Nancy Foote

Oral History Transcript of Nancy Foote

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: July 13th, 2018
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed: March 9th, 2021 by Nora Saks

[00:03:29]

NANCY FOOTE: So this is audio, right?

AUBREY JAAP: Correct. Yeah, no one likes video.

FOOTE: Can I have a piece of paper and a pen? Cause I doodle. A thought might occur to me and I might just...

CLARK GRANT: Sure.

FOOTE: This is the coolest thing, I found this guy yesterday though, this guy's primo, this guy worked all the fires. He worked at this fire hall. His name is Shirtliff.

GRANT: Okay.

FOOTE: He worked all the fires. He's looking down at that little museum down there, and he's looking in and he's going, 'oh yeah, that's me in the bucket'.

GRANT: Oh, wow.

FOOTE: Yeah. I said, 'we need you'. Plus he grew up on the East Side, and he ran around with all the Mexicans. He said he knows about rapes and murders and everything.

GRANT: Holy shit.

FOOTE: Yeah. He says, 'well'...I said, 'no, this is Butte history, told by Butte people, not told by people that come in and read the newspaper and go, oh yeah, I know all about...

GRANT: Is he, did he have anything to say about arson fires?

FOOTE: Yeah. He worked all the hot fires, all the big fires.

GRANT: What about the notion that the fire department helped out?

FOOTE: That is not - my husband, Rick Foote, he covered those fires. He covered some of them as a reporter, and he covered some of them as the managing editor of the Montana Standard. It wasn't the fire department, if it wasn't anyone. This is part of the Rick Foote story I'm telling you. He's an infamous character in this town. So he went to a press conference. And Don Scheidecker will verify this. And he stood up, and there was a press conference by the ACM, and he says, 'can you tell me, does the ACM have an arsonist on the fire staff'? But some of the fires, like he says, the, what do you call it fire - the medical arts fire, that was wiring. That building, a lot of these buildings burned because of the wiring. And a lot of the buildings burned because it was arson.

GRANT: And he asked them directly?

FOOTE: Oh he asked everybody directly, everything.

JAAP: No problem with that.

FOOTE: Kicked down the door of the city home. When he died, they said to me, 'where'd you put his ashes'? I said, 'I spread them on the front steps of city hall, so every time you go in, you drag him in'.

But I do not think that the fire department was complicit in the fires. There was a guy named Manny Boston, but he mostly burned down smaller buildings.

JAAP: Just the small ones.

FOOTE: He burned some bar in Nissler Junction. Well, I could be telling this on the..

JAAP: We'll get started.

[00:06:40]

FOOTE: Rick would go after work and sit in the M and M, like he wasn't a nine to fiver. He would go after work and sit in the M and M, and talk to these people like Manny Boston, and Manny Boston even told him how he did it.

Like how he did this bar, and it seems to me it was called the Cabin Bar, and I'm not positive. It was out in Nissler. What he did is he took the light bulbs, unscrewed them. He put gasoline inside of them, screwed them back, screwed them into the thing and then - and flipped the switch. Yep. Boom!

GRANT: Interesting.

FOOTE: Have we started?

JAAP: Okay. All right.

FOOTE: This is my favorite subject.

[00:07:27]

JAAP: I love it. So it's July 13th, 2018, we're here with Nancy Foote. And Nancy wants to share the Rick Foote story. So Nancy, I'm just going to let you get rolling. And if we have any questions, we'll just ask as you go, if that works.

FOOTE: Okay. I'll start out with the history of Rick Foote. As a journalist, he started out at, he went to the J school at University of Montana. And at that time in the sixties, the University of Montana J school was one of the premier journalism schools in the United States. Comparable with Columbia University, on a smaller scale. He was known as a resident troublemaker, that's when it all started.

His professor told him that he wanted this report, he told all the journalism students, he wanted their reports set in concrete. So Rick and his buddies went and wrote their report, rolled it up, got a box, filled it with concrete, put all the reports into the concrete and turned it into the professor.

JAAP: How'd that work out for him?

FOOTE: The professor just - you had to go along with them because I mean, it was such a good thing. His name was Bloomberg and he was very well known professor in the state of Montana. And he and Rick battled, and he threw Rick out of the school many times, but at the end of the day, they became very good friends.

[00:09:06]

So when he was a Missoula, as a job, he worked for a little small, weekly newspaper. And the name of it escapes me, but he also worked for the Montana Kaimin, which is a university newspaper. And he was a reporter for the Kaimin, I think for three years. And then he became the managing editor of the Kaimin and that started his really bossy career as the boss of the newspaper.

So then from there, from the University of Montana, he signed up for the draft. He went to Vietnam. He thought he volunteered for the draft. So he went to Vietnam and he tried to get on with Stars and Stripes, which was the military newspaper. He couldn't, he didn't get on with that. So he ended up in Dak To and he ended up kind of as the assessor, he went around and looked at all day - do you know, if you wreck a truck or an airplane or anything, and it's your fault, in the military, you have to pay for it.

JAAP: Really?

FOOTE: Yeah. So, that was his job. He went around and these guys were dumping trucks and everything, and he said he would go and say to him, 'oh, so what happened there'?

And he said, these guys are from the south and they said, well I was driving down the road had a doobie' - and 'oh no, that's not what happened. You were driving down the road, you hit an IED. It dumped in the ditch. Isn't that right, Leroy'? 'Oh yeah, man, that's right'. He, but anyway, he always, I don't know this general's name, he called him 'the crazy general'. So the crazy general wanted to have a battalion newspaper. So the crazy general gathered up all these kids who had university experience or journalism school. And he brought him to the air base at la Drang, which is the hottest spot for agent orange in Vietnam, even now. And also the Viet Cong had tunnels under this air base.

So anyway, he had this battalion newspaper, and six guys that worked for the battalion newspaper. And I guess it was a pretty good newspaper. It told the history, it's here at the archives, just told what was going on and they sent it to families, so the families would know what was going on in Vietnam. So that was his battalion newspaper, and this is a funny story about the battalion newspaper. He was having an inspection and so he said he shipped the Lieutenant, he had the Lieutenant go somewhere. And he wasn't a Sergeant, but he was an acting Sergeant. You got all the perks, but you didn't get the money.

