Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
With an old copy of the Daniels County Leader beside him, Milt Gunderson compiles a "75 Years Ago" column for the next issue of the Leader.
SCOBEY — Milt Gunderson was 22 years old when he applied for a job with the Daniels County Leader, a weekly newspaper in Scobey. That was in 1957.
“I was just a farm kid, with no education or anything,” he said.
But he was married to the niece of the owner-publisher, Larry Bowler, and he got the job. Gunderson said Bowler told him when he was hired that if he didn’t get a raise in a couple of months he should probably quit.
It took Gunderson a while to figure out that was Bowler’s way of telling him he was on probation, and that if it didn’t work out it would be better if he simply quit. Luckily for both of them, Gunderson soon got a raise and he stuck around.
Fifty-seven years later, he’s still there, working for Larry’s son Burley, whose grandfather, also Burley, founded the paper in 1922. (Larry’s brother, Duane “Doc” Bowler, was the editor of the Billings Gazette for a time.)
Gunderson remembers that his first job at the Leader was stuffing envelopes with bills and licking stamps. He soon learned how to operate a linotype machine, a piece of typesetting equipment that replaced the manual, or handset method. But he also learned handsetting, because certain sizes and styles of type were not available on the linotype machine.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Gunderson shows a tray of wooden type left over from the old handset printing days.
Then he started doing some reporting, in both the news and sports sections.
“That came about very gradually,” he said. “If something came up that I knew about, I’d do it.”
He also learned how to repair and maintain the linotype machine, and he did a lot of job printing — small print orders for individuals and businesses. For most of the job printing he worked on an old Heidelberg printing press.
The Heidelberg —along with a lot of much newer equipment, including a couple of brand-new iMac computers — was lost when the Leader building was destroyed in a fire on Nov. 30, 2006.
In the next issue of the Leader, published at the Herald-News in Wolf Point, Gunderson told his readers that this wasn’t the first time the Leader suffered a fire.
He went on to explain how, in 1926, the Leader office was firebombed by associates of the Producers News, a weekly communist paper in Plentywood, which had long carried on a newspaper feud with the original Burley Bowler.
Gunderson’s report on the fire was carried in his “Things, Ideas & People” column, or TIP. He has been banging that out on a weekly basis since the late 1990s, filling at least a third of Page 2 with mini-editorials, bits of wisdom and ruminations on whatever catches his fancy, from local events to international headlines.
These days he works four half days a week, with Thursdays off. In addition to the column, he compiles a popular “75 Years Ago” feature, with tidbits pulled from old issues of the Leader.
Thursday is the day the Leader goes out to its 1,500 readers. Wednesday is “paper day,” when everybody pitches in to fold the papers after they come off the press, put address labels on them and sort them into various bags for use by the post office. All subscription copies go out by mail, even to subscribers in Scobey.
Gunderson sounds excited just talking about that Wednesday ritual. And he rarely missed one.
“In those 50-some years, I don’t think I’ve missed but eight or nine times being here on paper day,” he said.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
The Leader fire was front-page news in the Daniels County Leader on Dec. 7, 2006. The paper went yellow in 1983.
He’s been there through lots of changes, not the least of which was the conversion to yellow newsprint in 1983. Larry Bowler’s eyesight was getting worse and he concluded that black type on yellow paper was the easiest combination to read. How did Gunderson like that change?
“Well, I heard a lot of jokes about yellow journalism, you know,” he said.
The current Burley Bowler didn’t like it, and after his father died he told everyone he was going back to black and white. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“It’s kind of our niche,” he said.
Just like Gunderson found his. He said he still gets “quite a few compliments” on his weekly column, especially from people who’ve moved away from Scobey.
“They say, ‘Don’t quit writing that column.’ That makes me feel good,” he said.
Gunderson was born on a farm near Navajo, on the east end of Daniels County. He’ll be 80 by the end of the year and he has no plans to retire. He said he’s always liked the people he works with, and he likes being part of something people look forward to, week after week.
“People always say there’s nothing in it,” he said. “But on the day it comes out, they’re down at the post office waiting for it.”
