70 years of great pictures

The Hungry Horse News celebrates its 70th year in 2016. The first newspaper was published Aug. 8, 1946 and was called the “Hungry Horse News and Columbian” by founder Mel Ruder.

The top photo was a rather boring one of a drilling rig doing test bores for the Hungry Horse Dam.

In his first editorial, Ruder pointed out the many virtues of the Flathead Valley at the time. For one, it was expected the building of the dam would bring jobs (it did) and the county would grow in population by 15,000 over the next 10 years. Back then, the key industries were farming and timber and the dam would not only provide power for the valley, it also was a seen as providing water for irrigation of farmland.

Ruder noted that it was estimated there would be 650 more farm families in Flathead. He also noted tourism would be a big industry, with over 200,000 Americans visiting the valley each summer.

“They save their money for 11.5 months in order to live two weeks where we live all year,” he said.

Today, more than 10 times as many people visit Glacier National Park.

Ruder was off on some of his predictions, however. He predicted the valley would see mining, but mines, outside of gravel pits, never panned out.

Ruder didn’t start running his photos big right away. The first few issues didn’t have many photos at all — which was typical for newspapers of the era.

But by December he was already bucking tradition and letting his talents as a photographer show through.

One humorous photo manipulation he did early on was a picture of Santa Claus with four shivering children on the shores of Lake McDonald, supposedly looking up to see Santa’s reindeer.

But in the original, Santa must not have been looking in the right direction and there was something wrong with the way one of the little girls was looking, so Ruder made two prints, cut out the head of Santa and the head of a little girl from the one print and then pasted them over for a final a version.

It was an early and rough version of “Photoshopping” done today and obviously a fake (Santa’s head is a bit crooked).

Of course, Ruder went on to become an accomplished photographer and his pictures of the valley and of the Glacier Park put the newspaper on the map. He won the Pulitzer Prize for community service for his coverage of the Flood of 1964.

Mrs. Herbert Koenig brought the message to Ruder in the barnyard while he was at their place shooting photos for the newspaper.

Newspapers across the state carried banner headlines announcing the prize — the Billings Gazette “gave a bigger headline on page one than did the Hungry Horse News,” and “the Daily Missoulian sent Al Darr, a good photographer and writer, to Columbia Falls for part of the day,” Ruder said at the time.

Gladys Shay, who had been with the newspaper from the Vol. 1 No. 1 until she quit in the 1970s, recalled Ruder’s reaction when she congratulated him — “I guess I can die now,” he quipped.

He continued to run and the newspaper until 1978, when he sold it to the Kennedy family.