Mention of Small Town’s Virtues Generates Big Response

No town is so small nor so remote that a reference to it in a metropolitan newspaper will not bring replies from its residents or friends.

Not surprisingly, I have heard from a few defenders of Hamilton, Mont., which I recently singled out for its apparent tranquillity. Its police blotter for three days in August showed nothing more traumatic that two barking dogs, a minor traffic accident and a person who appeared to be intoxicated but left the scene before police arrived.

Certainly no one needs to come to the defense of Hamilton. I was only hoping some Angelenos would be seduced by that favorable report to move there, thus lessening the population pressure on Los Angeles.

Hamilton (population 2,499) lies on the Bitterroot River at the foot of the Bitterroot Mountains, a range that is powerfully nostalgic for Paul Gropman, now of Los Angeles.

“Ah, the Bitterroot Mountains,” he writes. “I crossed them one October day in 1938. I was on a troop train and we were on our way to Cushman, Ore. Once over the Bitterroot range we arrived at St. Joe, Ida. A heavy snow had fallen but the boys on their way to school were still out there shirt-sleeved. I think I’ve had a love affair with small towns ever since.”

Incidentally, Gropman recalls that a few years later he was selling magazine subscriptions and knocked on a door in Broken Bow, Neb. “A girl came to the door, of such unutterable loveliness that I have not forgotten her name to this day: lovely black-haired, blue-eyed Coletta McCarthy. Where is she today?”

How many of us, I wonder, have glimpsed a face that was never to be forgotten?

“If that town reflects a different era in its freedom from serious lawbreaking,” writes James L. Wilkinson of North Hollywood, “consider that its site at the edge of the Bitterroot Wilderness has long been viewed as ideal by the U.S. Public Health Service, which for the past 60 years has operated a research laboratory in Hamilton.”

He recalls that in the 1930s when Lloyd C. Douglas was writing the novel “Green Light” he shifted the locale in mid-story from an eastern city to Hamilton and the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever Laboratory, which was engaged in eradicating that disease.

He says I was correct in noting that Hamilton lies between Corvallis (pop. 390) and Grantsdale (pop. 150), “just as Los Angeles lies between Perris and Piru.”

Loretta Kronmiller, 83, of Billings, Mont., takes umbrage at my suggestion that “one might have to travel many miles (from Hamilton) to reach the nearest concert hall or theater.”

“I feel compelled to advise you,” she writes, “that culture does exist in Montana. True, our pristine areas are gorgeous and the scenery spectacular and a singing trout stream has its own kind of music, not known in large cities.” (Well said.)

“However, I hasten to assure you that in most areas the theater, the concert halls and the arts draw the best of stars proficient in their own fields and not an impossible drive from any area excepting of course remote mountain regions--and even here we find tired movie and TV stars who revel in the magic of the Big Sky country.

“I live in Billings, a cultural city that boasts a theater where New York Broadway stars frequently perform. There is an arena that seats thousands when stars of great talent appear. We have a symphony orchestra second to none with a conductor whose sole job is to perform the works of the great masters.”

Kronmiller does not mention a cultural event that I once participated in several years ago. That was the annual re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand near Hardin and the Little Big Horn. I played the role of one of Custer’s men and died on a low hill only a few feet from Custer himself. It was a rough show, with Crow Indians playing the Sioux and Cheyenne who wiped out Custer’s troop to the last man.

Just to show that Southern California also has it towns of rural quietude, Carroll Hall sends a clipping from the Santa Paula Chronicle reproducing that town’s police blotter for three days.

Like Hamilton’s, the incidents were rather quaint: “A man was reported sleeping on a porch on South Palm Avenue. It was determined that he is the boyfriend of the resident.

“A man was reported swearing and yelling at no one on East Harvard Boulevard.

“A person reported a woman was suicidal on Pamela Court. She was contacted and said she was not.

“A woman, wearing a nightdress, fell in the bathtub and could not get out of it on Green Street. Police assisted her by filling up the tub, which floated her up and finally out.

“A dog was barking on Richard Road.

“A dog was barking on Rincon Court.”