Theodora Niemeyer and Roger Norgaard

[00:03] THEODORA NIEMEYER: I am Theodora Niemeyer. I'm 82 years of age. Today's date is Friday, June 24, 2022. We're in Missoula, Montana. I'm interviewing Roger Norgaard, and he's a friend.

[00:24] ROGER NORGAARD: I'm Roger Norgaard, and I'm 83. And this is Friday, June 24, 2022. We're here in Missoula, Montana, being interviewed by Theodora Niemeyer And we're friends.

[00:44] THEODORA NIEMEYER: You and I first met when we were in high school. And we had the good fortune of hanging with the same group of kids throughout high school and continuing a friendship throughout college. And then went our various ways after that. What I know is that you're crazy wild about Montana and the outdoors and the wilderness in Montana. But you weren't born here, and I'd like to know where you were born and how you came to be a Montanan.

[01:28] ROGER NORGAARD: I was born in February 2, 1939, in Bemidji, Minnesota, and moved to Montana because of my dad's work, and moved to Montana in the. Actually, it was in. I was about two years and four months old. We had moved to St. Mary's, Idaho, where my dad was working on a logging crew. But when I was two years and four months, we moved to the limestone river over near Nye, Montana. And that's when I first lived in Montana, was at that time.

[02:23] THEODORA NIEMEYER: Well, I know that you moved back and forth across boundaries from Minnesota, Washington, Idaho, Montana, because of your father's work as a surveyor, and that you lived on Emory Creek when the war ended. Tell me the story of how the ending of the war was celebrated by your family.

[02:53] ROGER NORGAARD: That was a huge occasion for all Americans. End of the war with Japan called Vijay. And that was in August, I believe, of 1945. And at that time, I was six years old, and we were living on Emery Creek, which is a tributary of the south fork of the Flathead river. And my dad was a forest service survey, and he was surveying a logging road up there. But at that particular time, when word came out that the war was over, everybody, his crew, and everybody in camp was extremely excited and wanted to go to town and celebrate. Nearest town was Martin City. So we got in our old model A, and we headed for the Deerlick bar in Martin City, Montana. And when we got there, everybody was just having a great time and celebrating. And my brother, who was four years older than I was, he was ten years old. The crew gave us a dime so we could play the pinball machine and shuffleboard, and so we spent some time there. My dad then decided, well, maybe we should go up to Coram and see what was going on at the Dew drop Inn, which was another bar that had been near Coram for many years. And so we drove up there and spent a little time. And then he decided, well, maybe we should go into Kalispell. Must be real celebration going on in there. So off we went to Kalispell, but by the time we got there. 09:00 930 Gosh, it wasn't much going on there. So he says, well, let's head on back to Martin City and the Deerlich. But as we were approaching bad Rock Canyon, we smelled this electrical smell of some wiring that was starting to burn. And then the lights on the car went out. So he chewed double mud gum and it had the foil from the wrapper of the gum. And he just took that old fuse out and put that in there, and the lights came back on. So, yeah, he could fix almost anything. And so as I started down the road a little further this time, there was smoke and stuff and it was smelling way more serious. So anyway, the lights went out again. But he wasn't to be deterred. He told my brother, he gave him a flashlight and he says, you go out there and sit on the, on the fender and straddled a headlight there and poked the flashlight down the highway. And we just got a few miles from bad rock Canyon up into Martin City. So that's what we did, and got up there. And so the evening proceeded until it was practically light. We weren't going anywhere. Well, it was still dark. We had to get back to camp. So I think I. Near sunrise or off we went. And it was light enough to drive back up to our camp. But it was a momentous occasion. We had a lot of fun.

[06:59] THEODORA NIEMEYER: American ingenuity.

[07:02] ROGER NORGAARD: Oh, yeah. At its best, he could fix anything on that model A. If you had a monkey wrench, a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, some black tape. And I, of course, that good old wire that could wire anything together on that Model A.

[07:24] THEODORA NIEMEYER: Well, I know you were living, at least in the summers, in tents in the forest or cabins in the forest, but at some point you were in Missoula. I think you were about seven years old, and you lived in a motel. Tell me about how you and Stan learned to tie flies.

[07:53] ROGER NORGAARD: Oh, yeah. Well, the second grade we did. We lived over at the Shady Grove motel on West Broadway. And we noticed that on Saturdays some local guys would come down and drive down behind the motel down by the river and throw these roosters out down there. Well, they were having chicken rooster fights on Saturdays, and that was the mercers and some of their friends. I don't know if it was legal or not, but these roosters were beautiful, and they had big, long hackles that were really nice for tying flies. So a friend of my dad's who was a real fisherman, he saw those beautiful hackles that my brother and I were salvaging off these chickens, and he said, you know, these make great hackles for dry flies to make them float. And so I'll teach you boys how to tie flies. So we. Every Saturday, we looked forward to going down there and finding two or three roosters that had lost the battle, and we would use those hackles to tie dry flies for fishing.

