Summer vacations in Montana

 I am in front, my cousin Mary in the back. This is on the Feeley farm in Eastern Montana, and the horse's name was Prince.  

As the 60s began, and I entered kindergarten, the makeup of my family was a bit different from most of my classmates. My oldest sister was entering college.  My next sister was in high school, and my brother was in 7^th grade at Holy Family (the Catholic school a few miles away). 

My parents were depression kids and World War II young adults.  They were both born in 1917, so survived the flu pandemic and WWI as toddlers.  They were both from rural eastern Montana, and met as youngsters when they lived on adjoining farms.

My mother’s family were immigrants known as “Germans from Russia”.  They were ethnic Germans who had settled in Russia a few generations back, only to be driven out by Catherine the Great’s ethnic cleansing.  They were hard working and clannish.  They spoke German and lived in tight-knit communities.  My mother did not speak English until she entered first grade at the age of 6.  State-mandated education took children through the 8^th grade in those days.  By the time my mother graduated from the 8^th grade, her mother and older sister had died.  She was taken out of school to do the “woman’s work” on the farm; cooking, cleaning, and laundry became her life.

My dad’s family were Irish by ethnicity.  His grandparents had come from Ireland, landed in Boston, ran into the “Know Nothings” and anti-Irish sentiment, went back to Ireland only to run afoul of the potato famine, and ended up in Canada (Albert, Ontario).  His father became a homesteader in what was previously Crow land south of the Yellowstone River and east of the Little Big Horn. 

At the age of 16, my dad graduated from high school at the top of his class.  He was offered scholarships to college, but in 1934 the country was at the height of the Great Depression and there was no money to send him.  Even with tuition covered by scholarship, the cost of clothing, books, train fare etc. was out of reach for a farm family that saw maybe 10 dollars in cash money in a year.  He told us with great resentment that he and his brothers acted as unpaid hired hands on the farm, and as soon as he turned18 he joined the Marine Corps.

After overseas stints in Shanghai and the Philippines, my dad returned to the U.S. and was stationed in Portland, Oregon on recruiting duty.  In January of 1941, the “girl next door” came out from Montana and they were married.  In December of 1941, almost simultaneously, my sister Kathie was born and Pearl Harbor was attacked.  

My dad soon shipped out to the war in the Pacific with the Fourth Marine Division, and there was a gap in family life as my mom and Kathie moved back to Billings, Montana.  With the end of the war and my dad’s return to civilian life, Marilyn joined the family in 1946 and Michael in 1948.  Dad re-joined the Marines, deployed to Southern California, the Korean War called, and I was a “welcome home” baby in 1955.

 

The family moved to San Diego in 1957, where my dad finally retired from the Marines for good.  They bought the house in the new suburb called Kearny Mesa, where I lived until 1975 and we finally sold in 2010 after dad passed away. 

 

As my friends’ families planned their summer vacations by going places like Yosemite National Park, going camping, and staying in San Diego at the beach, my family was going on a two-day car drive to Montana. 

Both my parents loved San Diego, but they had family “back home” that they wanted to visit when the occasion arose.  We began the decade of the 1960s with 4 kids and 2 adults in the car, no air conditioning, and at least two of the kids vomiting at any given time due to the heat.  We ended the decade with me alone in the car with 2 parents (once with a dog). 

The trips usually began at about 5 AM.  (One year we left in the early evening and drove all night, in an attempt to beat the desert heat.  The attempt was only partially successful.  I was supposed to be sleeping in the back seat, but popped up to see what all the fuss was about as we drove through Las Vegas at night and saw all the neon for the first time).  There were coolers and ice chests with snacks.  A cooler full of ice with a spigot on the side served us for drinking water as the ice melted and the day went on.  A few Styrofoam cups and a plastic spoon, a glass jar of Tang “instant breakfast drink”, and we were set.  For the parents, a thermos of coffee got the day started.  For the kids, the empty metal coffee can stayed in the backseat for carsickness.  The smell of coffee as I hung my nauseated self over the can guaranteed that it took many years for me to be able to stomach coffee.

The first stops were often somewhere on the fringe of what we considered the “real” Montana.  Butte, for example, home of my dad’s Aunt Emma.  His dad had a large family of siblings, and my Great-Aunt-Emma was the last one left.  Known to a few generations of Butte schoolchildren as “Miss Feeley”, she was a proper, Catholic, opinionated spinster lady.  Butte had the distinction of being the first place the Feeleys landed when they came to the U.S. from Ireland by way of Ontario.   There was some question as to whether they had emigrated legally into the U.S. from Canada, in fact, and my dad’s younger brother used to twit his father about it as he grew up and they began to butt heads.  Threatening to turn your father in as an undocumented immigrant is nothing new, apparently. 

