Letters

WANTED: YOUR OPINIONS

The Montanan welcomes letters to the editor. Please sign and include your graduating year or years of attendance, home address, and phone number or e-mail address.

Send them to: Montanan Editor, 325 Brantly Hall, Missoula, MT 59812 or themontanan@umontana.edu.

Because of space limitations, we are not able to include all letters sent to us. Letters may be edited for length or clarity. While universities are places of discussion where good people do not always agree, letters deemed potentially libelous or that malign a person or group will not be published. Opinions expressed in the Montanan do not necessarily reflect those of The University of Montana.

BEAR NECESSITY

Thank you for your article on Chris Servheen (fall 2010). As area manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the very early 1980s, I was wise enough to employ Chris as the newly established grizzly bear coordinator.

The grizzly bear recovery plan had just been approved after several iterations and was ready for implementation. The recovery plan was controversial and publicly and politically sensitive. It also was scientifically sound. To get bears back into available habitat required both a good scientist and an individual who could relate to concerned citizens and politicians alike. The FWS was fortunate to have Chris available when we needed him. 

The movement of the coordinator position from Billings to Missoula was logical, but it also was predicated on the FWS closing its Billings office, some political events within the staff at the University, and the availability of expertise at the University. Sometimes bureaucracies do not do logical things, but this time they did. Since 1972 the Endangered Species Act has been met with successes and failures. The grizzly bear recovery plan is a success. I am proud to be an alum.

Wally Steucke ’60
Woodland, Wash.

LONGTIME READER

What an excellent fall 2010 issue of the Montanan! Since I got my life membership after I graduated in 1941, I’ve gone the whole route. It used to be weddings, births, and About Alumni were the first items I read. Now I check In Memoriam and the many fine articles! Thanks for a great magazine.

Elizabeth Wood Tullis ’41 Ogden, Utah

CONTINUING EDUCATION

Little did I know—when I was at school there fifty years ago—that my education at UM would turn out to be a lifelong experience. A page in the fall 2010 Montanan brought this lesson home for me. It described the dedication of the new Payne Family Native American Center.

If I would have read this fifty years ago, I would have been in disbelief. Native American studies? Are you kidding? Where are they, those Native Americans? Fifty years ago, it wasn’t hard to get the impression that Native Americans were not welcome on campus or, for that matter, anywhere else in Missoula. I am truly glad to have gotten this lesson, to have learned that in Montana the worth of the human individual, regardless of ethnicity, would finally come to be recognized.

Peter Margolin ’61
Pisgah Forest, N.C.

MONTANA PRIDE

Thank you for producing a publication that consistently makes me proud to be a Montanan and a UM graduate. It was a moment of serendipity when your magazine arrived in the mail the same day that I received a letter from a college friend reminding me of the terrific times we’d had as UM Advocates in the early 1980s. I truly loved participating in new student orientations and conducting UM campus tours for prospective students, their families, and visiting alumni. As a young student volunteer, walking the campus with alumni gave me some of the best history lessons ever.

Yvonne Lucero ’84, ’02
Spokane, Wash.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

Several years ago some person unknown to me placed prominent “Go Griz” signs on each side of Interstate 90 between Laurel and Billings. I’m sure they delighted many Griz fans as they did me. They were undisturbed for years.

Then about two years ago, someone painted “Cats” over the top of both signs. I repainted the signs, and within a month they were vandalized. Again I repainted both signs, and again they were vandalized. Recruiting my “Cat” friend Bill Hanson from Laurel, we repainted both signs, this time saying “Go Griz, Go Cats” on one side and “Go Cats, Go Griz” on the other. They have remained there undisturbed for the past six months.

Jerry Nordstrom ’60
Billings