Abbott Memorial, May 7
Stanley Keith Abbott, 91, Dillon, passed away Feb. 13. Stan's wishes were to be cremated and to have only a graveside service in the spring with Pastor Karen Disney officiating.
A memorial graveside service to honor Stan will be held at the Mountain View Cemetery, Dillon, at 1 p.m. Friday, May 7.
The family will visit with friends and family at the Grace United Methodist Church immediately following the memorial service.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that memorial contributions be made to Grace United methodist Church, P.O. Box 1313, Dillon, MT., 59725; or the Barrett Hospital Foundation, Inc., 90 Highway 91 South, Dillon, MT., 59725.
Arrangements were made through the Brundage Funeral Home.
James Arthur Reichle
1948 - 2010
James (Two Gun) Arthur Reichle 61, passed away on April 30 at the University of Utah Medical Center from injuries sustained in an accident while working in Dell, Mont.
Jim was born on Aug. 14, 1948 in Dillon to George William and Jessie May Reichle. Jim was raised in Glen on the ranch his parents both worked on.
His love for being a cowboy when he grew up was evident from the start. He would follow his dad and the hired men all over the ranch from a very early age. He and his big brother George, and sisters Barbara and Margie, had many years playing cowboys and Indians growing up. One time Jim and George tied Margie up to a stake, heated a stove poker and branded her, then they decided they were going to burn her at the stake, only to be rescued by dad. They learned that was not the thing to do to little sister.
One Thanksgiving Day they went for a walk in the foothills and halfway up the hill he tripped, rolled down the hill, breaking his nose for the first time and finding out just how much cactus there really was on the hill. Full of mischief, one day while waiting for the bus, he and his sister were throwing rocks at the train that was going by. When they returned home that night, the train investigator was there and they paid for some damage. One day while in elementary school, he tripped coming out the door and hit his face on the cement steps, breaking out his two front teeth getting silver crowns to replace them. The kids in high school looked forward to his next prank, getting them out of school early by putting limburger cheese in the heating system or him and his pals putting the shop teacher on the chain hoist and raising him up. He spent most of his younger life on horseback, and loved to be in the outdoors working with animals.
He went to school at the Reichle School in Glen and later graduated from Beaverhead County High School. After High school Jim enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He served for three years stationed in Hawaii and Viet Nam on a Navy destroyer. He was awarded the Viet Nam Service and Campaign Medal.
After his time in the Navy he went back to work at the ranch with his dad. One day he thought he was all that, being the rough and tough sailor he was, and attempted to take on his dad. Huge mistake.
Later he met Linda, they married in 1970, in Stevensville, and had three children, Shawn, Billy and Jenne. They later divorced.
He went to college for two years to become a teacher. He worked at the Montana State Prison for five years as a guard. That little grumbling in his belly took over and he decided that he was going to be a cowboy, not sit in a classroom.
Over the rest of his life Jim worked on ranches in Beaverhead County. Working for John Erb for 18 years he picked up the nickname “Two Gun”. On Aug. 14, 1982, one year and one day after meeting, Jim married the love of his life, Shirleen. During this union they had two children, Shirley and Benny. Jim was very proud of his wife and children, boasting about them whenever he had the opportunity.
He most recently worked for 12 years for Roger Peters, The Dragging Y Cattle Company. He very much liked working there and enjoyed the lifelong friendships he made there. Jim was a cowboy’s cowboy. He taught kids how to work on ranches effectively, more than most others would even try. He was looked up to and admired by all that have worked with him over the years. He loved to rodeo in his younger years, and loved being outside on his horse or in his tractor. He will be remembered as a wonderful husband, father, brother and best friend.
Jim is survived by his wife and best friend of 27 years; children, Shaw and Billy Reichle, Havre, Jenne (Bobby) Shepard, Havre, Shirley and Benny, Dillon; sister Barbara Hyde, Vale, Ore.; brother George Reichle, Dillon; sister Margie (John) Genta, Dillon; niece and nephews, Robert, Barry, Brian, Gerry, Steven, Michel, Michelle and John; cousins, Richard, Vicki and Robert; and all his many friends
Jim was preceded in death by his parents, and nephew George III.
Jim loved kids, animals and being out in the country. He will be remembered with love and laughter as he rides into the sunset…
Memorial services will be Saturday, May 8, at 10:30 a.m. at the Beaverhead County High School gymnasium.
Memorial donations can be made to the charity of your choice in Jim’s name.
Elizabeth Breneman
1917 - 2010
Elizabeth Breneman passed away at Valley View Nursing Home in Hamilton, April 27.
She was born in Mecedonia, Iowa, September 19, 1917.
She married Sam Breneman in 1937 and they moved to Montana’s Centennial Valley in 1941, where they ranched until 1995.
