[Mt-blind] Nelson Article

[Daniel Burke]

Here's a scanned version of the article, taken from the Sept. 17 Missoulian
pages:

Times have changed
Couple reflects on beloved town,
70 years of marriage



By MICHAEL JAMISON

Photo
Flo and Joe Nelson have lived together in Bigfork
since 1937, the year they were married. Over the 
past 70 years they have seen major changes and growth in the town they call
home
BIGFORK - In 1917. the United States entered World War I, Buffalo Bill Cody
died. Mata Hari was executed for spying and 4-year-old Joe Nelson moved with
his family from Kalispell to Bigfork, a village of 40 or so homes scattered
along Flathead Lake.
Two decades later, in 1937, Wallace Carothers patented nylon, Daffy Duck and
the Golden Gate Bridge both made their national debuts, and Nelson married a
girl named Flo, adding one German-Irish outsider to Bigfork's tight-knit and
tight-lipped population of 250 Scandinavians.
Last month, in 2007, Bigfork's summer population cracked 10,000, the
Nelsons' mountain views were blocked by new roofs on all sides, and Joe and
Flo and their three kids and seven grandkids and 16 great-grandkids prepared
to celebrate the couple's 70th wedding anniversary.
"I've seen some things in all those years," 94-year-old Joe Nelson said.
"We've been some places. But we always come back to Bigfork. I've always
come home."
These days, though. Nelson hardly recognizes his hometown, let alone the
world at large. No one in town says "hello" anymore, he said, and when he
goes to the pharmacy or the bank, "you don't see any familiar faces. When
they took the Post Office out of downtown, that's when it all went downhill
and became a tourist trap."
Flo puts the turning point for her adopted hometown in the late 1980s, on a
summer's day up Crane Mountain. She and Joe were picking berries, and "in
Montana, you have your berry patch, and I have mine."
But on that day, a woman with a gaggle of kids in tow pulled up and crawled
right into Joe and Flo's patch.
 
"She said she was an old-timer there," Flo said. "She said she had been
corning there every summer for seven years."
Seven years. An old-timer. Flo's been here since '37. and still calls
herself a newcomer, if for no other reason than respect for what came
before.
"I just quietly put my berry bucket in the car and we drove away."
Thing is, Flo always figured Bigfork was geographical immune to the
explosive growth spilling out across the rest of the Flathead Valley, what
with the rivers and the mountains and the lake shores hemming it in.
"But 1 forgot about straight up and slam-bang together." she said. "They
build them right on top of one another."
Bigfork wasn't always this way, of course, wasn't always an artsy village of
boutiques and galleries and real estate offices.
"You know," Joe said, "there wasn't much here in 1917. We all played right
down there on Main Street."
If they had a can, they'd play kick-the-can; and if they didn't, they'd play
hide-and-seek.
If they could swipe dad's empty billfold, they'd tic a string to it. drop it
in a popular trail, cover the string with dirt and hide in the bushes,
tugging the wallet away just as someone bent to collect it.
"We were all poor," Joe said, "so we didn't know we were poor."
They rode Flexible Flyer sleds home from school, played hooky, went fishing.
Nelson's dad operated the hydroelectric dam at the south end of town and in
the fall, on the other side of the river from their company house, "the
Indians would set up camp."
They would come up from the reservation, he said.
 
passing through on their way to hunt elk in the Swan.
"They'd camp by the bridge for a couple days," he said, "with all those
horses and teepees, every fall. We liked to watch, but we stayed pretty much
in our own yard when they were here. It was like a mystery to us, and I
suppose we were a little scared of it all."
Downtown, the blacksmith would shoe the Indians' horses, in his busy little
shop next to the newfangled automobile service station.
The restaurant owner went fishing every morning, to fill the menu. The
grocer let out long lines of credit through the winter, got paid when people
went back to work in the summer.
Mostly, Joe said, they went to work in the woods, logging the heavy timber
that climbed dark and steep from riverfront to mountaintop. "In the spring,
when they'd turn all those logs loose in the river, that was quite a sight.
We'd just stand on the bridge and watch it for hours."
Joe laughs a lot when he remembers those days, smiles and names names of
neighbors long gone.
"Everyone took care of one another," he said. "We cared about one another."
Not much had changed by the time Flo showed up in 1937 and Joe took over his
dad's job at the dam, became lire chief for the next four decades.
The cash-strapped volunteers had an annual ball to raise money - "You come
to our dance, and we'll come to your fire."
"We went to our first fire in a Studebaker touring car with three flat
tires," Joe said. The rig had been stripped to the frame, just a seat and a
water tank behind. They'd fill the tank with water and baking soda, then
spill in
 
