{"id":18403,"date":"2017-07-10T08:26:02","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T14:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=18403"},"modified":"2017-07-10T08:26:02","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T14:26:02","slug":"montana-viewpoint-remembering-uncle-davey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/07\/montana-viewpoint-remembering-uncle-davey\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Viewpoint: Remembering Uncle Davey"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Elliott\"<\/a>

Jim Elliott<\/p><\/div>\n

I don\u2019t know if you need a break from politics, but I sure as heck do, so this is about my mother\u2019s Uncle\u00a0Davey.<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s parents were Canadian, from southern Ontario, but her father had somehow\u00a0wound up owning a hardware store in a small town in North Dakota, so that\u2019s where she was born.<\/p>\n

Her mother\u2019s family were farmers on 120 acres of very good land, and prospered at it. They had moved\u00a0to the farm from Scotland in 1837. Her father lived across the road where his widowed mother ran a\u00a0small hotel for travelers. It\u2019s still there and the names of my grandfather and his brothers are carved in\u00a0the brick along with the names of many who stayed there.<\/p>\n

Her mother had three sisters\u2014Gert was the\u00a0only one left living\u2014and two brothers, Davey and Frank. Davey was a small, dapper fellow who usually wore a coat and tie and sported a bowler hat. Frank, the eldest, was a beanpole of a man whose idea of\u00a0a good time was to bathe on Sunday morning, put on clean overalls\u2014his version of dapper\u2014and walk\u00a0the fields inspecting his crops.<\/p>\n

But Davey\u2019s idea of a good time was one in which drink and horses figured prominently. The hotel was a\u00a0source of some of that good time\u2014not the whiskey part, the horses part\u2014because it seemed to\u00a0produce an unending supply of traveling men who could be talked into a buggy race with Davey.<\/p>\n

Of course, most of the men who put up at the hotel had come there in their buggies, and the sucker was usually approached by a local who said he admired the man\u2019s horse, and did he race it often and would\u00a0he like to take a shot at beating the local champion, for a wager? It was a set-up and made Davey and his friends a fair amount of money.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>But because Davey drank he was not always someone\u2019s first choice for employment, so he often had to\u00a0rely on odd jobs. One of these was cleaning out the undertakers in a nearby town, and lo, he found a\u00a0bottle of whiskey, which he was drinking when the Presbyterian minister walked by.<\/p>\n

They exchanged\u00a0pleasantries and Davey told the minister that he had decided he that wanted to be buried face down in\u00a0the coffin.\u201d Why would you ever want to do that?\u201d the minister asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat way,\u201d Davey said, \u201cthe\u00a0people at my funeral can walk past my casket and can all kiss my behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

My mother left North Dakota to live on the farm in Ontario after her mother, who was a nurse, died of\u00a0typhus in 1916. She loved the farm, and eventually bought it from her Aunt Gert and Uncle Frank who were both well up in years, and that\u2019s how I got to know that part of my family.<\/p>\n

It happened that\u00a0Davey\u2019s wife was killed by a truck in front of their home in the neighboring town, and he wound up living\u00a0at the farm after Frank died. It was a choice neither Gert nor Davey relished. While Davey liked the bottle, Gert\u00a0didn\u2019t. If there was a Canadian equivalent of the Women\u2019s Christian Temperance Union, she would have\u00a0been in it.<\/p>\n

So there was no booze and no drinking on the farm and the closest pub was seven miles away. Davey\u00a0didn\u2019t drive a car, but shortly after he moved in with Gert he bought a trotting horse and built a sulky,\u00a0which he used to visit the Iroquois Hotel bar on a regular schedule.<\/p>\n

Since Davey knew the road to the\u00a0hotel and the horse knew the road back, it worked out pretty well. It was a little dicey sometimes\u00a0because there were no lights or reflectors on the sulky, but being as Davey was usually asleep in the seat\u00a0what he didn\u2019t know couldn\u2019t hurt him.<\/p>\n

Gert, who never drank, lived to be 101 and attributed her longevity to a lifetime of fear and worry.<\/p>\n

Davey reaped the wages of sin and cashed in his chips at the age of 96. I think it\u2019s all in the genes.<\/p>\n

I never did find out if he was put in the coffin face down, but then there are some things a boy shouldn\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

Jim Elliott is a former chairman of the Montana Democratic Party and a former state senator from Trout Creek.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t know if you need a break from politics, but I sure as heck do, so this is about my mother\u2019s Uncle\u00a0Davey. My mother\u2019s parents were Canadian, from southern Ontario, but her father had somehow\u00a0wound up owning a hardware store in a small town in North Dakota, so that\u2019s where she was born.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":18231,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[1705,6037],"class_list":["post-18403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-north-dakota","tag-ontario","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18403"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18405,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18403\/revisions\/18405"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}