Butte was a copper mining town and to this day has one of the largest Irish-American populations in the U.S.  My great-grandfather and his sons, my grandfather and his brothers, arrived first.  My great-grandfather died there in 1905 while his wife and daughters were still in Ontario.  The women came to Butte a couple of months later and most of the family never left there.  The “old cemetery” there contains a great many Feeley headstones.  I have never seen them, since we would make a quick stop to see Aunt Emma then get the real trip started. 

We knew we were getting closer when we got to Laurel (just short of Billings).  My mother’s favorite cousin, Evelyn, lived there with her husband and three daughters.  I am sure this was a highlight of the trip for my mom, but we kids were itching to get on to “the farm”.

We always called it “the farm”, while my dad referred to it as “the old homestead”. First, we would arrive at the thriving metropolis of Hysham (population about 300), home of my dad’s high school.  A few miles east on Highway 10 is the wide place in the road called Sanders.  In 1908 my grandfather, George A. Feeley, left Butte and took a homestead in this area just south of the Yellowstone River.    He built a shack and became involved in the local civic affairs, including acting as clerk for the school.  His younger sister Emma spent 3 years as a teacher there.  In 1913, as required by the 1862 Homestead Act, George A. was given deed to the land having shown that he could live on it and work it for 5 years.  He also married one of the other local schoolteachers at that time (Katherine Conway) and brought her home to the little shack.  They had 5 children in short order, lived, worked, and survived in a fairly harsh environment until they both died in 1950. 

Their five children included George Vincent (named for his dad but called G.V.), James Robert (called Robert), Frances Joseph (Frank, my dad) Lawrence Phillip (called Lawrence, go figure) and Mary Bernadette (called Petty.)  

George V. had a wife and the beginnings of his own family at the time George A. passed away in 1950.  He remained on the farm with daughter Sandy, who was a bit younger than my oldest sister Kathie, twins Pat (George Patrick) and Terry, and son Tim.  Between 1950 and 1956 they would be joined by three more:  John, Martin, and Mary. 

My family could unerringly find the dirt lane that left highway 10 near the Sanders store and headed north toward the Yellowstone.  The lane passed the Feeley farmhouse on the left, then came to a two-story white house we knew as “the O’Grady Place” where my mother had grown up.  (My mother’s family name was not O’Grady. There is a long history of referring to such “places” by their original owners’ names.)  A quick right turn led us into the farmyard, passing a barn on the left that I don’t remember whole:  in my mind it was always relatively ramshackle.  Bumping into the yard, we passed the chicken coop and the root cellar, and the dog of the season might bark at us and a few cats would twine around the chickens. 

The cousins had seen us enter the lane and generally came pouring out into the yard:  one year, according to family lore, shouting “The Dodos are here!”  Since this family never called anyone by their correct names, it is unsurprising that my dad’s inability to say “Frances Joseph” as a toddler, which became something like “Tantun Dodie”, became Dodo to his family and many of them called him that until they (or he) died.

Each of us had best-friend-cousins among the farm Feeleys.  My sister Kathie had been babies together with their oldest daughter Sandy during the WWII, when my dad was overseas.  My red-haired sister Marilyn had a red-haired friend in Terry, the second daughter.  And the youngest of the seven kids, Mary, was just a year younger than me.  My brother ecstatically adopted the four boys in between as the brothers he never had:  Pat, Tim, John, and Martin.

To be taken from the mild suburbia of San Diego to the banks of the Yellowstone was a bit of a culture shock.  The boys swam and fished in the river, after the chores were done (cows needed milking, eggs needed gathering).  Mary and I swam in the Big Ditch (an irrigation canal that had lots of soft oozy mud at the bottom).  When fried chicken was on the menu for supper, we all went out to the chicken yard armed with coat hangers with which to catch them by the neck.  It took me a while, but I was determined:  I eventually caught one by the tail and carried it around proudly until it got away.  Aunt Marcella put the chicken on the chopping block and cut its head off with an axe.  Marilyn said “Don’t look!” and tried to turn my head away, but I found it fascinating. 

Since our cousins were all good Catholics, the odd habits from school and church followed us to the farm.  The farm house was a small, old, structure that had been hastily built by my grandfather and shored up haphazardly since then.  It had one bathroom, which was a challenge when a family with 2 adults and 4 kids visited a family with 2 adults and 7 kids.   I was fascinated at the sight of their youngest, Mary, brushing her teeth over the toilet bowl, since she could rarely elbow her way to the actual sink.  Marilyn and Terry, being close in age and “best cousins”, would take a bath together in the evenings.  The boy cousins (we found out years later) clued my brother in to the existence of a “peek hole” in the bedroom closet in which they could spy into the bathroom.  Sisters/cousins or not, these were naked girls and there were no Playboy magazines available for perusal.  There was an earnest discussion among the five boys as to whether it was a sin to peek in at the girls.  Pat, the oldest boy, told his siblings and my brother that while it was probably a sin to look at Terry, who was a bit older and more developed, it was certainly no sin to look at Marilyn.