Submitted by: greg
I am fortunate that before his passing my grandfather decided to write down many of his early life experiences as a series of stories. A few years ago my uncle compiled all of the stories into a single volume and entitled it “Montana Stories.” It includes stories from when my grandfather was part of the Civilian Conservation Core (CCC) in the 1930’s, to his time working for the Forest Service, to his experiences as a naval officer in World War II.
I’ve enjoyed reading these stories but decided that what it needed was a more visual reference so that I could display photographs from different points in his life and put them on a timeline showing glimpses of his life and where he lived during his time in Montana, heading one of the CCC crews as a 19 year-old supervising men in their 30s and 40s, to his working as a writer for the U.S. Forest Service in San Francisco, helping to create the story of Smokey the Bear. His stories include his time in the North Pacific during WWII doing intelligence and surveillance work, but his Montana upbringing seem to have prepared him for the extreme cold of the Aleutian Islands.
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