So he set this all up. They're expecting, they're inspecting the newspaper site and the office and everything. And they've got a dark room, but within the dark room, they have a lot of contraband. No drugs, but lots of contraband. So the General's walking around and Rick said he saluted him. And he said he got him coffee and donuts. And he said, 'would you like some coffee and donuts, sir'? And he said 'no, I'm in a hurry'. So he's walking around and he said he walked down the hall and he walked smack dab into something Rick forgot to take down off the wall. A naked picture of a woman.

[00:12:44]

So the General goes all through and he comes back to the desk and he says, 'you know, Sergeant Foote, something about this operation, strangely reminds me of McHale's Navy.

So from there, he moved on to, when he got out of Vietnam in 1970, he proceeded to get a job at the Montana Standard. He works in the Montana Standard as a reporter, mostly covering city and educational things. I think he was a reporter for about three years. Then he got the job as a managing editor. The managing editor runs the newsroom. So all the big stories, the fires, the crooked cops, the merging of Walkerville and city of Butte, all those stories he was managing and sending reporters on. But he wasn't satisfied to work the nine to five. So he would get down to the M and M and talk to the various nefarious - rhymes - folks. One of them being Ruby Garrett.

Here's a Ruby Garrett story. So he said he walked in at four o'clock in the morning and Ruby was just getting off shift. And she was sitting at the bar and she put a hundred dollar bill on the bar, and she said 'okay, Foote, we're gonna sit here and drink this until it's gone. And if I was a little younger, I'd take you home with me'.

And he said, he tried for years and years to get Ruby to tell her story, but she would not tell her story. When she was sent to prison, she wrote letters to him, which are also here at the Archives, comparing the quality of the jails. Butte city jail was not as good as the Billings women's prison, but the primo prison and the best place to be was down there in California, wherever the federal prison was in California. And she wrote on her letter, and you can use all this information to write an article.

So, okay. So then he was a managing editor of the Montana Standard. And then they asked him to be the editor. And he took that job, but he said the day he took the job, he wrote his resignation and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk. And that lasted until 1993.

[00:15:23]

He got really tired of Lee Enterprises. He got tired of how they were wrapping the news around the advertising. Now advertisers could call up and say, 'you know, I don't like that story'. And the powers that be were knocking the story off. And I think by mutual agreement, they parted company. So that was the end of the Montana Standard.

So then he went to a career counseling - it's a thing where they tell you what you could be, what you should be, what would be a good field for you to go into. And so they told him he could be a preacher, an entrepreneur, or a cook.

So, but then Rick and I had hooked up, but I won't go into that whole thing, but it was quite a hookup. And I was in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, although I am from Butte, Montana. And there's a premier cooking school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and I was also on the lookout for catching Rick Foote in my grasp. So I said to him, 'oh my goodness, wouldn't that be wonderful. You could come up to Calgary, Alberta and go to the cooking school'. Which he did. And he lived in Calgary, Alberta for a year and got a degree in professional cooking, which then leads you into being a chef. It takes three years to be a chef and he was in his late forties there, so he just took the professional cooking thing.

And we came back and we were going to open a catering service, but in the meantime, Norlene Holt and - why can't I think of his name? Anyway, her partner, her live-in partner, significant other, they owned the Mini Nickel, but they just, they sold it. And they were both Libertarians. So they decided that they were going to open a weekly, to just publish weekly - just city issues mostly. And they got Karen Sullivan to come in as the editor and writer and the everything. But then Karen got a better job. So Karen suggested that Rick was hanging out and not really, didn't have a job yet. So Karen came up and asked him if he would do it, if he would go and be the editor of the Butte Weekly. And he said well, yeah, he would do it for six months. Six months turned into about 16 years. And every year they said, 'it's going to fail. It's going to fail. It's not going to last. The first six months - it's going to only last six months'.

[00:18:28]

They didn't have a big staff. Rick was the whole paper. They had a couple of stringers, one that wrote about sports and one that wrote about hunting. I'm sorry, their names escape me. And he covered - he killed himself. He covered everything. He went back to the city commissioners meetings, and Mike Kearns, who was the Dean of the city commissioner said, 'oh my God, Rick, when you'd walk in, they all sat up straight'.

Because when he was at the Montana Standard, the county commissioners were holding secret meetings. Closed door meetings, not open meetings. And it's Montana law that you must hold open meetings. So he got the Montana law in his hand and he walked down down, and it was Eric Homin and the boys, and he gave the door a boot. And Don Scheidecker was behind him from KXLF. And he went in the door with the Montana law in his fist. And he said, 'you are violating Montana law. You cannot have closed meetings'. And so that established another one of his Butte character creds. And Don Scheidecker once again, it was like Don followed him around or something. He verifies that actually happened.

So when he came back to the county commissioners meeting, they thought he was gone forever, like up to Canada and everything. And he just didn't, he was relentless. He would not let them get away with nothing. I'm sure they're glad he's not - I said to a friend - 'all these people, all these politicians are here at his funeral, I think they came to make sure he was dead'.

[00:20:30]

And he also had a little satire thing that was very popular with a certain type of people in Butte, older people. His Milo the Miner. And he tapped a lot of issues through Milo the Miner, and some of the stuff like his Halloween, three-part Halloween story, was a little bit hokey, but people loved it.

And he also, he was really the only reporter at that newspaper. And Norlene Holt did not take a salary. And Rick Foote would pay $320 a month in that job. They had a salesperson and they had an office manager, who got paid. But the Butte weekly was not a huge money maker. It was just, people wanted to put the truth out on the street. They wanted the other side of the story on the street. And Rick was the guy to do it, but people thought they had five or six reporters. They did not. So, when he died, his obituary was in the same newspaper with his last column. So, he died with his boots on and he was a character of the first degree, a very intelligent man, but he loved this city.

[00:21:49]

He had a chance when he came out of Vietnam, he had a chance to go and work for the Chicago Tribune or the Los Angeles Times. He turned it down because he loved this town. He absolutely loved Butte and he wanted to come and make sure everybody knew what was going on here. So that's the Butte Weekly.

JAAP: So do you want to talk a little more about some of the things he did cover? Do you want to talk a little more about the fires and some of the things he covered? Did he ever well, I know he didn't share his sources.

FOOTE: Absolutely not. He'd go to prison before he shared his sources. He actually was a managing editor in the fires. He sent reporters out on those stories, but he also went out and stood there and watched them burn. His greatest regret was, his first wife got sick and tired of him going out to the fires and staying out until five in the morning. And then hitting the M and M, I'm sure that was part of it.