[09:25] THEODORA NIEMEYER: Well, before the offer to learn how to tie flies, what were you guys going to do with them?

[09:33] ROGER NORGAARD: With the chickens?

[09:35] THEODORA NIEMEYER: Uh huh. With the hackles? Did you have some plan for them? Or was it just because they were.

[09:40] ROGER NORGAARD: Beautiful and, well, we knew that that was part of tying flies, is that's what you needed. And they sold a down at Baymy's fly shop at one of the bars on West Main that we used to watch him tie flies down there, and we knew that's what he was using, so we thought they had some value.

[10:09] THEODORA NIEMEYER: You were inventive enough to think you could make a little money.

[10:13] ROGER NORGAARD: Well, I don't know about making money, but because we weren't going to sell these hackles from the neck and from down here on, the saddle hackles were longer, nicer ones, and these were all brown colored hackles. They weren't the white and gray ones like sometimes they use. But no, we weren't going to sell them, but we were going to give them to Hollis Strich, who was the guy that's going to teach us how to tie flies.

[10:47] THEODORA NIEMEYER: Well, I know you ended up in Missoula as your home and started high school in Missoula and went to school before high school, but you certainly were in Missoula through high school and college. And I'm wondering, when you think back about high school, if there was any class or experience or teacher maybe Miss Fink, that you would tell me about.

[11:23] ROGER NORGAARD: Well, I don't know if we want to go into the story about Miss Fink, but that's where I first met you. We were taking a class from Mister Whitmer. It was a biology class. And you end up being my lab partner. Yes, and we got to dissect all of those earthworms and bugs and other types of things that he would come up for dissection. And I think that's where we first got acquainted. And I was grateful to have somebody help me get through biology because you were, you were a great student.

[12:15] THEODORA NIEMEYER: I also remember that you were on the golf team and you still play golf at 83. That must have had a huge impact on your life.

[12:29] ROGER NORGAARD: Golf has been a big part of my life, and one of my first jobs was for a Memorial Day golf tournament on the 7th grade. They were looking for caddies for people entering the tournament. So I went out to the country club and waited for someone from the caddy master to come over and see who was next on the list, because there was somebody that wanted either you needed to carry their clubs or, and be lucky enough to have a cart and be able to pull his clubs on a cart. Now that was real luxury. But I started in 7th grade, and then over the years, I became the ran the pro shop, taking in green fees and selling golf balls. And pretty much every job I had after that, later in my high school and college days were related to people I knew at the country club that were in business, like the american dental. I've worked there for several years throughout high school and in college. I worked for a while at the White Pine and sash. These were people that I had met out at the golf course.

[14:00] THEODORA NIEMEYER: And you continued on the golf team when you were in college?

[14:04] ROGER NORGAARD: I did. I was on the high school team for four years at Missoula County High. And then when I went to the University of Montana, Eddie Chinsky, who was the football coach, he had since taken the job as the golf coach. When a new football coach moved in, he asked me if I wanted to be on the university team, because at that time I was playing a lot of golf and playing the best golf, probably of my life. So I played for university for three years, and then I continued to play for the rest of my life. It's a game you can play in a lifetime. I still about every other day, if the weather's right and if my muscles and bones allow me to, I still play at the Polson golf course, but right around in the golf car instead of pull or carry clubs.

[15:15] THEODORA NIEMEYER: Well, from college, one of the pictures I have in my mind of you is you're walking across campus in your air Force ROTC uniform, and I'm curious to know why you joined, how you joined the ROTC, because then it took you on to your days in the air force.

[15:47] ROGER NORGAARD: Well, I started in the fall of 1957, started at the university. And for all males, you had to register with the selective service. And you had a requirement for four years to in some way serve in the military in some form unless you had a deferment. One of those deferments is whether you were in a going to the university or there could be other types of deferments. But anyway, I lived next door to an air force ROTC instructor, and he was asking me how I was planning on filling my four year requirement to the military, which wasn't volunteer at that time. It was a draft system. And I says, well, I wasn't really sure. And he says, well, how about looking at the Air Force ROTC program? And so I looked at their program and decided that maybe it would be best to serve that time, get into the pilot training program and learn how to fly and serve the four years. Ended up spending six and a half years and completed my military obligation in that way. But that's how I started. It's through my neighbor who suggested, at least made me think about it.