Elizabeth is survived by her husband; Dolores Breneman, daughter; Mary Jo Gibbons, daughter; and Tom and Barbara Breneman, son and daughter-in-law; four grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.
There was a visitation Sunday, May 2, at Brundage Funeral Home from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., with graveside services Monday, at Mountain View Cemetery, at 10:30 a.m.
A guest book is available at www.brundagefuneralhome.com.
John Christian Seidensticker III, MD
1915 - 2010
John Christian Seidensticker III, MD, was a country doctor, staunch community backer, rancher, hunter and fisherman, committed conservationist, chronicler of family and Montana history, world traveler, and committed family man, died in Missoula April 30 from complications of old age. He was 95.
Dr. Seidensticker, Doc or Dr. John to his scores of patients and friends, was the quintessential country doctor. The health and well-being of his patients was his first priority. Coming from a ranching family, he held the residents of the remote ranches he served in high regard. In the early days of his practice he often drove 50 miles and more, day or night, in tricky weather, to attend to an ailing patient. The hard-line, assertive ranch dogs that guarded those remote ranches recognized he was there for good reason. After a barking and snarling frenzy when he drove up, the dogs greeted him amicably when he got out of the car, and guarded the car while he attended to the patient in the ranch house. By his estimate, he delivered nearly 3,000 babies during 40 years of medical practice.
He played a leading role in establishing quality care for the elderly and disadvantaged in Madison and Beaverhead counties in the years before Medicare and Medicaid. Indeed, he often told his family that a main reason he retired was that the paperwork involved in managing Medicare and Medicaid payments was overwhelming after his lifelong office manager, his wife Gladys, passed away in 1982.
Returning from military service in Europe in 1946 after the close of World War II, Dr. Seidensticker moved his young family from Twin Bridges, where they had waited out the war, to Bozeman, where he established his first medical practice with a second office in nearby Belgrade.
Unhappy in Bozeman, he soon moved his practice 100 miles south to his hometown of Twin Bridges, where he practiced for a decade. In 1957, he moved the 30 miles to Dillon where he practiced until his retirement in 1983. In notes to his family he wrote that his wife Gladys’ roots in Twin Bridges, were “not truly pulled-up” until the family house was also moved to Dillon in 1958, causing much comment at the time. The local wisdom was, “If Dr. Seidensticker was moving his house, he intended to stay in Dillon,” and he did, until poor health prompted his move to Missoula in 2008.
Writing in his book, Good Medicine, Dr. Seidensticker marveled at the skill of the old country doctors he knew and replaced. With no laboratory backup, even before the advent of penicillin, they tended to the health of rural Montanans.
During his long tenure as a practicing physician he was appointed twice to the Montana State Board of Medical Examiners, twice serving as president. He made it his mission to encourage doctors to come to Montana, particularly to practice in the vast rural areas of the state. He served as county health officer, at times for both Madison and Beaverhead Counties. He served as physician to the Montana State Orphans Home (renamed Montana Children’s Center in 1959, closed in 1979) for more than a decade, beginning in 1947.
He was born on January 25, 1915, on the ranch near Twin Bridges, where his father, John (Jack) C. Seidensticker Jr. was also born. His mother, Agnes Woosley Seidensticker died during childbirth in 1923, and he and his brothers, Sylvester (Siv) and Lowell (Si), were raised on the ranch by their grandmother, Sarah Jane (Maddox) Seidensticker, and stepmother, Veronica (Gorshe) Seidensticker.
Dr. Seidensticker, an outstanding athlete, graduated valedictorian of his high school class in Twin Bridges in 1933. After working for a year on the family ranch to save money, he attended the University of Montana-Missoula (then Montana State University), graduating in 1938 in pre-medical science. He continued to work on the family ranch during summers and graduated from Northwestern University Medical School, Evanston, Ill., with a bachelor's in medicine in 1942. He received his MD in 1943 after completing a rotating internship at Fresno County Hospital, Calif.
He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Medical Administrative Corps in 1942, and was called to active duty as a first lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps in 1943, upon completion of his internship. He was sent to England with the 82nd General Hospital.
In preparations for and during the Normandy Invasion, he served in the near shore evacuation unit. At the end of the war in Europe he served in the occupying Army and was posted to medical facilities in France, Austria, and Germany. He was discharged with the rank of Major in 1946.
Dr. Seidensticker married Gladys Block Seidensticker, from Whitehall, in 1941 during spring break of his junior year in medical school. During the war, Gladys worked as a secretary at the Orphans’ Home in Twin Bridges, and his first son, John C. Seidensticker IV, was born.
In an attempt to get home quickly after the War, he told a newly arrived commanding officer that his little boy, who he had never seen, was waiting for him in the Montana Orphans Home, not mentioning that his wife worked there. He was given the next available berth out.
