Good beginnings
A classic G. George Ostrom column from 2007.
Last week a friend asked me how I got started writing this newspaper column. If anyone else is wondering, it was all explained on the 50th anniversary of the Hungry Horse News, Aug. 1, 1996...
Couldn’t be 50 years!? Maybe we’d better look back.
Guess the first time I heard of the Hungry Horse News was in the Army and my dad wrote saying a young veteran from North Dakota had started a paper up in Columbia Falls. We joked he had probably picked Montana because more people here could read. There were those who thought the paper might do all right while the dam was being built, but would then fade away like the boom town bars and brothels. My folks mailed a copy now and then and I became a fan because that editor was better at what he did than any I’d read before. He took lots of pictures…easier reading for the folks back in Bismarck.
While Mel and Ruth were working like dogs for their first ten years, George was pretty much studying art galleries, museums, classical music and stuff like that in the European Occupation Forces before coming back to the University of Montana, for quite awhile…maybe two or three years just as a sophomore. Worked summers with the Smoke Jumpers. Traveled a bit. Spent one winter in Florida but left because there weren’t any good museums or art galleries along the beaches. Back to the jumpers. Visited Mel and Ruth in ’54 … probably on a project assignment to the Flathead Forest. Wasn’t my usual happy self. The Ranger’s well-stacked daughter had wed another.
When a bad parachute jump wiped out my career of running around the world studying art galleries and museums, the Ruders had finished their first publishing decade and were going great. Being temporarily crippled, George was easily dragged into a Whitefish church by a local old maid of 21 summers name Iris Wilhelm, who promptly suggested he find regular employment.
In January of 1962, while Iris, our first two little crumb smashers and I were living in Washington D.C. being Kennedy “New Frontiersmen,” I wrote a letter to Mel, telling him the weird things going on in the nation’s capital. While I was seriously relating facts, Mel thought my views were funny and said his paper could stand a little humor. Asked me to do it every week.
It was only a couple years after that when the big flood hit. One wag said, “Ruder was in over his head,” but the next year the valley had a dandy banquet to honor Mel for wining the Pulitzer Prize. Back home in Kalispell, I helped Mel cover sad stories in the ‘60s: park fires and grizzly attacks in ’67, five young men killed on mount Cleveland in December of ’69.
But mostly it was good times…a thousand columns about everyday things and people.
The exposure made me a few dumb, ignorant enemies, but thousands of smart, intelligent and discerning friends.
Upon buying my own paper, Kalispell Weekly News, the first person called was Mel Ruder and he said, “I wish you the best of luck. You will do well George, and the only words of advice I have to offer are, “When you fairly and professionally cover the news … you can’t have any friends.” I understood exactly what he meant; however, I also know … Columbia Falls named a school after him.
No doubt about it! From 1956 to 1996 was not just fifty years…it was ‘FIFTY YEARS.”