So there was yet again another fire. And he lived on Mercury Street, he lived in an apartment on West Mercury. And there was yet again, another fire, and she told him if he goes to one more fire, that she will divorce him. So he said he reluctantly stayed in the apartment. The next day came out and they were saying, 'jeez, Foote, where were you?JC Penney's burned down last night'. He said he was so mad at her he could have just like strung her up, because he missed that big fire. He was at all the other ones, but he missed that big fire.

[00:23:30]

And also he covered, what they call the crooked cops. He was, during that time, he was threatened. He sent his young son and his wife up to their ranch in Toston, because people were calling him and telling him they were going to blow up his house. So he knew somebody who knew somebody and he had a pistol. And he went down to the bar. Of course, he didn't tell me where the bar was. He didn't tell me who the people were. But he went down the bar and he pointed the gun at the guy. And he's like, 'you get these guys off of my back. Quit having them threaten my family'. And it stopped.

I said to him once, 'you should write a book about the fires'. And he says, 'I will, but they're not all dead yet'. All the perpetrators. So, yeah he covered school issues. He was really big on school issues. He got two Carnegie grants to cover Montana school issues and education issues.

You know, I wasn't here. These are just stories he told me, about different things. I would always say to him...oh, I know one big story the Butte Weekly had. It was the picture of Bob Gannon's house up on Flathead Lake. And I said, 'where'd you get that'? Because you had to take a boat to that place, to his house. I said, 'who gave you that'? 'Not telling you. It's a deep source. I'm not telling you'. He would not tell me. I said, 'I won't tell anybody'. Here, I am telling people. 'I won't tell anybody. Honest, I won't tell a soul'. Nope. Nope. He wouldn't. He would never divulge his source. When you worked for the Standard, his wife thought he was having an affair because this one source would call up, call the house and say, 'tell Foote to call Purple Orchid'. And that was one of his sources, was a guy. But she thought he was having an affair with this person named Purple Orchid.

[00:25:44]

Yeah, the fires, I think he had a story about those fires, but he just, they're still people now around that, that know more about those fires. And I don't think he was fearful of it, but maybe he didn't want to give up sources. Probably. They might've been the sources. Because he really, people trusted him. They really trusted him. They hated him. But they trusted him. You either liked him or you hated him. And he was more happy if somebody disliked him.

Oh, another thing he did was the Christmas list. He would take all of the commissioners and the near and dear people at the city hall. And he would give them things. Like, he would give Jimmy Johnson more asphalt to fill up the potholes. And he would, and I said, Jiminy, don't people really get like mad at you about doing that? And he said, 'no, they call me up. They asked me how come they didn't make the list'? So he did so many things, I just can't.

He also was one of the first journalists into Albania, when Albania became a quasi- democracy, you might say. He went with the Knight Foundation into Albania. He went there for six months. They had no food, they had nothing. We packed 85 pounds worth of food and clothing to take over there. And when he was over there, he lost 50 pounds. And the people in Romania, desperate people, they were begging him to adopt their children to get them out of there. But he said it was amazing that the, you know, having nothing. He said, 'you bitch about the government. I've written about the government. But when you see what it really is like not to have a government, then you appreciate what you have'. And then he went with the International Center for Journalism and he went to Romania for three months. And that was all about training journalists to start a free press in those countries. And the other day I was watching something on television and they said, yeah, this came out of Popoli Po.

And Popoli Po was one of the newspapers that was trying to start something in Albania. So, yeah, he had a million stories about that too, but like I say, when he came back, he was skinny and that was unusual for him.

JAAP: All right. So Nancy, if you don't have more stories to share about Rick, I might kind of segue to you - but Clark, do you have more questions about Rick before we go there?

[00:28:54]

GRANT: Yeah. I'm just curious about his coverage of Bob Gannon. What all did he go into there?

FOOTE: Well, he went into the Bob Gannon crushed the Montana Power, and he was writing story after story about the Enron. About the the mess that was caused by the crash, where I, myself lost tons of money. I had bought safe stocks, you know, they call them granny stocks. Utilities, I can't remember the name of it, it was like they made firetrucks. You wouldn't think they would go bankrupt. All these things that were going bankrupt, but because it involved Montana, it involved Butte, Bob Gannon just screwed the pooch there.

And he was writing stories about him. And he didn't care if he was Bob Gannon or Charlie Smith, he was writing about it. And one day at his office, shows up the person, with this picture of Gannon's big fat palatial estate, I think to illustrate that - you're losing all your stock, the people that work for the, like Rick said, 'the old man would be lying on the bed dying, and he'd say to the future widow, don't sell the Montana Power stock'! And here, the Montana Power stock is crashing. My sister-in-law worked for the Montana Power. In April, that stock worth $75 a share. She couldn't cash them until October. By October, they were worth $2.30 a share. People were getting creamed. And he was writing about it.

And this person brought, look at this, what Bob Gannon's got up on Flathead Lake. This is a big fancy house. And he published it. And what's his name? 60 Minutes. Got a hold of him, they called him to ask him if they could use it. And 60 Minutes came here and chased Bob Gannon up and down the alleys, asking him, ' what's going on here'? But I mean, it ruined Montana Power Company.

[00:31:17]

GRANT: What was it that compelled Rick to want to hold people's feet to the fire like that?

FOOTE: He was just a Don Quixote. He just wanted to go out and make things right. Tell the truth, make things right. Okay. Here's another Rick story. I was - New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve day, and he was in his office. And people came, I mean, they came to him like he was a social worker. And this man came up, and he was in absolute tears because he just had a set of twins. He'd lost his job. He was basically destitute. He didn't know what he was gonna do. And he didn't know where to go. So, Rick picked up the phone and he called Queenie Lynch, who was the head of the welfare department.

And he said, 'Queenie, if you don't get down here right away and give this guy a helping hand, and set him up with his kids so he can get them out of the hospital and get them a place to live, your name's gonna be all over the front page tomorrow morning on New Year's Day. Guess what happened?

He was absolutely fearless. He did not care about, he cared nothing about money. He didn't care about - his status was in his reporting. His status was in his, like he said, his barrel of ink. People that knew him in grade school, cause he went to the St. Anne's Tigers and I went to the St. Joseph's Bulldogs. I always told him, St. Anne's Tigers suck.

