Stories come alive in the stitches of quilts

Erin Scott

"Some dance with their feet. I dance with my hands."

Local seniors meet at the Polson Senior Citizens Community Center to reminisce about days gone by while stitching quilts for area residents.

Betty Gerrity and Mary Arden meet several days a week, working side-by-side on quilts, swapping their lives' stories as they press on with needle and thread in hand.

Betty was born in June of 1928, to a dairy farming family in Bristol, Conn. She was an only child and helped out on farms most of her life.

Her family moved to Mont. when she was 19, and she followed them with a fiancé newly-discharged from the Air Force. They all lived together in a house in Potter River County. She worked at a fourth-class post office with her mother until it was shut down.

"People would come from 23 miles away just to get their mail," she said.

She had three children with her husband, and followed her parents again when they moved and bought a house in Columbia Falls on 160 acres. They went on to buy 14 cows, which they pastured.

Three years after a tragic tractor accident, which killed her husband, Betty went on to marry again and later had two more children. Betty has spent her life working: raising her children, making clothes, farming, teaching, and designing saddle artwork. She taught saddle artwork at a school once in Bayhorse.

"There were seven kids in a one room school," she said, recalling her short teaching stint while the primary teacher was on maternity leave for seven months.

She met with women in Valley View on Tuesdays and Thursdays through the winter months of her youth; now she meets with the seniors at the center to pass the time. She starts with a little over two feet of thread, and ends with less than an inch. Betty and Mary swap stitching techniques while swapping life stories sewn with laughter, triumph and defeat.

Mary grew up in Sabetha, Kan. and was born in August of 1925. She jokes that she's William Shakespeare's mother. She spent the beginning portion of her life babysitting and helping the elderly. She soon became a telephone/switchboard operator, and went on to work in a music store's credit department.

She divorced her first husband, and met her second at the Tamarac Inn nightclub in California, while she was working there. Mary lived in the back of the club, which seemed like an ideal living situation for her. Unfortunately, one night while she was out the entire building caught on fire, leaving her empty handed.

"I lost everything I had except the clothes on my back," Mary said.

Soon after the fire she married the deputy sheriff - who she befriended earlier at the club. He had three children from a previous marriage and loved hunting. They made a habit of alternating vacations every year. One year they would go to Kansas, the next Vancouver Island and the next Kalispell.

She began working at the music store, Hockett Cowan in Fresno, but the business was forced to close after a strip mall across the street detracted their business in the 50's. Soon after, the store reopened in a different location and the owners asked Mary to return to work for them.

"Not until I rest!" she told them. She worked her whole life and needed a break, she said. She told them to let her be for one year, and then she would return.

Mary and Betty know so much about one another, but they also know so much about a time others are oblivious to. A time when the Union Pacific was a treat to ride; when everybody went to church on Sundays; when families sewed, embroidered and crocheted their own clothes; when sugar, silk stockings and butter were rationed; when you made your own flour; and when your "grocery isle" was in your backyard or at a neighbor's house who had horses, cows, pigs, chickens and geese.

"They let ya know if something was happening," Betty said of the guinny hens she had. And something was definitely happening during those times.

One of the several historic events these women lived through was World War II. They said some of the boys in their high school class dropped out to enlist and fight. They said everyone enlisted.

"They didn't know what they were getting into," Mary said.

During that time, Mary and Betty said people just got by any way they could."If you had food on your table and clothes on your back you didn't need anything else," Betty said.

"You all worked together," Mary added, thinking of the past, and wandering to the spaces in between.

"Everything changes - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse," she said.