Livingston Weekly

The Whithorn Collection: New Archives at the Yellowstone Gateway Museum

Doris and Bill Whithorn spent nearly 50 years compiling the oral, written and photographic history of Park County, Yellowstone Park and the surrounding areas. While Doris collected stories from the past, her husband archived historical photos from local residents’ archives by creating high-quality photo and print reproductions with a Hasselblad camera.

Over the course of writing, compiling, and producing over 20 books on the subject of area history, the Whithorns amassed a collection of nearly 8,000 images. The Whithorn’s photographic records, along with oral and written histories, negatives and video, were donated to the Yellowstone Gateway Museum by the Whithorn’s daughters Alta and Carol in the fall of 2006.

Over the next two years, the Livingston Weekly will be working with the Yellowstone Gateway Museum to publish periodical “sneak peeks” at the historic collection of Bill and Doris Whithorn as the newly-acquired archives are cataloged. According to museum cataloger Jon Watson, over 100 images have already been processed and catalogued by museum staff and volunteers over the past month.

The notable shots picked by the museum staff for this week's print edition are only a hint of what is yet to be discovered and preserved for future generations. If anyone is able to identify persons in the group shot at the Depot above or in the Buffalo Bill shot below, please contact the Gateway museum at (406) 222-4184.

Pictured above in the shot at the Livingston Depot: a group assembled in front of the historic landmark circa 1933. Below from left, Chittenden's Bridge, a concrete bridge over the Yellowstone River from around 1912; the last group of wolf cubs captured in Yellowstone Park circa 1922; an orginal print photograph of Buffalo Bill Cody hiring cowboys for his Wild West Show, location unknown but dated July 4, 1887; and President Theodore Roosevelt in a sleigh near Fort Yellowstone April 17, 1903. Click on thumbnails below for larger version of print or see the complete series of Whithorn collection high-quality reprints in the newest edition of Livingston Weekly.

Warrantless Wiretapping and Telecom Immunity

by Roger Roots

Living in Livingston, I must confess that I never miss a wink of sleep worrying about terrorism in my own life. The notion that we in this idyllic setting need fear al-Qa’eda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or any other nebulous terrorist threat is, quite frankly, preposterous. Ludicrous. Farcical, really. In fact, if any of these people or organizations became so frustrated that they would launch an attack in Park County, I would then know immediately that they had reached a stage of utter desperation and global irrelevancy.

No, the fear of terrorism is a fear that must be felt somewhere else. But where? The most common source of expressions of fear of terrorism appears to be government officials. Especially government officials who seek more power and unchecked authority for themselves. Such heroes never stop telling us we are in danger at every moment.

This is quite ironic—or maybe predictable—given that the average person in the world is more likely to be murdered by his own government than by any other source. Statistically, governments and not criminals, terrorists, or soldiers from any foreign country, are the greatest source of danger most people will ever face in their lives. University of Hawaii Professor R.J. Rummel has documented the fact that during the twentieth century alone, governments murdered more than 150 million of their own citizens, generally pursuant to claims that they were “protecting” their citizenry from some threat.

Thankfully, this is not true in the United States. The Founding Fathers made it that way so that no one official or agency could ever wield dictatorial powers. But last week, the President proclaimed yet again that “our country is in more danger of an attack" if the U.S. House of Representatives refuses to pass a bill immunizing the nation’s telecommunications companies from lawsuits for their illegal warrantless wiretapping on behalf of the Bush Administration. These companies are presently being sued (in various lawsuits nationwide) for violating their customers’ constitutional rights by providing their customers’ phone and internet communications to the government without warrant, subpoena or court order.

The New York Times broke the startling story in December 2005. The executive branch has been openly wiretapping without warrant any communication(s) it wants to since at least 9/11 and probably before. It has done so by secretly demanding that the nation’s telecommunications providers “cooperate” by handing over their private communications data. This is even while every executive-branch agent (including Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez) who testified before congressional committees claimed under oath he was following the law that requires warrants to engage in such surveillance. The Times had sat on the story for more than a year in fear of retaliation by the Justice Department. After the story went public, the Bush Administration announced publicly that federal grand juries were indeed looking into the New York Times as a criminal suspect.

