Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
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Do you remember when you were 20? Of course, what a stupid question as most of us like to remember those “good old days.” I know that we all have a tendency to exaggerate our hardships, like walking to school x number of miles and probably in the snow, packing a lunch while you were at it. Actually, today my thoughts on remembering are not on the inconveniences we had, [but] rather the lack of some of the irritating and annoying things that we endure today. Those little things like turning on the radio or TV, remember very little TV back the...
We hear a lot right now about our collective societal need to find common ground. This place sounds so mystical and alludes us as our citizenry grows further apart. The state of our society today is divided, to be sure. Some say we are more divided than ever as a nation and research attempts to confirm that sentiment. A Pew Research Center study from the end of 2017 shows that since the mid-1990s, political divides have more than doubled, from 15 percent to 36 percent based on ten key measures. I must believe that in our American history, divid...
After visiting with a friend awhile ago, I was thinking about our conversation. We had talked about many topics, one of them being ripples. I was reminded of high school age students in a Sunday School class I’d taught some years ago. At the time, the students I was working with asked if they could write a church service. Since it happened to be the season of Lent, I felt it would be a great learning opportunity. So I set down some basic rules for them. The night of the service, they brought out a large old galvanized wash tub. One by one t...
To Gwen Cornwell. Love your article on skating! I grew up in Nashua where the rink was across the road and behind the CONOCO gas station. They gave us old tires to burn and we kept warm all winter by the heat of those tires AND none of us died! Thanks for the memories!...
I have known Russ Fagg for over 25 years. When you know someone a long time, you see what they are made of. Russ served as a Montana district judge for 20 years in Yellowstone County. Judges have the title "Honorable" in front of their names. This is not just a title for Judge Fagg, it is a description of his character. Russ is a man of honor and integrity. He does what he says, he is transparent and there is nothing false about him. I don't know about others, but that is a key character trait I am looking for in someone I vote for. Is he/she...
My family was sorry to hear that Cindy was denied her permit to continue operating her pet rescue. Clover has really completed our family. She's polite to the other animals, both wild and domestic. She's equally happy to spend all day either running and working cows with horsebackers or lounging around being Jason's writing buddy. She was Zora's first 4-H project and an enthusiastic participant in the fair. She courageously saved the life of my mom's beloved old dog when a cow attacked her....
Do you remember outside skating rinks? Being a long-time resident of Valley County, I remember when almost every community had an outdoor skating rink. If you lived in a larger community like Glasgow, you had the luxury of several different skating sites. On the other hand, if you were from one of the surrounding smaller communities, there was one skating pond where the skaters gathered. No age limits either. I assume time of day had a lot to do with the age of the people skating. It does make me sad to think of the fun the young miss out on...
The election cycle is picking up steam and campaigning is well underway. While it is important to pay attention to what each candidate has said, it is also important to look at what each candidate has done. This proves more true for an incumbent candidate like Jon Tester. As one of our state's senators, he has a large presence on the national scale for Montana. Has he truly fought for what is in the best interest of Montana and its citizens? What are his plans moving forward for our state and our nation? And most importantly, is he really the...
Last week, I wrote about a gentleman who lived next door to us -- Grandpa Hjort. I learned a great deal from him. As I thought about him later on, it came to mind that Grandpa Hjort was like so many older people I visited with when I was growing up. People, such as a lady who lived a few houses west of us. Her husband was killed in an accident while working on railroad tracks. She told me of how six men came to her house with her husband’s body on an old door and of how she cleaned him, put clean clothes on him, then called the sheriff and u...
Over the past month it was made public that the Interior Department, the one run by Ryan Zinke, proposed the“disposition of federal real property,” in an effort to pay for infrastructure projects. Zinke of course denied it, and has recently told Field and Stream, Outdoor Life and Sportsmen’s groups that there was no such plan to sell off public lands. The leaked proposal contradicting the promises of the administration is not new, but it is still concerning. Once again, Zinke has played second fiddle to Trump’s tormentors, I mean adviser...
Montana’s disastrous flash drought of 2017 and the million-acre fire season have left many asking: What will the new year bring? And what about all this snow? Weather may be getting harder to predict, not easier. Last year, Montana’s weather proved that a big spring snowpack does not mean moisture down the road. “By May 1, we thought that things were in really good shape,” Michael Downey, water planner with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told lawmakers Jan. 8. “Last winter was a really good winter.” Northeast M...
Montana has become the first state to establish net neutrality requirements for telecommunications providers who wish to maintain state contracts. Governor Steve Bullock signed the executive order Jan. 22, and with the stroke of a pen protected Montanans’ access to a free and open internet. Internet service providers will not be able to block or prioritize content or charge any customer in the state of Montana more for speediness if they wish to maintain or renew contracts with the state government. As the Governor said on Monday, “the sta...
Every once in a great while we meet a special person. That one person whom we want to know more about, someone who makes us shake our head at their stories, and who, as time goes on, comes to mind in times we are having difficulties in our own lives. So it’s been with me from time to time. One of the most interesting people l’ve known is a gentleman who lived next door to me and my family when I was growing up. He insisted my brother and I call him and his wife Grandpa and Grandma, which we did. I can’t call his first name to mind, but his l...