He, the man was fearless. He just, he didn't care what you said about him. He didn't care if you didn't like him. He just didn't. I mean, sometimes he didn't care if I liked him. He just didn't give a damn. I just think he had a thing in, like I was saying in trying to - got waylaid there - even kids in grade school said he always stuck up for the underdog. And that's the way he was. That's the way he rolled.

[00:33:42]

GRANT: Why did he volunteer for Vietnam?

FOOTE: He volunteered for Vietnam because he couldn't, well in May he was covering more protests at the University of Montana. And in October he was in basic training at Fort Sentinel. He actually probably volunteered for - he didn't know what his draft number was. He didn't know when he was going to get drafted. He'd just got out of college and he wanted to get on with his life, but he knew there's always a chance you're going to get drafted and he didn't want it hanging over his head. Plus he said he wanted to know what was going on over there.

So he volunteered for the draft and he wrote his first wife, oh probably close to 200 letters. And within these letters, one of them, he says, 'maybe this wasn't such a good idea'. And then another one, he says, 'well, I've been here seven months. I haven't shot a gun yet. Let's keep it that way'.

He was very funny. He had a wry wit about him. That's why he joined. He just wanted to go get his year tour of duty, although he was there 14 months done, and then he wanted to come back and live. He said he wanted a nice home with good music. And he loved children and he wanted children, but he only ended up having one son who, unfortunately, drowned when he was 11 years old.

[00:35:33]

That's basically why he went there. I'd think he was sort of nosy, but here's a good thing about - a story about what I thought about Vietnam. He got into, what was the name of it - anyway, into the depot where you were assigned your duties. And he was standing in line in Vietnam, everybody - in the other wars, people went out together as troops. In Vietnam, you went out by yourself. So he was getting his assignment as to where he could go. You know, you go to the front - and you go here, and you go here. You're going to be the assessor or whatever. But he said, he walked up and this person, I guess, a Captain or a Sergeant or whatever it was, said to him, actually said this to him, 'step aside, Mr. Foote, you are too old and too well-educated to go to the front line'. That's what it kind of was, if you... Yeah, you got sent - he said a lot of kids from the south, uneducated, poor kids were sent. So, that's how he got to Vietnam. And Vietnam was a trip for him too, actually, if you were reading the letters.

GRANT: Did he ever end up firing a gun?

FOOTE: He never did say. He always told me things that were actually funny stories about Vietnam. I actually thought he was making some of it up, until I met his buddy from Vietnam, who was telling the same stories. And I said, 'you're kidding me. These stories are true'? And he says, 'oh yeah, they're true. Ya, they're true'.But because he was in Le Drang, on that base, he ended up with diabetes, which a lot of Vietnam veterans are doing because of agent orange. And he ended up with diabetes. This is the place where, now you fly into Le Drang when you're going on an excursion to see Vietnam. They haven't cleaned that site up yet. It's still full of agent orange. Yeah. Dangerous crap, that stuff. Roundup.

But he never really told me, he was very upset about the little children that were like, I donated to the archives some photos he took while he was there. He always felt really bad about the kids, little children that had no shoes. They had really no clothes and they were hungry. But he didn't really, like mostly Vietnam vets, he really didn't go into the detail about what went on there. But he did, he gives a different prospect on Vietnam through those letters, because he was a really good writer. And when I first found them, I thought, 'oh, these are probably love letters. I don't think I should be looking at them. But I made a mistake and I dropped them on the floor and they splayed across the floor and I had to match them. I had to match the last paragraph. It's a big, huge mess. So I got snippets of them. I never have read them. He also wrote some letters to a friend of his, Susan Lovers. And I did read those. They were very best friends. She was actually his news editor at the time, and they're very informational and they're very interesting. But he was never on, he used to fly around with the crazy general in a jet, into battle sites to - the general is going to the after battle assessments, and he would go in so he could write the story of, you know what the battle was like. The battle of Dak To and stuff. Yeah.

[00:39:49]

And he, here's another Rick Foote story. So he goes up and he's going to interview this this general up, I don't know, in the Highlands. And so this general is telling him this big story about this battle, and Rick's writing it down, and going - this is a great story, and the people at home will love to know about this. And so then he leaves and he's back at Le Drang, and the MPS come in, no, actually it wasn't the MPs, it was the CIA. They came in and said, 'Sergeant Foote'? And he says, 'yeah'. And they said, 'is this your notebook? Do you recognize this'? And he said, 'well, yeah, that's my notebook. I've been looking for it, I lost it or dropped it. They said, 'do you know that you have the entire battle plan for the battle of something'? And he says, 'no, I was interviewing this general'. And he says, 'he gave you the whole battle plan and you dropped it'. And he said they were gonna arrest him. But he, what saved him was he didn't have a security clearance. So that general shouldn't have been talking to him in the first place. But he thought he was going to end up at Leavenworth, he really did. He said, 'here, you can have my notebook'.

GRANT: Yeah. Anytime people, I've talked to people about doing coverage of active mining in Butte, especially if they're going to be critical of it, the argument is that, well, those are good paying jobs, so we don't pay attention to that. How did Rick respond to that kind of, if he's covering something about the Anaconda Company, did people ever tell him, shut up, they're our employers?

FOOTE: I don't think so because Rick worked in the mines. Of all the accomplishments he had, and he had a lot, the proudest thing he ever would say was he had been a hard rock miner in Butte, Montana. Mind, it was in the summers between college semesters, but he did work in the mines. He worked at the Leonard mine on the pumps. And his family, you know, were miners. His dad was not a miner. His dad was a machinist. But most of his family, his grandfather worked at the, was a sawyer, and he worked at the the Tramway mine as a carpenter. But no, he loved the Butte heritage. He'd love the town. I don't, I think he liked the mines, right? I mean, I don't think he'd like the pollution. And he covered a lot of the cleanup and everything, but, and Evan Barrett told me this - once again at his funeral, all good things come to the funeral, he told me that had it not been for Rick Foote, the hardrock miners fund would not exist because he pounded on it day after day. Pounded on it to get that passed and to get that through. And now they spent the last $200,000 of that fund. I think he'd be so PO'ed about that.

GRANT: City Brew.

[00:43:09]

FOOTE: Yeah, he'd be really mad about that, burning mad He wasn't happy about it being spent on a lot of things. He was kinda, he was mad about McKenzie River. He covered that. And he knocked that. He was mad about Bugs and Bullets - he didn't think that's what the hardrock mining fund was for.

