2 L.A. Escapees Wax Rhapsodic About the Good Life

In thinking about small towns where Angelenos might find a better life, I happened upon Hamilton, Mont., because a reader sent me a newspaper report of its police blotter.

Over three days it had nothing more traumatic than a drunk, a minor traffic accident and a barking dog. In three days Los Angeles would have at least three murders, several rapes, dozens of holdups and hundreds of burglaries.

Among several letters I have received praising Hamilton is one from Jean Israel, who moved there from Los Angeles with her husband, Charlie, in 1990.

The Israels got fed up with Los Angeles after her grandmother was robbed and murdered in the 1980s by a drug addict and his mother was fatally beaten by two young men as she left her bank.

The Israels had been looking for a place to retire for several years, visiting Washington, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, Northern California and Montana. They had chosen Hamilton, in the Bitterroot Valley, below the Bitterroot Mountains in southwestern Montana.

They gave up much that they had liked about Los Angeles: the County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Mark Taper Forum. “We were cultured, sophisticated Angelenos.”

But on April 12, 1990, they set out for Hamilton behind a moving van with 1,200 pounds of their belongings. “We were giving up lucrative careers, but we knew it would be worth it, and we haven’t been wrong.”

With $70,000 from the sale of their house they bought a three-bedroom, two-bath house on half an acre at the edge of town with a patio, a massive fireplace and a view of the mountains. Charlie added a darkroom and went into business as a photo finisher. Jean works for a real estate office.

They travel 15 miles to Stevensville to attend live drama at the 99-seat Chantilly Theater; in summer they attend concerts of the Montana Symphony and Chamber Orchestra while picnicking on the grounds of the Marcus Daly Mansion.

Daly was an entrepreneur who started a mining and lumbering industry west of the site; in 1890 he hired two Minnesotans to plan and build a company town. It was named after James Hamilton, one of the planners.

“Concerts here are a treat to the eye, to the ear and to the heart,” Jean writes. “Picture if you will a smaller version of the mansion out of ‘Gone With the Wind.’ Large maples, elms, cottonwood trees gracefully dotting the huge grassy green lawns with flower beds and lots of lovely shade. . . . Here you spread your picnic supper in a summer’s evening and enjoy the classical music.

“I will never forget our first concert at the mansion with the evening’s sun shimmering through the leafy boughs overhead, the Bitterroot Peaks as a majestic backdrop and the townsfolk arrayed across the lawn.

“The audience arose for the singing of the National Anthem. With a tear in our eyes and a lump in our throats we felt like we were beginning to live the real American dream.”

“Tuesday at the Park” is held each Tuesday at noon on the mansion grounds. “The music ranges from Broadway songs to jazz to classical to barbershop to the Old Time Kitchen Band (in which group the average age of the ladies must be 85). Each month a fiddlers’ jam takes place somewhere in the valley on a Sunday afternoon.”

Trout fishing in the nearby Bitterroot River and its subsidiary creeks is as good as any in the country, she says. “I am an avid fishing lady, and Charlie is an avid fly fisherman. I am not going to name our favorite creeks here, because I don’t want to give away our favorite fishing spots. But I can tell you it will probably take us a good 10 years to discover all the places there are to fish.”

Hamilton is not perfect, she concedes. “There are drugs in the high school, but also an active D.A.R.E program. We have not found very much which we do not like. Lots of folks around here don’t even know where their door keys are, it’s been so long since they locked their doors.

“We are enjoying life. Now at ages 58 (Charlie) and 50 (me), life is really the very best it has ever been. The money we made on our California home has given us a strong financial cushion. The cost of living here is only one-third of what it cost to live in Southern California. We have found our Paradise on Earth. So have a lot of other Californians.”

I’m not beating the drums for Hamilton alone. I’m just suggesting that dispirited Angelenos do have options.

My wife and I might drive through Hamilton on our vacation. I just hope we catch the fiddlers’ jam and the Old Time Kitchen Band.