SPIRIT OF THE RADIO

The alarm at George Ostrom’s home goes off at 5:30 a.m. every weekday morning. Ostrom is usually awake about 15 minutes before that. For the better part of 61 years, Ostrom’s voice has been on the Flathead Valley’s airwaves, giving folks his unique brand of news and commentary on KGEZ 600 AM radio in Kalispell.

Ostrom, 88, grew up at the Flathead mine north of Kila where his father, Logan, mined for silver for the Anaconda Mining Co. Ostrom went to Flathead High School. World War II was on and Ostrom lied about his age, going to work for the Forest Service, maintaining the telephone lines from Hungry Horse to Spotted Bear.

It was challenging work.

“Loggers were felling trees on the line every day,” he recalled in a recent interview. He said he’d complain and they’d reply, “Ostrom, without us, you wouldn’t have a job.”

He quit high school when he was 17 and joined the Army in 1945. He was shipped overseas but World War II had just ended. He worked in a top secret signal center in Frankfurt, Germany in the I.G. Farben building and was discharged from the service when he was 20.

Returning to the Montana, he attended the University of Montana, but he didn’t do well in class and never graduated.

“I was a lousy student,” he said. “They called me kissing George.”

Even so, he served 20 years on the university’s president advisory council and received a distinguished alumni award.

He was also a Forest Service Smokejumper for five years and was an instructor in parachuting and smokejumping. He got hurt on a jump, “broke just about every bone in my body” in the Salmon River country of Idaho. He was down on his luck, living with his parents when a small radio station started up in Kalispell, the 10,000-watt KOFI Radio.

It was the fall of 1955. Ostrom was in debt and needed work, but was told there wasn’t any openings.

“You’d have an opening if you’d fire that announcer,” Ostrom told them. He knew he could do better than the guy they had working in the booth.

So they gave Ostrom a chance. They recorded him, liked what they heard and sure enough, fired the other announcer.

Ostrom has been in radio on and off ever since. That same year he met his “first wife” Iris. It was a blind date — the two went to a political rally for then Sen. Mike Mansfield.

“I never took out another girl,” Ostrom said.

They were married April 12, 1958.

“She straightened me out,” Ostrom said. “I was a wild S.O.B.”

Ostrom held other posts through his career, but he always kept in touch with radio. He was a loan officer for a time at what is now Glacier Bank, but his primary job was helping Owen Sowerine promote and start up the new Flathead Valley Community College in the mid 1960s.

From 1961 to 1962 he worked in Sen. Lee Metcalf’s office on the Wilderness Act and attended George Washington University Law School. He wrote a letter to then editor Mel Ruder. It was so well received that Ostrom began writing a regular column from Washington that always began with the headline “Hello Hungry Horse.” The first one appeared in the Horse on July 13, 1962. Ostrom returned home, but continued the column, but with a different name as the “Hog Heaven” columnist. It ran until Ostrom bought the Kalispell Weekly News in 1974.

He sold the weekly newspaper in 1982 and started writing for the Hungry Horse News again, this time as “The Trailwatcher” in February, 1986. He’s been writing the column for the newspaper ever since.

One of the biggest stories of his career was the fatal mauling of two people in Glacier National Park in 1967 by separate grizzly bears — one at Granite Park and the other at Trout Lake on Aug. 12, 1967. The next day Ostrom went to Granite, as Park rangers were patrolling the area and shooting suspected grizzlies.

“They told me, ‘You can’t go up there,’” he recalled. “I told them, ‘You can’t stop me.’”

And up the trail he went. His pictures of the dead bears graced the pages of newspapers across the country, including the Hungry Horse News.

Author Jack Olsen drew heavily on Ostrom’s work for his book, “Night of the Grizzlies” which chronicled the deaths and the aftermath of the tragedy.

Ostrom has had a life-long love affair with Glacier. He’s written three books on his adventures, “Glacier’s Secrets, Beyond the Roads and Above the Clouds,” “Wondrous Wildlife” and “Glacier Secrets, Goat Trails and Grizzly Tales.” His exploits with the Over-the-Hill Gang, a group of businessmen who hike every Thursday in Glacier, have been documented in the pages of the Hungry Horse News for years.

Ostrom gave the group its name. They used to call themselves the “Thursday Hiking Group.”

“You all look Over-the-Hill to me,” Ostrom quipped.

Many of those exploits were with best friend and hiking companion Ivan O’Neil. O’Neil founded Western Building Centers. The two grew up together.

Ostrom recalled one adventure where O’Neil and fellow climber Hi Gibson climbed the “Dragon’s Tail” of Mount Reynolds. The pair found the way up, but had a tough time finding a way down. Gibson made it out before dark, but O’Neil didn’t. The Park was going to send out rangers for a search the next morning. Ostrom told them to get a helicopter.

“Who’s going to pay for that?” they asked him.

“Ivan will,” Ostrom said.

As it was, O’Neil made it out on his own before the search commenced.

Ostrom left KOFI several years ago and now does his morning reports for KGEZ. George and Iris have four children, Shannon, Heidi, Wendy and Clark, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

He said he has no regrets and no plans to retire. Every day he’s reading and gathering more material for the next day’s show.

There’s a valley out there, eager to listen.