And he also had great pride in Butte. And when they were trying to build this archives, he pounded on that constantly and got people to figure out maybe this was a good idea. He fought the swimming pool. He and Fran Dorn went tongue and nail about the swimming pool. He did not want that swimming pool. He didn't mind having a swim pool. He didn't want the water park. He thought it was a waste of money. He would be rolling these people, I mean, he'd be up at that city hall, he'd be bitching about every single thing they were doing.

His favorite thing, and he also had a cartoonist, but he directed what the cartoon was going to be. And every spring, you know, it was like the potholes. Always the potholes. And I said to him, 'you know the potholes aren't that bad. I don't know why you always are going on the potholes'. And he said, 'well, it's just the thing in Butte in the spring, you harass the city about the potholes'. Honest to God. Now, I'm thinking the potholes are ridiculous here. He would be going crazy. He went after issues that were like, means something to the regular person. Like, raising your property taxes for - I mean the swimming pool is fine. I don't have a problem with the swimming pool. But he thought, why should we have a swimming pool in the streets are falling apart? You know?

[00:45:10]

GRANT: When did he die?

FOOTE: He died October 10th, I think, 2013. And he actually died from liver cancer, but he also, an extenuating thing was the diabetes from the agent orange, from Vietnam. Which are all kinds of Vietnam veterans are dying daily, even in this town. I was just talking to one the other day that has diabetes and is in rough shape.

JAAP: So, what do you think Rick would have said about Walt and Carmen being let go?

GRANT: Hmm, Lee Enterprises.

FOOTE: He detested Lee Enterprises. He held one stock. He kept one stock in Lee enterprises, so he'd get their newsletter. He harassed the ever living hell out of The Montana Standard. That was his prime goal in life was to get The Montana standard. And if they spelled something wrong, he was after them. Walt worked, they grew up together in the newspaper business. He loved Walt. They were actually personal friends, also. Carmen, I'm hesitant to say what he'd think about Carmen. I don't think he'd give a shit. He hired Carmen. Everybody he hired, he hired on the phone. He didn't like doing face-to-face, he was really actually an introvert. People would walk up to him and think he was going to expound on all this stuff. But he spoke with his hands, his fingers, his brain. He was not like Mr. Friendly. He said he thought he made a mistake when he hired Carmen.

JAAP: Interesting.

FOOTE: And, so when he died, he told me what he wanted - he wanted no funeral. But what he wanted for his obit - and he wanted this: Rick Foote. Born July 14th, 1945. Died October 13th, 2014. Whatever happened between those dates is none of your damn business. So I called The Montana Standard, and I told them that I wanted to put that in. They refused, they would not put it in. They said we don't put things like that in the paper. No, they wouldn't put it in.

So I said to Denny Dawn, just what I just told you, and Denny said, 'I know why they wouldn't put it in'. And I said, 'why is that'? And he said, 'he had exactly enough words to get a free obit. They don't like it when they have to do free obits'. That infuriated him, that they charged for obituaries. He really did not like that they charged for obituaries. And then years ago, they used to put births and deaths and weddings in the paper, and they would put the addresses. And people were starting to be robbed. So they had to take it out, but he was kind of ticked about that too. So in the Butte Weekly, he did have the births and the deaths, without addresses, of course. But he didn't like that they took that out. He thought that was, it should be part of the what's known to the public.

[00:49:05]

JAAP: Yeah, I think we lost a really critical voice when Rick died, you know. An interesting perspective that I miss, you know. He was a joy to read, I thought, his thoughts, as critical as they were. You know, it's too bad because it's a void that hasn't been filled I don't think.

FOOTE: Yeah, I used to come into the archives and Lee Whitney was - and that's one thing too. He never told me what he was writing. I found out what the story is the same as everybody else found out the story. So I'd come in, and the Butte Weekly would come out on Wednesday. And I'd come in on Wednesday and Lee Whitney would say to me, 'oh, my God. What's Rick, where'd he get that story? What do you think about'? I'd say, I haven't even read it. I don't know anything. I don't know anything about it'.

JAAP: Yeah, they used to fly off so people would, yeah.

FOOTE: He has a circulation of 10,000. That's direct people taking it off the newsstand, but then they always say, one and a half more. You count one and a half more of people that are handoffs. People say, 'oh, I got, you want to read my Butte Weekly'?

JAAP: Do you know what it is now?

FOOTE: I didn't know anything about the Butte Weekly now, I'm sorry to say. And I know they tried. I know they've tried really hard. It's just not the Butte Weekly.

JAAP: No.

FOOTE: It's kind of a, it's almost just an advertising tool. Like the Auto Trader or something, there's nothing in it. But he was a different kind of a journalist and he had a lot of sources, so that's what you gotta have. You got to have a lot of people calling you up and saying, 'hey'... He had Republicans calling him saying, 'hey, did you hear about this? I don't like what you write in there, but this could be true'. He wrote a whole bunch about the VA in Helena because they had two sets of, only two sets of instruments to do operations.

So if one of those sets of instruments was falled, somebody who had come all the way down from say, Havre, for an operation would have to, they couldn't do the operation because they didn't have enough surgical instruments. Well, he had a source in the VA who was telling him all this stuff. And he was writing all this stuff about how people were getting inferior care with examples like that.

And Jon Tester got ahold of it. And he and Jon Tester did a lot of work to try and improve conditions at the VA. I don't know, I don't think they've helped that much. I think the VA's going down the toy toy up there at Fort Harrison, but yeah, he really wrote a lot of stuff about the VA.

[00:52:18]

JAAP: So Nancy, would you like to talk about yourself for a little bit?

GRANT: Yeah, you ought to.

JAAP: I think you've got some stories to share.

FOOTE: Well, I'm just a railroad rat. I grew up at 853 South Main, on the good side of the tracks, because anything above Front Street is considered to be Butte. The rest of it is just the flat.

JAAP: I know, no 's' at the end.

FOOTE: No 's' at the end, the flat. The train comes through the middle of the house, I lived - the train rock and rolled right by my house. You know, I can't say how many feet it was, but it was right by my house. One of my proudest accomplishments is I could walk on the railroad track from Main street to Montana, pivot and walk back without falling off.

JAAP: There you go.

FOOTE: That was a great thing. We had what we used to call, they were the flagmen, because the electric, you know, gates and stuff, they had men that would go out in the middle of the street and flag people to stop. And they lived in what we called the shack.

