The Big Sky, By and By | True Tales, Real People and Strange Times in the Heart of Montana
Published: October 20, 2011
Ed Kemmick, who writes the “City Lights” column for The Billings Gazette, has been enthralled with Montana since he moved to Missoula in 1974 from his native state of Minnesota.
And he loves a good yarn – whether he’s crafting one or reading one. The best stories, he writes, “were told by people who had lived their adventures, not simply narrated them.”
Like his favorite storytellers (A.B. Guthrie among them), Kemmick seems to fully inhabit his tales about Montanans, becoming, in the best ones, participant as well as narrator. “In Evel Knievel, The Aftermath,” he describes the scene at the Pekin Noodle Parlor in Butte, where friends and family of the daredevil motorcyclist gathered a day after his funeral in 2007.
Following a raucous evening, Kemmick’s sidekick, Gazette photographer David Grubbs, discovered he’d been bitten on the arm by an Aussie with fake teeth. “In a city bursting with great stories, Grubbs now had his own. I have to admit, I was a little jealous.”
Like Butte, Kemmick’s book is bursting with great stories, and for readers from the western half of the state, it’s an entertaining way to get to know Montana’s eastern terrain, both human and geographical.
In addition to Knievel, the collection of columns from Kemmick’s long career is dappled with plenty of familiar faces, including Nashville songwriter Kostas, who grew up in Billings; artist Ben Steele, who survived the Bataan Death March; and troubadour and curiosity collector Dobro Dick.
But many are surprises (at least to this westerner): Shirley Smith, curator of the Little Cowboy Bar and Museum in Fromberg; Halleck Brenden, a linguist and fiddler “who was always drunk on words”; and Maryona Johnson, former bartender and madam at the now defunct Wild Horse Pavilion near Miles City.
UM journalism professor Dennis Swibold describes Kemmick as a “Montana treasure,” and this collection lays anchor to that claim. The Big Sky, By and By, was published by Missouri Breaks Press and sells for $14.
– Kristi Niemeyer
