Katy in Butte, Montana - 1936
"Katy stepped off the train with her cardboard suitcase and her guitar into the acrid night air of the wild mining town of Butte. She was just 16. = A Seven-Minute story
• This post is from the Archive of 2022 - the first Katy story I posted. I was happy to see that it was of interest to more than just her family, and I thank everyone for making it a success and urging me to write more about her.
• The direct quotes here are from an interview over 25 years ago, when Katy was 75. They are her exact words. The recording and transcript of my mother’s voice is a priceless treasure to me.
“I was only sixteen when I ran away from home. It was in 1936. I left the farm as soon as I could. The old man on the next farm, we called him Daddy Stevens, he knew how bad my life was, you know, and so he drove me in his truck to the railway station in Minot in the middle of the night.
“My father, when he found out that I was gone, knew that the old man had helped me get away, but … well, he just had to keep his mouth shut, because the old man knew the reason I had to get out of there. So that was good. I took the train as far as my savings of $34 would get me. But, you know, I wasn’t afraid, I knew I’d be okay. I was a good worker and I could take care of myself … I never wanted to see North Dakota again, I’ll tell you that.”
Katy stepped off the train with her cardboard suitcase and her guitar into the cold, acrid night air of the rugged mining town of Butte, Montana. She stood there alone outside the station for a while, dazzled by the lights. She could see the top of a high hill with silhouettes of dozens of towering, skeletal structures. She had no idea what they were, but she’d find out soon enough.
A man was loitering on the platform, smoking a cheroot, shoulders raised against the cold. His slouch hat was too big and had slipped down over his ears. “Excuse me, mister. Do you know what direction I should walk in to find a place to sleep for the night? Can you tell me that?”
“Well, let’s see... They’s lots a places to sleep in Butte, but you’ll want to take some care, miss. Some is more rowdy than others. It can be dangerous for the likes of you on the streets alone. You just go to that corner right over there — see, where the cafe is? An you go straight down that street about four long blocks an you will find Mrs. Browning’s boarding house. She might have a room for you, an she is a kind un.”
He watched her walk away and shook his head to think how young, how innocent she looked. Katy followed his directions, and continued down the uneven sidewalk under the widely spaced street lamps. She stepped carefully between deep pools of light and scarcely navigable seas of dark.
The town, Katy learned, was in two parts. Downtown was set into the slopes of the hill and on the surrounding flat land. It was made up of tall office buildings, hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, busy saloons and even busier brothels.
The other part of Butte was The Hill — up in the areas of Centerville, Walkerville, and the Uptown. Most of Butte’s mines were located on The Hill. Tall head frames straddled the vertical mine shafts, marking the entrances to nearly 10,000 miles of tunnels upon which the city rested.
“So I lived in Butte for a while, where there were a lot of miners. I found a place to stay in a big boarding house where they gave me a little room with just a bed and a cupboard. I had my meals there, and I helped serve the food to the miners that were the boarders. I’d clean their rooms and change the beds and help with the laundry. It was a lot of work, believe you me, but I liked being there. I felt safe.
In the evenings, when the day’s work was done, I had my guitar with me and I would sing to those old miners. I was just a kid, and I think they all wanted to protect me. I remember they especially liked those old Jimmy Rogers songs, and sometimes I’d see tears in their eyes. They were lonely, you know. There were a lot of older women there too, who worked in the kitchen and they would sit around and listen too. I was too young for beer, so they bought me chocolate bars and chewing gum.”
Katy was a sweet girl who had known very little kindness in her sixteen years. In Butte, she found strangers who were concerned for her well-being, who spoke to her gently. She was often surprised by the unexpected goodness of the folks she met. How ironic it is that at home on the farm with her family, she was always in danger, yet she was able to find safety all alone in the arms of that wild, rough western town. She settled in and worked in that boarding house for nearly two years.
“Then, in 1938 I joined the National Youth Administration program in Butte. That was a thing started by Roosevelt. I was in a group with twenty-one girls about my age. The *NYA teachers there were so nice to us. They taught us so many things and we worked for them in exchange. I learned how to cook a little fancier food than I’d cooked back in North Dakota, and I learned how to set a table properly and they taught me how to do really professional sewing.
We made a lot of olive drab trousers for the boys who worked in the *CCC camps. My job was making the pockets and the zipper flies. Those were the hardest parts, but I figured it out and got pretty good at it. They paid us a little money, too, I can’t remember how much it was.
In those days, when I was 18, I had a little apartment with two other NYA girls, which was very reasonable and we all went to work together every morning. When you are young, you really need somebody to take the time to teach you how to do things. Otherwise you don’t do so well and, you know, you can get into trouble.
Katy and her friends, Wilma and Frances, would go downtown and sit on the steps of the courthouse after work on Friday afternoons to look for handsome men.
“Us girls went down there, and a lot of flirting was going on. Later, if we were lucky, the boys would take us up to Walkerville, at the top of the hill above Main Street. Young people went up there at night to make out. A bunch of us would sit on blankets at the edge of the hill and drink a little beer. When you looked at the town down below, the lights were like a sea of sparkling diamonds. We were good girls, though. Most of us, anyway.”
The years between 1936 and 1941 were happy, possibly the first happy years Katy had ever known. She had been given the thin edge of life in every way, but she made the most of what she had. She’d only completed the eighth grade, but she was smart and resourceful. She had courage. I look back and wonder how she managed to free herself at such an early age, and carry on forward with the enthusiasm and optimism that stayed with her throughout her entire life.
I am reminded of a line in a movie from a while back where the little creature admonishes: “There is no Try. There is only Do — or Do Not.” My mother, Katy, would have agreed with that. She never chose to Try, she just jumped in and Did.
If you missed my brief article on the fine work of the NYA and the CCC, you can read it HERE .
What a beautiful snapshot of an era past when EVERYTHING was associated with hard work and one putting his/her shoulder to the wheel EVERY day of the year. This was the generation which singlehandedly defeated Hitler, Mussolini, and imperial Japan allowing the world to take a deep breath that continues to this day (although we're doing OUR BEST to ruin the immense sacrifices of the past).
My Greek American "parents," a wonderful couple in Middletown, NY, both now deceased, often relayed stories of their own experiences of those tough yet heroic years. They were my mentors and saviors whose presence and sustenance, moral and material, made me an "American" myself.
God Bless America and those who built it with sweat (and, often, tears) and hard work.
Lovely as your thoughts!