Word: choteau
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Careful readers of our American Scene section will have noticed that pieces by Gregory Jaynes appear more often than those by anyone else. This week's story, about a musical recital in the ranching community of Choteau, Mont., is Associate Editor Jaynes' 44th for the section. Like many others, the idea came from one of his favorite sources, a reader. A woman from Montana wrote to TIME about a nearby piano teacher with an interesting clientele...
Everyone calls Marguerite Hanusa "Marge," and everyone who is anyone in the high plains Montana town of Choteau comes to Marge's adult piano and organ recital every year about this time. She holds it in the parlor of her house, where she has a Story & Clark upright, a Steinway baby grand and a two-tiered Conn with a full footboard. The first townspeople to show up get to sit on folding chairs from the Methodist and Lutheran churches; the tardy in the audience must make do with the staircase and the floor. After the music the party moves into...
Marge is 82 years old. She was graduated from Earlham College in Indiana in 1926, and after a period of piano study in Dayton, she yielded to a love of all things western and moved to Choteau, becoming the high school music teacher in 1928. It is a ranching community -- wheat mostly -- set on rolling land studded with spruce, fir and aspen, by the eastern face of the Rockies. Its winters can get quite brutal, and now and again an old hand decides to break the monotony by taking a lesson from Marge. Even if you have...
Soon enough it was time for the performance, and Marge's parlor filled to overflowing. Everyone was there, it seemed, but Choteau's best-known citizen, A.B. Guthrie Jr., author of The Big Sky, among other celebrated works. He is 85, and the last time he came, explained his daughter, Helen Guthrie Miller, "he fell asleep in the kitchen. The next morning he woke up screaming, 'Who's making all that goddam racket!' " Helen Guthrie Miller possesses a tart tongue herself, it turns out. When a woman companion at the recital boasted that because of aerobics, she has the pulse...