Montana Kay

A loving tribute on her birthday, June 28

Katy in 1952

I joined Substack in December 2021. My very first story was this short eulogy for Katy, my mother, who died at age 97. She belieed in courage and kindness. You can find a few more stories about her remarkable odyssey in THE KATY MEMOIR.

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Katy was a farm girl from North Dakota, born in June of 1920. It was a small-minded farm town she lived in, with a few pine trees, two churches and plenty enough meanness to go around. She tended cows, shocked grain, read Cowboy Romances magazine. In 1936 at the innocent age of sixteen she ran away into the night.

She got on a train straight west with only a cardboard suitcase, a beat-up Sears Roebuck guitar and $34 in her pocket. She knew exactly where she was going – she was going as far away from North Dakota as a $34 one-way ticket would take her.

She stepped off the train on a drizzly night in Butte Montana, and there she stayed for about five years, making her living by serving meals and cleaning rooms in a large boarding house for single copper miners. In the evenings she would sing and play cowboy ballads in the dusty saloon. The crusty old miners, exhausted and lonely, would listen to her sweet, sweet voice singing That Dear Old Daddy of Mine. “More than a few would cry,” she said. They gave her nickels and bought her chocolate bars. She was too young for beer.

In 1938 Katy found herself working with the National Youth Administration, sewing clothing for the boys in the Civilian Conservation Corps.Both of these agencies were part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. She continued to sing and play the old battered guitar in rodeos and bars all over that Big Sky Country.

Katy married the wrong man - a handsome young soldier who had no dreams to speak of, no drive, no plan… and an inordinate love of drink. The only good thing he did for Katy was to abandon her and their daughter in Santa Cruz, California, where she soon learned more than she ever wanted to know about Brussels sprouts and the frozen food plant. She became a master at sorting apples in the packing sheds of Freedom. She canned enough pears at Stokely's to feed the entire forty-eight states.

“Montana Kay” was discovered by KSCO in the 1950s. They gave her a radio show called The Musical Roundup. She sang and she played the old 78s as well – Lefty Frizell, Jimmy Rogers, Ernest Tubb. She had many fans in the nearby Soledad prison. Inmates mailed in requests and she would dedicate songs especially to them on every program.

If you were lucky and dropped in on the right evening, you could also find Montana Kay singing at Brady’s Bar on Seabright Avenue in those days as well.

Katy lived in Santa Cruz for seventy-six years in all. She had three children who adored her. Even in her 80s she could still yodel out a mean rendition of the Okie Boogie or a toe-tapping Jambalaya, if you would buy her a glass of gin. She said she was going to live forever. Oh, how we hoped she would.