Hedman honored for life’s work

Wayne Hedman of Hamilton was recently honored by the Bitterroot Valley Chamber of Commerce with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Hedman was born in January of 1939, and grew up on a “stump ranch” on Blanchard Lake Road just south of Whitefish. He said the Flathead valley at the time was covered with stumps. The area where they located was ground owned by the Great Northern Railroad and harvested by the Summers Lumber Company. The ground was cheap. His parents bought 40 acres for $650 in 1945, but had to get rid of all the stumps before they could use it. They lived in a three-room house with no electricity, no well and no running water.

He played football, basketball and did a little track at Whitefish High School and also sang in the school choir. He graduated in 1957.

“The Whitefish I grew up in is not the same town you see today,” said Hedman. “The Whitefish I grew up in was a railroad town.” He said the town had some loggers but it didn’t have any sawmills. The sawmills were located over in Columbia Falls.

“But it was a special place at that time,” said Hedman. “It was magical, because where there are huge resort communities today, there was open land.”

“Another thing about that railroad community,” he said, “it offered you the opportunity for work. But you had to be 16 years old.” So first he worked summers in the woods where there was no age limit. He said this was in the days before they had direct drive chainsaws. It was very difficult to limb with them, so a young man could have the job of chopping the limbs with an axe. This is what he did the first summer.

“I was working for a fellow who had come back from the Korean War about as crazy as you can get,” remembers Hedman. “He loved to fall trees towards me to see how fast I could get away. We all knew him from before the war and we knew him when he came back. We all felt the war changed him. He was aberrational. He was crazy. One of the things he did was see how fast he could get that ‘39 Ford Coupe come off the top of Logan Pass.”

Then he had a different sort of experience working for Stevensville journalist, author and publisher Dale Burk’s dad.

“I set chokers for Dale’s dad, Charlie Burk, in the upper Whitefish,” he said. There was a big spruce epidemic that led to a number of timber sales and the Burk family had one of those sales.

“The Burk family was a neat family,” said Hedman.

After turning 16, however, Hedman went to work in the summers for the railroad. He worked as a section hand for the railroad between his sophomore and junior year of high school. Between his junior and senior year, he worked on the bridging and building crew in Whitefish.
“All that made me sort of a commodity guy when it comes to the wood products industry, but I love and I need wilderness,” he said.
After high school, he worked for the railroad a bit more, but then his brother, who was working as a sawyer, convinced him to go back into the woods. He spent the next two summers and autumns as a timber faller.

Then he married his wife Helen and started thinking of going to college and working at the same time. He came out of the woods and started working as a timber grader for L. A. Hamilton Lumber Company, for over four years, until he graduated from college.

“It was really a blessing to have had that job,” said Hedman. In 1968, he said, the federal minimum wage was $1.60 an hour. As a timber grader, he was getting $2.33.

He said it was his wife’s father who noticed that this plan was not going to work. After two terms of working full time and going to classes, her dad said, “You know Wayne, this is not going to work. You don’t have enough time to put into your studies, and he made me a deal.” The deal was that he would pay their rent so Hedman could work a half shift at the mill and get more studying done.

“So my in-laws, Helen’s mother and father, Roy and Mable Lewis, have a special place in heaven as far as I’m concerned, for having the ability to see what was going to work and what was not going to work. You can’t work full time and go to school full time,” he said.
The result of that deal was a degree in Pharmacy after a five-year program at the University of Montana.

“It’s an odd thing,” said Hedman, “how being a pharmacist fit my personality. And I hope to God I have helped a few people along the way. And I had the opportunity to grow this drug store. The Bitterroot Drug is a busy place these days, but it wasn’t in 1969, I’ll tell you.”
Hedman had spent four years working in Idaho at a really busy drugstore, when the owner named Ross Payne came and asked if he would be interested in owning a pharmacy in Hamilton, Montana.

“He said we could go in halves on it, if I could rustle up $5,000 for a down payment. The rest is history,” said Hedman. They purchased the drug store and got a line of credit from the First National Bank and remodeled the interior of the building. He said he and Helen arrived in Hamilton with two kids, one seven years old, the other a brand new baby. It was a struggle and it took a number of years for the store to become self-sustaining. When it did, around 1976, his partner decided to sell his share in the business and Helen and Wayne became the sole owners.

Hedman said that he and Helen rented the house they currently own, from Harold Mildenberger. After about three years, he said, Mildenberger called him up and said, “… Hedman, I aint a landlord. I’m going to meet you down at the Branding Iron Restaurant and I’m going to sell you that… house.” And he did, Hedman said, with no down payment. According to Hedman, Mildenberger said the rent they had paid would be the down payment and then he made a graduated payment plan to make it workable for them.

Asked about what the town was like when he started, he answered first off by taking us on a walk down memory lane. In this case it was a walk down Hamilton’s Main Street back in 1969 or 70.

He recalled the businesses on Main Street at the time by name. Some are still here. Some are not. There were three drug stores on Main Street, Downing Drug, Hamilton Pharmacy and St. John’s Drug Store, which, he said, devolved into “Drugs and Jugs” when it added liquor. He said the owner was not a pharmacist. It went out of business and Mikesell’s Jewelry came in to replace it.

