and traveled to Columbia Falls once a week to pick up ads from businesses. Shortly after graduating from Flathead High School in 1946, she was visiting her uncle, John O’Connell, mayor of Columbia Falls, when Ruder walked in and said he was starting a newspaper in Columbia Falls.

“He had egg on his tie,” Shay recalled.

Ruder knew she worked for the Kalispell Times and hired her shortly thereafter.

“I was his first and only news employee,” she said.

Ruder hired printers over the years, but Shay was the only person who worked in the newsroom with him. They sat and typed stories at nearby desks, talking to themselves as they wrote. People often thought they were talking to each other, which wasn’t the case.

In fact, Ruder hated being interrupted when he was typing, a trait his wife, Ruth, never really figured out. Ruder would have a fit if Ruth interrupted him, Shay recalled.

“If he was typing, you left him alone,” she said. “Ruder was a good name for him.”

Shay and Ruder had a lot in common, even if he was 20 years her senior. They had little patience and yet took each other’s advice. Their writing style was clipped. They left out articles like “the” to save space, and they were protective of their news and their sources.

“You didn’t dare let the Daily Inter Lake have anything before we did,” she said.

The two didn’t always get along.

“We always argued,” she recalled. “I read his editorials. I was the only one who could disagree with him.”

Shay married Al Shay in 1947 and had six children — Gail, Janet, Howard, Laurie, Tim and Becky. There was a 20-year span between the oldest and youngest, and when Becky was born, Shay quipped that she “was having her own grandchild.”

Weekly news was different a half century ago. There was no Internet or Facebook, so as society reporter Shay called around town to ask people what they were up to. The news stories were called “locals.” If Aunt Betty went and saw Uncle Lester for lunch, that was news. Shay said she didn’t really like the job — she’d make a dozen phone calls for an inch of copy, but people liked having their names in the newspapers.

She said she also re-wrote Ruder’s stories for regional dailies like the Missoulian and Great Falls Tribune, shortening them up for the daily presses.

Her life took an abrupt turn in the mid-1970s when her husband left her for another woman. Shay still had children to feed and the newspaper business didn’t make ends meet, so she quit.

“I never told Ruder why,” she said.

Ruder later said letting her go was the worst thing he ever did. A few years after that, he sold the paper to the Kennedy family from Wyoming.

Shay went on to work at the Montana Veterans Home as a receptionist and nurse’s aide and later managed a liquor store on Nucleus Avenue.

Shay has been active in a host of civic groups in Columbia Falls, serving as secretary or president of all of them at one point, including Eastern Star, PTA, Rebekah Lodge, VFW Auxiliary, Columbia Falls Senior Center, Columbia Falls Library Board and Columbia Falls Lions Club. She was the first female president of the Lions Club. At 86, she still gets out, playing cards at the senior center and visiting with the ladies of the Red Hat Society.

She recalled an amusing tale when Ruder lived in the loft above the Hungry Horse News offices. He had put a Christmas wreath with a light in the window and asked Shay what she thought.

“You’re the only bachelor in town with a red light in his window,” she quipped.