Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/author/edkemmick/page/72/)
This is a busy week for Shametrius Long. Long, who is in Billings with AmericCorps Volunteers in Service to America, was the main organizer of two events being held today to examine aspects of hunger and homelessness. And working with another Vista, Sade Johnson, Long organized a food drive this week that will help Family Service Inc. prepare Thanksgiving boxes for needy families. (more…) Continue Reading →
Two years of hard work by the Save Our Murals Committee at Billings Senior High School will come together tonight during an event that will feature a book launch, art auction and open house at Senior High. Copies of the book, “If the Walls Could Speak: The Iconic Murals of Billings Senior High School,” will be available for $45 during the open house, set for 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. The silent auction will take place in the old gym, featuring dozens of donated works by Kira Fercho, Dirk Lee, Kim Jette, Ben Steele and many others. (more…) Continue Reading →
It’s contest time! Here’s how it works: We will publish, verbatim, portions of a Billings Gazette employment ad and you, our readers, will attempt to figure out what the hell it means. There will be no prizes because there is no way of determining what the “correct” answer is. We just want you to put on your thinking cap, let your imagination run wild and try to explain to the rest of us what the Gazette could possibly be looking for. The ad, which I could not find online, is on Page D1 of the print edition of the Gazette, in the upper-left corner. Continue Reading →
I need to clear up a little misapprehension here at Last Best News. Several people have told me they were confused about the authorship of The Bar Tab, a series of local tavern reviews that debuted last week on this site. Some people even thought I, Ed Kemmick, your Last Best News correspondent, your LBN publisher and editor, was writing The Bar Tab reviews. In a word: no. The authors really are a local couple who are just as they described themselves in the introductory piece that ran with the first review. Continue Reading →
Years ago, I wrote a story about a Billings man who had entered one of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps shortly after it had been liberated. That prompted a well-known crank in Big Timber to call me and “argue” about whether the Holocaust had actually happened. I specifically said in my story (unavailable in the Gazette archives) that the soldier had entered a concentration camp, not technically one of the death camps, but that was beside the point. The crank didn’t need much pretext for expounding his silly views. (more…) Continue Reading →
Before he founded his own bread-making business last year, 10-year-old Ian Wollschlager had had a few other entrepreneurial ideas. One involved creating an indoor go-kart racing track, for which he created his own plans. “He’s really good at art, so he drew the whole schematic,” said his mother, Lotus Wollschlager. But his father, David Wollschlager, thought maybe the idea was a little too big. (more…) Continue Reading →
Here’s what we’ve come to: supposedly the most expensive house currently on the market in Montana is priced at $20 million—and the agent listing it says it will probably be torn down to make room for a bigger house. Why? Agent Pat Donovan told realtor.com that the main attraction is the 35-acre property on Whitefish Lake where the house sits. The house itself is merely a “log home” of 5,000 square feet. Mind you, it’s not exactly the gulag: “The home’s bedrooms and bathrooms are spacious and bright, and they manage to avoid the grimness often associated with lodge-style living.” Continue Reading →
During her first session of teaching an acrylic painting class at the Community Crisis Center, Samantha Harris’ two students didn’t much like the first few ideas she had for what they might paint. After a little searching on the Internet, they found a subject more to their liking, and Harris, who works at In Good Glazes, was soon teaching them the basics of painting a night sky and some mountains. “As they got further into it,” Harris said, “they got really into it.” (more…) Continue Reading →
Billings police Officer Grant Morrison, who was reprimanded for being cited by Laurel police for keeping pot-bellied pigs at his home and who recently pleaded not guilty to a state charge of possessing unlawfully captured deer fawns, has also been reprimanded for wrongfully obtaining criminal justice information for his private use. A “corrective action form” issued to Morrison in September, and obtained by Last Best News in a public information request, said the officer was given a written reprimand after seeking information for private use from the Criminal Justice Information Network and the National Crime Information Center. (more…) Continue Reading →
A District Court jury has awarded a Billings man just over $2 million in his action against a bank that foreclosed on and sold a house that he and his wife had purchased outright for cash two years earlier. After a four-day trial in the court of Yellowstone County District Judge Ingrid Gustafson last week, the jury unanimously awarded Jason Norman $350,000 in lost profitability, $100,000 for emotional distress and $1.6 million in punitive damages against Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. (more…) Continue Reading →
