It was, as it turned out, some of the best of times. Nearly all my friends were in their early twenties then, and would back me up on this… it was a crazy time, a magical time. Was it easy, predicable, comfortable? Oh god no! But it was us… being us in that more logical, simpler time, and we made it what it was… crazy, magical. In our 20’s, in the sixties, our lives were often tragic and fantastic, all in the same day. And most of us took it all in stride. Hell, several of my friends and I did things back then that we consider fairly adventurous now, but that we took for granted back then.
We were, as they say, comfortable in our own skin. We didn’t have life and the world figured out, not by any means, though we probably thought we did. But we did understand the parameters of the time, what was available to us, who and what we could trust, and where our possibilities for happiness and fulfillment might lead us. Yes, the outside, larger world was competitive and a little daunting for the high school or college graduate, but it was far more possible to crack the code and get into the main stream of things then than it is now.
No one that I knew back then expected to be handed happiness and success. None of our dads were investment bankers, no one I knew attended a private school or a military academy. Our moms didn’t tell us that vaping was dangerous, they told us things like, “You’re going to need a summer job if you want that car,” or “You need to think about getting a scholarship if you’re going to that college…” or even “Yes you need to get a job and work for a living. It was good enough for your father and I, and it’s good enough for you!”
If there were anything resembling a counterculture in Montana back then, I would have definitely been a part of it. But Montana wouldn’t, and most likely still doesn’t tolerate / harbor / have any empathy for any kind of counterculture thought or activities. Which is ironic in a way, in that most of Montana is tieless, suitless, and a strange mix of its own brand of cowboy culture.
In comparison to today’s standards and practices, we did so much more with so much less! And with a much smaller national population, our chances for success were greater. And all the time we hear older people say that the past was a simpler time. But dammit, it was!
I’m not going to waste your time giving examples of today’s world vs yesterday’s, such as no school shootings back then, and the only bullying was happening on the playground at recess or on the walk home from school. I know all about that part. There were no school psychologists and we worked out our problems largely by ourselves. Teachers could hit us back then, and occasionally did.
As all teenagers, we took great pains to be different from our parents, and different from the establishment in general. And we did weird hair, as teenagers still do today. But in the realm of more innocent times, having different hair from the adults consisted only of flat tops and DAs, duck asses. We sang along with the radio when we were in a car, and my group of guys even had a few harmonies worked out for our favorites.
Our musical faves were The Everly Brothers, Frankie Avalon, Chubby Checker, Santo and Johnny, (Ah, Sleepwalk!) Ricky Nelson, Bobby Vinton. We had mixers during the winter weekends, dances held in the lunch room on Saturday nights, after the basketball game. We danced to Elvis (Party Doll) The Platters (Only You) and Gene Vincent’s Be Bop A Lula.
Our hair was combed just right, we had our after-shave working and all our cool dancing moves on display. It was always a big deal when one of us showed up with a different date at the Sat. night mixers. And if you never kissed a pretty girl in a warm car parked in a dark place outside of town on a cold winter’s night, while listening to Sleepwalk on the radio, well my friend, perhaps you haven’t really lived.
Sharon Riley & I at the Sadie Hawkins Dance (don’t ask…)
And our cars! I had a ’47 Chevy coupe with dual pipes and strange hubcaps. Both Tom Erdie and Laurel McAtee had Fords, a ’50 and a ’51. Lee Sprout had a ’51 Chevy with dual pipes and dual two-barrel carbs. Allan Lane once took his parents’ 55 Hudson around a sharp curve just outside of town at 75, putting it into a skid, but saved it and made it. Talk of the town.
In the summer of ’63 I was working for the Forest Service in West Yellowstone, Montana. One afternoon in a bar after work, I met a guy named Doug Abelin. We got to talking and found we both loved cars… he even more than I. He had a ’33 Plymouth coupe with a Corvette V-8, and that baby would fly!
We took it up into the Park one afternoon, to swim in the Firehole River and enjoy a few brews. On the way back, just as we were leaving the Park gate at the edge of town, his engine caught on fire, and we pulled into the nearest gas station, where Doug ran inside, got a fire extinguisher and covered his beautiful engine in that white stuff, finally dousing the flame. I remember him being so cool about it… “Well, looks like I got a little work ahead of me.”
As the larger world began absorbing us, we, the graduates of Ennis High School, scattered like leaves in the wind. We became a bank vice president, a college math professor, a writer, a doctor in an L.A. ER, an insurance salesman, an auto mechanic and body shop owner, a farmowner, a ranch manager, a talc truck driver, a comptroller for the Air Force, a lawyer, a mailman and a musician. Only 3 of them stayed in Ennis. The rest of us landed in L.A., Seattle, Dillon MT, Helena MT, Bozeman MT, Ketchikan Alaska, San Antonio Texas and Atlanta GA.
In the ’70’s and ’80’s Ennis began to change. The population didn’t seem to grow so much, but many of its buildings either disappeared or moved and got much bigger. The bank, the hospital, the grocery store, the school, the drugstore and the fire house all got way bigger, while the two auto dealerships slowly disappeared into the big sky night.
Now, in 2025, we’ve lost quite a few of our classmates, and the rest of us are long retired. The memories remain, however, of those Saturday night mixers, and driving the snowy, icy Main Street of an empty downtown late at night, suddenly hitting the gas, turning the steering wheel sharply and sending our cars into a wonderful out-of-control spin, blurring the outside world of cold and snow, of our uncertain futures, of the challenges and successes yet to come. Spinning down the middle of Main Street, the world, at that moment, was all we needed it to be.
Steve Hulse