Old jail had laid-back atmosphere

A story I wrote recently about Flathead County making plans to renovate the old jail south of the courthouse prompted a telephone call from Irma Cook Wells of Kalispell, who worked at the jail from 1947 to 1952.

She stopped by the Inter Lake office to reminisce about her job there as a “Girl Friday” who baby-sat the sheriff’s kids, cooked meals for prisoners and did “a little bit of everything.” 

Wells, 81, worked there while she was in high school and for a couple of years following her graduation from Flathead High in 1950.

After she had finished regaling me with some pretty funny stories, I told her the atmosphere at that old jail sounded a lot like “The Andy Griffith Show” and the laid-back fictional town of Mayberry.

“It kind of was,” Wells confided. “Everything was so different back then.”

She worked there under the tutelage of the Sheriff Dick Walsh and his wife, Bernice, who lived at the jail with their two children, Pat and Caroline.

“I taught Bernice how to drive,” Wells said, remembering the time she and Bernice were driving the police car and discovered that when they honked the horn at a vehicle blocking traffic, the siren went off. 

After a scolding, they never did that again.

Then there was the time Wells had to drive the “paddy wagon” to Glacier Park to take care of the Walshes’ children while they attended a seminar. On the way home, Wells inadvertently left the emergency brake on. “I got a horrible teasing about that,” she said.

She talked about the jail “trusty” who was kept in the basement or “dungeon” as Wells referred to it. This trusty “was a prisoner but not a criminal,” she explained. As I understand it, the trusty was kind of on house arrest at the jail and actually helped out with the workload.

Wells said one of her brother’s good friends was the trusty at one point, and she would cook extra breakfast to be sure he got a plate full of food.

One time a young woman ran a stop sign in Kalispell and hit a pedestrian. She had to sleep at the jail, Wells recalled, but instead of being locked up she helped Wells with the cooking.

It reminded me of old Otis Campbell, the town drunk on “The Andy Griffith Show, who would lock himself in the town jail until he sobered up, and then he’d let himself out again because the cell keys were hung within reach. Of course the lack of crime in good old Mayberry nicely accommodated the good-natured style of Sheriff Andy and his sidekick Deputy Barney Fife.

Wells remembered the time she went to deliver the meals and found the deputy sheriff, the only employee on duty that night, “out cold drunk” on the floor. “He got fired,” she said.

I imagine Kalispell in the late ’40s and early ’50s wasn’t that far removed from the small town of Mayberry, where everyone knew his or her neighbors and what they were up to on any given day.

It’s a bygone era. 

In a news story the Inter Lake published when Dick Walsh died, his son Pat, a detective with the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office, recalled when his father was elected sheriff at age 29 in 1947, beginning officers were told, “Here’s your gun; go do cop stuff.” 

Of course Dick Walsh went on to attend the FBI National Academy and became one of the first polygraph examiners in the region.

But in those early days, when Wells said “everyone did everything,” I’m guessing the old jail truly reflected a slower pace of life in Kalispell.

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