Tag Archives: Western Montana

Revival of closed Montana hotel back on track after a discouraging year

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Hotel Deer Lodge, Montana

Hotel Deer Lodge as it looked soon after it opened. The building, now shuttered, dominates the Deer Lodge, Montana, business district.

By Kevin S. Giles

The pandemic and a $400 city fine nearly killed the latest effort to restore Hotel Deer Lodge, an abandoned 33,000-square-foot brick structure at the heart of a western Montana town’s business district.

“When they shut us down it took the wind out of our sails,” said Kip Kimerly, who leads the nonprofit venture to revive the long-shuttered hotel that opened in 1912 to a burst of civic celebration.

Now, he’s promising a renewed effort to bring the historic building back to life.

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Liquor company owner takes over shuttered Montana hotel, promises revival

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Photo of Hotel Deer Lodge.

Hotel Deer Lodge, standing at the center of the city’s business district, opened in 1912 as “one of the finest accommodations in Montana.” (Photos courtesy of Deer Lodge Preservation, Inc.)

By Kevin S. Giles

The chief executive officer of a Montana-based liquor company will lead a historic hotel revival with a plan to create a five-star destination.

Kip Kimerly, of Precious Vodka USA, Inc., took charge of Hotel Deer Lodge preservation in a deal struck Jan. 23, 2020.

The hotel remains owned by Deer Lodge Preservation, Inc., but the group will be represented by a new board of directors that Kimerly will lead as president, said Kayo Fraser, one of the former board members.

Kimerly envisions a nonprofit project to restore the empty building for hotel use on the upper floors, with retail space and a banquet room created on the ground floor.

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Senior Lounge, historic experiment during psychedelic days in Montana high school

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Photo shows Powell County High School

The “new” Powell County High School in Deer Lodge is more than 100 years old. An addition to the west side of this building, at left, was completed in the late 1950s. Senior Lounge was at the back of the school at far right.

By Kevin S. Giles

It probably occurred to reasonable adults that grouping “Senior” and “Lounge” in a singular title was a spectacular admission of what would follow, but so it was.

I’m a veteran (survivor?) of the historic, but short-lived, experiment that began at my Powell County High School in the fall of 1969. We were the new seniors, the Class of 1970, emboldened with a plan that we should be trusted without supervision in a remote corner of the old school.

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Taking that long drive to heaven on Montana’s two-lane highways

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By Kevin S. Giles

It’s dawn in oil country. Workers leave the motels early in oversized trucks, heading to the rigs. There was a time when they rented every sleeping room within 100 miles of Williston. Travelers heading west through North Dakota ought to plan ahead.

We pack up and cross the border into Montana through some of the emptiest land in America. A fair bit of driving takes us to Glendive, situated prominently enough that it resembles an oasis in the middle of a great prairie desert. It’s a small city, really, but population is relative in eastern Montana where Glendive’s 4,000 folks outnumber residents in some entire counties.

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My small town vs. all those big cities: Here’s one native Montanan’s point of view.

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Photo shows Japanese friends

When I attended a banquet in Japan, two of these young women came to me with a camera, gesturing they wanted their photo taken. Three more jumped into the picture seconds before it was taken. I think they liked that I am tall.

By Kevin S. Giles

I told someone the other day about visiting Tokyo-Yokohama, an imagination-stretching megalopolis of 38 million people. Riding a bus into the heart of Tokyo from Narita International Airport took three hours. It was after dark. Even in the night, young business types toting briefcases streamed down the sidewalks. That scene continued for most of my journey to a downtown hotel where I could extend my arms to reach both walls in my room. In a megalopolis, space is precious.

Raised a small-town Montanan, I never felt inclined to intentionally seek out big cities. I’ve seen my share, such as Chicago and Honolulu and Sydney. I’m probably a better man for it. A good life is one of resonance, particularly for writers. Fabled large cities bring perspective to our occupation of this good earth.

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My brush in Montana with actors in a western movie, in six easy interviews

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By Kevin S. Giles

It was a big deal, interviewing those movie actors in person for the newspaper. Natalie Wood’s sister Lana? Wow. And Ben Johnson, winner of an Academy Award? Yes.