They were little like structures, so they would be out of the elements. And so all the kids used to go up and visit the fellows in the shack. And there were two characters that I remember very well. There was a fellow named Eddo, and he had a dog named Bozo. And we used to go up to visit Eddo, and he was a great, huge man. And he used to send us up to the local little grocer and get him two ding dongs, and a quart of skim milk for a snack. Two ding dongs, which are kind of cupcakes with cream in them and stuff, and skim milk. When Eddo died, Bozo - and this is, I mean, people think this is malarkey, that dogs do this, but Bozo went out on his grave and laid there till he died. The dog.

And then we had another man, his name was Tommy Lehman, and he was from New York. And my mother used to - when the New York baseball games were on, my mother used to take the radio out on the porch and turn it up really loud, so Tommy could hear the games. And Tommy would walk up and down the tracks from the alleyway to Main Street, and back and forth, and listen to the New York Yankees play games. It was also, my aunts and my mom, on holidays they used to bring meals up to the flag guys. Like turkey dinner and everything. So they could be included. They were just our buddies. I've never had any kind of a weird person or, you know, you'd just go up there and visit with them. And they were interesting people.

Another thing that happened to me on the railroad tracks, I was about six and on Main Street, there was a switch that switched the train. And I was up there of course, fooling around on the tracks. Cause we played on the tracks, we were crazy.

[00:55:42]

Now I think we were crazy. And my foot got caught between the switch and the track, the tracks that moved, and the train was coming and I was stuck and I couldn't get off. And Kevin Shannon, Ellen Crain's father, ran in front of that train, like a mighty Superman, and threw me off those tracks and saved my life. And he never let me forget it. Until I, I mean, I'm in my seventies until he passed away, I would see how Kevin and he'd go, you know, I saved your life. I know Kevin. I know you saved my life. I saved her life. Did you know I saved her life?

And, oh my brothers. My brothers used to hitch the train. And the kitchen sink, there was a big, what they call a picture window, that looked down on the tracks. And the sink was there, and my mother would look out on the tracks and look out on what was going on and the trains going by. So one day, she's doing the dishes and she looks out and here's my blonde, blue-eyed brother, about nine, hanging off of the back of the train, waving at her.

The kids in that neighborhood, I would say from Iron street, to Second Street, there were about four girls and about 17 boys. So I thought I was one of the guys. And those guys used to hitch the train, go down to Gregson, and spend the day, hitch the train back. My brother Bill was notorious for hitching the train, and his friends. I used to like, they have rock climbing walls now, but there's these rock things that hold up the viaducts. And I used to crawl up those things and then hide underneath the bridge. My brothers used to crawl up there with water balloons, and I'm a good kid, I didn't do that, I just watched people. But they used to fire balloons people from underneath the viaduct on Colorado Street - bang! Bang!

Also there's a lady that lived by the railroad track, Mrs. Ryan. Once again, my brother Bill - he was kind of a rat wasn't he? He and his friend figured out that Mrs. Ryan only smoked about a quarter of her cigarettes and then she buttered them and threw them away. So they had a real great source of cigarettes when they were about 10, 12. They would go in Mrs. Ryan's garbage and get the cigarettes. And then they would go under the little wooden bridge that went across the alley and smoke. Well one day they lit the bridge on fire. It was just a small fire, but yeah, they lit the bridge on fire.

[00:58:54]

We used to run, I don't know if you've ever gone down Main Street and then over the tracks, and you can see who's running across the street there. Just above Fremont Street, my cousins and I used to run back and forth all the time. And I drive down that now and I go, oh my God, we could've been killed, with our dolls and our buggies and everything, running back and forth across the street.

I don't know. I don't know how, and because I've been doing the coroner's reports. There were kids that were hurt and killed doing this kind of crap. They really were. Sliding down alleys on the embankment, the railroad embankment, in the winter we used to get, there was a kid actually, he used to be a cop, Bobby Nelson. And we used to go and kind of make a luge run almost. He would go in his house and get buckets of water, and then we would pour them on the snow, down the Hill, and we'd make this ice run. And it went from the top of the embankment for the railroad down and into the alley. It was kind of like a luge. Yeah.

JAAP: That sounds pretty fun.

FOOTE: Oh yeah. I had my first gay person in my life, was the kid who lived next door to me. And he was what they called then a C. And he was a wonderfully talented, intelligent kid. And the kids were unmerciful to him. Absolutely unmerciful to him. They teased him. They beat him up. For no reason. So Bobby Nelson and I, once again, decided that we were going to get the mean kid. So, my job was to go and harass the mean kids to chase me up the alley. And Bobby Nelson would be hiding behind the garbage cans. And I was a real fast on my feet, you never know it now, but I was. I'd run past his garbage can, and Bobby Nelson would jump out and we just beat the crap out of this kid and tell him to leave Kenneth Hill alone.

And he did. And if he didn't, we'd go after him again. And he was so dumb, we'd do it every time, we'd get him to chase me up the alley.

JAAP: And every time...

GRANT: Did the plan work?

[01:01:31]

FOOTE: Oh yeah. I would run past the garbage can. Bobby Nelson would jump out, tackle him, and then we both would just beat on him.

JAAP: How old were you when this happened?

FOOTE: Oh, I think I was older than, probably about 12.

JAAP: Okay.

FOOTE: Yeah, the boys in my neighborhood did not know I was a girl until I, I don't ever think they considered me to be a girl until I came back from college. And they went, oh gee, you're a girl.

JAAP: Right.

FOOTE: I was a tomboy. Anything they dared me to do, I'd do. I rode my bike off the - well, we used to call them the cliffs of Webster Garfield, but they were kind of a, they weren't really cliffs. They were kind of a dugout place, and I don't really know what it was, but it was like a cliff. It was an embankment. And they dared me to ride my bike off. And I did.

JAAP: Did you hurt yourself?

FOOTE: I don't know. I don't think so. And my dad, oh yeah, my dad. I had a boys bike. It was a great boys bike. It had no fenders, it was an excellent bike. It went really fast. And my dad decided for Christmas, he bought me a second hand bike, and he spent hours down in the basement, painting it pink and black, and it was a girl's bike. And I got it for Christmas and I was like, 'what? I don't want this bike. I want my crazy bike back'. 'No, you're a girl. You should have this pink and black bike'. And my mother says, 'that is nice, he spent a lot of time'. So I kind of had to ride the stupid bike. Unfortunately, something terrible happened to it. It got wrecked.