[17:41] THEODORA NIEMEYER: Well, when you were in pilot training in the air force after college, you had some choices of what to fly, and you chose to fly helicopters. How did that come about? Why?

[18:02] ROGER NORGAARD: Well, Bob Johnson, who owned Johnson flying service, which was a mountain flying service of renown here in Missoula, lived across the street from us. And I was always just so interested in Johnson's operations. They were one of the most renowned and earliest mountain flying service around. So in talking to him one day just across the street, I asked him what was the possibility of ever getting a job flying for Johnson flying service? And he says, well, he says, if you're going into the air force, you get all of your time and ratings. And he says, when you're done, you come and see us and talk to my chief pilot, Jack Hughes, and we can probably get you a job. So after six and a half years of applying in the air Force, where I flew jets and training, I thought, you know, Johnson's doesn't have any jets. Maybe I better think about something else. So helicopters fascinated me. So I went to the air Force helicopter school and still at Air Force Base, and then did a variety of assignments outside the country in 65, 66, spent in Vietnam, and then in 67, I joined an Air Force photo mapping wing that, through the USAID program, made maps for countries throughout the world that wanted their countries mapped but didn't have the capability to do it. So went to Brazil, and we mapped Brazil and spent some time down there and then came back and they were thinking, I thought this Vietnam war was going to wind down. But still in 60, it was going strong and they were looking for people to return and I wasn't interested in going back. I didn't think we were doing the right thing there. So I resigned my commission and came back to Missoula and anyway, ran into Jack Hughes and he said, yeah, he says, we're in need of helicopter pilots. And I had about 3000 hours of time that time. So they checked me out and I went to work for them in the summer of 1969.

[21:04] THEODORA NIEMEYER: I want to take you back to Vietnam for a minute because at least one mission ended up in a really big surprise.

[21:16] ROGER NORGAARD: Yeah, the outfit I was in, it was. We were flying ch three Sikorsky helicopters, about 25 passenger. And anyway, I landed in Saigon in December of 1965. And that's where we put our helicopters together. But as they developed a. A use for our particular squadron of about 60 pilots and lots of maintenance personnel, we got dispersed throughout South Vietnam up to Cameron Bay, then to Danang. And then I went to Thailand and to Udon and then eventually over to Kham phenomena where the CIA needed some additional capacity to do their mission up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. So one day they wanted a bunch of fuel flown up to one of our navigational sites called Lima sites. And so we loaded up about six or seven barrels of 50 gallon drum barrels of fuel and flew up to this navigational site in northern Laos. And while the crew was offloading, I went over to a little hut to see what was going on in the area of what their mission was up there. When I walked in, it was real dark in there. But when my eyes acclimated, there was one employee of the CIA and four or five among Laotian. They were actually in the military for the Laotian, but they were being employed by the us government. So I walked over behind this guy and I thought, boy, this guy looks really familiar. And then I become obvious that I knew who it was. It was Jerry Daniels. And I had been hunting when we were in high school with he and his brother. They were wrestlers and we all needed to get some good elk meat. So anyway, I walked up behind him and when we were hunting in there, there was a lot of sound, plop, plop, plop in the forest. And it was fresh snow that was falling off the trees. It had warmed up and it lighting off and we thought it was elk running. It sounded like elk, but it wasn't. It was the snow. And I had said to him when we were hunting, I said, be quiet. I said, here comes one. I can hear him. And we had a big laugh when I walked up behind him. I said, hey, here comes one. And he turned around and he knew exactly who I was. So that was a surprise to run into him. He had been a smoke jumper, and a lot of former smokejumpers were recruited to do that particular mission.

[24:59] THEODORA NIEMEYER: That's really interesting. Tell about flying the queen of Thailand.

[25:07] ROGER NORGAARD: Well, this pony Express squadron I was in, we did a variety of missions in Thailand, and they have monsoonal flooding up there where in northern Thailand, a lot of flooding. So it's just the queen of Thailand and some of her delegation wanted to show support for people that were being flooded. So we flew down to Bangkok and picked up her and her delegation to fly around and land at different places and give the thai people some support anyway. And it's always nice when some of the leadership, like the queen or the president, flies around the United States when we have really some bad type of damage from weather systems. And so that's just one thing I did at that time.

[26:15] THEODORA NIEMEYER: I think you flew someone else of major importance as one of your missions.

[26:24] ROGER NORGAARD: Well, the prime minister of South Vietnam was Nuyen cow key at that time in 1965 66, and he was running for election. So he wanted us to, because we had a large helicopter that could take himself and all of his chief of staff and his family and fly him over to a political rally over near the western edge of west of Saigon, over near Cambodia. And he especially wanted the vote of not only the South Vietnamese and a lot of Catholics, but he wanted this Cao Dai, which were a different religious group. He wanted their vote. So they were all dressed in white uniforms and white, white clothing and looked pretty fancy. And so we flew him over there so he could hold his rally and flew him back to Saigon.

