Marie Montana

Charles T. Shearer was a longtime Helena reporter and city editor. On February 18, 1902, Shearer was in a dingy saloon on Helena’s Main Street. In a back room, Jack Waite—a former deputy marshall, a handsome, strong, and powerful man—was likely thinking about this unfulfilled dreams when he put a colt revolver to his head and ended his troubled life. Shearer, the young reporter, took it upon himself to break to the news to Waite’s wife. He took a cab to the Waite home on Fifth Avenue and knocked on the shabby door. Alice Waite appeared with one child in her arms and four more holding onto her skirts. She took the news bravely. Mrs. Waite took her children and moved to Lewistown. Shearer lost track of the family, but he never forgot Jack Waite’s senseless suicide and the pitiful family scene. Jack’s daughter, Ruth, then six, maybe like her father—dreamed of bigger things and faraway places. She struggled hard to study music. She had no patron, no one helped her. At sixteen, she became the youngest person to graduate from the music conservatory at Toronto. In 1921, she went to Paris for further study and won a scholarship to the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau. She studied Italian operatic roles and took the grand opera in Milan by storm at her debut in 1923. Singing under the name Marie Montana because Ruth Waite was too difficult for Italians to pronounce, she won international renown as a lyric soprano.

This clipping appeared in the Billings Gazette on October 31, 1926.

The announcement of her immensely successful Italian debut caught Charles Shearer’s eye. He was astounded at her accomplishments, and wished that Jack Waite had been there to share congratulations with his daughter.

Kirby Grant

Here’s a bit of Montana trivia. Kirby Grant Hoon Jr., who used the stage name Kirby Grant, starred in the 1950s television series Sky King. Remember that? He was born in Butte in 1911 and grew up in Helena where his father, Kirby Grant Hoon Sr., was postmaster. Kirby Jr. was a 1929 graduate of Helena High School. In the series, he played wealthy Arizona rancher Schuyler King, nicknamed “Sky,” who fought bad guys and rescued people with his airplane. His niece Penny, who lived with him on the Flying Crown Ranch, was his sidekick on these adventures. Kirby was a pilot in real life and learned to fly the airplanes in the series. Early television demanded simultaneous filming of multiple episodes, and so Sky wore the same clothes on every show. File footage, especially of the plane flying, was often used numerous times, and sometimes the film would be reversed so that the plane appeared to fly in the opposite direction. On these occasions, observant fans could notice that the numbers on the aircraft would be backwards. Seventy-two episodes aired on ABC in 1953 and 1954. CBS later rebroadcast the series.

Kirby Grant (left) with Gloria Winters and Ron Hagerthy. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Kirby Grant did little acting after Sky King. He and his wife founded a ranch for orphaned or abandoned children, and he was often honored at aviation events. On October 30, 1985, Kirby died in a traffic accident in Florida en route to the last successful launching of the space shuttle Challenger. Astronauts had planned to honor the Montana native for his encouragement of aviation and space flight.