some sulfuric acid "and bingo," he claps his hands, "you've got pressure
just like that!"
The newlyweds arrived in what Flo says was "the pit of the Great
Depression."
"Bigfork was what you'd call rural," she said. "And very Scandinavian."
By which she means reserved, and polite, and tight to the hearth.
Flo came from Arizona, a smelting and mining town where Joe's mother had
once been sent to recover from tuberculosis, and she thought cooking was "a
pot of beans on the stove and that would last you three days. Put a ham hock
in it and it's even better. Maybe tamales on payday."
But these Scandinavians exchanged elaborate recipes, baked and baked and
constantly stopped for coffee. And cards. And careful, clannish
conversation.
To this day, Bigfork's high school mascots are Vikings and Valkyries, and on
the way to the Nelsons' house you're quite likely to see a bumper sticker
that says something
like "It takes a Viking to raze a village."
But beyond those faint echoes, not much remains of the couple's original
hometown. In less than a generation, Bigfork has completely transformed.
Some of the change has been good, Flo said. The streets are paved, the
sagging wooden sidewalks replaced  with durable concrete.
But Joe's not so sure. He can't point to anything he'd call an improvement,
exactly. Joe won't go downtown at all anymore. "No reason to," he said.
"There's nothing there  for me. Just tourists and
nonsense."        You can't buy a hammer or a nail downtown, can't buy a set
of sheets or a pair of boxer shorts. You can, however, buy a $10,000 bronze
statue of a grizzly bear, even if you aren't likely to see one in the woods.
For Joe Nelson, it's the explosive urban growth that has made his hometown
unrecognizable. If Bigfork had a mayor, and if Joe could hold that post for
a day, "I'd stop all this building," he said. "There's been enough now."
But for Flo, it's not the building of infrastructure but the collapsing of
inner structure that marks the
 
modern. Make her mayor for a day, and she'd pass some rules about
neighborliness, about community and about parents staying home to raise
their kids, about teaching the values of giving, and of earning.
"You adapt," Joe finally says. "It's just change. It has to happen. That's
just what time does to a place."
The Golden Gate Bridge and nylon just aren't what they were on the Nelsons'
wedding day, 70 years back.
Outside, builders are tacking siding to a new condominium complex, and
traffic hums south for Missoula, north toward Kalispell. Inside, photographs
have captured a very different time, all in this one lifetime, when Joe wore
a suit to take his girl to the Saturday-night dance.
"We might have been married for 70 years," he said, "but it doesn't seem
like it. It seems like yesterday."
"That depends on where you're looking at it from," Flo says, a bright light
teasing in her blue, blue eyes. "The first 50 years were the hardest."
Joe lets that slide without so much as a flinch. He's practiced.
"We still like each other, I think."
 
Flo takes his hand in hers. Her "wild man from Montana," as her friends in
teenage Arizona had called him.
"He just showed up with this little box, with a set of wedding rings in it."
The justice of the peace hitched them up at high noon Oct. 29, in Flagstaff.
She wore a black taffeta dress, "my Sunday clothes," and they immediately
hopped a bus for Bigfork.
"Like I said, I always cam home to Bigfork," Joe said. "It's been a happy
life. This town's been very, very good to us."'
Still is, actually, despite the persistent sound of nail guns At 94, he
still goes out to listen to jazz once a week, at she has her ladies' card
club,
"Everybody needs their own space," Flo said.
That's how you make it 70 years together.
"Every day, she said, "you have certain challenges. You take care of those,
and you make sure you're enjoying life along the way. Most of your life
depends on your attitude towards it."
"Flo and I got along just fine," Joe agreed. "Don't get me wrong - we had
our arguments."
"We don't agree on
 
everything even today," Flo added. "My theory is that intelligent people
always have disagreements."
And these, obviously, are two intelligent people.
But smart as he is, Joe's recipe for married life is far simpler than his
wife's.
'I just live day to day," he said. "Find something you love and stick with
it."
Something like Flo, or like Bigfork, both of which have changed much since
the days of FDR and trials for Trotskyism, but yet remain
 
loving constants in Joe Nelson's wonderful life.
"Life has been very generous to me," he said. "To both of us, I think. When
I think of Bigfork, I think of old friends and the places we used to go
berry picking.
"And no way does it seem like we've been married 70 years. It's like it was
yesterday, it went so fast."

Dan Burke
Missoula, Montana 

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