Citizen Carl was tireless advocate

Every week or two for the past 10 or 12 years, while typing on my computer at the Inter Lake, I would get the sense I was being watched. Then I would hear ominous raspy breathing behind me, as if some noisome creature from the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe had come to haunt me. 

Yet, despite the horrid overtones, I was confident I would survive this encounter, and so, without turning, I would begin a conversation with my unannounced visitor:

“Hello, Carl! What do you want this time?”

“How do you know I want anything?” he would ask.

“Because you always want something, Carl!”

And when I was through typing, I would swivel on my chair, rise, and shake the hand of my friend, the bouyant octogenarian who had adopted me as one of his pet causes more than a decade ago.

Thus began the ritual ceremony of mutual respect, cautious disclaimers, patriotic fervor and sardonic humor that defined my relationship with Carl Feig, who died at the age of 90 on Nov. 15.

Carl’s death was unexpected but not a shock. He had been in ill health for years. The raspy breathing was a symptom of the COPD that put him in the hospital several times over the past 10 years. COPD is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a progressive disease that makes it hard to breathe. Well, it may have hospitalized Carl, but it never slowed him down. Up until the week before his death, he was in my office with his list in hand of issues that he wanted to talk about.

The list was partly a memory device for Carl, but also partly a courtesy to me, as Carl was always conscious of my busy schedule and wanted to move along appropriately from Point A to Point B until he got through the list. Somewhere on the list usually was something about the Kalispell municipal airport.

Carl was known far and wide in the Flathead Valley as “the highest and best use” guy, who had been a tireless proponent of shutting down the airport and replacing it with anything from an auditorium, a community center or even a giant Ferris wheel! 

"There are higher and better uses for that land," Carl told the crowd at a 2009 meeting hosted by an anti-airport group, just as he said it many times before and after, including in my office.

Carl knew I vehemently disagreed with him about this issue, but he also knew I would respectfully listen to him, and I knew that he would respectfully listen to me — even if we both had to bite our lips to do so. That, it would seem, is a quality that is missing in much of our public debate today.

Of course, there were many other things Carl and I did agree about. He was raised in an immigrant German family in the 1930s in Philadelphia. I was the grandson of the children of Italian immigrants who arrived in New Jersey a generation earlier. We both passionately loved the United States of America and shared our dismay at the ways it had changed in the past 50 years. Unlike me, Carl was a veteran, having served in the Army Air Force in World War II, but we both respected the lessons of history and talked about health-care reform, immigration reform and other political maneuvers with growing skepticism. 

Hard work and education were the answers we had both been taught to use for all our problems, and we shook our heads in disbelief at the increasing number of people who think more government is the solution to everything.

We also shared a love of newspapers, and Carl had been a subscriber to the Inter Lake for many years. He didn’t understand how anyone who claimed to love this community could not read the paper. One time he told me that a city councilman had bragged about not reading the Inter Lake, and he wanted me to write it up to expose the other gentlemen as an uninformed buffoon. While it was tempting, I politely declined! Sometimes Carl would get himself in trouble by speaking his mind a little too plainly. 

But the old man was nobody’s fool. He made mistakes, as we all do, but when you measure a life, it is mostly character that matters more than specific individual accomplishments or failings. 

Carl had character, he had passion and he had integrity. I will miss him.