Retirement Haven Lands at Ex-Air Force Base : Montana: About 300 people have made their way to isolated St. Marie, which is long on solitude. But it has no crime, no noise, no pollution and no “hustle and bustle.”

The rolling prairie stretches in all directions like an ocean, with St. Marie seemingly huddled on a low crest like a jumble of toy buildings.

Glasgow, population 4,500, is out of sight 17 miles to the south. The north-facing sign at the St. Marie turnoff from Montana 24 reads “Opheim, 33.” To the north, 170 miles or so, is Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

St. Marie is a long way from anyplace.

“Some of us like it that way,” Elinor Lindsay said with a laugh among the morning crowd at the Breakfast Nook.

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The 300 or so people who live here apparently agree, and they’ve made St. Marie one of the unlikeliest of retirement havens.

St. Marie once was known as Glasgow Air Force Base, the home of B-52 strategic bombers poised against the Soviet Union. In the early 1960s, it employed nearly 10,000 people.

But the military abandoned Glasgow in 1968, raising this question: What do you do with an old base on the wind-swept plains in the middle of nowhere?

A variety of fanciful proposals never got off the ground--a climate-controlled city, a holding site for Cuban refugees, even the Richard Nixon M. Library.

In 1979, however, retired Air Force officer Patrick Kelly bought all 1,223 housing units and 360 acres for $520,000 and announced plans for a retirement community aimed primarily at the military.

Against all odds, and at its own deliberate pace, the development appears to be succeeding--or, at the least, surviving.

About 200 units have been purchased, and Kelly’s family-owned Valley Park Inc. says it hopes to sell all the remaining units by 1995.

The attraction, it seems, is the same solitude that weighs against the settlement: St. Marie, for all its profound isolation, has no crime, no noise, no pollution and, most of all--in a phrase that crops up repeatedly--no “hustle and bustle.”

The morning crowd at the Breakfast Nook and the afternoon crowd at St. Marie Lanes, the local bowling alley, were unanimous in praise of the St. Marie lifestyle.

They also voiced affection for their neighbors, who are so much like themselves.

“When everybody is retired,” Elinor Lindsay said, “everybody looks out for each other.”

She and her husband, Byron, who retired from the Air Force in 1970, moved to St. Marie in 1990 from Riverhead, N.Y., on Long Island.

They were quickly sold on the near-treeless area, but she agrees it is not for everyone.

“I have seen some people come in here with kind of a wild look in their eyes, thinking, ‘Lemme out of here!’ ” she said.

Phyllis Muzzillo has this advice for prospective residents:

“Be awfully sure you’re a self-sufficient person. You have to be able to entertain yourself and enjoy just neighborly type things. You know, you have to want to get away from the noise and hustle and bustle.”

Joan Bell, who runs the Breakfast Nook, came in 1989 from Southern California to escape “the crime, the hustle and bustle, all the driving.”

St. Marie has 35 to 40 children--military retirees can be young--and Glasgow sends a bus for those old enough to attend school. A senior citizens’ bus takes residents of any age to Glasgow two Fridays each month.

A building across from the bowling alley is available for a chapel, but it’s too big to heat for small groups, so most churchgoers drive into Glasgow for that too.

Most of the housing units are duplexes and four-plexes, with a few single-family houses. A three-bedroom, two-story unit with full basement and attached garage starts at less than $25,000, with prices ranging up to about $50,000.

The numerous buildings not yet sold or refurbished are shabby outside, with peeling paint, siding and roofing. But the occupied units and those ready for sale appear neatly painted and newly roofed and sport well-tended yards.

Phyllis and Louis Muzzillo’s duplex is a showplace for the company during winters, when the Muzzillos are in Arizona. Its lustrous hardwood floors and ceramic tile in the kitchen and bath illustrate two of the company’s bragging points about top-quality construction.

Still, there are some rough spots. The roads need work. The golf course is only a grassy field marked by a sign, and empty buildings designated for such facilities as a library, hospital and community center are only now being refurbished.

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Montana Aviation Research Co., a subsidiary of the Boeing Co., bought the old bomber runway and flight-line facilities in 1991. It uses them under tight security to flight-test new jetliners.

But residents say they seldom if ever hear the planes, and all the negatives are dismissed as minor to those who live under the Big Sky.

“The only thing I find frustrating here is that when you find a pretty view and want to take a picture of it, you can’t get it all in the picture,” Elinor Lindsay said. “You have to take four or five shots.”