JAAP: Accidentally?

FOOTE: Uh, that was the story.

JAAP: Okay.

FOOTE: Oh, we had a diversity on Main Street there, between Iron and Fremont, we had a diversity of developmentally disabled kids. They were, we had lots of them. I never, it never fizzed on me that there was something different about these kids. One of them, I think, was probably a savant, his name is Joe Erlich, and he used to stand out in front of his house and juggle. And he was marvelous. He was like a marvelous juggler. And they bought him things to juggle, his family. They bought him like clubs and balls, I mean I used to just think he was the most fabulous thing that ever was. He would juggle his - hours. He would do it for hours. And then there was another girl. Her name was Lorraine. I thought she was funnier than heck, because she used to moon everybody. She used to moon people and go - 'Asshole! Asshole! Asshole!'

And of course there was the infamous Junior. He lived a little bit farther up, the black kid that used to march with the Butte High band. And then there were the Smiths, God, they were just destitute people. I mean, we're not all well fixed on Main Street, but we had some folks that were really, really poor. So there were the Smith kids, and I used to go trick or treating every Halloween. I went to Catholic school. I was a rather naive person, and I'd go trick or treating every Halloween with Nancy Smith. And I didn't know she didn't really have a Halloween costume, she's just wearing her regular clothes, and we would go around and trick or treat, but she always had a bar of soap and she would always soap people's windows.

[01:05:29]

And I used to think, God she's soaping people's windows and they're giving her stuff, I thought you only did that if they didn't give you stuff. Years later, I found out, when I was trick or treating with Nancy Smith, she was probably about 50 years old.

JAAP: Oh no. Really?

FOOTE: It was kind of a little microcosm of, why don't you be kind to people? Yeah. Why don't you treat people right, you know? We didn't have any - oh yeah we did, we had Filipinos, who were kind of an anomaly back then in those days. Dennis Yaddo, he lived at our house more than he lived at his own house, the Yaddos. And Mr. Yaddo, he used to walk down the street in the evening from the store and the moon would be out and my mother was petrified of Mr. Yaddo. He'd come and he'd say, 'the moon is out. Who knows what will happen? The moon is'...My mother would go, I have to go in the house now, Mr. Yaddo. She was afraid to death of him. But yeah, we had a lot of Native American people in that neighborhood, too.

[01:06:40]

Joey Gardipee, he went to Vietnam, but he was one of the 'trash people' that was sent out to the front lines. I don't know what ever happened to him. I went to St. Joseph's school, which was a huge parish, it went from the Boulevard over to Shields Avenue. So you had every kind of kid - the kids from the Boulevard, they used to come in on the school bus because they were down in, what did they call it? The Barry, I guess they called it. And they used to come and they were like exotic. They used to come on the school bus and they never, you couldn't keep them - the nuns couldn't keep them after school. Cause they had to get on that bus, right. So we always thought it was really like, they were some kind of saintly things, rhey could do anything, they never got in trouble. They didn't get, you know, kept on detention, nothing. They just got on the bus and they went away and then they came back and then they went away. Then they came back.

And we had the kids over on East 2nd street, which were mostly railroading kids. We had every kind of kid. And St Joseph's, we used to have this big nun, and she said she was from Chicago, like all of them say. And her nine brothers were brick layers. And she was just, I mean, she was this huge woman and she'd just get so mad at the kids. And she'd stomp across the room and she'd go, 'oh Lord, give me patience'.

And then she'd take the boys, and the piano was up against the wall, and she'd get them on the skinny side of the piano, and she'd line them all up. And she'd just floor check them like - I'll give you - Bam! And then they'd go bup bup bup, into the piano. She locked three or four kids one time in the lockers. In the actual tall lockers, coat lockers. She locked them in there. But we loved her because she used to let us have parties. She let us have like Christmas parties and St. Patrick's days parties. And she died when we were still in grade school and we had to go to her funeral. And we had to go view her body in the nunnery. Which, I had never been in the nunnery, but we had to pray past her dead body, there, Sister St. Patrice, there, dead. And my brother would go - ha the nun's dead!

Yeah, the nun's house was just like this weird place that nobody ever got to go into. Except Molly Clark got to go into one at IC, but we never got to go in it. My mother used to say, 'if you don't behave, you'll have to go in and scrub the floors for the nuns'. Well, nobody wanted to...oh, yeah, I was in the choir at St. Joseph's school too. And that was a great thing to be in, you got to be in it in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, which meant if there were a lot of funerals in a week, you got to get out of school and go over and sing the funeral mass. So you know, you got like maybe a couple of hours out of class to go over and sing. And it took time to walk over from school and walk back. And, oh one year, we sang so many funerals. We got quite callous. We'd say, 'oh, Mrs. Smith had a way better coffin yesterday than Mr. Jones. His coffin is not as nice as Mrs. Smith. I am very irreverent about funerals and that's probably the genesis of it.

[01:10:23]

But that's unless you got, that's about all I can think of - I mean, I was just a regular Butte kid. My father was an alcoholic and my mother was crazy and very, very, very religious, but I survived and we survived. And actually when you look back on it, it wasn't as bad as you thought it was when it was happening.

JAAP: No.

GRANT: Is Butte changing?

FOOTE: You know, I was away from Butte for 30 years. And when I left Butte, I left to go to college and all I wanted out of Butte, was out of Butte. My mother knew nothing about Butte.. She just lived in her little church bubble. And my dad used to say to her, 'are you really from Butte'? So I often tell researchers that come in here and are talking about how old the buildings are, and how they weren't taken care of. And the Hennessy building. Well, I went to Girls Central and I walked down Park Street to Main. We weren't walking by going, oh, hey look, that building was built in 1904. Isn't that cool? No, we were headed for Diane Hughes, because they might have something on sale that we could buy or put in layaway. The only thing I knew about Hennessy's was, or wanted to know, was when's the next coat sale? And when's Santa Claus coming? So, I mean, I think it's wonderful that people are writing the history of Butte, and trying to preserve Butte, whatever.

