Unstoppable Gladys Shay takes a break: Longtime journalist retires but keeps writing

Gladys Shay has officially closed out a storied career with the Hungry Horse News, ending a run that spanned 30 years of full-time reporter work — she was assistant editor when Publisher Mel Ruder won the Pulitzer Prize in 1965 — plus decades of column writing and occasional features about everyday life in Columbia Falls.

Unofficially, she still intends to “string” for her hometown newspaper and the Daily Inter Lake, providing a story now and then. She’s also writing a book called “Facts, Gossip and History.”

Shay’s children say their mother was born with proverbial “ink in her blood.” And at age 85 she still has a nose for news. That’s evident as she tunes into the latest call coming over the police radio scanner in her living room.

That’s not all, she confides. Shay loves to watch the locally televised City Council meetings.

She always has wanted to know what’s going on.

“I remember looking outside the window as a child and saw a fire,” Shay recalled. “‘Oh, that’d make a good story,’ I thought.”

By the time she was 14 she already had begun working for local newspapers. At Flathead County High School she was heavily involved with the student newspaper and yearbook. After school she had a job at the Kalispell Times, then moved on to the Kalispell News where she sold ads and gathered news in Columbia Falls every Saturday, riding the popular Galloping Goose passenger train back and forth.

Shay’s father, Teddy Van, was conductor of the Goose, a one-car passenger-freight train the Great Northern Railway ran between the two towns.

Kalispell News Publisher Frank Trippet planned to start a newspaper in Columbia Falls and Shay was on track to be its editor right out of high school. That didn’t materialize, but another offer did.

Barely a month after graduating from Flathead in 1946, a young newspaper man by the name of Mel Ruder hired Shay as his first — and only — employee for his new weekly, the Hungry Horse News.

“Mel was 32. I was 18. I thought he was old,” Shay remembered with a laugh.

Shay’s title at the Hungry Horse News was society editor.

She wrote a column of local news called “Heard Around the Town Square,” which debuted with the newspaper’s first edition Aug. 8, 1946. The job entailed much, much more, though, than simply writing about who had entertained guests or traveled afar.

“I was a reporter, ad salesman, bookkeeper and I handled subscriptions,” she noted.

With a shorthand speed of 125 words a minute, she quickly became Ruder’s right-hand assistant. It allowed Ruder time to photograph Glacier National Park and events throughout the Columbia Falls community.

“Mel mostly worked nights and weekends in the office,” Shay recalled. “I’m probably the only person who ever argued with Mel. You couldn’t work for him without being a perfectionist.”

A crucial part of her job was soothing things over with newspaper customers who’d been ruffled by Ruder’s notoriously prickly personality.

Columbia Falls was on the cusp of a building boom after World War II. The streets were dusty and the population hovered around 500 in 1946, but soon the town would be bustling as Anaconda Aluminum built a processing plant there and Hungry Horse Dam was built.

All of the stories from those early years blend together now as Shay searches for memories, but she does remember where she was when the historic flood of 1964 roared into Columbia Falls.

“I was next door playing cards when I heard about the flood,” she said.

Ruder and Shay sprang into action, publishing daily accounts of the flood devastation — Ruder shooting photos in a boat out on the floodwaters and Shay holding down the office. They printed more than 12,000 copies of the paper each day, compared with normal circulation of 3,900.

It was an extraordinary effort that earned Ruder the Pulitzer Prize in 1965.

Shay also remembers a grim assignment early on in her career of writing a story about a 2-year-old child who died. She telephoned the distraught mother and found it so heart-wrenching she vowed after that to give grieving survivors their privacy.

“I never did that again,” she said.

Shay somehow found time to raise six children while she gathered the news.

“All six kids were raised sitting on my lap while I typed,” she said. “Gail was born in the middle of the Christmas edition.”

Shay worked from home some of the time, and there was nothing she wouldn’t tackle.

“I even did baseball,” she declared proudly.

Shay married George “Al” Shay in 1947 and they carved out a living in various ways as she continued her newspaper career. They had a taxi and freight transfer and delivered the mail to Hungry Horse and Martin City. Al drove a school bus, too, and later worked at the aluminum plant, then as a justice of the peace.

When Al walked out of the marriage in 1976, Shay reluctantly had to give up journalism and got a better-paying job as a receptionist for Dr. Robert Cotner’s dental office. Later she was a clerk/typist and nurse’s aide at the Montana Veterans Home. During World War II she had been a Girl Scout and had served as a nurse’s aide at Kalispell General Hospital. (Incidentally, she also wrote troop news for her Girl Scout troop in grade school, an early hint at her vocation for writing.)

In 1978 she changed jobs again, finding employment at the Columbia Falls liquor store. When the store manager retired, she ran the store.

She never strayed far from writing, though, and eventually resumed writing her column and offered up occasional feature stories for the Hungry Horse News.

Through the years Shay has been involved at some level in most of the town’s civic organizations. She was president of the Girl Scout Association and a troop leader for Brownies, Campfire Girls and Girl Scouts, and also was a Cub Scout den mother and pack secretary.

When she was 25 she was the youngest-ever Worthy Matron for the Order of Eastern Star. She’s a founding member of the Methodist Church Ladies Aid in Columbia Falls.

Shay is a past president of the VFW Auxiliary and was president of the Columbia Falls Library Association when the library moved to City Hall decades ago.

Her involvement with the Columbia Falls Lions Club and North Valley Senior Citizens also spanned decades.

“The nicest compliment I ever got was at the senior center when someone said, ‘Gladys doesn’t do anything, but she always delegates,’” Shay recalled.

Somehow the unstoppable Shay found time to enjoy the outdoors, too. She and her family loved to hike and camp on Forest Service land up the North Fork.

In 1969, when daughter Janet worked at Granite Park Chalet, Shay remembers hiking up every week to plan Janet’s September wedding.

These days Shay has whittled down her activities to the Red Hat Society, a women’s social club, and weekly sessions of pinochle at the senior center.

She has survived a few medical maladies. A bout with skin cancer in 1997 required doctors to rebuild her nose. “My snoopy nose got worn out,” she jokes.

Shay also had both knees replaced by Dr. Sears in Spokane, and told everyone she got new knees from Sears.

Recently, macular degeneration has forced her to quit driving and she has to use a magnifying glass for reading. A computer with a keyboard featuring large letters and numbers lets her stay active online, and for getting around she relies on family members.

“I call Gail [Linne] my seeing-eye daughter,” she quipped.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.