The spirit of Flathead radio for more than 60 years, G. George Ostrom dies

Radio personality and newsman. Author and longtime newspaper columnist. Adventurer and humorist. 

G. George Ostrom, the voice of the Flathead Valley for more than 60 years, died Jan. 1, 2025. 

He was 96. 

“George was the local voice. No one could match what he did on the air and people loved it,” said KGEZ Kalispell owner John Hendricks. Hendricks hired Ostrom after he left following years at KOFI radio. 

Hendricks credited Ostrom for literally saving the station, when Hendricks bought it in February 2011. Hendricks learned that Ostrom, who was in his 80s at the time, was available, so he offered Ostrom a job. 

At first, he said, Ostrom was hesitant. 

Ostrom was a great newsman, but he didn’t like computers. 

“Don’t worry about computers,” Hendricks told him. 

A few hours after their initial discussion Ostrom called back and took the job. 

“It was a such a pleasure to work with him,” Hendricks recalled. “We might not be here today if it hadn’t been for George,” 

He instantly gave the station credibility, which had gone through tough times with the previous owner.  

“If George would work for us,” Hendricks said. “We must be OK.” 

Ostrom retired in 2017. He celebrated his 90th birthday with the station. They gave him 90 one-dollar bills and “one to grow up,” Hendricks recalled. 

Ostrom was also a longtime Hungry Horse News columnist and vital news source. His columns about his adventures in Glacier National Park with the Over-the-Hill Gang (a group of hikers that ventured into Glacier every Thursday) were fabulously received. 

“People often thought George owned the newspaper,” editor Chris Peterson said. “He didn’t. But that just shows the influence he had on readers. He was a living legend, a friend, a source and incredibly funny. He was an integral part of the Hungry Horse News for decades.” 

Glen (G.) George Ostrom was born July 24, 1928, in Missoula, the first of four children born to Logan and Hazel Ostrom. 

He grew up at the Flathead mine north of Kila where his father 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 in his teens, maintaining the telephone lines from Hungry Horse to Spotted Bear, he said in a 2016 interview. 

It was challenging work. 

“Loggers were felling trees on the line every day,” he recalled. 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 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 in the 2016 interview. “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. 

Ostrom was in debt and needed work but was told there weren’t any openings. 

“You’d have an opening if you’d fire that announcer,” Ostrom told them at the time. 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. 

That same year he met his “first wife” Iris. (In his columns, that’s how she was lovingly referred to.) 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 on April 12, 1958. 

“She straightened me out,” Ostrom said in 2016. “I was a wild S.O.B.” 

After helping the upstart KOFI radio station develop into a successful news source, George bought the Kalispell Weekly News in 1974 and built it into the largest weekly in Montana with a circulation of over 12,000. He later purchased KOFI with partners and began delivering his legendary brand of news reports and commentary — “Let's see what the dingbats, wingnuts and evildoers were up to last night” signing off every broadcast with, “Drive carefully, wear your seatbelt, and be kind to one another.” 

He would later sell his stake in the station. Ostrom held other jobs throughout 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 while at the bank was helping Owen Sowerwine promote and start up 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.  

After a letter he wrote Hungry Horse News editor Mel Ruder was so well received, Ostrom began writing a regular column from Washington that always began with “Hello Hungry Horse.” The first one appeared 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. He sold the Kalispell Weekly News in 1982 and started writing for the Hungry Horse News again, this time as “The Trailwatcher” in February 1986, under editor and owner Brian Kennedy. 

He wrote the column until the late 2010s. 

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. The next day Ostrom went to Granite, as Park rangers were patrolling the area and shooting suspected grizzlies. 

“They (The Park Service) told me, ‘You can’t go up there,’” he recalled in 2016. “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 had a life-long love affair with Glacier. He wrote 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.”  

He wrote a children’s book, the “Yum Yoogle Snook Wild Beastie Book” when he was 90. 

His exploits with the Over-the-Hill Gang, a group who hiked every Thursday in Glacier (and still do), were 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. But it was the sort of story that was classic Ostrom. 

Ostrom was preceded in death by his parents, Logan and Hazel Ostrom, brothers Ritchey and Alva, sister Dora Lee "Dode" Wolf, his wife Iris, and sons Shannon and Clark.  

He is survived by daughters Heidi (Scott) Duncan and Wendy (Shawn) Ostrom-Price. He has three grandchildren, Tana and Parker Duncan and Wyatt Price and two great-grandsons, Zenovio “Novi” Negron and Aridian “Ridi” Price. 

He leaves behind many nieces and nephews, and his lifelong best friend, O’Neil. 

"When I was a teenager staying in a fire lookout one summer, I would get Ivan on a phone line when I could, and he'd listen to me practice my trumpet. Now that's friendship,” Ostrom recalled. 

The family is planning no public celebration of life, but suggests the following: 

“If you really want to celebrate him in style, we suggest you put on Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way,’ raise a glass (scotch was a favorite) and make a toast to G. George: a man who truly did live life his way and did it with insatiable curiosity and grand appreciation for the wonders of the world and his fellow humankind.” 

Tributes can be made at buffalohillfh.com and donations are welcome for the George Ostrom Journalism Scholarship at the University of Montana by visiting umt.academicworks.com.