But I think something like this is the story of Butte from the people who lived the story of Butte. I think Butte is - anyway, like I said, I wasn't real enamored with Butte. I left, I lived in Canada for 30 years. And then Foote came up, but he was so in love with this town. And he knew everything about it. And he just knew the Butte story. And I started thinking to myself, wow. And besides I traveled a lot in those 30 years and I saw that Butte wasn't the only falling down mining town, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And so then I started to think, wow, this is a really cool place. This is a place of excellence. I have had people come visit me from Winnipeg, Canada, to New York City to Mexico. And they all say the same thing - this is a marvelous town. This is a real town. This is, you're saving your history, but you're living in your history. You live in your buildings. One kid from New York said, 'this is a museum and everybody lives in it'. There's nothing makes me madder, than people that come here and say, 'oh boy, this is really a dump place, isn't it'? Well, we lost so much population. We are not that - we're trying, dammit. We're trying. If you don't like it here, leave. Don't come. I just had somebody come to my house, who said to me, because I live in the historic district of Butte, little jackass, 21 year old kid, and he said to me, 'are all the houses in this town as tumbledown as yours'? Yep. So he's X-ed off my list.

[01:14:18]

I think it's changing, but I think it's changing for the best. I think that it's not going back to the glory days, folks. And everybody's whining about the demise of the stores. Well, from my experience, even in high school and my brothers lived here, people in Butte have always gone somewhere else to shop. They've made a day trip. They've gone on a weekend. Oh, let's go on a weekend for Spokane. I'll get a cuter dress in Spokane and it won't be like the dress the other girls are wearing. They have always done that. So they're part of the problem. Box stores are going down the hill everywhere. Calgary, Alberta, where I lived for 30 years is destination shopping in Canada. They have even overbuilt too many malls and box stores. The mall rats are gone. The millenniums don't care. They go to Goodwill. Like, get off it. Quit -

The worst trashers of this town are people from Butte. My brother drives Uptown cause he lives on the flat. And he goes, 'oh, nothing going on up here. There's no shopping'. Guess what, if there was shopping up here, they wouldn't go to it anyway. It's 60 miles over to Helena. It's how many miles over to Bozeman? It'd be nice if we had some stores, but hey, we don't. A lot of people, myself included, use Amazon. And another thing, some of the people that work in some of the stores were not nice. And people just thought, blah.

But I think it's a marvelous place. You listen to people that come in here, cause I work on the desk, I have since it opened. People love this place. They are absolutely enamored with it. The only thing I wish they could do, I wish that somebody, I always say, if I won the lottery, I would do this. I would establish a paint fund and I would go around and knock on people's door and say - 'want paint? It's free. I've hired all these college kids, they're going to paint your house. No one going to cost you nothing. You can pick any color except brown. You can't paint your house brown. Okay? No Brown'. I think if they painted the buildings in the Uptown area and made kind of like a Potemkin village type thing. So what, there's nothing inside them anyway. I'm just wondering if you went around to some of these people that own these buildings say, 'hey, can we just paint your building'? That's what they did in Philipsburg, isn't it? The Philipsburg project, they painted a bunch -

JAAP: Oh, well they might have.

FOOTE: They painted a bunch of the buildings and everybody's all - Philipsburg! Okay, so if you think people are going to throw a beer bottle at your building, so you put boards in the windows, good idea. Get some plexiglass so you can shoot a puck at plexiglass. Gosh, you can throw a beer bottle. People should be made to - and I also think there should be signs on buildings that say, the owner of this building is not from Butte.

JAAP: Yeah. That would be pretty interesting wouldn't it?

[01:17:43]

FOOTE: Yeah. So that's my opinion. I think you can promote this on your radio station. A long time ago, and I think it was Mayor Griffin had a slogan. I think it was him, but it was some political slogan. And it was - 'Butte's my town. I like it'. I think we should get billboards put all over the damn town, put on the highway out there saying, 'Butte's my town. I like it'. T-shirts, hats, everything. 'Butte's my town. I like it.' I think that's a wonderful slogan. Because most people do like Butte, but they sure like to bitch about it.

GRANT: Have you ever seen that T-shirt, I think Paula Canfield has it.

FOOTE: Oh Paula, yeah.

GRANT: And it has a little pigeon on it, and it says - 'Give a shit about Uptown Butte’?

FOOTE: That sounds like Paula. Yeah. I just think, like I was talking to what's her name? Julia. Julia Crain. I said, 'why do people keep saying that Butte is dirty'? It's not, I've been to places where there's garbage in the street. I mean, it's dirty, there's garbage in the street, everything. There's not that here. She says it's because there's a lack of trees. But now, all these nice flower pots, and more trees, better sidewalks. I think the Original mine site is a gem in itself. You know, I've got company coming in tonight - because I live two blocks from a month. I live up there in the tumbledown house section.

JAAP: Oh, your house is not that tumbledown.

[01:19:37]

FOOTE: I know, that's what got me. My house isn't - he just meant, I don't know what he meant.

JAAP: He's a little asshole, that's what he is.

FOOTE: He really is, I could have slapped his head off. I'm still thinking about it. No, I think Butte's a wonderful place. I wouldn't, I would not leave it for anything, now. I mean, in the throws of immaturity, I did. But people worked hard here, and this was another thing that annoys me. Why do people want to make Butte into the capital of crime, prostitution and alcohol? I have jumped in when people are talking about that out there, at that desk, the person will remain unnamed, talking about, 'oh, the Cabbage Patch!' You know what, we have all kinds of churches here. We have lovely families here. People were not dressed in rags at church service. Your first communion got the most lovely dress that your family could afford. Your hair was always done up. We were not the dregs of society. At the beginning of anything, people don't have much, but as we progressed, we have beautiful churches. We have good kind people. That's why people like Butte, the people are friendly here. So that's my story. I'm sticking with it.

[01:21:06]

JAAP: All right, Nancy. Well, thank you.

FOOTE: Oh, you're welcome. I don't think I said a damn thing about the history of Butte, just expounding on my....

JAAP: No. It's perfect.

FOOTE: Of course, I'm his fan girl, even now.

JAAP: His number one fan?

FOOTE: That's right. He was, you had to know him. He had a huge laugh. He was in Zurich, Switzerland, in a bar. Cause Rick was not without liking the booze. And he was in a bar, and he was laughing. And he said, this guy came up to him and slapped him back and said, 'For God's sake Foote. I'd know your laugh anywhere in the world'. And it was Phil Fitzpatrick from Butte. Just knew him by the laugh.

[END OF RECORDING]