Warrantless eavesdropping on domestic phone and email communications is prohibited by a number of laws (including the Fourth Amendment itself). But the primary focus of the recent controversy has involved the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (“FISA”). Under FISA, it is a felony for anyone to wiretap any domestic phoneline without warrant, court order or subpoena after an initial 72 hour grace period (for "emergencies"). This grace period was expanded from 24 hours by the Patriot Act in 2001 and will be essentially infinite if Congress passes the bill in question, shamelessly called the “Protect America Act.” Every telecom company that handed over its customers' communication data to the government without warrant was committing a felony as well as violating contractual privacy agreements with its own customers.

The Bush Administration has been evading the FISA warrant process in cases where the Administration’s wiretapping does not fit into the two meager legal requirements of a FISA warrant. Either the target of the eavesdropping is not a foreigner or "agent of a foreign power," or the target is not actually suspected of spying or terrorism. It is noteworthy that warrant applications meeting these two legal requirements are being processed (granted, actually) by the FISA Court at an unprecedented rate.

Does anyone really believe the Administration’s claim that the communications they’ve been monitoring are merely “foreign” “overseas” or “terrorist” communications? Even the press reports that are most sympathetic to the Bush Administration state that these wiretaps and surveillance cover “phone calls and e-mails that ‘pass through’ the United States.” The technicians on the ground have admitted that giving the government access to emails and phone traffic that “passes through” the United States effectively gives the government access to all phone and email traffic within the United States.

At least one whistleblower has stated he personally helped reroute all internet and phone traffic at AT&T into split circuitry enabling the National Security Agency to monitor all of the company’s customers’ communications. We have reason to believe that Verizon, BellSouth and probably other major companies have given the government access to vast databases of domestic communications records, including purely domestic phone and Internet traffic. In any case, the legislation the Administration is demanding from Congress will provide no way for either the judiciary or the legislative branch to monitor whether the warrantless wiretapping by the executive branch is limited to foreign calls or not.

The 40th Reunion of Livingston’s Class of ’67

by Larry Shorthill

I want to discuss a wondrous and unique time and place in our lives.  The time was 1967 and the place was here in Livingston.  Our class was a very unique class, perhaps the most unique class to ever graduate in this town.

First, we graduated in a wonderful community.  Besides the natural beauty of Livingston, we had a beautiful community of parents and concerned citizens.  The Livingston of our youth was an affluent middle class small town.  It was, at the time, blessed mightily by the local agricultural community and the verdant valleys around Livingston were home to some of the finest cattle ranches in Montana, or anywhere for that matter.  The tourist industry was strong even then, giving local merchants a good base. The natural beauty and wonders of Yellowstone Park and the fishing on and around the Yellowstone River and surrounding areas helped to keep Livingston on the map and gave many of us youthful employment.  And, of course, there was the railroad with its abundant and good paying jobs that fed many of our families.  Poverty was not absent from Livingston, but the standard of living was middle class and good. This was unique among similar sized towns in Montana, and perhaps in a lot of other areas of the country as well.

The local affluence allowed our local school board to hire and retain some of the best high school teachers.  Our science department was unrivaled in all of Montana and it would have ranked among the top in the nation.  We had rich programs for music and art and our English department was excellent.  Park High also performed well in athletics and Livingston produced fine teams in basketball every year and Olympic-class track stars come from our community.  Our teachers and coaches set high standards and they expected performance.

The 1965 yearbook claims that the seniors of that year were the last PCHS class but all our class jewelry says otherwise. The old school still had Park County High School in letters on its north side. I doubt anyone in our class really thought of us as anything but PCHS graduates.  The next year, the class of 1968 truly graduated as PHS from the new high school.  We graduated from that old iconic high school from which many of our parents had graduated, and maybe our cousins or siblings or aunts and uncles.  The old school had proud traditions and a lot of school pride.

We graduated at a marvelous time. 1967, the summer of love, the Age of Aquarius, and soon to be, Woodstock—and the sobering influence of Vietnam.  All of us were shaped by the music and the war.  The time was vibrant, alive, and tragic.  Many of the young men of our class decided to go to college to avoid the war as long as possible.  By the time we were seniors in college, the draft and the war were winding down.  If we had been a year or two earlier, many more of our classmates would have fought and maybe several would have been lost to us.