Then there was Evans Furniture, then Frank’s Shoes where the Filling Station is now; further down there was Nobles Clothing. There was Robert’s Book Store, where Bunny Robbins’ store is now. There was the Banque Club on the corner. There was a lawyer, then a bakery and employment agency and more lawyers. There was Plumbing and Heating, and the doctor’s office. There was the Ravalli County Creamery and swimming pool, and the old Post Office and Sanderson’s Hardware.

He recalled some other businesses in town that are now gone. There was Sprouse Reitz, Ben Franklin, Gambles, and a Maytag store.
“And can we forget to talk about the cafes on Main Street,” said Hedman, “the Montana Café and the Range Café.” He said the Montana Café was owned by a Chinese-American family, May and Harry Hom, and that their café sign adorns the cover of one of Hank Williams Jr’s albums and the original is on display in the Ravalli County Museum.

The two major banks in town were the Citizens State Bank and Ravalli County Bank.

Ravalli County Bank has not changed since we came here,” said Hedman (except for the name, to TrailWest), “Citizens State Bank has had some major, major changes, now the First Security Bank.”

He said Main Street was a busy place in those days. His customers consisted of loggers, mill workers, farmers, ranchers, Rocky Mountain Lab workers, and retail people.

“It was kind of a self-sufficient town in those days,” said Hedman. “Missoula was a long way away.”

He said at one time there were about four sawmills or planers in Darby and one of the owners, Louise Conner, was a good customer of his. He can’t forget how she once allowed him to high grade a pile of one-by-eight inch boards to build a nice fence around his backyard.

“The boards are still there and every time I look at it I think about what a privilege it was to have a friend like that,” he said.

He said at Christmas time Louise would give every employee a big turkey and a 5-pound box of Russell Stover candy from the Bitterroot Drug. He said his supplier at the time told him it was the largest order of 5 lb. candy boxes on the west coast.

“I’m guessing it was between 60 to 100 boxes of candy,” said Hedman. “That was a real shot in the arm for my business.”

Hedman said that he lamented what happened to the timber industry in the Bitterroot and believes it did not have to happen the way it did. He said the most significant thing to happen in the Bitterroot was the loss of 13 sections of ground owned by Plum Creek in the Darby area. It was put up for bid and went to the Darby Lumber Company.

It was not environmentalists who put the sawmills in the Bitterroot out of business,” said Hedman, “it was greed.”

“It’s my feeling that if those 13 sections of land had been sold to Conner Lumber Company, the logging on those 13 sections would have been entirely different,” said Hedman. “They would not have been clear cut. They would have been selectively harvested and the timber would have sustained Conner Lumber Company in a way that they could have kept their sawmill open. But instead those 13 sections were high graded and clear cut as fast as they could be cut. The consequence was that the employees of Darby Lumber Company wound up with an empty bag.”

“I would love to see a small milling operation in the Bitterroot. There is a lot of timber that needs to be cut, especially in the wildland urban interface,” he said.

Hedman said that at a certain point as his business got on sound footing, he began to feel a little community pressure to get involved in something outside his pharmacy business.

Hedman said, “You know, they kind of make you feel that maybe you aren’t doing your part for the community so they ask you to serve on some board or other.”

The first one he served on was the Trapper Creek Job Corps Community Relations Council.

“That was something I had a lot of belief in, and still do,” said Hedman. “That’s a program that puts some money into the kids to get them off a bad track and put them on a new track. It’s a great program.”

He also became active in the Chamber of Commerce. It was the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce at first, but around 1976 it became the Bitterroot Chamber of Commerce. In 1987, Hedman was elected President. He said the organization was barely surviving at the time, but that it was the year the state’s promotion of seatbelt use called Buckle Up Montana began. He said he and Laurel Hegstad, Chamber director at the time, got a grant for $6,500 to implement the program and that’s what kept the Chamber going that year.

When the state started its tourist promotion program, Ravalli County was lumped with Dillon and the Big Hole, Hedman said. He said they fought hard to get it changed and were ultimately successful in getting the Bitterroot placed in Glacier Country along with Missoula and the Flathead.

Another hurdle his Board finally resolved was when they succeeded in absorbing the downtown association and the highway association into the Bitterroot Chamber of Commerce.

“We worked hard and united those into one organization,” he said. “The Chamber has grown from a couple hundred members when I joined, to over 600 members today.”

The next volunteer job he took on was with the Ravalli County Museum. He said he was leaving the drugstore one night and Helen Bibler approached him on the sidewalk.

“She said, ‘Wayne, the Museum needs you.’ She said that the board was resigning and she was leaving her job as director and that the museum needed my help,” said Hedman. He joined thwe board and they hired Tamar Stanley as the new director and she has done a tremendous job. He still serves on the board.

His lifelong interest in working and playing in the woods made him a good candidate for a few other volunteer jobs in the community as well. He worked in an Elk Management Group with local wildlife biologist Craig Jourdonnais charged with establishing some elk harvesting numbers when the number of elk in the valley was plummeting.

He was asked by Bitterroot National Forest Supervisor Julie King to serve on the Resource Advisory Council and took her up on it.
About his volunteer work and his lifetime achievement award from the Chamber, Hedman said, “I think of it as paying back what you’ve been given. You’ll end up feeling guilty if you don’t do your share. I feel lucky to live here. I love the Bitterroot Valley and I love the people here.”