I started my teaching career in Glasgow, Montana in 1964. I loved the town and the people in the town. It was a very welcoming town to a stranger like I was. The school administration told us young teachers to join groups and join in the community happenings. All fall and winter long various teachers would have Friday night parties. I don’t think I missed a one of them if I was in town. In Glasgow the winter alcoholic drink of choice was a little white devil called Moose Milk. It sure was good but three or four of them and I was ready to fly to the moon!
When I got to Glasgow High School to teach English, there were one thousand students in a school built for two hundred. That was because Glasgow Air Force Base was in full swing. The school administration handled the mess by making the school day into three shifts. I loved it because I went to work at 6am and was finished for the day around 1pm.
I will never forget the congestion between classes. Everyone had three minutes to get from one class to another. There were stair cases in that old, long and narrow building designated as up staircases and down staircases. If I ended up in the hall going from one room to another when the rest of the humanity was there too, I was just swept along down up staircases until I found myself in the basement of the school where there were just a few students so I could figure out again where I should be going and get there. I was rarely on time for classes.
How well I remember the first day of school when I started teaching. I had a 6am study hall. The study hall was a large room on the second floor and the teacher’s desk sat on a built up area like a small stage. I looked at the kids and they looked back at me. None of us knew what to expect. Certainly I didn’t. My teaching credentials had not taught me one single thing about study hall.
That first year was a year in which the school administration saw the value in computers and started placing students in various categories by computer. In each level of English, for instance, there were three categories of students. There was advanced English, English for those who struggled with it and the rest of sort of average English classes. I was told that I had what we called “bone head” English for freshmen. Another first year teacher had the advanced level of freshman English. My students could do no wrong and her students could do no right. I thought it was my teaching but I was giving nothing but A’s and B’s to my freshman English class. The other teacher was giving nothing but D’s and F’s to the advanced class. She was called in on the carpet many times for it was not the policy of Glasgow for anyone to fail, especially not advanced students. Many are the time I saw her drinking coffee in the cafeteria and crying silently about the hand she had been dealt. Meanwhile my students just got better and better until I was giving them all A’s and telling them they should look into having some of their material published. It was that good. I thought I was really doing a job on those below average students. Well, a six week period and half of another went by before finally a secretary in the main office caught the mistake. I had the advanced section while my friend had the disadvantaged section. I found out I wasn’t as great as I thought but the other first year teacher, well, I don’t know that she ever did get over her troubles with her class. It really scared her!
Teaching Glasgow kids with the Air Base there was most interesting. The Air Force Brats, as they were called, had been all over the world, so when I was teaching about Faulkner or Hemingway, they had been to Hemingway and Faulkner haunts. They had seen the sights in Rome and had stood on the Great Wall of China. It added so much to what Montana kids were learning in high school!
Alex Sternhagen, another English teacher and Ike Knutson, a math teacher had volunteered to take a group of kids to a speech meet in Miles City. They urged me to sign up as a chaperone. Mrs. Sternhagen said that the kids were all staying with Miles City kids so we could hit the bars and have a couple good steaks at the steak houses. I let myself be forced in although long before had thought I had not left anything in Miles City that I wanted to return to get. All was well with the bus trip until we got to the school in Miles City where our kids were to meet the parents that they were going to be staying with for two days. As they were milling round I looked up and there were three of our charges running up the street like they were making a break from hell. I pointed it out to Ike Knutson. As a result we all got on the bus and spent two or three hours driving up and down the streets and alleys of Miles City looking for our charges. To no avail I must add.
Finally, I think it was Ike who said we should drive out to the Cross Roads Inn, have a couple of drinks and a steak and figure out what to do next. We did that and when we got in the bar, to our amazement, about five or six tables over sat our wayward kids. We locked them in the bus while we conducted our business at the Cross Roads and then took them to the hotel where we baby sat them all during the speech meet. Not much fun on that trip for us or them.
Years later when I was working with speech kids I put the fear of God in them. If we had a meet in Great Falls, I would have the bus pull into Carter and stop in front of what looked like an old abandoned hotel. I would tell everyone to stay put and wander around the side of the building where they could not see me. After about ten minutes, I would come out, get on the bus and announce that we were all registered in the fine Carter Hotel and we would be returning there after the speech meet. I have never heard such crying. Finally, I would say I would take them to a hotel in Great Falls, but if they so much as twitched after the speeches were over, it is back to Carter we would go. They always believed me.
When I was in Glasgow I was always lonely for the Bear Paw Mountains and Glacier National Park. There were no mountains very close to Glasgow except for the Little Rockies and I did spend a lot of time looking around them.
I spent a lot of time on Fort Peck Lake and came darn near buying a cabin on the lake and living in it. Had there been a mountain range across the bay I would have.
Besides I didn’t want to wear out my welcome in Glasgow and it was time to come home and make some money. So, in 1975 I moved back to Havre and got reacquainted with the Bear Paw Mountains and have never strayed far since then.