Among those who went to war, we lost Alvy Wood.  I think Alvy was the first of our graduating class to die after graduation.  His death touched us all since Alvy was a quiet, gentle young man from a great family.  His name is on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.  The memorial will make any of us PCHS graduates, even the most stoic, cry.

As much as Vietnam shaped each of us, the music fed us.  I can still remember where I was the first time I heard some of the music of that summer.  It will always be the music of choice when I turn on the radio, or listen to a remastered CD.  I love other music, but the music of the late 1960s is special to me and special to all of rock and roll since most of the popular music before it consisted of love ballads and simple songs.  The rock from around 1967 was the foundation for all the rock that followed.  I know our parents thought a lot about their music as well, but our music helped shape a consciousness—It wasn’t just to dance to any more.

The last, and probably most important thing that made our class unique was its size.  I think the official count from our class is 162.  Livingston graduated classes of this size before us and after us, so the size, by itself is not what makes it unique. The size is what gave us a certain character and the size cemented our bonds and relationships as a whole. I mean by this that a class, say of 80, or 320 would not have been the same by any means. With 160 students, we were past the point of critical mass in size.  We had enough diversity in our class and in our school body to provide for a talent pool in art, music, drama, athletics and scholarship.  And at the same time, we were small enough that we all could know each other.  In a class of many hundreds it would have been impossible to know or remember all of the rest of the class.  Not so in our class.  The class of 1967 was a gifted, blessed, and very unique class.

The story of our our class is like a story quilt made up of 162 story pieces, or story squares. Many have seen such a quilt, I’m sure.  Actually there are more than 162 story squares in this quilt and I could not guess the exact number—some of the extra ones belong to some of our classmates who did not graduate and some belong to our classmates who moved from Livingston before graduation.  Some also belong to a few of our classmates a little older or a little younger than us who consider the class of 1967 their own for some reason or another.

Each story square represents one of our classmates.  It’s their life story.  What I learned in the 40 years since graduation is that each square is the same size. Some of these squares might be a little brighter or a little more colorful than the others, but the squares are all identical for the most part.  Each story told by one of these squares has ups and downs, successes and failures, good times and bad. Most, but not all of these stories include the joys and tribulations of raising our children and many include the boundless joys of our grandchildren.  Some tell of travel to far places and some tell of tragedy and sorrow.  Taken together the whole quilt is the story of the class of 1967.

In a regular quilt made of squares, each square borders four other squares and each square only directly touches four other pieces of the whole. Those on the borders touch even fewer.  In our quilt, however, each square touches 161 other squares.  Every one of us is interconnected within the whole of the story quilt of our class.  Since every story square is identical in size, its contribution to the whole story is just as important as any other square.  We all had some clique that we belonged to at the time.  Some of us even had several cliques of friends and some of were on the fringes of the class.  Others may not have felt like they had a single friend in our class.  But now, after 40 years, I have learned that every one of us has more similarity in our lives than we ever could have imagined while we were operating within our cliques.

We have now lost 24 of our ’67 classmates to their final rest.  Their story squares are now finalized, even if their stories had not been completed.  As our lives are touched by their loss, our own stories are diminished as well. We also have lost six or eight other ’67 classmates who we cannot locate.  Their stories are largely unknown and their quilt pieces are yet unfinished.  The whole of the quilted fabric and each of our own stories are diminished by their loss as well.

There are other groups, like those of our class who for health, financial, or logistical reasons could not join us.  Some are far from home and others are physically incapacitated and unable to be here. Hopefully they will join us in ten years.  We need their story squares for sure.  The second group of story pieces belong to those who are away from Livingston and who chose not to attend the recent reunion because they might have felt they didn’t have friends among us, or who believed they had little in common with us anymore. To this group I say we all have more in common now than we ever did then and your story square is important to each and every one of us. Join us next time and add to the richness of our tapestry.

The third and final group of squares belongs to those classmates who still live in or near Livingston but who did not attend our class reunion.  Your stories are the most important to us since your experiences in Livingston fill in the gaps of time for us.  They color the quilt brighter still.  All of you provide a beacon that draws us back to Livingston.

If any of you know someone who has not attended a reunion, or if you come across someone who has been lost to us, please let them know about our story quilt and their needed contribution.

To all of you who will be traveling home from the reunion, I wish you a safe journey. To all of you, please stay or get healthy so you can be here in another decade. Long live the class of 1967.