In case you were unaware, the U.S. Government shut down over the weekend, and almost nothing came of it. In what was more or less political theater in which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was able to use words like “negotiating with Jell-O” to describe talks with President Trump, and everyone tried to brand a hashtag that more or less went #(insert name of responsible party)shutdown it was blandly uneventful and anti-climactic. In brief, Democrats caved under political fear, and Republicans promised to tackle DACA next month. The poi...
Do you remember saving all of the plastic sacks that your bread came in? Many of my parents’ generation, as well as mine always recycled those sacks. Waste not, want not. That expression must have come from depression days. Anyway your plastic sack was not thrown away when empty, but washed, dried and put away for reuse. I remember these sacks being rolled on an empty wax paper tube for storage. I must admit I still have some in my cupboard. If you were not a crust eater, this part of the bread was put in the oven or someplace to dry, saving f...
I want to respond to the article in the paper about the pet rescue (Glasgow City Council Denies Pet Rescue, Jan. 10, 2018). I live north of Glasgow on the Opheim highway in the summer, and a year ago someone, on a very hot day, dumped a big dog on the road. No water or food. The dog finally came into my yard. I fed and watered it for a month or so until I had to move to Billings for the winter. I couldn’t take the dog so I asked Cindy Ramsbacher if she could find a home for him. She took the dog and I don’t know what she did with him, but I’m...
President Trump affirmed to applause, "Farmers always lead the way," at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s 99th annual convention meeting this last week in Nashville, Tenn. The American dream is soaring back to life, he continued. It is a dream that we all hope for, the dream that with enough hard work we can obtain a free and financially rewarding life. However, in many rural communities, poverty and abandonment of generational farms is growing. The United States Department of Agriculture conducted a census in 2012 that over 150,000 f...
Government may seem like a dirty word around here. And with so much turmoil in today's politics, it can seem like it is too much to keep up with. Even if you have given up on our national government, don't forget about your state and local elections. These elections aren't as exciting as the national ones, but in many ways, they are more important. These offices have a direct impact on our lives and are vital to the smooth operation of our cities and counties. Jan. 11 was the first day to file for a nomination and the first round of paperwork f...
It’s soon going to be eight years since I was diagnosed with cancer. I went through major surgery and six months of chemotherapy. Not quite five years later, I was told my cancer had returned and mestastasized to my bones. I then began a regimen of hormone therapy medications - four or five different ones. Each one would work for a few months and then become ineffective. So just about a year ago, the oncologist decided my treatment was going to have to change to chemotherapy infusion. That meant having surgery to insert a port in my chest t...
To my readers, I have no real excuse for not sending an article for your weekly reading, except, I had a hard time REMEMBERING which day it was. Like so many, my family got to battle that cold bug that seemed to make the rounds during the holidays. It seems that one of the current home remedies is the use of Vicks vapor rub. Of course, my generation has used Vicks for years. How many of you remember having Mom grease your chest with Vicks at night before bed? Now, you couldn’t just crawl in bed and let Vicks get all over the bed sheets, so y...
It is not strange to think of Trump’s actions as that of a ratings junky. He brags about crowds, ratings, favor with celebrities and politicians and the like, but he really is tone deaf to modern America. Whether he is making broad ethnic assertions about minority groups, calling Mexicans immigrants with generalized derogatory terms, having Freudian fights with dictators about the size and function of their, ahem, nuclear buttons, or referring, allegedly of course, to African countries in a profane way, Trump just keeps falling flat with the b...
They arrived in the winter, bundled in snowsuits which hid beneath layers of rejection and abandonment. The thick walls that lay before us were massive and seemed at the time, impenetrable. She was 15 months, and he was just over 3. They were sleep deprived, malnourished, and they did not exist, or so they had been told. Our worlds collided as we embraced these two, all the while caring for the other two already within our safety. Birth order was trumped, and anger and frustration dominated our dwelling. Peace was replaced by chaos. I shudder...
The new year is upon us, and in the grand tradition of ordering our lives by summaries and data, I resolved to write about 2017 in the Valley County Attorney’s Office to shed light on some of the work we accomplished and some of the changes that will affect criminal prosecutions in the year to come. In the interest of the reader engagement, I have decided to limit my comments to felony criminal cases because, while cases regarding traffic tickets can be very exciting (honestly), I suspect readers may find them less than enthralling. By way o...
The pages of the calendar have turned and now it’s a new year. It’s hard to believe that it’s the year 2018. I remember being in World History class as a sophomore in high school, studying a historical time line. A discussion began concerning when the 20th century would be left behind and we’d be living in the 21st century. At the time, the year 1958, we all wondered if we’d be alive to see the new century. We talked about what it would be like, about what progress humanity would make. Last week, I was visiting with a close friend. She comme...
I can comically recall the issues Republicans rail on and on about every day. The deficit is a national security issue, lower taxes, less regulations, more local input in government, less environmental conservation, no federal land grabs or federal lands period. This local control is a conservative hallmark of less government, or at least more self-government, and in most cases Republicans support it as the backbone of the federalist system we constitutionalized in America. Why then, do Republicans insist on federal criminal enforcement of...