I was a young writer at the Helena Independent Record when American International filmed “Grayeagle” east of the city. Sensing an opportunity, I volunteered to write profiles of the top actors. Then the fun began.

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That memorable time renting in Alberton, Montana, autumn 1973

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By Kevin S. Giles

That dog looked obedient enough, staring at us with shining eyes and nary a whimper until the retired teacher told us Tippy was dead and stuffed and nailed to a board. A black poodle she couldn’t bear to part with when the parting time came. Dead dog on a board decorating the living room in the dead old house.

The house sat on a hillside beneath an umbrella of trees, pretty enough at a glance. Just out the back door, half a dozen steps north, the mountain began its steep climb to somewhere a thousand feet above us. Watch for bears when you hang your clothes outside to dry, she warned us. They come around, right down that mountain, wandering into the yard just as they please. They like it best after dusk.

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50 years later, rumors linger in Montana over hit-and-run death of 63-year-old woman

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(The following story was compiled in 2015 from public court records, newspaper coverage and interviews with public officials and residents. Thanks to Gary Newlon for his research assistance.)

By Kevin S. Giles

Half an hour past twilight, with only a sliver of a moon rising, Montana Martinz began her fateful walk home.

Cradling a sack of groceries, the 63-year-old woman left the IGA supermarket on the main street of Deer Lodge, Montana. It was October 15, 1966. The wind off the mountains felt cold. She stepped briskly through pools of light under the streetlamps.

Four blocks later, she entered the intersection of Fifth Street and Texas Avenue. She was three minutes from her house at 524 Conley Avenue. Mrs. Martinz lived alone. A year earlier, her husband Peter had died at St. Joseph Hospital of coronary thrombosis. Their only child, a son, was grown and gone.

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We can’t go home again to Montana? Look again at those majestic mountains

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Photo shows Glacier National Park

Unspoken beauty: This is how St. Mary’s Lake, in Glacier National Park, looks from the air. Pilot David R. Hunt, a Deer Lodge native, took this photo.

By Kevin S. Giles

From my aisle seat aboard the sardine can of an airplane, I manage a glimpse through the window before the sleepy woman in front of me, blinded in a purple sleep mask, fumbles the shade down to block any evidence of the outside world. Imagine flying over some of the best mountains on earth and she doesn’t want to look.

Mountains look small from several miles up. We see them blotched over the landscape like paint globs on a canvas, snow gracing their highest peaks. We see their beginnings and endings and the context of their existence in the wide and wild place we know as Montana.

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It’s always a bit unsettling returning to my native state. The mountains point the way to a long-ago place, a yearning deep in the spirit. Random glimpses through tiny plane windows show me little of what I already know is down there. Those mountains are intensely familiar to me but a sudden turnabout from the crowds and traffic noise that surround me in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, now approaching 4 million residents. It takes time to hear Montana’s wind-born silence. Montanans know what I mean.

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Interview with Montana native Kevin S. Giles who writes books about his home state

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Photo shows Kevin S. Giles

Kevin S. Giles is a native Montanan and longtime newspaper journalist.

You’ve published a biography of Jeannette Rankin. Who was she?

¶ History knows her as the first woman elected to Congress. She went to the US House of Representatives in 1916. She was a fierce suffragist, led Montana to approving suffrage in 1914, and rode that momentum to Congress. At that time only 10 states had given women the right to vote. Once Montanans elected Rankin, national suffragists saw her as the voice in Congress who would achieve a federal suffrage amendment.

Did that work out?

¶ Unfortunately for the suffragists, no. World War I got in the way. But even as Congress preoccupied itself with war legislation, Rankin led a push for the federal amendment. The House approved it but the Senate didn’t, by a narrow margin, and it wasn’t until the next Congress that the amendment got enough votes and went to the states for ratification. Some people fault Rankin for failing to secure suffrage by federal amendment in those two years she served in the House. I think the opposite.There’s substantial proof that Rankin’s success at being elected astonished many Americans, the first woman ever, and she achieved more in that term than anybody expected. During that war, Congress didn’t spend much time considering the needs of women and children. That was Rankin’s principal platform, so you can see her challenges beyond the obvious one of being the only woman in the entire male Congress.

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