'Girl Friday' of Hungry Horse News passes away

Longtime Hungry Horse News reporter and columnist Gladys Shay died Monday evening of natural causes. She was 87. Shay grew up with a penchant for the news.

When just a child, she recalled seeing the lights and hearing the fire engines outside the window of her Kalispell home as firefighters raced to save a house ablaze.

“And I automatically started writing a story,” she said in an interview earlier this year. Just a few days before her death, Shay was sending news tips via email to the newspaper.

“She always had an interesting news item to share,” said Hungry Horse News editor Chris Peterson, who worked with Shay for 18 years. “She was a great source of information and history. It’s a sad day for the newspaper.”

Shay was the “Girl Friday” for Hungry Horse News founder and editor Mel Ruder for 30 years, covering society news, Columbia Falls city council and a host of other topics for Ruder, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 in community journalism for his coverage of the 1964 flood.

Shay’s journalism career, however, started long before she went to work for Ruder. As a kid, she wrote for the Kalispell Times, which was the weekly newspaper in Kalispell at the time.

In her teens she worked in the newspaper mailroom and then came to Columbia Falls once a week to pickup ads from businesses. Shay was one of four children. Her mother, Ella, was a homemaker and her father, George, was a mainline conductor for the Great Northern Railway. In 1929 he got a transfer so he could drive the Galloping Goose — a passenger train — from Columbia Falls to Kalispell everyday.

Shay graduated from Flathead High School in 1946 and her uncle, John O’Connell was mayor of Columbia Falls at the time. Shay was visiting her uncle and Ruder walked in one day that same year 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 paper and hired her shortly thereafter. 

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

They sat and typed stories in desks close to each other. Both talked to themselves as they wrote and people often thought they were talking to each other, which wasn’t the case. Ruder hated being interrupted.

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

Both of their writing styles were clipped. They left articles like the word “the” out of their sentences on purpose 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.

Shay married Al Shay in 1947 and she 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, who had a wry sense of humor, quipped that she “was having her own grandchild.”

But in the mid-1970s her life took an abrupt turn 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 would later say that letting her go was the worst thing he ever did. A few years later he sold the paper to the Kennedy family from Wyoming.

Later on, she wrote stories for owner Brian Kennedy and a column “Gabbing with Gigi” for years as well.

Shay was also active in a host of community organizations.

She was either the secretary or president of the Columbia Falls Eastern Star, the PTA, the Rebekah Lodge, the VFW Auxiliary, the Columbia Falls Senior Center, The Columbia Falls Library Board and the Columbia Falls Lions Club, to name a few. She was the first woman president of the Lions Club.

A graveside service is planned for 3 p.m. Friday at Woodlawn Cemetery in Columbia Falls.