In this photo of downtown Billings, taken in mid-February 2014, the top of the First Interstate Building is just visible on the horizon.
As the New Year dawned a year ago this week, most people in Montana were already sick and tired of winter, of endless days of bitter cold and snowstorms that raged with Arctic intensity.
Billings was hit particularly hard. At one point in mid-February the snow was so deep that only the top seven floors of the First Interstate Building were visible.
Ed Kemmick
Meteorologist Ed McIntosh discovered that much of the heavy snowfall in Billings was a result of what he called the “Lake Elmo Effect,” whereby that immense body of water created its own microclimate, effecting weather patterns for hundreds of miles around.
But 2014 wasn’t memorable just for its resemblance to the waning years of the last Ice Age, not by a long shot. Let’s take a stroll down the icy streets of memory lane and recall other highlights. And who knows? With a few days remaining in the year, anything could still happen.
Just before the year actually started, Max Baucus announced that he would be ending his 74-year hitch in the U.S. Senate. Then, early in February, his old pals in the Senate voted to make him chairman of the Appropriations Committee of the National People’s Congress of China.
Baucus said in an interview with meteorologist Ed McIntosh that he planned “to milk the hell out of” the Chinese, who, fortunately, still make use of congressional earmarks.
Later that month, Gov. Steve Bullock appointed his lieutenant governor, John Walsh, to finish out Baucus’ term in the U.S. Senate, even though Walsh’s resume bore a strikingly suspicious resemblance to that of the late Ulysses S. Grant.
In March, Yellowstone County Treasurer Max Lenington, having already caused an uproar with racially insensitive comments over the previous year, wrote what he said would be his final letter to the editor of the Billings Gazette. It was, alas, even more offensive than the utterances he was hoping to clarify. His subsequent attempts to absolve himself by proving that he lifted the whole statement from a turn-of-the-last-century KKK pamphlet didn’t really help his cause.
Construction crews had to dig down through 17 feet of snow in April to break ground for what was going to be, reportedly, the biggest house ever built in Yellowstone County, out near the Ironwood Subdivision. Plans for the mammoth residence revealed that it would have 43 bedrooms, his-and-her Olympic-size swimming pools, a moat and its own Scheels store.
Speaking of the fall of pillars, Walsh was forced to abandon his Senate election campaign in July, after the New York Times reported that an exhaustive examination of Walsh’s 1977 novel, “Old Ishy,” showed that the entire text had been lifted from a 19th-century novel by the name of “Moby Dick,” purportedly penned by H. Melville.
Meanwhile, over the course of the summer, the Billings City Council spent 4,000 hours debating, taking public testimony and pontificating on the None Of Your Damned Business Ordinance, or NOYDBO, which would have prohibited discrimination against other human beings on the basis of attributes that are none of your damned business.
Because the proposed law was so simple and self-evident, it became known informally as the NDO, or No Duh Ordinance. Nevertheless, the NDO was voted down after Mayor Tom Hanel cast the deciding vote, declaring that “Billings is not ready for the 21st century.”
Late in the summer, the upcoming election season looked for a moment as if it could actually be interesting. Billings-area resident Libby Pratt launched a Facebook campaign urging the Montana Democratic Party to select part-time Paradise Valley resident Jeff Bridges as the candidate to replace Walsh.
Bridges ultimately decided that The Dude was too cool for school, and way too cool for the U.S. Senate. No one could argue with that.
In Billings, fall was marked by a debate that split the town into warring factions. The distressing situation escalated from fiery debates on the courthouse lawn to actual skirmishes in the street. Peace eventually came back to the city, but to this day one scarcely dares to give his opinion—lest hostilities erupt all over again—on whether girls should be allowed to wear yoga pants to high school.
In November, U.S. District Judge Brian Morris ruled that a state constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex couples from engaging in bitter custody disputes violated the U.S. Constitution, which was written by Antonin Scalia, the same Italian who discovered America.
As 2014 drew to a close and Montanans wearily hunkered down in expectation of another long, gray winter, a bright ray of sunshine blazed forth from a most unexpected quarter—Butte.
The entire state swelled with pride when it was revealed that Mining City native Robert O’Neill was the Navy SEAL who was sent to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong Un, which became the basis for “The Interview,” a screwball comedy starring former Navy SEAL Ryan Zinke.
Kim threatened to remove a statue of Evel Knievel from the main square in Pyongyang unless the movie was shelved, prompting O’Neill to challenge young Kim to an arm-wrestling bout at the M&M Tavern.
As the year neared its expiration date, details of the projected match were still being worked out.