[27:44] THEODORA NIEMEYER: So you served your year, and you spent a couple of more years after that in the Air force before you came to Missoula. What year did you come back to Missoula? And did Johnson hire you right away?

[28:06] ROGER NORGAARD: When I mentioned earlier that Bob told me, Bob Johnson, president of Johnson flying service how to prepare and get the time. But I needed to talk to his chief pilot, Jack Hughes. So I was working in Washington, DC for an airborne gravity measuring system in the helicopter. And I was walking back to my hotel after dinner one night and ran across Jack Hughes, just coincidentally in Washington, DC. And I said, jack, I says, I was just wondering. He says, I'm thinking about getting out of the Air force. I said, is there a possibility of you might need a helicopter pilot? He said, yeah, he says, especially for contracts with the Forest service in the summertime. And he says, we're always looking for a pilot. And so I told him what the amount of time I had and experience. He said, okay. He said, you go ahead and put in your resignation and come on back and be back in Montana by May. And our first contract starts in June, and you'll be doing, and after you check out with us, flying much smaller helicopters, bell 47 g turbocharged helicopters. I came back and contacted him, and first job was spraying sagebrush over in the Dillon area and in the Ruby river valley. And when he returned to Missoula, he wanted to know if I won the contract at the interagency base in West Yellowstone, and that would be doing all the flying in Yellowstone park and Teton park, all types of work. And I said, sounded like a great job to me.

[30:29] THEODORA NIEMEYER: For the Montana man?

[30:30] ROGER NORGAARD: Yeah. For a person who loved everything about Montana and get to see those beautiful parts and fly some interesting mission, it was something I looked forward to.

[30:45] THEODORA NIEMEYER: So what type of flights did you have with them? I mean, what kinds of jobs would they ask you to do?

[30:58] ROGER NORGAARD: Most of the work was hell. Attack, fire fighting for taking, taking firefighters that were used to being deployed by helicopter in to put out small lightning fires that they could handle and or rescue work. People are always injured in the park, whether they're climbing in the tetons, breaking bones or heart attacks or whatever. Take them to a hospital down in Jackson Hole. And then looking for people. Found a couple of young kids that spend the night out and separated from their hiking family, and they spent all night and found them the next morning as a first light. And so those are some fun things of being able to find people that are lost or injured.

[32:03] THEODORA NIEMEYER: So did the machine ever give you a challenge or did it always work perfectly?

[32:12] ROGER NORGAARD: Well, you know, equipment, especially a lot of moving parts to a helicopter, so things aren't always working perfectly. But Johnson flying service had some renowned great mechanics and a great reputation for high quality of working on our equipment. But one day I was flying back to the interagency base in West Yellowstone and heard a ping and then a real vibration set in. So I knew immediately we needed to land and check that out. And it was a fan blade. One blade came out on the cooling fan, broke off. And so one of the mechanics who was an old high school friend, also Bill Howe, the only access in there into the park, there were no roads or anything, was to hire a packer, and he bought a new cooling fan, and all equipment is necessary. And Bill made the repair there and fixed everything up. But I was real surprised to see him come straddling a horse. He was only about five foot seven and seems like his legs were sticking straight out on both sides. It was kind of funny, but he sure did fix things up.

[33:47] THEODORA NIEMEYER: I value our friendship now that it's been renewed. I value it from high school and found myself at 80 years of age, falling in love with you and share the story of how we reunited our.

[34:14] ROGER NORGAARD: Friendship was an act of real serendipity and just turned out to be a wonderful surprise for me, too. I had moved to Polson from Great Falls in 2014, and so one day I I was in Polson and saw this restaurant called the hotspot, and someone had told me it was great thai food. And of course, when I was in Thailand, I learned to really enjoy good Thai cooking. And looking on their business card there, it said, Lamson. So I asked this handsome young guy, I said, lamson? I says, I went to high school with a person by name of Roger Lamson. He says, well, that's my grandma, our grandpa. And I said, well, where's your grandma? And he said, well, he lives back in Kansas City, but she lives down by St. Ignatius on a beautiful estate. And I said, well, have her call me sometime, and I'd like to say hi to her. I. And so I had a nice surprise one day, and to have you call went down, and we had a nice visit, and kind of our relationship seemed to just reignite at that time. And it's been a wonderful experience ever since.

[35:58] THEODORA NIEMEYER: And that's the story.