John’s birth was followed by the births of five more children, James, Judith, Jeanne, Jerry, and Jeffrey over the next 15 years. “My children,” he said “are my greatest pleasure and treasure.”
Dr. Seidensticker grew up in a family of hunters and fishermen/ women, and maintained the tradition throughout his life. Ranching families in the Depression sold their cows and depended on deer, elk, ducks, and fish for everyday fare. In the 1950s, economic conditions for ranchers in southwestern Montana improved significantly, enabling world travel opportunities not dreamed of in the hardscrabble Depression years.
With his father Jack, and at times with his brother Siv, he took long, big game hunting trips to Alaska, Canada, Africa, and India, and deep-sea fishing trips to the Caribbean, Honduras, and Ecuador. He was proud of his “grand slam” of North American bighorn sheep trophies. He collected nearly all the plains game of East and South Africa, and the big game of India. A sampling of his trophies, and those of his fathers, are on permanent exhibit in the Seidensticker Wildlife Collection at the University of Montana Western.
Dr. Seidensticker relished the unsurpassed beauty and outdoor opportunities of Southwestern Montana. He hunted and fished at every opportunity, usually with the family in tow. He especially enjoyed taking his father Jack, his beloved aunts, Jeannettie (Nettie) Seidensticker Campbell and Lucy Seidensticker Ruppel, to fish in the small, clear, willow-clad mountain creeks. He was a lifelong advocate for water rights for fish. His children recall growing up thinking that destinations like the Gravelly Range, Camp Creek, Garden Creek, Hell’s Canyon, and Upper Big Hole Basin were their own playgrounds.
When asked why he never wanted to own a mountain cabin, he said he didn’t want to be tied down to one place when there was so much in Montana to enjoy. He wrote in Good Medicine how the telephone, with a bell attached to outside of the garage, had its good side and its demanding side. Many a planned picnic and camping trip had to be abandoned just as the family was pulling out of the driveway, because of a telephone call alerting him to attend to a patient in labor, or with an injury.
With sport and subsistence hunting and fishing such an integral part of his life, Dr. Seidensticker, a life member of the National Rifle Association, devoted countless hours to teaching young hunters to hunt and use firearms safely. He organized local and regional shooting matches with both the Twin Bridges and Dillon gun clubs.
He was a collector of firearms ranging from his own well used hunting arms to American Revolution-era muzzling-loading “squirrel rifles,” and buffalo guns, to high-tech modern hunting rifles. His collection of fishing rods ranged from the very best available to those he made with his own hands. He tied his own dry and wet flies. To create flies to “match the hatch” on Southwestern Montana’s Blue Ribbon trout streams, he devised is own version of a wet fly he called a “girdle bug,” which, as the name implies, required rubber threads from abandoned girdles together with deer hair and other essential ingredients.
A life-long diarist and one who always loved, and could tell a good story, in retirement Dr. Seidensticker embarked on a second career, a chronicler of family and Montana history. Over a 25-year span he produced a succession of privately published volumes including The Ranch, Meanderings, My Life, Good Medicine, Grains of Sand, Stories, Safari, The Great War, and others, tracing family history with biographies of relatives and interesting characters who were Montana pioneers, but otherwise would have been long-forgotten.
After the death of his wife in 1982, he married Elaine Willey Hjort in 1985. Together, they traveled throughout Montana, the United States and the world until his health prevented him from doing so.
He was a member of the Masonic Lodge, serving as Worshipful Master of Westgate Lodge No. 27 Twin Bridges, Royal Arch of Virginia City, Knight Templar of Dillon, and Baghdad Shrine of Butte.
He was a member of the Elks’ Lodge, American Legion, and a Rotarian since 1947. Through his work with the Rotary, a biking and hiking trail was established around Dillon that he regularly used in his later years. He supported the Shriners Hospital for Children in Spokane, Wash.
Dr. Seidensticker is survived by his wife; sister Jane Ann (Seidensticker) Grant, Butte; five children, John C. Seidensticker IV, Washington D.C., James A. Seidensticker and Jeanne A (Seidensticker) Pusey, Chelan, Wash., Jerry D. Seidensticker, Missoula, Jeffrey A. Seidensticker, Spokane, Wash.; and ten grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
Preceding him in death were grandson James Seidensticker, Jr., daughter Judith Ann (Seidensticker) Strong, and brothers Sylvester and Lowell.
Funeral services will be held at the Brundage Funeral Home in Dillon, Saturday, May 8, at 10 a.m., with a reception to follow.
Interment will be at 3 p.m. at the Twin Bridges Cemetery.
Memorials may be made to the Dillon Rotary Club or Shriners.
A guest book is available on line at www.brundagefuneralhome.com.
Paid obituary by the family.
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