Photo courtesy of Mike Menahan
This photo, from the 1999 session of the Montana Legislature, shows Red Menahan with seat mate Rep. Emily (Stonington) Hibbard, from Bozeman. After watching her eat carrots and rice crackers for lunch every day, Red once said to her, “If you keep that up, you’ll be the healthiest old lady in the nursing home.”
Red Menahan was one of the first people I met when I started my reporting career in the Anaconda Bureau of the Montana Standard in 1980.
I knew Red’s cousin, John McNay, so we were introduced to Red and his wife, Shirley, and we soon became good friends and frequent visitors at their house.
According to AP style, by the way, I should have called him William “Red” Menahan on first reference, but when I worked in Anaconda everyone had a nickname and one rarely knew a person’s real first name. When we visited Red in the hospital in Billings 10 days ago, I had to dig deep in the memory banks to scrape up “William” at the front desk.
The funny thing is, though I knew him only as Red, his red hair was completely white by the time we met him. It still fit, though, because his face was often quite crimson, usually from laughing at his own stories.
That’s how I will remember Red, who died last Saturday in Billings: On his feet — in a barroom, his garage or his family room — telling a long, involved story, interrupted at short intervals by bursts of laughter from his audience, or by Red stopping to swipe at his mustache with his forearm.
Red was a member of the state House for 30 years. He must have been among the top five longest-serving legislators in the history of Montana, and he may well have been the funniest person ever to serve in Helena.
The Montana Standard news story on his death and the obituary written by his family both make references to his sense of humor, but neither included any examples of his wit. That may have been the wiser course, since Red’s presence was vital to the humor.
But let me try to give you some feeble idea of how funny he was. Many of his best lines were a bit profane, but only in an old-school way that really was not offensive or boorish.
Another time, when a legislator debating a bill having to do with women’s health said something about a woman carrying a baby “in her belly,” Red said, “I hope you know more about the law than you do about biology.”
He was also the first person I ever heard utter the phrase, “He couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.” I’ve heard it many times since, but no one could touch Red’s delivery.
In his younger days, Red once told us, young men from Anaconda would go to a bar in Rocker to fight young men from Butte, leading to some legendary brawls. But in the Legislature, as everyone knows, the people who represented Butte and Anaconda formed the tightest voting bloc in Helena, which always gave those two cities an outsize influence on state affairs.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Irish Democrat and union man, Red loved to bait legislators from the eastern part of the state, particularly Billings Republicans. But he was never spiteful or mean, and he served in the Legislature at a time when it was unthinkable that people with fiercely different politics couldn’t go to Jorgensen’s at the end of day and have a beer together.
When my youngest daughter was born a year after we settled in Billings, Red told me, “Christ, I’d rather have a daughter born in a house of ill repute than Billings.” Coming from Red, such a statement could sound oddly affectionate.
I mentioned Red’s wife, Shirley. I can’t picture Red without thinking of Shirley, or their three fine children, Pat, Kara and Mike. Like Red, Shirley was and is funny, outgoing and welcoming. She and Red had the kind of house where people were always dropping by, where food and drink and stories were always being served.
I distinctly remember thinking, at the start of my own career as a family man, “This is the kind of house I want to live in someday.”
My oldest daughter barely knew her own grandfathers, who left us too soon, and so Red, who was not quite 20 years older than I, became something of a surrogate grandfather for her. Santa Claus himself couldn’t have been a better or a more devilishly funny grandfather, for which I am forever grateful.
The damnedest thing is, it’s hard to feel sad about Red’s passing. Every time I think of him and catch a breath, or catch a tear starting to form, I picture Red standing there howling uproariously, surrounded by people likewise laughing and clutching their sides or wiping their eyes, full to the brim with joy and a love of life.
That’s how I, and many, many other people, will remember Red.
Editor’s note: It has come to my attention that Chuck Johnson, Helena bureau chief for Lee Newspapers of Montana, wrote a farewell column about Red, too, and took a stab at relating some of Red’s witty remarks. I should have known Chuck would do that. And I’m glad to see that in our one overlapping mot, about the legislator’s heart, my recollection matched almost perfectly what Chuck found in the archives.
